Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
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Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about a
Speaker 1: world sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel
Speaker 1: and Nagaza strip rages on, and the moral authority of
Speaker 1: Biden in his liberal cohort crumbles day by day. A
Speaker 1: new generation of right wing media grifters have seized on
Speaker 1: Palestine as a way to boost their own reactionary brand.
Speaker 1: But these are not the standard kind of right wing
Speaker 1: grifter that we've become accustomed to on this show. They
Speaker 1: aren't Chris Ruffo, they aren't of TikTok, and although they
Speaker 1: will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they are cut from
Speaker 1: that pre existing template. These are our monsters. These are
Speaker 1: monsters birth by the left. I grew up in by
Speaker 1: the generation of new socialist radicalized by Bernie Sanders, the
Speaker 1: Syrianceivil War, and the election of Donald Trump. This is
Speaker 1: largely going to be a set up episode to understand
Speaker 1: the background of the kinds of people who are going
Speaker 1: to come later. But I wanted to start the story
Speaker 1: with a taste of where it's going to end. Max
Speaker 1: Bluemothal is a left wing journalist with the outlet Gray Zone.
Speaker 1: He was for a very long time well regarded in
Speaker 1: anti imperialist circles. In many ways, he is the ideological
Speaker 1: predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National
Speaker 1: Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's chief health official,
Speaker 1: went on Face Nation to face allegations and calls by
Speaker 1: Senator Ran Paul and Ted Cruz for him to step
Speaker 1: down and quote be prosecuted over the course of COVID nineteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After this interview happened, Face the Nation released a tweet
Speaker 1: about it. Bluementhal responded with an incredibly disturbing video I'm
Speaker 1: going to read the tweet. I'm not going to play
Speaker 1: the video because this guy listening to him is a
Speaker 1: painful experience. Bluementhal responded, quote Nobel winning inventor of the
Speaker 1: PCR test, Carrie Mollus on Anthony quote, I am the
Speaker 1: science Fauci quote and this is from Molas Tony Fauci
Speaker 1: does not mind going on camera in front of the
Speaker 1: people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.
Speaker 1: By the way, the part where he says lie instead
Speaker 1: of lying, there is a direct quote that is him,
Speaker 1: not me. So to understand how absolutely it absolutely absurd,
Speaker 1: this is we need to talk about who Carrie Burris
Speaker 1: actually is. So Max Bluemoenthal is correct that Carrie Mollis
Speaker 1: won the nineteen ninety three Nobel Prize for the invention
Speaker 1: of the PCR test, which is now one of the
Speaker 1: basic building blocks of biology. Like they let undergrads and
Speaker 1: college do this stuff, But he is also an enormous crank.
Speaker 1: Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote a profile of him when he
Speaker 1: died in twenty nineteen. They described him like this quote,
Speaker 1: He'd become a vociferous critic of widely accepted scientific theories
Speaker 1: ridiculing the notion that CFCs caused the ozone hole, that
Speaker 1: humans caused climate change, and that HIV caused AIDS. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: climate change denihilism, I think is something we all understand.
Speaker 1: The ozone layer stuff is extremely funny. This interviews from
Speaker 1: the nineties. So in the nineties, we were using these
Speaker 1: things called CFC's, which is a class of chemical that
Speaker 1: we used in like hairspray and refrigerators, and using them
Speaker 1: tore a hole in the ozone layer. So the world,
Speaker 1: for maybe the last time, actually performed a collective action
Speaker 1: stop using them, and the whole fixed itself. So okay, Obviously,
Speaker 1: carry mollis unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But
Speaker 1: the last part, the part where carrying Mullus claims that
Speaker 1: HIV does not cause AIDS, we need to talk about
Speaker 1: a bit more because it is absolutely monstrous and it
Speaker 1: is going to give molos a body count. Even Kissinger
Speaker 1: would not in respect to So, okay, we need to
Speaker 1: talk about what HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna go to the CDC for this one. HIV
Speaker 1: Human and amino deficiency virus is a virus that attacks
Speaker 1: the body's immune system. If HIV is not treated, it
Speaker 1: can lead to AIDS acquired amino deficiency syndrome. There is
Speaker 1: no effective cure. Once people get HIV, they have it
Speaker 1: for life, but with proper medical care, HIV can be controlled.
Speaker 1: People with HIV who get effective HIV treatment can live long,
Speaker 1: healthy lives and protective partners. And this is something that
Speaker 1: people fought and died for. If you have HIV, there
Speaker 1: are simple and easy tests for it now you can
Speaker 1: get treatment and you can live a normal life. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, if HIV isn't treated, you can get
Speaker 1: acquired immuno deficiency syndrome AIDS, and that can and will
Speaker 1: kill you. It is what killed so so many, almost
Speaker 1: an entire generation of queer people. It killed them for
Speaker 1: decades and decades and decades, and it's still killing them now.
Speaker 1: Carrie Mullis, the guy who max bluemitthal is tweeting a
Speaker 1: video of to Go After. Anthony Fauci doesn't think that
Speaker 1: HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is caused by
Speaker 1: malnutrition in poverty, and he is going to spend the
Speaker 1: rest of his life telling anyone in everyone he can
Speaker 1: getting mainstream press coverage telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
Speaker 1: He is the Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS in nihilism.
Speaker 1: Lots of people believe him, including for example, the FOO
Speaker 1: fighters Dave Gruel. They believe him because he is apparently
Speaker 1: a reputable source. The man has a Nobel prize. But unfortunately,
Speaker 1: as we've already seen from his climate denial and his
Speaker 1: CFC denial, he is spreading unbelievably dangerous lies, and this
Speaker 1: specific lie that HIV doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people.
Speaker 1: Here's from that Berkeley article. Again, I don't like the
Speaker 1: way they're phrasing it. It's the you know, it's Berkeley,
Speaker 1: right like, so some stuff going to some stuff's going
Speaker 1: to be racist. His views on AIDS don't just look bad,
Speaker 1: they may have had deadly consequences. By the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: South Africa was in the midst of a catastrophic A's epidemic.
Speaker 1: President Thumbo mcbecky, under the spell of AIDS denialist including Mullis,
Speaker 1: declared that A's was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many
Speaker 1: South Africans were denied access to treatment. A two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight study published in the Journal of Acquired Immuno
Speaker 1: Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, thirty five thousand
Speaker 1: babies were born with HIV and three hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: thousand South Africans died of AIDS on it. Necessarily, this
Speaker 1: is monstrous. And here is Max Bluementhal, who was up
Speaker 1: until very recently, at the very least nominally a left
Speaker 1: wing journalist, tweeting a video of this fucking guy to
Speaker 1: attack Anthony Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right
Speaker 1: wing anti lockdown rules. Now, I especially want to do
Speaker 1: this because if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it
Speaker 1: is very very easy to do from the left. You
Speaker 1: can attack him for his response to the original HIV
Speaker 1: AIDS pandemic, and you know, lots of queer people have
Speaker 1: done this. Instead, Max Bluementhal is tweeting a guy is
Speaker 1: tweeting a video from an unbelievable right wing crank who
Speaker 1: was responsible for the death of three hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people. And so the question we're going to be
Speaker 1: answering for the next three episodes is how did we
Speaker 1: get here and what is happening now, and to do
Speaker 1: this we need to talk about the rise of American
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninism. I'm going to try to present the ideology
Speaker 1: as sympathetically as possible, because it's important to understand how
Speaker 1: people came to believe in these things, because part of
Speaker 1: the horror and tragedy here is that not all of
Speaker 1: these people are the grifters and shills in right wing
Speaker 1: fanatics that the IDEOLOGI spawned and who were now having
Speaker 1: to deal with people who are on info wars agreeing
Speaker 1: with Alex Jones. Most of them were people like us,
Speaker 1: people who saw the horrors of this world and wanted
Speaker 1: to make it better. A lot of the writing about
Speaker 1: this is clinical and antiseptic, largely coming from either academic
Speaker 1: journals or very very angry liberals. And I can't be
Speaker 1: clinical about this. I can't cover this neutraally, and I
Speaker 1: can't do that because some of these people were my friends.
Speaker 1: There were people I loved and respected and cared about,
Speaker 1: and they're people who have now lost, and so I
Speaker 1: owe it to them to be fair about this. So
Speaker 1: what is is the modern generation of Marxist Leninism. You
Speaker 1: could start with the history of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's
Speaker 1: consolidation of power and the development of Marxist Leninism as
Speaker 1: an ideology, and you could trace it through the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and you could trace, you know, the ways in which
Speaker 1: it is and isn't the ideology that Lenin had originally
Speaker 1: been developing. But that really is the wrong place to
Speaker 1: start here. If you want to understand how this ideology
Speaker 1: came to be and why so many people came to
Speaker 1: follow it, the right place to start is America. It's
Speaker 1: with a generation of young people who grew up in
Speaker 1: the wake of the two thousand and eight financial collapse
Speaker 1: and the ruthless suppression of occupy by the Obama administration.
Speaker 1: It's a generation of people who grew up on the
Speaker 1: Internet who began to learn about the lies we've been
Speaker 1: fed our entire lives about the world and America's role
Speaker 1: in it. They learned the lies we've been told about
Speaker 1: the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about Allende
Speaker 1: and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about American imperialism
Speaker 1: in Lebanon and Haitian, Guatemala and Honduras and Iran, about
Speaker 1: Patrice Labumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharo in
Speaker 1: the Killing Fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Shai Guavara, about
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a thousand
Speaker 1: crimes of the American Empire crime as we could spend
Speaker 1: an entire episode just listing by name. They learned in
Speaker 1: a tremendously short amount of time that the American Empire
Speaker 1: was born of genocide. It was built by slavery, and
Speaker 1: he is sustained by replicating those genocides across the world
Speaker 1: and at home. That the governments, they were taught from
Speaker 1: birth to love and respect, slaughtered children in the streets
Speaker 1: with health fire and missiles, and then had the unmitigated
Speaker 1: gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders of
Speaker 1: the free world and the upholder of the rules based
Speaker 1: international order. And so they started learning about how our
Speaker 1: capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx, and then
Speaker 1: they started reading Angles, and it led to other Marxists
Speaker 1: into the great international enemies of American imperialism from the
Speaker 1: last century ho Chi Minh Castro to Lenin, to struggles
Speaker 1: against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like phenomen and
Speaker 1: militants like Asada Shakur. It led them to believe, to
Speaker 1: really believe in the struggle against capitalism and racism and imperialism,
Speaker 1: and that led them to Stalin and Mao, And eventually
Speaker 1: it would lead them down a darker path, a path
Speaker 1: where anything and everything could be justified if it meant
Speaker 1: defeating the American Empire, a path that told them it
Speaker 1: was their duty to back every state in the world
Speaker 1: who could even conceivably check the advance of American power.
Speaker 1: It led them to modern geopolitics, to the belief that
Speaker 1: modern China and Vietnam or socialist states still resisting American imperialism.
Speaker 1: It would lead them eventually to backing the very Russian
Speaker 1: oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. And it would
Speaker 1: lead some of them into the very heart of darkness itself,
Speaker 1: to an alliance with anyone and everyone who opposed liberal interventionism.
Speaker 1: It would lead to the Sekin alliance with the arch
Speaker 1: right wing anti communist Donald Trump. But it didn't start
Speaker 1: that way. The co option of the ideology is a
Speaker 1: process that took almost a decade and comprise a series
Speaker 1: of debates inside the left about what capitalism, socialism, and
Speaker 1: imperialism really are, and how the left should relate to
Speaker 1: nationalism in the state. We'll talk more about how these
Speaker 1: debates led to a right wing turn at episode three.
Speaker 1: But the core beliefs anti imperialism, objection to capitalism, a
Speaker 1: rejection of liberal interventionism, and some of the darker and
Speaker 1: more conspiratorial tendencies, like accusing any protest movement against the
Speaker 1: government they supported of being CIA assets, spread like wildfire.
Speaker 1: There were contradictions from the beginning, of course, how do
Speaker 1: you square your opposition to capitalism with your support for China,
Speaker 1: a country with almost one thousand billionaires. The solution was
Speaker 1: to lie. Lies about China, in particular abound it. Many
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninists believe, for reasons that are deeply unclear to me,
Speaker 1: that China has public housing that automatically guarantees every citizen
Speaker 1: a home. This is not true. This unclear to me
Speaker 1: if it's ever been true, even through this so, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you could argue it was sort of true
Speaker 1: during the socialist period. It has not been true for
Speaker 1: a very very long time. China has a lot of
Speaker 1: homeless people. But you know, these sort of lies persist
Speaker 1: because they are what you need to believe in order
Speaker 1: to believe that China is a socialist state and not
Speaker 1: a capitalist one. Another common line is that China has
Speaker 1: a fully socialized healthcare system. This is unbelievably not true. China,
Speaker 1: in fact, used to have something like a universal medical
Speaker 1: system that they operated in extreme difficulty with groups of
Speaker 1: people called the barefoot doctors who would go to rural
Speaker 1: villages that had never really received proper medical care before
Speaker 1: and attempt to treat them. This was the thing that
Speaker 1: China used to have, and then they tore it up
Speaker 1: and privatized it, and now Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster.
Speaker 1: Calculations by the Chinese Journal Twang estimate that almost the
Speaker 1: entire Chinese economy is based on corporations not paying their
Speaker 1: required contributions to healthcare plans, and that if corporations actually
Speaker 1: paid into the healthcare plans of micro workers, the entire
Speaker 1: economies of entire provinces would immediately go under as an
Speaker 1: enormous majority of their corporations immediately went underwater. And so
Speaker 1: what we're getting this sort of picture of is people
Speaker 1: begin to believe things that need to be true in
Speaker 1: order for their ant to square their anti imperialism, or
Speaker 1: their version of anti imperialism, which is opposing at all
Speaker 1: costs the United States with their anti capitalism when the
Speaker 1: two began to conflict in terms of, you know, attempting
Speaker 1: to support a very obviously capitalist economy, and this leads
Speaker 1: to some very very bizarre twists in turns. One very
Speaker 1: common thing is for socialists and socialist organizations in the US,
Speaker 1: or at least I say socialists, I made Marxist Leninists
Speaker 1: organizations to advocate for a fifteen or twenty dollars midiroom
Speaker 1: wage in China while simultaneously celebrating thirty two cents an
Speaker 1: hour as the end of poverty in China. This has
Speaker 1: never actually penetrated the minds of the new Marxist Leninists.
Speaker 1: With their endless parades of flags and new countries added
Speaker 1: every day, from the genocidal austerity bongers in Ethiopia to
Speaker 1: the hardline, murderous anti communists to rule meenmore by baton
Speaker 1: and bullet, new Marxist Leninists were able to effectively insulate
Speaker 1: themselves from reality. This left them as prey for a
Speaker 1: new generation of right wing grifters. Would cynically exploit them
Speaker 1: for wealth and status. They also garnered the hatred of
Speaker 1: the more internationalist factions of the left, and then, as
Speaker 1: their numbers expanded, the increasing ire of liberals, who, stealing
Speaker 1: a term from anarchists, began to call the Marxist Leninist tankies. This,
Speaker 1: I suspect, if you have heard of these people, is
Speaker 1: probably the word you've heard used to describe them. So
Speaker 1: we should talk about what this word actually means. But first,
Speaker 1: unfortunately some ads, and we're back. To explain what a
Speaker 1: tanky is, we have to go back to, bizarrely, the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six Hungarian Revolution. So all right, in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six there was a massive uprising in Hungary. The
Speaker 1: Hungarians effectively forced their government to break with the Soviets.
Speaker 1: The Soviets respond to this by rolling a bunch of
Speaker 1: tanks across the border, claiming everyone in the revolution is
Speaker 1: the fascist and killing them all. And they were fairly
Speaker 1: successfully able to convince a large number of communists that
Speaker 1: the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They were aided in
Speaker 1: this by the fact that the liberals also lied about
Speaker 1: what the Hungarian revolution really was. And this is a
Speaker 1: lie that they continue to spread to this day. The
Speaker 1: liberal version of the revolution is that it was, you know,
Speaker 1: it was a liberal revolution by people who wanted liberal
Speaker 1: democracy against the Soviets'll tell Terrrianism, etc. Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising
Speaker 1: and what most of it was was a rebellion by
Speaker 1: the Hungarian workers' councils, So workers across their factories seized
Speaker 1: control of their factories, threw their bosses out, and began
Speaker 1: to manage the democratically. The different workers' councils like foreign
Speaker 1: regional federations. It is very stunningly, very very similar to
Speaker 1: the original Soviets of the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution, which
Speaker 1: in theory the USSR is supposed to be named after.
Speaker 1: But when they reappeared again, the the Soviets just absolutely
Speaker 1: smashed them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned
Speaker 1: one party state. And what this actually meant was tanks
Speaker 1: rolling up to the gates of factories blasting apart the
Speaker 1: very workers' councils who are supposed to be the basis
Speaker 1: of communism. This was an attempt in some sense yes,
Speaker 1: to implement democracy, but it was an attempt to implement
Speaker 1: democracy in the factory, and it was attempted by the
Speaker 1: working class to seize control of the means of production
Speaker 1: and manage them themselves. Now, the smashing of the Hungarian
Speaker 1: Revolution led to a split in enormous numbers of communist
Speaker 1: parties all across the world. There are people leave communist
Speaker 1: parties and droves. This is a big enough deal that
Speaker 1: it spawns effectively like a crisis in China, where there
Speaker 1: is a series of bast strikes and people chanting like
Speaker 1: here another Hungary, and in particular the British Communist Party
Speaker 1: had a guy on the ground in Hungary reporting of
Speaker 1: what was happening, and his reports split the party between
Speaker 1: the people who supported the Hungarians and the people who
Speaker 1: supported the Soviets. The latter faction became known as tankies
Speaker 1: for their support of rolling tanks across the border and
Speaker 1: slaughtering in the working class. The term was revived in
Speaker 1: the twenty tens to describe the return of Marcist Leninists,
Speaker 1: so though much of its usage was about Russia and
Speaker 1: Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising. Now it is
Speaker 1: true that all of these people do actually support they
Speaker 1: do actually believe that the Soviets were crushing like the
Speaker 1: return of fascism, but that that actual belief, like the
Speaker 1: belief in you know, that the Soviets were right to
Speaker 1: crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively irrelevant now except as
Speaker 1: a sort of marker of loyalty, because you know, the
Speaker 1: USSR is gone and the Hungarian Revolution is gone too,
Speaker 1: and so what's left is a term that on the
Speaker 1: one hand, does correctly, you know, it does correctly describe
Speaker 1: a part of their political tradition, but it has it
Speaker 1: has a tendency to sort of anchor these arguments in
Speaker 1: the past instead of the present. With the substance of
Speaker 1: disagreements with the Marxist Leninists actually are now Marxist Leninists,
Speaker 1: they're also just yeah, they're called mls to Marxist Leninists
Speaker 1: absolutely hate being called tankies except under, you know, the
Speaker 1: circumstances where they adopted ironically, and I'm of two minds.
Speaker 1: I have called these people's tankies a lot. But the
Speaker 1: biggest problem with calling these people tankies is that the
Speaker 1: original tankies, the people who supported the Soviets butchering the
Speaker 1: Hungarian working class were actually communists. They were Marxist Latinists
Speaker 1: who supported the USSR and believe that state ownership of
Speaker 1: the means of production was the socialist transition to communism.
Speaker 1: These modern quote unquote Marxist Leninists don't even believe that.
Speaker 1: Both Stalin and Kruish Chef, for all the differences, would
Speaker 1: have had these people's shop for supporting capitalists in their
Speaker 1: imperialist market economies. If you tried to explain to Mao
Speaker 1: that Deng Jhao Ping, with his people's billionaires and a
Speaker 1: trillion dollars of American treasury bond singing it sitting in
Speaker 1: his coffers, was doing communism, he would have branded you
Speaker 1: a capitalist, wrote and sent you to your re education
Speaker 1: camp at the end of the day. Whatever else, the
Speaker 1: original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR were communists.
Speaker 1: Their modern day equivalents don't even have that to height behind.
Speaker 1: They have been reduced to capitalists with a hammer and
Speaker 1: sickle fetish. So who are these people really? What they've
Speaker 1: become is suicide net socialists, because the suicide nets are
Speaker 1: the actual content of their politics. This is the actual
Speaker 1: content of backing states like the people's Republic of China.
Speaker 1: It is full throated support for the suicide nets to
Speaker 1: fly under the roofs of the Fox confactories in Shenzhen.
Speaker 1: The reality of their suicide net socialism is that the
Speaker 1: Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than live under it.
Speaker 1: And it was these suicide net socialists who sins spawned
Speaker 1: their bastard children, patriotic socialism, and eventually Maga communism. So
Speaker 1: how do we understand what these people are? I am
Speaker 1: going to give the final word to Karl Marx, the
Speaker 1: man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read from one of Marx's most famous works, the eighteenth
Speaker 1: through Mayor. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on the
Speaker 1: show before. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like
Speaker 1: a nightmare on the mina into the living. And just
Speaker 1: as they seemed to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things,
Speaker 1: creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such
Speaker 1: epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits
Speaker 1: of the past to their service, borrowing from them names,
Speaker 1: battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new
Speaker 1: scene in world history and time, honor, disguise and borrowed language.
Speaker 1: Thus Luther Martin Luther put on the mask of the
Speaker 1: apostle Paul. The French Revolution of seventeen eighty nine to
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen draped itself alternatingly in the guise of the
Speaker 1: Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight knew nothing better to do than to
Speaker 1: parody now seventeen eighty nine, now the revolutionary tradition of
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety three, seventeen ninety five. This is precisely the
Speaker 1: trap that Marxist Leninis have walked into. Faced with mass
Speaker 1: social upheaval, they knew nothing better than the down the
Speaker 1: mask of Stalind and Mao. It was a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1: Here is Marx again. The social revolution of the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only
Speaker 1: from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it
Speaker 1: has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former
Speaker 1: revolutionaries required recollections of past world history in order to
Speaker 1: smother their own content. The Revolution of the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: must let the dead bury their dead in order to
Speaker 1: arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond
Speaker 1: the content. Here, the content goes beyond the phrase. But
Speaker 1: we never buried our dead. The memories of dead generations
Speaker 1: still weigh like a nightmare in the minds of the living.
Speaker 1: And in the next episode we will walk face first
Speaker 1: into that nightmare and behold the abyss within.
Speaker 2: Woo All right, guys, I did my job. That could
Speaker 2: happen here a podcast that I just opened by saying,
Speaker 2: woo ha meyeah, I'm gonna throw to you. Now what
Speaker 2: are we talking about today?
Speaker 1: Boy? So, yesterday we did I guess, the sort of
Speaker 1: intro legwork to the kind of stuff that you need
Speaker 1: to know to understand the sort of new crop of
Speaker 1: right wing Palestine grifters. And today we're actually gonna get
Speaker 1: into who these people are and how their politics developed,
Speaker 1: and how the sort of trajectory of this has shaped
Speaker 1: a lot of the left. And to do this, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we need to introduce one of the main characters of this,
Speaker 1: for better or for worse, probably for worse, Max Blumenthal.
Speaker 2: I just woke up. We're talking about Max Blumenthal and
Speaker 2: I'm just barely starting my coffee for the morning. Son
Speaker 2: of a bitch.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. I apologize to everyone, but unfortunately, unfortunately
Speaker 1: this needs to be done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the human equivalent of soap scum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so okay, I think the place to start with
Speaker 1: Max Bluementhal is a thing that's pretty common among most
Speaker 1: of the kind of new crop of these Palestine grifters
Speaker 1: is that he used to be a pretty normal progressive.
Speaker 1: Now for some of the people were going to be
Speaker 1: talking about, pretty normal progressive was a thing they were
Speaker 1: in like twenty nineteen. For Max Blumenthal, like, he was
Speaker 1: a pretty normal progressive in like the two thousands and
Speaker 1: in nine was.
Speaker 3: A real journalist at some point, right, yeah, yeah, Like,
Speaker 3: like he wrote this book called Republican Gomorah, Inside the
Speaker 3: Movement that Shattered the Part, which is a pretty good
Speaker 3: book about the rise of the Christian Right and how
Speaker 3: they seize the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: And this is very funny because the place he is
Speaker 1: going to end up at the end of this story
Speaker 1: is going on Tucker Carlson and being aligned with like
Speaker 1: the exact forces he was talking about like a decade
Speaker 1: and a half ago. So before we really started to
Speaker 1: get into him, we need to talk about his family. Garrett,
Speaker 1: do you know who Sid Blumenthal is?
Speaker 4: Oh? Yeah, the name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing
Speaker 4: any specific bells for me.
Speaker 2: Ye Clinton staffer, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he was like Clinton's hatchet man basically, like
Speaker 1: this is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but like later
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton too. He's like the guy who does the
Speaker 1: Clinton's like political dirty work, and he was like, here's
Speaker 1: a big guy in the nineties. The most impactful thing
Speaker 1: that he did for modern politics is that he is
Speaker 1: the guy who invented birth rhythm is slightly too strong
Speaker 1: of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like
Speaker 1: Obama birth rhism him like into the mainstream because like
Speaker 1: as an attempt basically to kill Obama's campaign so that
Speaker 1: Hillary could win the nomination.
Speaker 4: How well did how well did that turn out?
Speaker 1: Well? Gave us Donald Trump, So you know, things going great,
Speaker 1: and you know, so so this is Max Bluementhal's dad, right,
Speaker 1: like Max, And this is I think I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of important about him is that he grows up
Speaker 1: very sort of proximal to power. Like he goes to
Speaker 1: Georgetown Day School, which is a forty thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: year prep school that has like multiple Supreme Court justices,
Speaker 1: Like I've sent their kids there now. But he's so
Speaker 1: he's like kind of a normal progressive journalist for a
Speaker 1: long time. But in the early twenty tens, he takes
Speaker 1: a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets
Speaker 1: him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive
Speaker 1: circles because in twenty twelve thirteen, it was and it
Speaker 1: still is to this day, but like it was, it
Speaker 1: was very hard to take profalesime positions, and he like
Speaker 1: he just ends up in this sort of spiral where
Speaker 1: like he loses most of his friends, his girlfriend breaks
Speaker 1: up with him, like he's not getting work from the
Speaker 1: usual places he'd been getting work from because he's been
Speaker 1: sort of like kicked out and isolated for taking this stance.
Speaker 1: And the product of this is that he goes he
Speaker 1: takes this meeting that is very very weird. So in
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, Russia today has this like week long gala
Speaker 1: thing that's for its tenth anniversary. And if you're like
Speaker 1: a Mueller investigation fan, this is very famous. If you're
Speaker 1: a Nova person, almost no one has ever heard of
Speaker 1: this thing. Yeah, so this this gala thing is this
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. It has a bunch of very very
Speaker 1: important like Russian officials. Gorbachev is there, Like there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of like senior like senior officials. Very famously, Mike
Speaker 1: Flynn gets paid forty five thousand dollars to speak there.
Speaker 1: Jill Stein, who the Green Party can in twenty sixteen?
Speaker 1: This is where.
Speaker 4: Running again for the Green Party this year?
Speaker 1: Technics. Yeah, I don't know if they're gonna be this year.
Speaker 2: I think they got it. I think they got it.
Speaker 1: On lock Now Jill Jill Jill Stein twenty four? Would
Speaker 1: she beat Howie Hawkins? Is he not running again?
Speaker 4: I believe, I believe it's her. That's last last night
Speaker 4: I heard Jill Stein is making is making another run
Speaker 4: for it?
Speaker 1: Goddamn?
Speaker 4: All right, yeah, yeah, she has one month ago she
Speaker 4: launched her twenty twenty four presidential bid.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, so yeah, okay, so so Jill Stein. This
Speaker 1: is where if you've ever heard the conspiracy stuff, that's
Speaker 1: like Jill Stein is like a Russian agent. It comes
Speaker 1: from the fact that she was at this meeting and
Speaker 1: then started running for president. Now, what's interesting about Max
Speaker 1: Bluman thought going here is at this point he's a
Speaker 1: pro Syrian revolution guy. He writes, he writes a bunch
Speaker 1: of articles like criticizing Western leftists for supporting a Saudid.
Speaker 1: I want to read from a little bit of them,
Speaker 1: because it's a really interesting look into who he was
Speaker 1: before and the fact that he knows exactly what the
Speaker 1: playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting
Speaker 1: the Palestinian cause, the Assaud apologists have eagerly played the
Speaker 1: al Qaeda card to stoke fears of his Islamic takeover Assyria.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and three, Assaud accused the US
Speaker 1: of deliberately overstating the strength of Alkaida in order to
Speaker 1: justify it so called war on Terror. But now in
Speaker 1: a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world, Asad
Speaker 1: insists the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost entirely by
Speaker 1: al Qaeda like jahadists who have come from abroad to
Speaker 1: place the country under Islamic control, and is addressed to
Speaker 1: the Syrian People's Assembly. On June third, the dictator tried
Speaker 1: to hammer the theme home by using the terms terrorists
Speaker 1: or terrorism a whopping forty three times. That is a
Speaker 1: full ten times more than George Bush digit he speech
Speaker 1: to Congress. In the aftermath of nine to eleven, enjoining
Speaker 1: the Asade regimes campaign that g legitimize the Syrian opposition
Speaker 1: by casting it as a bunch off irrational Jahatis. Ironically,
Speaker 1: they seem to have little problem with Hesbelah's core Islamist values.
Speaker 1: Assaud's apologists have unwinningly underwritten the war on Terror lexicon
Speaker 1: introduced by George Bush, Ariel Sharon and the Neo Kon
Speaker 1: cabal after nine to eleven. So this is pre twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: like twenty fifteen, like pre this meeting, Max bluementhal So
Speaker 1: he goes to this meeting and then after that founds
Speaker 1: grey Zone and all of his positions suddenly flip. And
Speaker 1: this is the thing you can actually if you want to,
Speaker 1: if you go back and trace. So graizone is this
Speaker 1: sort of media outlet thing that Max Blumenthal found it.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because there's a lot of like Aaron
Speaker 1: Batte too, Like if you go through the journalist in
Speaker 1: this outlet, the moment they start working for Greyzone, all
Speaker 1: of their positions on stuff like Syria just immediately flip.
Speaker 1: There's okay. So there's a conspiracy version of this where
Speaker 1: like if you read Liberal Accouncil with Grayzone. They will
Speaker 1: argue that maxlely Wenthal went to this meeting, got paid
Speaker 1: off by the Russian government and that grey Zone is
Speaker 1: like a Russian asset. I I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's true. Well, the thing I can say was,
Speaker 1: nobody knows where Grayzone gets his money from. Right, they're
Speaker 1: very they're very sort of like like there's Patreon stuff.
Speaker 1: But other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence, like directly that he's been paid by
Speaker 1: the Russian government to do Grayzone. The thing that I
Speaker 1: can say is that he has taken a bunch of
Speaker 1: money from the Russian government to go on RT like
Speaker 1: all the fucking time. That's the part of it that
Speaker 1: I can say. I don't know. This is one of
Speaker 1: these things that's it's such a sort of like confluence
Speaker 1: of like all of these people were in the same
Speaker 1: place at the same time. It's one of these things
Speaker 1: that generates a trilling conspiracy theories. I'm gonna say that
Speaker 1: I don't think that this is like a giant Russian conspiracy.
Speaker 1: But he does flip all of his positions almost immediately
Speaker 1: after going to this meeting, and the thing that he
Speaker 1: starts taking is is the exact same position that he
Speaker 1: was he was writing about like before this in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: he starts talking about how like anyone who opposes a
Speaker 1: SAWD is a quote head chopper, and he starts he
Speaker 1: starts selling like one of these big things is selling
Speaker 1: this line that like a SAWD is the defender of
Speaker 1: serious ethnic minorities, which is like a thing that I
Speaker 1: think would be newsed to them, and you know, and
Speaker 1: he's he starts a podcast called Moderate Rebels, which is
Speaker 1: a joke about like, ah, like the US is funding
Speaker 1: moderate rebels, but all those people are actually like ol
Speaker 1: Kaida supporters, and I don't know, like I think. I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting comparing his pre twenty fifteen writing to
Speaker 1: his post twenty fifteen writing, because he very clearly understands
Speaker 1: what he's doing, Like he he wrote an analysis of
Speaker 1: the thing that he's going to be dealing.
Speaker 2: There's no plausible deniability with him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a big part of this whole deal is
Speaker 1: like and this is one of the things that Max
Speaker 1: Lminthal figures out is that there are there are there's
Speaker 1: a very large market in selling a palatable form of
Speaker 1: Islamophobia to the left. You're gonna see this in this
Speaker 1: is one of the things that he doesn't shing John,
Speaker 1: where there's he's he's part of this whole sort of
Speaker 1: sphere of people who are like, there's nothing happening in
Speaker 1: Chan John, Everything's actually great. And with both that and Syria,
Speaker 1: there's exactly the same playbook, which is to go all, like,
Speaker 1: you know, all of the resistance to this government is
Speaker 1: CIA back Wahabi terrorists. You can find like some people
Speaker 1: who suck and go oh hey, like these guys are
Speaker 1: all Jahadists, and you know, in Syria this is sort
Speaker 1: of bleakly funny because if you know your War on
Speaker 1: terror history, like Bashar al Assad like tortured people with
Speaker 1: the CIA and the US like held some Weiger guys
Speaker 1: for the CCP in Gitmo for allegedly being part of
Speaker 1: a separatist group. But this is an important part of
Speaker 1: how people sort of launder these right wing dictators. And
Speaker 1: this is something that there's a very old sort of
Speaker 1: tradition of this on the left that these these a
Speaker 1: lot of people are able to sort of raft onto
Speaker 1: And I'm going to take an example of this because
Speaker 1: I think it's important because one of the the er
Speaker 1: sort of moments of all of this politics is the
Speaker 1: collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left wing defense
Speaker 1: of Melosovic. So I'm going to read from to take
Speaker 1: an example of like what this shit looks like. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read from an article that Jeremy Skahill wrote,
Speaker 1: which is, I think the worst article about Melosovik I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. This is this is a Huffington Post piece.
Speaker 1: This is I think the worst thing I've ever seen
Speaker 1: written about Molosovik in a mainstream outlet. Here is here.
Speaker 1: Here is Jeremy's Gayhill quote. Little attention therefore, has been
Speaker 1: paid to Melosovic's long term efforts, which predate nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety nine NATO bombing and his own trial
Speaker 1: to expose the presence of Al Qaeda and the Balkans
Speaker 1: from Bosnia to Kosovo. With nine to eleven, Melosovic's talk
Speaker 1: of al Kaido easily dismissed as laughable, pathetic opportunism. But
Speaker 1: those who follow Melosovic's career and importantly the events of
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties in Yugoslavia, no, it was none of these.
Speaker 1: The those allegations were based on true events the US
Speaker 1: does not want discussed in an international court. Following the
Speaker 1: defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the eighties, many
Speaker 1: Musha Hadeen eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia, where they
Speaker 1: went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs
Speaker 1: and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and bin Laden
Speaker 1: were on the same team. To this day, there are
Speaker 1: reports of trading camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation.
Speaker 1: It is also likely a trading ground for future blowback.
Speaker 1: So that's like nonsense, Like there are not there are
Speaker 1: not all Kaida training camps in Bosnia, Like what the fuck? Like,
Speaker 1: it's just it's complete nonsense, And you know, it relies
Speaker 1: on a lot of the other sort of like weird
Speaker 1: things that leftists like believe and don't believe about this.
Speaker 1: There's there's a very if if you want to actually
Speaker 1: read about these sort of like transnational Islamist networks, there's
Speaker 1: there's a very good book by the anthropologist DARRYL Lee
Speaker 1: called The Universal Enemy in Jihad and Jihada Empire and
Speaker 1: the Challenge of Solidarity. But like, okay, I want I
Speaker 1: want to ask the audience a question, right, why would
Speaker 1: members of the muja Hadeen be in Bosnia in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, And I want to suggest that it might
Speaker 1: have something to do with the fact that Melosivic was
Speaker 1: trying to kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He
Speaker 1: almost did it. He was pretty close to actually doing it,
Speaker 1: you know. But the sort of the sort of like
Speaker 1: left conspiracy solutions like no, no, it must have been
Speaker 1: the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex Musja Hadeen
Speaker 1: guys would have gone to a country where someone was
Speaker 1: trying to kill the entire Muslim population, Like what the
Speaker 1: fuck did you?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: It's it's it's all stuff that's like this, And you know,
Speaker 1: he also talks about how like Belosovic would have like
Speaker 1: testified about the CIA institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo,
Speaker 1: and like what like Belosovic is the guy who presided
Speaker 1: like he was one of the architects of of decollectivisation
Speaker 1: in Yugoslavia, like he is like before before he was this,
Speaker 1: before he was the butcher of Belgrade, he was the
Speaker 1: butcher of the Yugoslavian social estate. But you can, you know,
Speaker 1: and so and he was he was just a hardline
Speaker 1: right wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to
Speaker 1: a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting, you know,
Speaker 1: by by by doing this thing where you're like, oh
Speaker 1: well actually like all of these people were, uh, they
Speaker 1: were all al Kaeda. You can use this to sell
Speaker 1: the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as like the left to
Speaker 1: savor of Yugoslavia. And you know, I think that the
Speaker 1: part about this that really said is like you know,
Speaker 1: there was you know, the sort of last true believers
Speaker 1: of the old Yugoslavia working class right where these the
Speaker 1: Yugoslavin anti war protesters and these guys, you know, they
Speaker 1: they're they're they're protesting to stop the war. They see
Speaker 1: coming that the Serbians are about to win, leash and
Speaker 1: they just get murdered in the streets by Melosovic. You know,
Speaker 1: well because seven years later the US society that they
Speaker 1: didn't like him, like he's become this like hero of
Speaker 1: a bunch of these like a bunch of barxsis Leninists
Speaker 1: like see this guy as a hero, and this is
Speaker 1: you know, this, this is just this is their big
Speaker 1: sort of like political trick is using the threat of
Speaker 1: like terrifying Muslim like terrorists to just legitimize right wing dictators.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, speaking of right wing dictators. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's this non zero chance there's an ad for someone
Speaker 2: who will be one in the future. Uh, right now,
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: So we're back to this stuff. And Syria and specifically
Speaker 1: the way people think about Syria plays a huge role
Speaker 1: in the sort of development of the left. And one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that the sort of new gray zone line,
Speaker 1: which is that the entire opposition is composed of Islamists
Speaker 1: and that Asad is the only person who can stop them,
Speaker 1: is that, like, you know, part of the reason this
Speaker 1: works is that like yeah, like they're and this is
Speaker 1: this is the gap that these people always sort of
Speaker 1: come in through. Is that like a lot of the
Speaker 1: Western media was not covering Syria very well. They weren't
Speaker 1: covering the rise of like job Outel news Row very well,
Speaker 1: and you know, they use this gap to sort of
Speaker 1: like come through and rehabilitate a sod by going like
Speaker 1: the media is lying to you a sad who again,
Speaker 1: I need to mention like ten years earlier, this guy
Speaker 1: was torturing people for the Cia. But you know, now
Speaker 1: like Asad is actually Nancy imperialist, and this works, This
Speaker 1: works enormously well. This is the sort of breach through
Speaker 1: which Bluemithal enters the mainstream. And this, this discourse about
Speaker 1: Syria like reshapes everything about the left. This is where
Speaker 1: this is where American Marcist Leninism like comes from right,
Speaker 1: like a huge portion of ideas from the people who
Speaker 1: backed the SOD And this is it's actually really weird,
Speaker 1: like almost every big sort of like leftist like podcast
Speaker 1: or media thing like came out of the Syrian Civil
Speaker 1: War in some way or another, Like the whole Grazo
Speaker 1: versus Bellingcat thing is a like is a thing that
Speaker 1: was originally about the Syrian Civil War Tropo trap House,
Speaker 1: which is like I guess if people who don't know
Speaker 1: it's this massive like social democratic podcast also like sort
Speaker 1: of came out of there, like it was partially about
Speaker 1: like came out of like Turkish politics. But those were
Speaker 1: very very similar circles like on Twitter at the time,
Speaker 1: and you know, and one of their big things is
Speaker 1: like Felix Peterman's like The Truth about Syria, which is
Speaker 1: a sort of slightly softer like version of supporting ASAD
Speaker 1: that also supports like the revolution in Rojeva. Like I
Speaker 1: came out of this because I was on the pro
Speaker 1: Rojava side because like I'm an anarchist and I have
Speaker 1: a bunch of Kurdish friends. So there's this giant fight
Speaker 1: about what the Syrian Civil War is and what the
Speaker 1: sides are and what it means. And this is one
Speaker 1: of the things that comes to define what the left
Speaker 1: is and the grey zone people sort of win. And
Speaker 1: the result of this is that this pro acod like
Speaker 1: nominally anti imperialist position becomes the default position of a
Speaker 1: bunch of sort of like people who aren't like hardline Marxistlenis,
Speaker 1: who are just sort of like like kind of edgy
Speaker 1: Bernie like Birdie supporters. And this is something that like
Speaker 1: you can see the effect of this, like to this
Speaker 1: day if you look at left, if you look at
Speaker 1: like leftist meme culture, like you can see people who
Speaker 1: are otherwise mostly normal making Line of Damascus jokes about
Speaker 1: how like a sod is like the line of Damascus
Speaker 1: people still make jokes about barrel bombs, which is you
Speaker 1: know this thing that ASD would do. Uh, there's the
Speaker 1: whole like the one that I see the most, it's
Speaker 1: like still very very common, is there is this whole
Speaker 1: meme of like Hillary Clinton says, asod must go, and
Speaker 1: then there's like the second panel as like who must
Speaker 1: go and Hillary Clinton gone, and people still do this
Speaker 1: like to this day.
Speaker 2: The other really common one, there's this little girl named
Speaker 2: Bana A Labet who was a Syrian girl who got bombed,
Speaker 2: and there's like a video of her, you know, reacting
Speaker 2: in the way a small child would to being bombed,
Speaker 2: and like there's a meme that's basically taking her words
Speaker 2: and twisting it into like please America, you know, come
Speaker 2: and intervene in Syria. Like turn it basically like this
Speaker 2: this girl is CIA propaganda trying to like justify US
Speaker 2: intervention in the war. Like that's the that's the bit
Speaker 2: you see it posted A lot people repurposed it after
Speaker 2: the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like pretty fundamentally cruel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's that's how a lot of this stuff
Speaker 1: worked because it was it's stuff that fits into the
Speaker 1: social values of that part of the left at that time,
Speaker 1: which is that both the Marxist leninists and what was
Speaker 1: called the dirtbag left around Tchapa was completely irony poisoned
Speaker 1: and like, I get it. I was around then, like
Speaker 1: I did my time in the art trenches, Like it's
Speaker 1: really hard not to react to the worlds with ironic
Speaker 1: detachment when it's so fucking terrible. But you know the
Speaker 1: other side of that was like these people started like
Speaker 1: we're doing these Assadmians because they were like because they
Speaker 1: were edgy and contrarian, and because you know, like the
Speaker 1: like this is like the stuff with the bond. This
Speaker 1: is one of the things with the Bonum stuff is
Speaker 1: like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is
Speaker 1: something that's edgy and contrarian, and like like the performance
Speaker 1: of that was this very sort of like powerful emotional
Speaker 1: pull that that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff.
Speaker 1: And you know, originally, and part of the everything here
Speaker 1: too is like everyone everyone in all of these circles,
Speaker 1: their big thing is trying to own the Libs, and
Speaker 1: this is something that like the Libs cared about and
Speaker 1: doing this thing of like how much you don't care
Speaker 1: about it and how much you think it's like them
Speaker 1: falling for propaganda that was you know, that was something
Speaker 1: that was heavily incentivized by the structure of housings like
Speaker 1: Twitter work and how like retweets work, and you know
Speaker 1: this this is I mean, it's bleak in and of itself,
Speaker 1: but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only
Speaker 1: other people who support ASAD are like white supremacists, and
Speaker 1: this leads to a bunch of very very weird cross
Speaker 1: pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between
Speaker 1: these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of
Speaker 1: the most common sources about Syria for both sort of
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninists and like social democratic Twitter users is this
Speaker 1: person named Partisan Girl who's, like I still to this day,
Speaker 1: like a very big media figure. So she is a
Speaker 1: Syrian Australian quote unquote Syria expert. We don't really have
Speaker 1: time to get into all of her stuff on.
Speaker 2: Munch, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's been on David Duke's podcast.
Speaker 2: David Duke as a former podcast, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. She was
Speaker 1: on Richard Spencer's podcast like she is just a Nazi.
Speaker 1: The last post that I saw from her was her
Speaker 1: responding to another guy who's just just a straight up
Speaker 1: Partland anti Semite who posted this beam that was like
Speaker 1: maybe this is why all conservatives support Israel and has
Speaker 1: a bunch of faces of conservatives with like us stars
Speaker 1: of David on them, like including Max Blumenthal and partisan girls.
Speaker 1: Response to this is not too object to the fact
Speaker 1: that it's unbelievably anti Semitic, but to be like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: Max Blumenthal is actually an anti Zionist, so you shouldn't
Speaker 1: include him with all of the rest of the people
Speaker 1: who you've included on here because they're Jewish, even though
Speaker 1: some of them aren't. He's just accusing random people of
Speaker 1: being Jewish who aren't. But that's the thing. Like she's
Speaker 1: straight up in anti semi just actually a fascist. I like,
Speaker 1: I literally, like we could sit here for ten minutes
Speaker 1: list the names of all of the fascist podcasts she's
Speaker 1: been on. And this is one of these things that
Speaker 1: people knew, Like people knew that she was a fascist.
Speaker 1: And I had arguments with people where I would be like, hey,
Speaker 1: this person is a Nazi, like she's been on David
Speaker 1: Duke's podcast, and people would be like well, yeah, she's
Speaker 1: a fascist, but I like her Syria analysis and this
Speaker 1: is you know, one of the things that happens in
Speaker 1: this is this is I'm gonna kind of defer to
Speaker 1: you on this, Robert, because this is something I know
Speaker 1: a lot less about. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: the grays On people become really heavily involved about is
Speaker 1: the doing a bunch of weird denihalism stuff around chemical
Speaker 1: weapons attacks and Duma.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's it. That's a lot of
Speaker 2: the nexus of the kind of asshole Left takes on
Speaker 2: Syria revolve around is because if if Basha al Assade
Speaker 2: was dumping chemical weapons on civil populations and mass which
Speaker 2: we know he was, then there's absolutely no way you
Speaker 2: can justify or defend him. It doesn't matter how many
Speaker 2: of his enemies were quote unquote Islamists. He was pumping
Speaker 2: chemical weapons into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to
Speaker 2: be that that never happened, right, that that was the
Speaker 2: CIA faking it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and
Speaker 2: it got blamed on a sod. A lot of it
Speaker 2: comes down to there's this group. These guys are civil
Speaker 2: defense people. This is there are civil defense units in
Speaker 2: any city being bombed made up of civilians in the area.
Speaker 2: When I was in Mosul, I was embedded with a
Speaker 2: lot of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go
Speaker 2: in and they pull people out and bodies out of
Speaker 2: wreckage after bombings, right, they're usually locals. They provide some
Speaker 2: emergency medical care to the extent that that's possible. There's
Speaker 2: people doing this right now. In Gaza and in Syria,
Speaker 2: it was the White Helmets, And you know, the White
Speaker 2: Helmets were in large part formed by a dude named
Speaker 2: James Messia I believe it's the way his name is pronounced.
Speaker 2: He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that
Speaker 2: long ago. But a big part of this chunk of
Speaker 2: the left's line on Syria is that because these guys
Speaker 2: are the first responders and they're getting in after these
Speaker 2: chemical attacks and providing a lot of the initial evidence
Speaker 2: in the wake of them, it's that these guys, the
Speaker 2: White Helmets, are a CIA front and they're the ones
Speaker 2: who are kind of planting all of the evidence of
Speaker 2: these attacks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this stuff gets really really out of control
Speaker 1: very quickly. I mean, this is one of the you
Speaker 1: suddenly see all of these people doing the stuff that
Speaker 1: the Alex Jones supporters are doing about Sandy Hook were
Speaker 1: like they're like taking pictures of like dead bodies and going, oh,
Speaker 1: this is like a mannequin or like these are crisis actors,
Speaker 1: and it's it's insane because it's like this is all
Speaker 1: the stuff that like the Israelis are doing now, where
Speaker 1: like they're taking pictures of a dead baby and going
Speaker 1: like this is a doll. But so many people were
Speaker 1: doing this with like with the shit in Syria, and
Speaker 1: it really struck me as like I was kind of
Speaker 1: observing it from the outside because I don't know, like
Speaker 1: the period this was happening as the period where Occupy
Speaker 1: Ice was starting, so I was not super involved in
Speaker 1: this stuff, but you could just sort of see like
Speaker 1: the kind of the level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing
Speaker 1: to the point where like all of the stuff that's
Speaker 1: like the modern like conspiracy canon is just getting embedded
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's where you see a lot of the stuff
Speaker 2: that has been the norm on the right for twenty
Speaker 2: years start to take hold in the left default reality
Speaker 2: kind of fragmenting conspiratorial angles on verifiable things that are
Speaker 2: happening right where you have what's obviously occurring based on
Speaker 2: the evidence and the completely errant reality fragment that that
Speaker 2: is how you have to perceive events in order to
Speaker 2: stay ideologically consistent. That's when a lot of that start
Speaker 2: starts to infect the left in a way that is
Speaker 2: now you know, pretty widely prevalent.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things that he's able to do with this
Speaker 1: that becomes one of the staples of a lot of
Speaker 1: the left is this this line about color revolutions, where
Speaker 1: every single time a protest starts in a country that
Speaker 1: he doesn't like, or like the US doesn't like, like
Speaker 1: everyone on Twitter would suddenly be like, Oh, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a color revolution, it's a CIA op. All the
Speaker 1: protesters are being paid by the CIA. And I could
Speaker 1: pick like a thousand examples of this from everywhere from
Speaker 1: like Lebanon to Hong Kong. Like every time a mass
Speaker 1: protest would start, these people would be like, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a color revolution. I'm gonna I'm gonna pick one
Speaker 1: that I think, I genuinely think is the most egregious
Speaker 1: piece of slander they've ever fucking printed or at least
Speaker 1: like like slander of a leftist group, which is so
Speaker 1: Ben Norton wrote a piece that was about Ecuador because
Speaker 1: there been there have been a bunch of like Ecuador
Speaker 1: has periodic mass protests, they also had elections. And Ben Norton,
Speaker 1: who's another gray Zone guy who eventually like we wouldn't
Speaker 1: even have time to cover this, but he's gonna break
Speaker 1: with the gray Zone people when they take their hard
Speaker 1: right pivot because they start doing like anti vax shit
Speaker 1: that's too much.
Speaker 2: Even fame, which has been at least a little bit
Speaker 2: of fun to watch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, watching them all fighting each other has been
Speaker 1: all gone some one of the few pieces of satisfaction
Speaker 1: we've gotten out of this. But Norton, so he on
Speaker 1: the one of the people he's targeting is the Confederation
Speaker 1: of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and so we've talked about
Speaker 1: them on this show before. They are one of the
Speaker 1: most radical indigenous organizations on the planet. Like they you know,
Speaker 1: they they have been literally in the case of Ben Norton,
Speaker 1: they have been overthrowing near liberal government since before Ben
Speaker 1: Norton was born. Like their big thing is doing is
Speaker 1: is they do these days where like they call an
Speaker 1: uprising and it uprising happens, hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 1: go into the streets and try to bring down the
Speaker 1: government and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But
Speaker 1: you know this is this is one of their big things.
Speaker 1: And Gray Zone like like Norton calls these people uh
Speaker 1: anarchists inspired ultra leftists backed by the US.
Speaker 4: Which is just you know, you're in for a good
Speaker 4: political analysis when someone uses the term ultra leftists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it as an insults like what, oh no,
Speaker 1: I've been ultra leftists and my politics are too good
Speaker 1: you my takes are too based like what this is
Speaker 1: supposed to be an insult like baffling stuff. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: like and like, in the span of two years, they
Speaker 1: went from like praising they went from praising the Confederation
Speaker 1: if the Just Nationalities of Ecuador to calling them a
Speaker 1: cia OP like again within two years. And and a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of this stuff is based on
Speaker 1: the work of this guy named William Engdah. I don't
Speaker 1: know how a pounce this Leason. I think I think
Speaker 1: it's William Ngdah. So he's he's a Laruchite We've talked
Speaker 1: about the Laruchites on this podcast before. They're famous for
Speaker 1: like beating up leftists on college campuses in the seventies.
Speaker 1: They're also like the most feted up motherfuckers in the
Speaker 1: entire world. Like they are. They are snitching on leftist
Speaker 1: groups to like federal agencies you've never heard of before,
Speaker 1: like they claim to have worked with the CIA, the FBI,
Speaker 1: Defents Intelligence Agency, directly cooperated with Reagan's National Security Council,
Speaker 1: like they have. They are like the biggest snitches in
Speaker 1: the entire world. And you know, Bluementhal's like copying their
Speaker 1: stuff right, Like he's this, this is where a lot
Speaker 1: of his stuff about what color revolutions are comes from.
Speaker 1: And eng Daw is, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to
Speaker 1: some research by Emmy bevinse Us, an anti fascist researcher.
Speaker 1: So eng Daw thinks that BLM was a color revolution
Speaker 1: because he is just a a really really hard line
Speaker 1: like right worker. This is actually like a pretty common
Speaker 1: thing in these circles of people who think that b
Speaker 1: Alema's color revolution, people who think that like occupies a
Speaker 1: color revolution, and that's sort of like the far right
Speaker 1: of these of these sort of circles, and uh, I
Speaker 1: guess speaking of the far right of these circles. Uh,
Speaker 1: do you know what is the by far the right
Speaker 1: choice for you to.
Speaker 4: To use your consuming power of the of the purchasing dollar.
Speaker 4: That's right, these these ads.
Speaker 1: Great job.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was That was wonderful and.
Speaker 1: We are unfortunately back.
Speaker 4: Well my wallet is later and I've never felt happier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So okay, so we The reason we're covering this
Speaker 1: in the first place is the sort of right wing
Speaker 1: pivot that this circle does. But before we talk about that,
Speaker 1: we need to talk about one more thing that is
Speaker 1: incredibly bleak, which which is the time he accused a
Speaker 1: sexual assault victim of being a co intel pro op.
Speaker 1: So this is a story I don't think most people know.
Speaker 1: I only know about it because I was there in
Speaker 1: the DSA at the time this is happening. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: the DSA has its first has his first elections after
Speaker 1: the giant surgeon membership from both like Trump winning and
Speaker 1: also Bernie, and they have his first elections to its
Speaker 1: governing body. And one of the people who's elected is
Speaker 1: this guy named Arles Stevens. Arl Stevens is. He's a
Speaker 1: very popular leftist leftist at the time he does this
Speaker 1: whole podcast circuit. He's very charismatic. He gets the third
Speaker 1: most votes of anyone elected to the National Political Committee.
Speaker 1: But it turns out he is also an abuser. A
Speaker 1: woman publishes an anonymous letter about Stevens sexually assaulting her.
Speaker 1: It is fucking brutal. Ben Norton, who's one of his
Speaker 1: coworkers that we've talked about before, makes a giant threat
Speaker 1: accused the victim of being co intel pro Max Blumenthal
Speaker 1: quote tweets it and says quote can't help but be
Speaker 1: reminded of cointelprobe while reading this thread, and even people
Speaker 1: who are normally Max Plumenthal supporters were like, what the
Speaker 1: fuck are you doing? And like the full story of
Speaker 1: Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement, and this is actually worse
Speaker 1: than I can talk about on air. So after the
Speaker 1: first thread where he where Ben Norton calls it a
Speaker 1: coen Tel for up, he deletes that one because it's
Speaker 1: just not obviously not sure if people are yelling at him,
Speaker 1: So he makes a second thread that that threat is
Speaker 1: still up to this fucking day. You can find the
Speaker 1: thread of Ben Norton talking about how a DSA faction
Speaker 1: called Momentum had like manufactured this sexual assault thing to
Speaker 1: like destroy its opposition. And I want to make something
Speaker 1: very clear, because I was there when, but when, like
Speaker 1: during the in this fight inside the DSA, which Momentum
Speaker 1: and everyone else in the fucking org And I was
Speaker 1: on the anti Momentum side.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Momentum was basically the right wing of the DSA, not
Speaker 1: exactly the right wing, like there's there were some other
Speaker 1: people who were further right than them, but they were
Speaker 1: they were like the center right of the DSA. They
Speaker 1: were electoralists. The only thing they ever wanted to do
Speaker 1: was canvassing, like I was on and Arl Stevens was
Speaker 1: on the other side, like opposing them, and I was
Speaker 1: on like politically, I was in the in like on
Speaker 1: the same side as Arl Stevens here right, Like I
Speaker 1: fucking hate the Momentum people. I think they destroyed the
Speaker 1: DSA one one day I will do a whole thing
Speaker 1: about them. Like these these people, like the Domentum people,
Speaker 1: literally purged my friends from the York right. And Arl
Speaker 1: Stevens is one of their enemies. And that is not
Speaker 1: what this shit was fucking about like Arl Stevens is
Speaker 1: just a rapist. But you know, Max Blumenthal and Ben
Speaker 1: Norton came in and were like, oh shit, this Arl
Speaker 1: Stevens guy is like an anti imperialist, so we're going
Speaker 1: to accuse the survivor of being a co intel pro
Speaker 1: op and it's fucking it's so fucking bl Max has
Speaker 1: deleted his tweet, but you can find it if you.
Speaker 1: You know, I have screenshots of it, and I have
Speaker 1: wayback machine things, right because I was there when this
Speaker 1: was happening, and none of these people ever suffered any
Speaker 1: professional repercussions for this. They were just fucking allowed to
Speaker 1: do this shit and nothing ever happened to them. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It makes me just incredibly deeply angry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean it's it is like there's that
Speaker 2: piece that goes around regularly about how like misogynists make
Speaker 2: the best informants, and it remains a pretty durable fact
Speaker 2: about organizing. Like if you run into people who are
Speaker 2: immediately attacking the victim of sexual assault as some sort
Speaker 2: of an informant because the person who committed it is
Speaker 2: on the quote unquote right ideological side, that might tell
Speaker 2: you something about the people who are doing that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, and this is this is this,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the thing that like, like to
Speaker 1: this day there are like really shitty left wing groups
Speaker 1: who still do this stuff. You know. Okay, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna move on from that to some very okay. So
Speaker 1: this is you know, all of the stuff that Max
Speaker 1: Blumenthal had been doing until that point, that was all
Speaker 1: inside of the bounds of what was considered acceptable on
Speaker 1: the left. And that sucks, right, like that's not good.
Speaker 1: But by about twenty twenty one, he is And I
Speaker 1: found the exact I'm pretty sure I found the exact
Speaker 1: bunth with this happened where in twenty twenty one, like
Speaker 1: Bluementhal just loses it like it is it'specifically August twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, he very specifically starts like tacking right really fast.
Speaker 1: And what he starts doing is he starts he starts
Speaker 1: doing anti lockdown stuff. And so he starts ranting about
Speaker 1: how like Australian lawmakers or opposing fians for sharing information
Speaker 1: about anti lockdown protests and like fans for finans for
Speaker 1: attending rallies, and he just gets more and more into
Speaker 1: hardcore anti lockdown stuff and then into stuff that's effectively
Speaker 1: just straight up anti vax stuff. One of the things
Speaker 1: that he ends up doing is he writes an article
Speaker 1: about like if people back remember in COVID, there was
Speaker 1: the whole thing about flattening the curve and trying to
Speaker 1: get less people to die, and there was this whole
Speaker 1: debate over whether you should just like not have lockdowns
Speaker 1: to let everyone get COVID and that would give you
Speaker 1: like quote unquote herd immunity and everyone would be safe.
Speaker 1: And that's like like Sweden tried that and it fucking
Speaker 1: killed almost other people. So it was a terrible idea.
Speaker 1: But like the whole sort of Gray Zone crew like
Speaker 1: starts well except for Ben Norton, who leaves starts like
Speaker 1: rallying around this stuff. And it's really weird because like
Speaker 1: like in twenty twenty, when China was doing the lockdowns,
Speaker 1: Ben Norton was really really pro lockdowns, but as as
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one goes on, he starts pivoting into this
Speaker 1: anti lockdown stuff. And so I first saw the stuff
Speaker 1: from this journalist named Walter Bragman back when he goes
Speaker 1: on Twitter, is he starts like he he writes an
Speaker 1: article that has a bunch of claims from this thing
Speaker 1: called the Great Barringing Declaration. Do you if you remember that?
Speaker 2: Uh no, not really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So so this this was this giant anti lockdown
Speaker 1: like declaration that a bunch of right wingers were pushing
Speaker 1: around that was it's this giant anti lockdown's creed that's
Speaker 1: basically saying, like, the way to stop COVID is you
Speaker 1: have to like open all the all the businesses again
Speaker 1: forced when to go back to work, and then people
Speaker 1: will get like infected with COVID and that will get
Speaker 1: the immunity to COVID, which is a terrible idea because
Speaker 1: if you get infected with COVID, there's, you know, the
Speaker 1: chance that you die, right.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And but the interesting thing about the Great Barrying Declorations,
Speaker 1: so it's created by the Economic the American Institute for
Speaker 1: Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are.
Speaker 1: So they are a right wing libertarian think tank, which
Speaker 1: Bloominenthal should hate, right he's supposed to be a leftist,
Speaker 1: he should hate these people. They received sixty eight thousand
Speaker 1: dollars from the Koch Brothers to do an economics conference,
Speaker 1: a thing that they are very mad about anytime. So
Speaker 1: everytime someone tries to bring it up and to talk
Speaker 1: about how they're Coke funded, they're like, well, we only
Speaker 1: took sixty eight thousand dollars one time to do one
Speaker 1: economics conference. You can't call us Coke funded. But then,
Speaker 1: like all their website, they admit that they like quote
Speaker 1: for the record, aier received sixty eight thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: Coke funding over the last ten years, and that someone
Speaker 1: was used entirely the offset the conference of a single
Speaker 1: economics conference in twenty seventeen with no links to the
Speaker 1: Great Barrington decoration. But like you know, obviously, so the
Speaker 1: reason the Coke's fun this thing is because these guys
Speaker 1: have the same economics like politics as they do. And
Speaker 1: you know, as someone who has taken zero dollars from
Speaker 1: the Koch brothers, I could safely say that it's bullshit
Speaker 1: to say that we only took money for the Coke
Speaker 1: Brothers once. So what happens basically is the American Institute
Speaker 1: for Economical Research has a like conference for a bunch
Speaker 1: of weirdo hacks who are also technically scientists to put
Speaker 1: out this report saying the lockdowns that happened immediately like
Speaker 1: after like the disease like COVID really started spreading in
Speaker 1: the US. They said that that was a mistake, and
Speaker 1: they're advocating ending lockdowns, reopening businesses, and this was an
Speaker 1: overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of people killed,
Speaker 1: Like that's what these people were trying to do. But MATC.
Speaker 1: Blumenthal suddenly is like pushing this stuff, like in pieces
Speaker 1: that he's writing for grey Zone. It's very deeply weird.
Speaker 1: And this stuff just and as as like twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one goes on, this stuff gets like worse and worse
Speaker 1: and worse. By twenty twenty one, the bluementhal is writing
Speaker 1: articles about an impending attempt to implement social credits alongside
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Lofredo. So, okay, we need to take this in
Speaker 1: two parts. We'll get to the social credit stuff at
Speaker 1: a second. First we need to talk about who Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Lofredo is, because this guy, so, this guy used to
Speaker 1: work at Rebel News, which is this like I I mean,
Speaker 1: like Garrison, I know, you know this is you know,
Speaker 1: you two know what Rebel News is.
Speaker 4: It's a Canadian Yeah basically yeah, yeah, Canadian art Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like a bright bart info wars type thing. They
Speaker 4: have like podcasts and online sight. Yeah, they're like a
Speaker 4: Canadian far right news source. Essentially, they also engage in
Speaker 4: a lot of like activism.
Speaker 2: It's one of the few relatively few Canadian far right
Speaker 2: websites that also regularly goes viral in the US.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like I think it's also quite popular in Australia
Speaker 4: or they have a in Australia.
Speaker 2: They played a significant role in if you remember the
Speaker 2: basically Caravan that drive. We're going to get to that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're geting to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So so Bluementhal is writing like an article with
Speaker 1: Jeremy Lafrido, who is a guy who like wrote like
Speaker 1: a million articles for Rebel News. In fact, as best
Speaker 1: I can tell, she was still working for Rebel News
Speaker 1: when Bluementhal starts like directly linking to Rebel News articles
Speaker 1: about this stuff. Now it turns out she was actually
Speaker 1: fine from Rebel Dues after a bunch of tweets surfaced,
Speaker 1: which like, okay, the kinds of how hard it is
Speaker 1: to get fired from Rebel News. I tracked down these tweets.
Speaker 1: It is I'm not even gonna read any of them.
Speaker 1: There are there are there are seven different tweets where
Speaker 1: he talks about how how he wants to rate people.
Speaker 1: There's one where he's confascinating that's just about him being
Speaker 1: a pedophile. There's a bunch of him saying the N word.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of like incredibly racist, like Chinese, anti
Speaker 1: Chinese stuff, which is very funny because Max Blumenthal presents
Speaker 1: himself as like the big pro China guy, and here
Speaker 1: he is like writing articles with this deranged anti Chinese
Speaker 1: racist and again like this this got him fired like
Speaker 1: from Rebel News, and the Maxi blue Waw article with
Speaker 1: him is still up now, so that that's insane enough, right,
Speaker 1: But the I wanted to talk the reason that was
Speaker 1: a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was
Speaker 1: looking at this article. The reason I want to talk
Speaker 1: about this article in the first place is because he's
Speaker 1: writing about social credit. Now. For people who don't recognize
Speaker 1: the social credit stuff. Here's the title of this article.
Speaker 1: Quote the title is the subtitle The Titans of global
Speaker 1: capitalism are exploiting the COVID nineteen crisis to institute social
Speaker 1: credit style digital idea sisms across the West, So what
Speaker 1: is this social credit thing? This is like a this
Speaker 1: is a very big right wing conspiracy theory thing, like
Speaker 1: Alex Jones is a huge pusher of this. And basically
Speaker 1: what they're saying is that they're going to import this
Speaker 1: system from China that they say exists called social credit,
Speaker 1: where like if you say something bad about the government,
Speaker 1: you won't be able to like use your credit card
Speaker 1: to buy food. And this is not how things work
Speaker 1: in China. But it's very interesting because you know, these
Speaker 1: right wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming
Speaker 1: to the US, Like this never happened, It was never
Speaker 1: going to happen. But what's interesting about it is that
Speaker 1: Gray Zone is specifically writing about this, which is insane
Speaker 1: because again, this is this whole thing is an antich
Speaker 1: is an anti China conspiracy theory, and like all of
Speaker 1: the sort of Marcist Leninism's like whole one of their
Speaker 1: whole pitches was that they are the like they they
Speaker 1: support China against American imperialism, and then like within about
Speaker 1: a year, like in like a one year span, they've
Speaker 1: just pivoted to publishing like full on right wing social
Speaker 1: credit stuff. And you know, by twenty twenty two, it's
Speaker 1: gone even further. This is this is this is where
Speaker 1: we get at the trucker's convoy. So Garrison covered this
Speaker 1: extensively on the show. Yes, Yeah, do you want to
Speaker 1: do like the really short version of what that was?
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: This of a few kind of quanon influencers, most of
Speaker 4: them based in Alberta, and then a few other kind
Speaker 4: of conservative influencers tied to and some of whom were
Speaker 4: tied to Rebel News kind of who were based more
Speaker 4: throughout Canada, organized this event where a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: truckers but mostly just regular people would drive to the
Speaker 4: capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau would meet their
Speaker 4: demands or something like that. They were out there for
Speaker 4: for for a few weeks. It really started getting shut
Speaker 4: down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to block
Speaker 4: one of one of the big trade border crossings between
Speaker 4: the US and Canada. At that point, it became enough
Speaker 4: of a problem that the government was like, Okay, we're
Speaker 4: just gonna like make you guys leave, and that was that.
Speaker 4: It caused kind of chaos in Ottawa for a few days.
Speaker 4: It was compared a little bit to like it's like
Speaker 4: Canada's January sixth, not really. I mean it had a
Speaker 4: very large mobilization of people, which was unique for Canada.
Speaker 4: And we've started to see some of like the the
Speaker 4: tactics and stylings of this of this trucker convoy get
Speaker 4: adopted both in Canada and the States. We've we've had,
Speaker 4: you know, versions of this tried to get started in
Speaker 4: the States. Never they never really turned cross. There's been
Speaker 4: there's been people have tried to do organize it again
Speaker 4: in Canada. Hasn't really taken off the same way. But but yeah,
Speaker 4: that is kind of the gist. I did a few
Speaker 4: episodes as this was ongoing, and then I did a
Speaker 4: larger kind of piece about the whole thing that was
Speaker 4: that was more scripted towards towards the end of it.
Speaker 4: You can find those, I think in like if you
Speaker 4: go back to like February of twenty twenty two, you'll
Speaker 4: you'll find some some of those pieces.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think I think the other thing that's
Speaker 1: important to amcise about this is these guys are right wingers.
Speaker 1: Like I I have pictures of these guys waving Gustaci flags.
Speaker 1: What if you saw your like the guys you did
Speaker 1: in the Holocaust in Croatia, Like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there, there there was a mix of like conservatives
Speaker 4: to like actual fascists with like not flags there like that.
Speaker 6: That.
Speaker 4: It was. It was pretty there was a pretty wide
Speaker 4: ideological spectrum that was present. Now, some conservatives weren't happy
Speaker 4: that they're not that yeah there and try and try
Speaker 4: to get them to leave, you know. Others are more ambivalent.
Speaker 4: But yes, there was there was a large variety of
Speaker 4: of ideological re representation at the trucker convoy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So here's Max Blumenthal's response to it. The lockdown
Speaker 1: Left spent the last week's about academic theory to undercut
Speaker 1: support for a trucker strike. Looks on with silent satisfaction.
Speaker 1: Is the imperial Trudeau regime imposes the Emergency Act to
Speaker 1: freeze bank accounts. They wanted this, So he's just fully
Speaker 1: like fully spends his whole time fully on board with
Speaker 1: a truckers thing. He's trying to convince people as a
Speaker 1: trucker strike, which is it's not it's like objectively it's not,
Speaker 1: it's it's almost all these people are like anti union
Speaker 1: who are participating. Yeah, and they're also they're also like
Speaker 1: the actual people who are truckers are the people who
Speaker 1: own trucking companies. They're not like they're not the people
Speaker 1: who are leasing trucks out. They are like the owners
Speaker 1: of these trucks. So he's really doing this sort of
Speaker 1: like like he's really doing this this sort of like
Speaker 1: pivot right, like she was suporting himself. By twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: he's just posting straight up anti VAC stuff, like here's
Speaker 1: here's the thing that he wrote about. Uh, Peter Holtz,
Speaker 1: who was this guy. He was like this guy who
Speaker 1: was I don't know, he's like a science guy. He
Speaker 1: was like he was a really big target of the
Speaker 1: right for a while because he wouldn't he kept for
Speaker 1: like there's there's this whole thing where Joe Rogan was
Speaker 1: trying to debate him about whether vaccines worked, and it
Speaker 1: was it was this whole weird thing meeting of the minds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's ffol with all his like Bill Gates made hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars off his investment in biotech thanks
Speaker 1: to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear campaigns
Speaker 1: in history. He called mRNA a miracle, VACS a miracle.
Speaker 1: Now he admits the vaccines were semi worthless, big pharma junk.
Speaker 1: And then, but after contributing so much social damage with
Speaker 1: his unrelenting sanatory in demand for hard lockdowns and the
Speaker 1: mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including
Speaker 1: to small children, Hoates seems desperate to avoid account of building.
Speaker 1: So this is just straight up anti vax shit, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is like where we are like now. It's
Speaker 1: like he spent like a whole bunch of like the
Speaker 1: last two years just tweeting anti vax stuff and this
Speaker 1: got fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing I think is really interesting
Speaker 1: because it's another demonstration that like he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: So back in twenty twenty one, back like right after
Speaker 1: the Atlanta the Atlanta Spas shootings happened, he like maxlely
Speaker 1: menthol'sractionto was like, oh yeah, here's like, well, here's this
Speaker 1: in light of recent racist attacks. Here's a reminder of
Speaker 1: Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump the Washington Post blaming China
Speaker 1: for cooking up COVID nineteen. In the Lab, Rogan cited
Speaker 1: a US funded dissident as a fake scientist, legitimated propaganda.
Speaker 1: Now this is actually the stuff with the LAB leak
Speaker 1: is actually true, which is sort of wild. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not quite like the lab leak stuff I think
Speaker 1: has directly contributed to people getting attacked the Atlanta's shooting.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I did a bunch. I did two
Speaker 1: episodes about it at the like a bit later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to hear me talk about the full
Speaker 1: explanation of that for a very long time. So that's
Speaker 1: what he's saying. In twenty twenty one, right, is he
Speaker 1: has correctly identified that the lab leak stuff is I
Speaker 1: like theoconn like Trump like anti China stuff.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: One year later, he has Jeffrey Sachs on the show
Speaker 1: to talk about how the US is covering up how
Speaker 1: the Pentagon in the National Institute of Health funded biological
Speaker 1: research that created COVID nineteen a lab in Wuhan. In
Speaker 1: one year, he has gone from calling the lab leak
Speaker 1: like a neocon quote a quote Trump dis info dump
Speaker 1: that was created by a neocon to having Jeffrey Sachs
Speaker 1: on his show to talk about how the lab leak
Speaker 1: is real and like, like this is bad enough, just
Speaker 1: as an ideological shift. Right, But we need to talk
Speaker 1: about do you guys know who Jeffrey Sachs is?
Speaker 2: No, not really, oh boy.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Sas is a Columbia University economists. He is
Speaker 1: also the guy who did shock therapy both in Russia
Speaker 1: and in Poland. Like, this is the guy who privatized
Speaker 1: the Russian economy and handed it over to a combination
Speaker 1: of like American investors, Russian mobsters, and the guys who
Speaker 1: would become Russia's oligarchy. Like, he is the guy who, like,
Speaker 1: if you are one of these people, he should be
Speaker 1: enemy number one, right he is. He is the guy
Speaker 1: who like destroyed if like, if you believe this, he's
Speaker 1: the guy who destroyed Russian communism, right he is. He
Speaker 1: is responsible. And this is this is one of the
Speaker 1: things that people will talk about a lot, is how
Speaker 1: like all of the shock therapy stuff like caused the
Speaker 1: largest drop in life expectancy between World War Two and COVID, right,
Speaker 1: and like, like Sax is not a bit Like Sax
Speaker 1: was literally in the room. He was in the room
Speaker 1: in the Kremlin when the USSR was dissolved. This is like,
Speaker 1: this is one of the greatest anti communist in human history.
Speaker 1: And here is Max Bloem with all a man who
Speaker 1: is supposed to like his entire thing is about like
Speaker 1: opposing the imperialist you over through communism, like sitting down,
Speaker 1: having like a very like a very sort of like
Speaker 1: having like a very paling around interview about that. That
Speaker 1: is sax pushing a conspiracy theory, the lady conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: that he was literally calling this info one year ago.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, I thought about this for a
Speaker 1: long time trying to figure out what was happening here,
Speaker 1: and the conclusion that I came to is that this
Speaker 1: is the soul of a man who believes in nothing.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can you can ask the question
Speaker 1: why do this? And the short answer people tend to
Speaker 1: give is just is money. And that's like true, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't go anywhere near far enough because I think
Speaker 1: the real, the real answer why these people did these
Speaker 1: right wing pivots is much much worse the actual reason
Speaker 1: people in left media suddenly start taking right wing turns.
Speaker 1: And this is something we've seen from like the young
Speaker 1: Turks like taking this like anti trans anti homeless pivots.
Speaker 1: There have been several other outlets that have done a
Speaker 1: right wing turn. And this is a structural problem in
Speaker 1: left media, which is that if you're in left media,
Speaker 1: you have a massive and you're trying to expand, you
Speaker 1: have a massive problem. And the problem is that the
Speaker 1: left in the US just isn't that big. Right Like,
Speaker 1: there are more leftists now than there've been for a
Speaker 1: very very long time, but there's only so many leftists
Speaker 1: and you can't pull from them all because leftists all
Speaker 1: hate each other. So even if you try to corner
Speaker 1: like the market of one faction of the left, another
Speaker 1: faction to the leftist is going to hate you because
Speaker 1: this is just how this is just how infighting works.
Speaker 1: And so if you're producing something that's designed for the
Speaker 1: left and only the left, there is built in a
Speaker 1: hard cap on how big your audience can get. And
Speaker 1: if you're successful, you can hit that limit. But if
Speaker 1: you want to grow more after that, you have to
Speaker 1: expand your ideological base, like the ideological base of your audience.
Speaker 1: But the problem is there's only two directions you can
Speaker 1: go right. You can either try to get liberals to
Speaker 1: listen to your show, or you could try to get conservatives.
Speaker 1: But you know, for people like Max wely monthal or
Speaker 1: like Jimmy Dre for example, it's another person who did
Speaker 1: this big like anti vax pivot around the same time
Speaker 1: maxle Wenthal was doing it. They have a whole thing
Speaker 1: where they they're they're talking about how ivromactin is actually
Speaker 1: a good COVID treatment. Together.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he used to be like a like a left
Speaker 4: wing YouTuber or.
Speaker 1: Like yeah he was a young guy from the Young
Speaker 1: Turks and he went off to his own thing. Is
Speaker 1: now like just completely only does anti vax shit. But
Speaker 1: the promise if you're if you're a Jimmy dor Like,
Speaker 1: you're you're gray zone. Right. Recruiting liberals is really really
Speaker 1: hard because your entire brand is based on how much
Speaker 1: you hate liberals. And this means that the people who
Speaker 1: naturally agree with them are conservatives. And the other important
Speaker 1: thing here is that leftists don't have that much money right,
Speaker 1: like they're there's not there's like us. There's like there
Speaker 1: there are there are leftists who are like college students
Speaker 1: who have rich families who have some money. There's like
Speaker 1: a small number of like leftist business, but they like
Speaker 1: they don't have on average, leftists don't have that much
Speaker 1: money on the other hand, conservatives have an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of money and they are very very easily pandered to.
Speaker 1: If you just like pump out like bottom barrel anti
Speaker 1: vax shit, like, they will flock to you. And you know,
Speaker 1: whenever you need to get leftists sort of back on
Speaker 1: your side, right, you can just start tweeting with a
Speaker 1: Palestine and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done,
Speaker 1: because any like, any time anytime someone posts posts like
Speaker 1: a pro palesiine thing, people just click on it. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been. This has been like some Maxleen thoals
Speaker 1: met the last about two years just doing anti vax stuff.
Speaker 1: The moment, like the moment Palestine became something that people
Speaker 1: were focusing on again, and you know, and there're gore
Speaker 1: reasons for that, right, like, but the moment he did that,
Speaker 1: he just pivoted back into doing Palestine stuff, and everyone
Speaker 1: just completely ignored what he'd been doing this whole time.
Speaker 1: And if you do this, and you could you pander
Speaker 1: to you pander to the antivactors and making anti vaxed content,
Speaker 1: and then also you could just go back and regain
Speaker 1: your leftist credentials and get views and support from leftists.
Speaker 1: By doing Palestigne stuff, you can make a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but there's a price. Every time you sell out to
Speaker 1: these people, you betray another part of yourself, until one
Speaker 1: day you believe in nothing left and the right and
Speaker 1: lose all meeting and the only thing that's left is
Speaker 1: content in the culture war. And I want to close
Speaker 1: this episode by talking by reading something from another Gray
Speaker 1: Zone contributor, Anya Parimpel, who is she's another Gray Zone journalist,
Speaker 1: and she's Maxi blue Wenthal's wife, and she she is
Speaker 1: the Gray Zone person who's reached the end of this cycle.
Speaker 1: Now I'm just going to read what this looks like quote.
Speaker 1: The labels of left and right are outdated in the US.
Speaker 1: Case in point, leftist white men now pander to other
Speaker 1: white men by telling women of color they're biggots for
Speaker 1: saying boys wouldn't be able to piss in the girls room.
Speaker 1: These same punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily. I
Speaker 1: don't know, Okay, her tweet just trails offices bodily. It
Speaker 1: says dot dot dot and just moves. I don't know.
Speaker 1: She's not a very good writer. Gender ideology has created
Speaker 1: a dynamic in which a bunch of men can come
Speaker 1: into organizing circles, play victim and a certain control over
Speaker 1: what is acceptible for others, especially women, to say and think.
Speaker 1: Most people know it's just misogyny tied up at a
Speaker 1: frilly bow, but are too afraid to it. Just dots
Speaker 1: off again. I deeply weird now that participants in the
Speaker 1: Impression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti war rally
Speaker 1: because it didn't fit their tunnel vision for the movement.
Speaker 1: Gloves are off. Good luck winning over the people with
Speaker 1: your message. The same people who believed workers should not
Speaker 1: be mandated to take an experimental injection that did not
Speaker 1: quote stop the spread, cried my body, my choice, and
Speaker 1: roe was overturned. Yet these same these are the same
Speaker 1: people who do not even believe biologue women exist total incoherence.
Speaker 1: So this is this is just a collection of This
Speaker 1: is just.
Speaker 4: A collection of like very basic right wing talking points
Speaker 4: like this is the the the like the false correlation
Speaker 4: between like reproductive health care and like vaccines for public health,
Speaker 4: and the stuff a gender gender ideology. All of it
Speaker 4: is just very very basic like talking points used used
Speaker 4: by the right that conflate various issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just like this is indistinguishable from the ravings
Speaker 1: of any other right winger, and this is just this
Speaker 1: is just where this stuff ends, because this this this
Speaker 1: specific line, this is how you fucking make money. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's you know, I mean, we could talk
Speaker 1: about a million more iterations of how this these stuff
Speaker 1: fused together. I mean, maxply went aal goes to like
Speaker 1: an anti vax rally that has a bunch of like
Speaker 1: three percenters and like a bunch of just straight up
Speaker 1: right wing fascists. But you know, this is at least
Speaker 1: one of the end points of where this stuff goes.
Speaker 1: But tomorrow we're going to look at a group of
Speaker 1: people who took this even further. Yeah, so get ready
Speaker 1: for that ship, because it's about to get wildly anti semitic.
Speaker 1: Oh great, hooray. It's it's an introduction to the podcast.
Speaker 7: I'm your host Bi along with me with these Garrison. Hello, Hello,
Speaker 7: welcome to part three of This Nightmare. Yeah, so, okay,
Speaker 7: all the way back in episode one, I said that
Speaker 7: Marxist Leninism was based at a series of arguments about
Speaker 7: the state, the nature of socialism, and the left relation
Speaker 7: to nationalism, And today we're going to go through some
Speaker 7: of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise
Speaker 7: of a new kind of nationalist socialism, one that's focused
Speaker 7: on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and
Speaker 7: from Zionists. They call it baga communism, but you might
Speaker 7: almost call it a kind of national socialism. So how
Speaker 7: do we get from Marxist Leninism in ideology, who's defining
Speaker 7: thing is pure total opposition to the American Empire, to
Speaker 7: maga communism and think about how great the US is
Speaker 7: and how much they.
Speaker 4: Like trump patriotic community.
Speaker 1: On that path, these are two distant Patriotic socialism and
Speaker 1: maga communism are two technically distinct things. Will be getting
Speaker 1: into that. It's a it's a long dark road ahead,
Speaker 1: but there's no light at the end of it either.
Speaker 1: It just it just keeps being long dark. So I
Speaker 1: think I think the place to start if you want
Speaker 1: to understand how this sort of like or a borous
Speaker 1: of shit emerged from the left is by talking about
Speaker 1: the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that Marxist Leninism did, and this is one of its
Speaker 1: key political achievements, on the left was to rehabilitate nationalism
Speaker 1: and talk about it in a way that was very,
Speaker 1: very different to what was happening in the left before this.
Speaker 1: And you know, because the left around twenty eleven, like
Speaker 1: around Occupy, but after that tended to be very skeptical
Speaker 1: of nationalism because you know, they had come out of
Speaker 1: like the Bush era and where you know, had had
Speaker 1: had had first hand experience with like what American nationalism
Speaker 1: really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks now.
Speaker 1: And the Marxis Leninists are something to bring this bring
Speaker 1: nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this the
Speaker 1: arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. Their argument is effectively that
Speaker 1: anti colonial nationalism and anti colonial nationalisms, because there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of them, and particularly like non white anti colonial nationalism, like,
Speaker 1: aren't the same thing as American nationalism, and that these
Speaker 1: anti colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary. And this is true
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, right, Like Palestinian nationalism is
Speaker 1: like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle,
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to like tell some Kourdish kid
Speaker 1: that they need to like abandon their desire to speak
Speaker 1: Krimungi because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: but this is where we kind of start running into
Speaker 1: problems because you know, okay, so what about like Bathism
Speaker 1: For example, Bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement
Speaker 1: right and they are opposed at least non lead to
Speaker 1: American imperialism. But they are one hardline anti communists and
Speaker 1: two hardcore Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable
Speaker 1: if you were Arab, but like, God help you if
Speaker 1: you are like Kurdish or Syria or Yazdi or like
Speaker 1: any other national minority under bath Party rule, where you know,
Speaker 1: they're going to ban your flags, they're going to ban
Speaker 1: your language, they're going to like keep your keep you
Speaker 1: from like naming your kids like your names. This is
Speaker 1: literally a thing, Like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah,
Speaker 1: like it was illegal to give your kid like a
Speaker 1: Kurdish name in both in both sort of Bathist Syria
Speaker 1: and Bathists I Raq. And you know, if you try
Speaker 1: to resist, they'll kill you. And I'm using Baphism like
Speaker 1: as an example for this, because like there are people
Speaker 1: now who are genuinely Bathists. But it's like it's really
Speaker 1: hard to find people who support the bath Party.
Speaker 4: Yes, for for reference, I have never heard of this
Speaker 4: despite have you never heard of the bath Party?
Speaker 1: This is this is Saddam Hussein's party in Okay.
Speaker 4: Well, in terms of of the it's relevancy to the
Speaker 4: modern kind of workings of of of the sort of
Speaker 4: political spheres I operated, this is not something that has
Speaker 4: come up in Yeah, I've in my.
Speaker 1: Conversations, I've ran into them. There. I've ran into a
Speaker 1: few neo Bathists who are either like Saddam well so
Speaker 1: so the big bastion of kind of like it's not
Speaker 1: even really Bathism anymore, but like like Basharo saw, it
Speaker 1: technically is like a Batheist. Okay, although his they're not
Speaker 1: really Baptists anymore. They just kind of have this party
Speaker 1: apparatus still around. But like you know, most people are like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this sucks, right, but but you know, I'm using Baptism
Speaker 1: because it's it's the easy tall. But like this is
Speaker 1: this is a question you have to ask with basically
Speaker 1: all national liberation movements, and it's one people don't like asking,
Speaker 1: which is whose nation is being liberated. And you know
Speaker 1: what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these
Speaker 1: national movements produce? And these aren't abstract questions, right. One
Speaker 1: of the big examples of this is West Papua, which
Speaker 1: is a place that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia.
Speaker 1: But you know Sukarno, who's this great sort of like
Speaker 1: Sucarno is this great like anti imperialist hero. He's the
Speaker 1: guy who did the band Dun Conference, which is the
Speaker 1: giant assembly of all of the sort of like Asian
Speaker 1: and African states to like join together to resist imperialism.
Speaker 1: And but but like, one of the things that that
Speaker 1: that this left wing Indonesian nationalism is about is their
Speaker 1: right to colonize Papua. So the West Papua wins just
Speaker 1: get absolutely screwed over by by the Indonesians. And this
Speaker 1: is this is this place where you have to ask, like,
Speaker 1: whose nation is being liberated? And the answer is not
Speaker 1: the West pap Wins. Right, They're just getting absolutely screwed
Speaker 1: because the nation that's being liberated is this new nation
Speaker 1: of Indonesia and not them. And you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've talked about this on the show before, like I'm
Speaker 1: so skeptical of left wing nationalist movements because I'm from China, Like,
Speaker 1: like my family is from China, and we had two
Speaker 1: left wing national liberation movements traded back by the USSR,
Speaker 1: and the first one, which is the Chinese Nationalist Party,
Speaker 1: made it about seven years before they turned on the
Speaker 1: Chinese working class and bushered them in the streets with
Speaker 1: machine guns and then spent the next seventy years is
Speaker 1: like a fascist desk squad party. And then the other one,
Speaker 1: the Chinese Communist Party, lasted yeah, it maybe like forty years.
Speaker 1: I mean they lasted like how many years in power,
Speaker 1: like seventeen years in power before they get to the
Speaker 1: Cultural Revolution where they were also shooting workers in the
Speaker 1: streets and bulldozing moss and ching John, which is the
Speaker 1: thing that they continue to do to this day as
Speaker 1: part of what is and I shit you not the
Speaker 1: name for the quote unquote counter terrorism operation that China
Speaker 1: runs in Ching John is the People's War on Terror.
Speaker 1: I wish I was making this up. I'm not right
Speaker 1: this and this is a probauct of Chinese nationalism, right,
Speaker 1: like like it's Chinese is amophobia and Chinese nationalist some
Speaker 1: that sort of do this stuff. I'm very skeptical of
Speaker 1: nationalism as like a liberatory framework, but like it's complicated, right,
Speaker 1: It's genuinely is sure one of these things that's you know,
Speaker 1: like there there are there are there's lots of nuances
Speaker 1: to it, and you know, I think you have to
Speaker 1: take a kind of middle ground of like you have
Speaker 1: to keep it kind of under control, but also like
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go tele a Palestinian care that
Speaker 1: their nationalism is bad, right, like it's you know, I should.
Speaker 1: I realized that I've never explained this the whole time
Speaker 1: I was doing this. So mL is an abbreviation for
Speaker 1: Marxist Leninist that people say because saying Marxist Leninists over
Speaker 1: and over again, like I've been doing for these past
Speaker 1: two episodes is wearying. Yeah, So the MLS decided to
Speaker 1: take the other extreme, which is just mainlining every single
Speaker 1: non Western nationalism that can get their hands on, because
Speaker 1: they're trying to hold nationalist positions that are contradictory at
Speaker 1: the same time. So for example like that, they're trying
Speaker 1: to be both. Okay, I guess I should explain this
Speaker 1: a little bit so part of it is people being
Speaker 1: nationalists for countries that they're not from, which is deeply weird.
Speaker 1: Part of it also, and this is this is part
Speaker 1: of the reason this stuff spread is you know, you
Speaker 1: get like Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists, like in response
Speaker 1: to like COVID and anti Asian violence or just sort
Speaker 1: of in general as like a pipeline. But you know,
Speaker 1: you get people trying to have both being both like
Speaker 1: Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese nationalist at the same time, and
Speaker 1: that doesn't make any sense. I mean, like the whole
Speaker 1: apparatus that all of these sort of revolutionary anti imperialist
Speaker 1: nationalisms would work together was sha like should have been
Speaker 1: shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is
Speaker 1: just to pretend that it never happened, you know. And
Speaker 1: and but but like like Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists like
Speaker 1: don't like each other, like on the Vietnamese side in
Speaker 1: like modern Vietnam. So they have like a basically their
Speaker 1: own vers it's not actually their own version of like
Speaker 1: it's not actually like a QAnon branded thing, but they
Speaker 1: have a conspiracy theory that like their version of the
Speaker 1: like sovereign citizen like q thing, and their version of
Speaker 1: it is that it basically says that the Vietnamese government
Speaker 1: sold the country to China in nineteen ninety and they're
Speaker 1: like embarking on like a forty year plan to like
Speaker 1: fully sell the country to China, and like the Globe,
Speaker 1: like Western House just completely ignore this stuff because it's
Speaker 1: not convenient for them, and they just pretend that all
Speaker 1: these people get along. But this stuff gets, you know,
Speaker 1: it gets incredibly bizarre and like just weird really quickly.
Speaker 1: Like one of the things I remember from back in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, I started I was hearing like
Speaker 1: leftists talking about how Ukraine wasn't a real nationality and
Speaker 1: how they've been invented by Nazis and that Ukrainians are
Speaker 1: inherently fascist, and I was like, what, like why is
Speaker 1: some random kid from New Jersey suddenly screaming about how
Speaker 1: Ukraine is like a fake nationality? And you know, it
Speaker 1: turns out, yeah, like it's because these people were like
Speaker 1: really getting into Russian nationalism, and like in like twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: it was just deeply weird. And then you get to
Speaker 1: like twenty twenty two and all these people are just
Speaker 1: straight up supporting like Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the
Speaker 1: grounds that like Ukraine isn't a real place and also
Speaker 1: is only Nazis and stuff like that. And this has
Speaker 1: real sort of ideological consequences for what Marxist Leninism becomes,
Speaker 1: because it begins to pivot around a collection of nationalism,
Speaker 1: so the point where it's not even it's not based
Speaker 1: on communism anymore, it's just pure economic nationalism. And this
Speaker 1: is a product of these incredibly convoluted justifications they have
Speaker 1: to put together for supporting China, which is objectively a
Speaker 1: market economy and like very obviously a market economy, will
Speaker 1: you know, so they have to support China while also
Speaker 1: nominally being anti capitalist. I'm not going to go into
Speaker 1: these arguments because they're just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just
Speaker 1: just weird intellectual posta ring. I think it's more useful
Speaker 1: to look at where it ends up, which is have
Speaker 1: have you ran into the people advocating bricks. It's like
Speaker 1: the great anti American thing. Do you know what bricks is? No?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: God, okay, so I don't know. Get I don't think
Speaker 1: so bricks is a thing. That stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China,
Speaker 1: and South Africa.
Speaker 4: Oh god, it.
Speaker 1: Was originally a asset class developed by the chairman of
Speaker 1: asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how you
Speaker 1: know it's really anti imperialist, right, Like this.
Speaker 4: It's golden golden Sacks, carrier of the red flag.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it's it's it's an investment, It's an outline
Speaker 1: of an investment strategy.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But a lot of a lot of these people become
Speaker 1: convinced that like bricks is like it's like a real
Speaker 1: alliance and these people are like gonna like create the
Speaker 1: multipolar world where the US is no longer the only power.
Speaker 1: This is anti imperialist and like uhhh yeah, this is
Speaker 1: like on a fundamental level if you're pushing bricks as
Speaker 1: an anti imperialist formation, Like what are we even doing here?
Speaker 1: Like who is doing the socialism in Brazil, Russia, India
Speaker 1: and China and South Africa? Right? Like is it the
Speaker 1: guy who invaded Haiti? Is it the butcher a Gujarat?
Speaker 1: Is it Vladimir quote, we will show Ukraine true decommunization
Speaker 1: putin is it the African National Congress of selling your
Speaker 1: comrades out to Bank of America or is it quote
Speaker 1: we must combat Welfaism shijianping, Like none of these states
Speaker 1: are even remotely socialist, but you know, people are people
Speaker 1: are holding them up as like anti imperialist powers because
Speaker 1: you know, their their sort of faux anti imperialism has
Speaker 1: completely devoured whatever their anti capitalism used to be. And
Speaker 1: you know, you shouldn't look too close to yet, like
Speaker 1: India's relations with the US either, pay no attention to
Speaker 1: the fact that Indian and Chinese truth periodically beat each
Speaker 1: other to death in the mountains. You know, it's a disaster.
Speaker 1: But this is what happens you mix nationalism with your socialism.
Speaker 1: And because of where this is going, we should talk
Speaker 1: about the history a little bit, about the history of
Speaker 1: displacing class struggle with the struggle between states. Because one
Speaker 1: of the people who does this is a man that
Speaker 1: a garrison. I bet you have heard of. His name
Speaker 1: is Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 4: Oh yes, I'm slightly familiar with his with his work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in
Speaker 1: the beginning is that you know, okay, so like the
Speaker 1: Marxist line is that there's class struggle between the proletariat
Speaker 1: and the BOURGEOISI. Right, So the capitalists and working class
Speaker 1: are fighting it out, and that's the you know, the
Speaker 1: logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting
Speaker 1: it out, and Mussolini goes no, no, proletarians of bourgeoisie
Speaker 1: have been replaced by the struggle between like proletarian nations
Speaker 1: and capitalists nations. So this is you know, you can
Speaker 1: you can start to see the outlines of how we're
Speaker 1: going to get to a national socialism from here. But first,
Speaker 1: do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is
Speaker 1: it the products?
Speaker 4: Okay this podcast? Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure advertising hates
Speaker 4: the tenants of national socialism.
Speaker 1: We're back, okay, So we have the nationalism part in
Speaker 1: national socialism. And one of the other parts about this
Speaker 1: nationalism is that it's the vector by which a bunch
Speaker 1: of right wing social values start creeping into these Marxist
Speaker 1: lnin spaces, because there are still a lot of like
Speaker 1: old school MARXISTLINS parties left over from like the sixties,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them are just basically right wingers now,
Speaker 1: Like they're unbelievably homophobic, they're transphobic, they like scream about
Speaker 1: cancel culture all the time, like they're just they're just boomers, right,
Speaker 1: but they're boomers who the thing they're a boomer for
Speaker 1: is marked just leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing
Speaker 1: with this was to just ignore it effectively, you know.
Speaker 1: And and they're they're they're able, they do a really
Speaker 1: good job at ignoring this is happening right, like the
Speaker 1: fact that Russia has passed a series of laws that
Speaker 1: ban all gender affirming surgery and changing like all They
Speaker 1: bann all gender affirming surgery. They banned like anything that
Speaker 1: allows would have allowed you to change your gender on
Speaker 1: like any any like any state identification documents. Uh, they've
Speaker 1: banned same sex marriage and the Constitution. They banned anyone
Speaker 1: like the recent one is they banned anyone from saying
Speaker 1: that same sex relationships are quote normal or good and
Speaker 1: those are their words, not mine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have seen this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, they've also declared the quote global
Speaker 1: LGBTQ movement as an extremist organ immediately started doing raids
Speaker 1: on like queer ballers and nightclubs. And this has changed
Speaker 1: the minds of zero of the MLS who've been supporting
Speaker 1: who've been supporting like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They
Speaker 1: just don't care. And because they don't care, because they've
Speaker 1: been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know. One
Speaker 1: of the things that they do too, is like they've
Speaker 1: been trying to they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: these places are actually good for group people. I see
Speaker 1: this with China a lot, where they're like, no, no,
Speaker 1: China has one trans person who was a talk show host,
Speaker 1: So conditions for trans people there are really good. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: like actually being a transperson and trying to fucking sucks ass.
Speaker 1: There's really only like a tiny number of of gender clinics,
Speaker 1: like you have to like you have to like there's
Speaker 1: like this whole thing where you have to like get
Speaker 1: approval from a bunch of people to get surgery. You
Speaker 1: have to like prove you're not a criminal or something.
Speaker 1: You to have like a great it's it's it's completely nuts.
Speaker 1: The whole system is just nuts, right, But you know
Speaker 1: they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or
Speaker 1: just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave
Speaker 1: a space, like leave room in these Martians lenited spaces
Speaker 1: for people who are not really leftists at all, but
Speaker 1: are just like hard lined, homophobic, like transphobic, anti American nationalists.
Speaker 1: And I started seeing this with because so one of
Speaker 1: the problems that Martcis Leninism has is that it's not
Speaker 1: it's not an ideology that exists outside of like the US, Britain, Australia,
Speaker 1: a bit of Europe, right like, it doesn't exist in China.
Speaker 1: The closest equivalent to this stuff in China, like people
Speaker 1: who are pro like very hardline pro Chinese government and
Speaker 1: are also like pro Chinese nationalism. The only people in
Speaker 1: China who believe this stuff are hardline right wingers, like
Speaker 1: people who are people who in the US would be
Speaker 1: classified as fascists. And you started to see these people
Speaker 1: like moving into like Marcius Lendino spaces because you know,
Speaker 1: nobody gave a shit that they were like incredibly homophobic
Speaker 1: and transphobic and they were just I mean again, just
Speaker 1: objectively right wingers, right, and they start to sort of
Speaker 1: creep into these spaces. Now, this may or may not
Speaker 1: have ever turned into a real thing, we don't know,
Speaker 1: but there were two break points that really like kicked
Speaker 1: the sort of birth of the the of like maga,
Speaker 1: communism and patriarchs and like the sort of right trajectory
Speaker 1: of this stuff, like into focus. There was some stuff
Speaker 1: that happened in the middle of the twenty twenty uprisings
Speaker 1: and then surprise, surprise, January sixth. So do you remember
Speaker 1: you probably yeah, you were probably busy while this was
Speaker 1: going on. Do you remember that the giant outcry over
Speaker 1: the book in Defensive Looting? Uh?
Speaker 4: Slightly, Yeah, I know that liberals were mad about the
Speaker 4: title of the book, that's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and and conservative selfiously oh yeah, yeah so yeah.
Speaker 1: So so in the middle of the uprising kind of,
Speaker 1: I guess, kind of towards the tail end of the uprising,
Speaker 1: completely by coincidence, my friend Vicky austinwil had been writing
Speaker 1: a book called Indefensive Looting, which people should actually go
Speaker 1: read because it's really interesting, and she got an interview
Speaker 1: with MPR about it, and people lost their fucking minds
Speaker 1: about this book. Like everyone from like everyone from Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson who like sitting members of the US Senate were
Speaker 1: going on record announcing like I think I think the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party like officially denounced it like it was I
Speaker 1: have never seen this kind of like cross partisan every
Speaker 1: like hate longering about a book, and like the entire
Speaker 1: time I've been on the left, and you know, and
Speaker 1: this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and conservatives
Speaker 1: and fascists whore freaking out about this. This extended to
Speaker 1: a bunch of the left. There was there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like like Ian the editors of the New Republic
Speaker 1: right or like writing articles announcing this stuff like it
Speaker 1: is it's and it spreads across the social democratic left
Speaker 1: because the social Democrats are mad that people are looting
Speaker 1: small businesses. And the other group that really really comes
Speaker 1: out against this is like, are the Marxistlennon is like
Speaker 1: as people like the gray Zone. People really come out
Speaker 1: against this, And you know, okay, so like why am
Speaker 1: I talking about people not liking a book. The reason
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this is that what emerges
Speaker 1: from this specific thing. So Vicky, the author of this book,
Speaker 1: is both trans and Jewish, and what emerges here is
Speaker 1: this very specific combination of transphobia, anti semitism, anti black racism,
Speaker 1: both explicitly anti black racism and in the form of
Speaker 1: crime panics. And if you look at all of those
Speaker 1: elements together, that has been the entire right wing strategy
Speaker 1: for you know, putting all of the like uppity minorities
Speaker 1: back in their place after the uprising right that was
Speaker 1: their entire strategy, the defense of small businesses, you know,
Speaker 1: and then and then turning that into crime panic to
Speaker 1: rebuild support for the police. This was you know, that
Speaker 1: anti semitism and transphobia. That is their entire strategy for
Speaker 1: post twenty twenty. And this is like, this is the
Speaker 1: place where it was first. All of it was put
Speaker 1: together in one spot. And again like a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist
Speaker 1: Londonists like join in on this because even though the
Speaker 1: point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property.
Speaker 4: Well that is that is ostensibly the point, I think, yeah, but.
Speaker 1: In reality, like like the Marxist London is, like they
Speaker 1: don't actually oppose capitalism, they just think it should be
Speaker 1: run by someone else. So they everyone, like everyone falls
Speaker 1: in line and joins this sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: joins the sort of ritual denunciation of this book. And
Speaker 1: this is one of these things that really sort of
Speaker 1: cleaves like it really it cleaves the left in between
Speaker 1: the people who like actually fully support the uprising, and
Speaker 1: the people who are like, oh no, the small business
Speaker 1: is oh no, the horror. And the second thing that
Speaker 1: really reshapes the environment, like the whole sort of ecosystem
Speaker 1: like of the left is January sixth, and so I
Speaker 1: don't know if people how much people remember the initial
Speaker 1: reactions to it. I think the reactions to January sixth
Speaker 1: and the left can be divided into roughly three different reactions,
Speaker 1: although people have mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny,
Speaker 1: reaction two, oh my god, the fascists tried to do
Speaker 1: a coup and installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three
Speaker 1: January sixth was the white working class having its revenge
Speaker 1: on the liberal politicians. Now, okay, objectively, we can say
Speaker 1: that January safe was not the white working class. It's
Speaker 1: revenge with the politicians.
Speaker 4: If you are one of the first two opinions, that's fine,
Speaker 4: that's normal, that makes sense. If you're the last of one,
Speaker 4: you should stop listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know I want to Actually so I
Speaker 1: spent a bunch of time after this, and some other
Speaker 1: people did this too, like trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: actual like who from who was arrest student who we
Speaker 1: know was there what their actual class backgrounds are. And
Speaker 1: it turns out the three most common kinds of people
Speaker 1: who were there are troops, cops, the small business owners.
Speaker 1: Which is it is as pure of an expression of
Speaker 1: the social base of fascism as you can possibly get, right,
Speaker 1: like it is. The world was just like, hey, this
Speaker 1: is what fashions crops like. I mean it is, well,
Speaker 1: I think there's I think there's a lot a lot.
Speaker 4: Of participants in that crowd who I maybe wouldn't even
Speaker 4: consider fascists. But they are a crop of conservatives that
Speaker 4: are that have the financial and social resources to be
Speaker 4: able to go across the country to this, to this
Speaker 4: big event to watch the soon to be ex president
Speaker 4: speak like they they have enough capital and sports to
Speaker 4: be able to do this, which is very different than
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of like broke punks writing on trains
Speaker 4: to go protests like halfway across the country like these
Speaker 4: these are two very different social factions, but yeah, it is.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 4: It is a grouping of conservatives who are able to
Speaker 4: financially support going across the country to hear President Trump speak.
Speaker 4: And then in the moment you realize.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, where we can just go we're breaking into Congress. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the thing I would say about that too
Speaker 1: is like like part of the process of what fascism
Speaker 1: is is turning those people from regular conservatives into into
Speaker 1: ground troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, and that's and that's what's
Speaker 1: happening here. But but there's a bunch of the left
Speaker 1: who like absolutely insist that this was really the working
Speaker 1: class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing between a
Speaker 1: large group of white people and the working class. And
Speaker 1: these are the people. Okay, it's not good they keep
Speaker 1: doing this like they were. They were doing this with
Speaker 1: like a bunch of like like French anti vaxxers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like a bunch of people who were convinced like
Speaker 1: and this is this is one of the everything we
Speaker 1: talk on this last episode, like these people support the
Speaker 1: Canadian trucker's convoy even though they're just right wingers. The
Speaker 1: other big example of this is the Belgian farmers protests.
Speaker 1: This is huge farm protests in Belgium that are like
Speaker 1: a very big car caused to left on the right,
Speaker 1: and literally the thing they are protesting about is that
Speaker 1: they're incredibly pissed off that there's environmental regulation to try
Speaker 1: to get them to not like dump fertilizer in the
Speaker 1: fucking rivers. It's like that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: they're mad about, Like they're mad about environmental regulation. They're
Speaker 1: mad about like like not being allowed to completely destroy
Speaker 1: the environment completely. But because it's like a large, massive people,
Speaker 1: there's all these people who are like, ah, it's the revolution.
Speaker 1: It's like no, these guys are like they're small business
Speaker 1: owners on farms.
Speaker 4: Yeah, ooh woo, small bean blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the products of this is this thing
Speaker 1: that becomes known as patriotic socialism. But first, do you
Speaker 1: know what else?
Speaker 4: Is a product all of the wonderful little snippet of
Speaker 4: important messages that it's about to flow right into your
Speaker 4: brain as you listen to these ads.
Speaker 1: We're back with patriotic socialism. So patriotic socialism is this
Speaker 1: thing that emerges in like I think like late. I
Speaker 1: think it's like early twenty twenty. I was too late.
Speaker 1: I'm obviously I was just gonna admit I was too
Speaker 1: lazy to go back and find the first time someone
Speaker 1: used the term.
Speaker 4: Socialist. You mean yeah, Yeah, I mean, I mean it's
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm sure those two words have been combined
Speaker 4: many times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like in the modern context. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a thing from very like like twenty twenty. Basically is
Speaker 1: when it.
Speaker 4: Like, yes, this specific ideological strain that we'll be talking
Speaker 4: about emerges around twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: I think that's fair. Yeah, And it's so patriarch socialism.
Speaker 1: It combines all of the elements that we've talked about already, right,
Speaker 1: it takes the now she lives in, the homophobia, the
Speaker 1: support for capitalist economies. But then it makes one crucial move,
Speaker 1: which is it flips the direction of the nationalisms. So
Speaker 1: instead of being like hard line anti Americans, you're now
Speaker 1: like a hard line pro American nationalist, instead of being
Speaker 1: an anti.
Speaker 4: Imperialist who ignores the war crimes of China and Syria
Speaker 4: and blah blah blah blah Blahhia and r yeah obviously Russia. Instead,
Speaker 4: now America is the best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you know, and I mean their line basically
Speaker 1: they've adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line that
Speaker 1: the American Communist Party took on like the thirties, which
Speaker 1: was like, ah, the way we get a revolution in
Speaker 1: America is through American nationalism. So we're gonna like post
Speaker 1: pictures of us next to Abe Lincoln, and this is
Speaker 1: going to make people not hate us, you know. And
Speaker 1: you can tell how well this worked by tracking the
Speaker 1: number of people in the Communist Party as they adopt
Speaker 1: the strategy in the late thirties and seeing how it plummets.
Speaker 1: So you know, winning ideas great, great, great moves here.
Speaker 1: But okay, so the thing about patriotic socialism is that
Speaker 1: it never did that well because it sucks because you
Speaker 1: can't There was originally an attempt to pull in people
Speaker 1: from the left right, but everyone who looked at this
Speaker 1: was like this is lame and sucks, Like why would
Speaker 1: I want to get? Why would I want it?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Did these people suck? I don't like that they're weird
Speaker 1: American nationalists. Why would anyone be interested in this? And
Speaker 1: so what they were in So that didn't work very well.
Speaker 1: The thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core
Speaker 1: of like Laruhites and these like very weird third positionist people.
Speaker 1: But there's just not that many of them.
Speaker 4: I mean, like they definitely the people that were there
Speaker 4: were pushing this as like an it's almost like a
Speaker 4: memetic ideology. In twenty twenty, there was there was some
Speaker 4: of them who were more kind of typical like Marxist Latinists,
Speaker 4: people who kind of orbited around, uh, the writers at
Speaker 4: grey Zone. Like we mentioned in the last episode, we
Speaker 4: had this one YouTuber named Peter Coffin. He was like
Speaker 4: like a Marxist YouTuber.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the guy guy is mostly as for kicking himself
Speaker 1: in the balls on Live TV.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I think he was really one of the
Speaker 4: guys to kind of uh popularized patriotic socialism as as
Speaker 4: a term, even before people like Kinkle came onto the scene,
Speaker 4: which I assume will be getting to show. We'll get
Speaker 4: to that, yeah, but but yeah, it kind of it
Speaker 4: kind of circled around this like Caleb Moppin, Peter Coffin
Speaker 4: circle of these sorts of like content creators and writers
Speaker 4: who were really into like a classical Marxist theory. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but like not but I yeah, it's like but from
Speaker 4: they were from from very like statist yeah, American imperial aspective.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: The thing is like they suck as theorist right like
Speaker 1: and this is this is like a one of the
Speaker 1: trends of these people that they're and this is why
Speaker 1: it doesn't take off because like one of the other guys,
Speaker 1: he's going to become like a maga communism guy later.
Speaker 1: Or is this a guy named Hawes or Infrared who
Speaker 1: he's like the big theory guy and stuff is unreader essentially,
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's like a twits streamers. He's stuff is
Speaker 1: completely unreadable, like it's nonsense, like to the point where
Speaker 1: even when this politics gets big and Hinkle tries to
Speaker 1: get people to read it, no one will fucking read it.
Speaker 1: His own followers won't read it because it's awful.
Speaker 4: I think between like, I don't think that this at
Speaker 4: least in my observations of this political subculture. The point
Speaker 4: is not to convert people to your politics, because there
Speaker 4: really isn't any core political essence of this thing. It's
Speaker 4: mostly a visual meme to get eyes on you. Because
Speaker 4: all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators.
Speaker 4: Like it's all a way just to boost your personal
Speaker 4: brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal
Speaker 4: brand like that. All the guys who are pushing this
Speaker 4: really hard, none of them were serious about any kind
Speaker 4: of political theory. Tied to this notion. They were all
Speaker 4: plugging their twitch stream, plugging their YouTube, their new book
Speaker 4: that's coming out, like all of it was just to
Speaker 4: sell content. I read on a lot of the guys
Speaker 4: that at least initially started pushing this thing as a
Speaker 4: as like a meme.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But I think the thing that's important about this too, though,
Speaker 1: is the original guys were fucking losers, Like this is
Speaker 1: why this didn't work. Sure, often, like Coffin starts doing
Speaker 1: this because his arigest previous seventeen grifts have all fallowed
Speaker 1: apart he was, He's been through, He's taken every conceivable
Speaker 1: leftist position and tried to make a brand around it,
Speaker 1: and it was just failing. Right, he just turned in
Speaker 1: to this. It doesn't work and like him and Moppin
Speaker 1: and like the other people in the space like are
Speaker 1: so unbelievably uncharismatic, and so it just doesn't work. The
Speaker 1: thing about this too, right, is like the reason it
Speaker 1: doesn't work partially because the people aren't charismatic, and partially
Speaker 1: it's because they really are obsessed with writing theory bullshit,
Speaker 1: like like yeah, like the theory betialty is completely incoherent,
Speaker 1: but they're like reading their theory on streams and shit,
Speaker 1: and like nobody likes that they need to produce some
Speaker 1: theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but like husband's
Speaker 1: almost time they're fancy about Hagel. It's like, does anyone
Speaker 1: want to list Like no, Like.
Speaker 4: I mean, I I do like hearing about Hagel, but
Speaker 4: not from host. Yeah, but you know, like like he's
Speaker 4: like he's also yelling about how like there.
Speaker 1: Isn't a real left anymore because I'm like the far
Speaker 1: right people want align with Putin. But into this gap
Speaker 1: comes Jackson Hinkle. So Hinkle was just like a nobody.
Speaker 1: He was some random left Twitter person with like ten
Speaker 1: k followers. Yeah, like lost a city council race in
Speaker 1: to like he was like he was a joke. But
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty he starts to crack the formula, which
Speaker 1: is he figures out the same thing the gray Zone
Speaker 1: people do, which is that you can't pull from the
Speaker 1: left right. If you want to actually build a large
Speaker 1: scale brand, you have to pull from the right. And
Speaker 1: so he's one of the people who first gets really
Speaker 1: big into this thing called Maga communism, which is like
Speaker 1: kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideologies,
Speaker 1: like mostly a troll ideology, Like.
Speaker 4: It's yeah, yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 1: It is meme based. Yeah. Basically, what they've done is
Speaker 1: like they've they've pulled together it's an attempt to build
Speaker 1: an ideology based on pure authoritarianism, Like it's based on
Speaker 1: like liking both Trump and CHIESI Ping and Putin at
Speaker 1: the same time, because all of them are powerful leaders
Speaker 1: who like want to restore their nation or whatever. And
Speaker 1: you know, but like the actual content of it is
Speaker 1: kind of nothing. But but what Hinkle does, and this
Speaker 1: is the thing he does that's very smart is that
Speaker 1: he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less
Speaker 1: smart than Hawes. But because he's not smart, he kind
Speaker 1: of half stumbles and half figures out into how you
Speaker 1: make content for the right, which is just incredibly simple propaganda.
Speaker 1: Right You reach wheet write wing social media people. You
Speaker 1: make posts with very very simple slogans and like sentences
Speaker 1: with like words that don't go above two syllables, and
Speaker 1: you get You get in every single time a right
Speaker 1: wing grievance thing happens. You just get in and you
Speaker 1: just keep cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day.
Speaker 1: He does this on his YouTube channel, he does this
Speaker 1: on his Twitter. He now has two point three million Twitter.
Speaker 4: Followers, most of which he has made in the past
Speaker 4: two months.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And he was on you know, and he's
Speaker 1: now he's now taken like he's done one of these
Speaker 1: right wing media tours, like he's been on Carlson, He's
Speaker 1: been on fucking Info Wars, He's been on OEMs, the
Speaker 1: One American Network. And part of the reason this works
Speaker 1: is because right wingers love to find like a nominal
Speaker 1: leftists who agrees with them. And Hinkle, you know, he
Speaker 1: gets into argument with people sometimes, like when he was
Speaker 1: on Alex Jones, they're Alex Jones is like, what do
Speaker 1: you mean you're a communists? Like what the fuck? And
Speaker 1: Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why Americ like communism
Speaker 1: is when no globalists, it's just.
Speaker 4: Like, in effect, they are doing a form of national
Speaker 4: socialism which relies which relies on anti Semitism and this
Speaker 4: notion of casting globalists as Jewish Zionists who are secretly
Speaker 4: controlling all of industry and We're going to give the
Speaker 4: real power back to the average regular working man which
Speaker 4: is it's it's he can frame it as communism, but
Speaker 4: like it is, it is it is just a form
Speaker 4: of Nazi theory. Like that is what he fundamentally operates on.
Speaker 1: And he's he's interesting because his she is he has
Speaker 1: gone you know, as as bad as the like transphobia
Speaker 1: stuff in last episode is right like that that is
Speaker 1: like an average like COVID grifter things he has. He
Speaker 1: has his own own share of transphobia as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well hekl is way further right than anyone who's ever
Speaker 1: come out of the left to like do this kind
Speaker 1: of thing has ever gone. He is like so there's
Speaker 1: a video of him arguing with a guy named sneak
Speaker 1: O and who I who just cover was just a
Speaker 1: twitch line.
Speaker 4: Is just as a twitch streamer who aligns himself with
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of kind of influencers for young usually
Speaker 4: white men. Like he's like, he's like close like Andrew Tate.
Speaker 4: It's it's it's just yeah, he's a fucking twitch influencer
Speaker 4: who courts unbelievable misogynist young man. That's the basic of it,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, he he's he's kind of he's
Speaker 4: gone to the point where he's he's not quite in
Speaker 4: the same circles as Nick Flentes, but that's largely because
Speaker 4: Flentes is like a hardline Christian fascist, and Sneko's like,
Speaker 4: is like a Muslim fascist in the same wow like
Speaker 4: fat He's like, he's like a far right wing Muslim
Speaker 4: in the same Vein is like, I don't even I don't.
Speaker 4: I don't think Sneko is really id politically driven, like
Speaker 4: like like consciously so he's he's he's just a he's
Speaker 4: just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you
Speaker 4: say certain things, you can get a twelve year employees
Speaker 4: to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's that's
Speaker 4: it's really, it's really the I think that the core of.
Speaker 1: Of of his of him, I hate politics. He sucks
Speaker 1: so much. But like so, Hinko goes on his show
Speaker 1: and he spends the entire show trying to convince Sneco
Speaker 1: that Hitler was gay and that the reason, and and
Speaker 1: Sneko's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the the Mangisrochwelt Institute
Speaker 1: for Sexual Research, And sneak Go's like, well that was
Speaker 1: a good thing. And Hinkel's response is no, no, no,
Speaker 1: all of the Nazis were gay in trans so they
Speaker 1: had to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover
Speaker 1: up the fact, like to hide the evidence that they
Speaker 1: were all gay in trans Like this is a level
Speaker 1: of like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so
Speaker 1: far beyond the like normal shit that like and you know,
Speaker 1: and and and this, and like even Sneko is like
Speaker 1: what are you talking about?
Speaker 4: But I just can't take anything Hinkel says as like
Speaker 4: a literal thing he believes.
Speaker 1: He doesn't believe, he believes that everything. It's Yeah, he
Speaker 1: is the pure disillation of a man who believes in nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like like he is. She's not even a person, He's
Speaker 1: not even a human being. He is just a content mill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: That's that's all he is. He's just a brand. But
Speaker 1: what he's discovered, the way he's he's decided to build
Speaker 1: his brand is by basically out trying to he's doing. Okay,
Speaker 1: there was a there was a weird maga communism thing.
Speaker 1: He does that less now because it's outlived usefulness and
Speaker 1: a lot of this now it's now it's easier to
Speaker 1: be a a Palestine. Uh Yeah, like and quote unquote
Speaker 1: Anti's Zionist influencer. In reality, he just is extremely anti Semitic.
Speaker 1: Like this is yes, that is his actual politics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk about well okay, she's like it's genuinely unclear
Speaker 1: to me whether he personally is really anti Semitic, Like
Speaker 1: I don't know he might be. I mean, like it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. Like that's the thing, Like he's.
Speaker 4: The way that he talks about it, the way oh yeah,
Speaker 4: he talks about how how how Zionists like rule the world.
Speaker 1: It's it's, it's it's you can just like that Intel
Speaker 1: Protocols of the Elders. Yeah, so this is the thing
Speaker 1: like like Hinkle, Hinkle is not really at this point,
Speaker 1: like they're like there there, there is no person behind it, right,
Speaker 1: He's just purely a right wing mill that regurgitates stuff
Speaker 1: and the stuff. And then the way that he figured
Speaker 1: out you could do this is by trying to outflank
Speaker 1: the traditional hard right on anti Semitism. So let's let's
Speaker 1: let's let's take a look at like exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of anti Semitic ship that he's on, because he is
Speaker 1: just straight up an anti Semite. Right, this is not
Speaker 1: a like think I'm saying because of the Palaside stuff,
Speaker 1: so grant the Like last week the trailer for Grand
Speaker 1: Theft Auto six came out. Yeah, and there's like a
Speaker 1: bunch of women tworking in it and like having a
Speaker 1: good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff, and there's
Speaker 1: like this enormous, like really weird, incredibly pathetic right wing
Speaker 1: like thing about it, saying that it's like anti Christian
Speaker 1: and it's like spreading porn to children and teaching people
Speaker 1: to do crimes, and that like shooting cops is bad
Speaker 1: and no one should ever play it. And because this
Speaker 1: is like the current right wing media panic, Hinkle starts
Speaker 1: tweeting about it, and his tweet is, so this starts
Speaker 1: with an Israeli flag, and it starts with like that
Speaker 1: like siren thing that people post when they're about to
Speaker 1: do an alert quote, why are the Zionists all capitalized
Speaker 1: at Rockstar Games releasing this all caps sexualized video game
Speaker 1: for children in America? Get hashtag ban GTA six. This
Speaker 1: is also in all caps trending right now. So this
Speaker 1: is straight up neo Nazi shit, right, This is neo
Speaker 1: Nazi shit about the Jews, conspiracy right, Like that's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like this is a right of neo Nazi shit.
Speaker 1: And he's been trying to use the fact that he
Speaker 1: is more anti Semitic than openly anti semitic, even than
Speaker 1: so even than someone like Elon Musk, right sure, and
Speaker 1: he's been trying to use this as a way to
Speaker 1: basically to o their bases. So like two days ago
Speaker 1: when this goes up three uh really recently there was
Speaker 1: this giant like call, like there's this giant like Twitter
Speaker 1: space thing that had Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Trey
Speaker 1: and Vivik Ramaswami in it, and Hinkle just like keeps
Speaker 1: asking Elon Musk about whether he's gonna turn on the
Speaker 1: starlink like internet stuff or Palestine, and these people basically
Speaker 1: tell him to shut up and like kick him off.
Speaker 1: But then he does that. He starts doing this like
Speaker 1: giant like I've been censored like media thing about it.
Speaker 1: And what he's doing here, this is the thing he
Speaker 1: does constantly. He's trying to take the basis from people
Speaker 1: like Alex Jones, people like Elon Musk, people of Manedu
Speaker 1: Tate who wants more open anti Semitism, right like these
Speaker 1: people are anti He's trying to flank them.
Speaker 4: You can say, quote unquote from the right, but like
Speaker 4: at this point the right less spectrum kind of resolves
Speaker 4: into meaningless uh mambo jumbo.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's trying to He's I mean, he's just
Speaker 1: a fascist, right, He's he's trying to he's trying to
Speaker 1: play like the anti Semite flame from the anti Semitics thing. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, and but but he's he's figured out.
Speaker 1: This is the thing that actually pushed him really into
Speaker 1: the mainstream. Is he figured out a way to do
Speaker 1: cover for this that also lets him get a bunch
Speaker 1: of like attention and clicks and stuff from the left,
Speaker 1: which is and also like a lot of support from Palestinians.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about that in a second.
Speaker 4: People who don't understand who he actually is, or maybe
Speaker 4: if they do, they just don't really care because because
Speaker 4: it doesn't affect them, Because he is currently possibly the
Speaker 4: most influential person talking about this conflict right now, like
Speaker 4: like at least on the internet, like his his his
Speaker 4: impressions is larger than anyone else. His tweets get read
Speaker 4: aloud in newsrooms across across the country. Like he is
Speaker 4: he has succeeded in grifting off of off of this
Speaker 4: conflict to promote his personal brand in almost an almost
Speaker 4: unparalleled way. Like there's never been someone who's done this
Speaker 4: as successfully as Hin called us for any other conflict.
Speaker 4: It is, it is. It is quite quite quite surprising
Speaker 4: that there's just this one guy sitting in sitting in
Speaker 4: on his phone in America has has been this successful
Speaker 4: by essentially just tweeting NonStop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like to put this in perspective, so like he
Speaker 1: has Alex Jones got banned and that kind of like
Speaker 1: limited his coverage, but he has more followers on Twitter
Speaker 1: of Alex Jones. Alex Jones has just been on band
Speaker 1: from Twitter, Like he has more followers at Alex Jones.
Speaker 1: Like that's that's how And it's not even just followers too,
Speaker 1: it's it's how much his posts are seen and circulated
Speaker 1: like he yeah, there was. He was for almost I
Speaker 1: think the most of the month of October, he was
Speaker 1: person with the highest digital impressions on the platform like
Speaker 1: he he yea, his stuff was being seen by more
Speaker 1: people than anyone else, like he yeah, So let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about what that stuff actually is. It's large, It's
Speaker 1: like it's a combination of him just retweeting other people,
Speaker 1: stealing other people's like videos of like press conferences from
Speaker 1: a coma. Most of it is dead babies, like it's
Speaker 1: a bunch, it's a bunch of dead babies, it's a
Speaker 1: bunch of dead Palestinians, just over and over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire,
Speaker 1: like how could the Zionists do this?
Speaker 4: One about misinformations, characterizing attacks events, like a lot of
Speaker 4: others basic stuff.
Speaker 1: Like it's yeah, and one of one of his tricks
Speaker 1: and that this is this has been a thing for
Speaker 1: these kinds of like these Marginalonist people for a long time,
Speaker 1: is spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the Serians
Speaker 1: civil war, yes, features from Palestine, which they do constantly,
Speaker 1: and this, you know, and like one of the things
Speaker 1: that we haven't sort of toushed on yet is like
Speaker 1: yet he so one of the things that's happened with
Speaker 1: him is because he's the biggest person tweeting about Palestine.
Speaker 1: His like a lot of his tweets about Palestine are
Speaker 1: translated into Arabic and they're posted all over like Arabic
Speaker 1: Instagram of Arabic Twitter, Like it's like they're they're spent
Speaker 1: fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either like don't
Speaker 1: know who he is, right, because they're only seeing him
Speaker 1: Palestine stuff, right, They're not seeing his like raving about
Speaker 1: how GTA six is anti Christian, right, They're only seeing
Speaker 1: that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more
Speaker 1: popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the really grim parts about this, which is
Speaker 1: that you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting
Speaker 1: fucking killed all the time, Like every single day, another
Speaker 1: Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed, Like more and more Palestinian
Speaker 1: intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle
Speaker 1: exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of
Speaker 1: people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks
Speaker 1: and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill
Speaker 1: the void left by the fact that the Israelis have
Speaker 1: been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own
Speaker 1: fucking grifting brands. And he's able to do this because
Speaker 1: you know, Kinkle is incredibly safe, just fucking living it
Speaker 1: up in the US while the people who's suffering, he's exploiting,
Speaker 1: are getting fucking murdered in the streets.
Speaker 4: And he's making tons of money doing this.
Speaker 1: Enormous amounts of money. Yeah, and I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't really have I don't have a fucking
Speaker 1: solution to this. Like he's he's effectively just figured out
Speaker 1: how to completely game this system in a way that
Speaker 1: hasn't been done before.
Speaker 4: I think part of this is like with the way
Speaker 4: Twitter's content moderation is working now, Gore can we spread
Speaker 4: around in ways that it didn't used to, which is
Speaker 4: a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people.
Speaker 4: So he's able to to do a whole buntu quote
Speaker 4: teet quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images which
Speaker 4: draw more people to his platform. He's he's he's just
Speaker 4: like figured out a specific thing, like he's he's been
Speaker 4: trying to do this for a few years with very
Speaker 4: with various types of like you know, conflicts or like
Speaker 4: little little like bits that he he like tries to
Speaker 4: tries to do this media strategy thing on and this
Speaker 4: this one has happened to work. There there was there
Speaker 4: was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to
Speaker 4: to get get platformed by many, many, many unwitting people,
Speaker 4: and at this point, deplatforming is not even an option,
Speaker 4: Like it's it's like, you can't you can't deplatform someone
Speaker 4: with three million followers. Really, just that just isn't that
Speaker 4: He's strategy and it too, like yeah, yeah, it just
Speaker 4: it just that's right, It just doesn't even follow anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess, I guess. One last thing I want
Speaker 1: to say about this is like, and he's he's been
Speaker 1: incredibly successful at leveraging, like at leveraging the fact that
Speaker 1: he posts not not even good pro pales sign content,
Speaker 1: right sucks ass right, it's but he's been incredibly successful
Speaker 1: leveraging that to use his defense against any claims of
Speaker 1: anti Semitism. And this sucks because he's, you know, he's
Speaker 1: he's effectively using he's using Palestinians as a human shield
Speaker 1: and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to
Speaker 1: build a brand.
Speaker 4: While that also complaining about the degeneracy of seeing a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of non white people having a beach party
Speaker 4: in GTA five, right, Like it's like, it's not like
Speaker 4: he actually cares about the lives of Palestinians being killed
Speaker 4: because he's complaining about black people in GTA five. Like
Speaker 4: it's not like, come on, like it's it's he is.
Speaker 4: He's just an anti Semitic fascist.
Speaker 7: This is y.
Speaker 1: This is very very clear. I think I think the
Speaker 1: thing that can be done is, like we need to
Speaker 1: like these people can't be allowed to fucking get their
Speaker 1: start here, Like we can't be having a bunch of
Speaker 1: fucking transphobes and anti Semits. We can't be having all
Speaker 1: of these fucking homophobic right wing nationalists like in leftist basis,
Speaker 1: they just like they can't be here because if if
Speaker 1: there had actually been you know, a kind of sustained
Speaker 1: effort to get these people fucking out before before they
Speaker 1: pulled all of this shit, we wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't done. Were people were just completely okay
Speaker 1: with having all of these right wingers just being there
Speaker 1: because they supported the same states that they do, and
Speaker 1: because of that we're here.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, I really only see that on like
Speaker 4: the heavily communist and statist contingent of the left right,
Speaker 4: Like these types of people aren't super popular among most
Speaker 4: like social democrats at least recently, there's been kind of
Speaker 4: a harder divide, at least from my observation between like
Speaker 4: SoC dems, between like socialists libertarian socialists, and the people
Speaker 4: who are like hardlined. I am a Marxist Leninist. I
Speaker 4: am affiliated with these Marxi Leninist organizations, and those are
Speaker 4: the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind
Speaker 4: of almost like prey on to like gain followers and
Speaker 4: gain some poy.
Speaker 1: Well, and I would say this, like, this is like
Speaker 1: those groups like like the PSL for examples, PSL is
Speaker 1: what example shores right, And like they also have a
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them chasing
Speaker 1: down abusers. Like I know people who they liked a
Speaker 1: tweet that was talking about how the PSL had had
Speaker 1: fucked up a a sexual assault investigation and they were
Speaker 1: dragged because they had liked to tweet about this. They
Speaker 1: were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee where
Speaker 1: Gloria Rivera, they're fucking like eternal presidential candidates started doing
Speaker 1: a bunch of fucking transphobia shit and then covering it
Speaker 1: with the exact same gray zone, Like I'm a woman
Speaker 1: of color, thing, you know, but these groups were like
Speaker 1: on they were on the edge of colla like basically
Speaker 1: becoming a non relevant because they've been supporting Russia during
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine for this whole time. But then
Speaker 1: Palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like, is
Speaker 1: the one issue that their stance is like, you know,
Speaker 1: tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all
Speaker 1: all of these people have been using Palestine, even all
Speaker 1: these people who've been fucking pivoting harder, harder and harder
Speaker 1: right for years and years and years now have been
Speaker 1: have like have I've been exploiting the exploiting the fucking
Speaker 1: genocide and Palestine in order to fucking get all their
Speaker 1: leftist clicks back. And it's utterly grotesque. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: That's what I've got about this.
Speaker 4: It is. It is certainly upsetting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, free Palestine, Fuck the grifters.
Speaker 6: Hello, welcome to it could happen here today. My episode
Speaker 6: is going to be a bit more philosophical. I love
Speaker 6: me some philosophy. I don't always understand it, but I
Speaker 6: do like it. And I read something recently that really
Speaker 6: stuck with me, especially in the context of what is
Speaker 6: currently going on right now in Palestine and the genocide
Speaker 6: and Gaza. I read something and I couldn't stop thinking it,
Speaker 6: so I thought, let's just make an episode. So today
Speaker 6: I wanted to talk about this word I learned called grievability.
Speaker 6: It was coined by Judith Butler in this blog post
Speaker 6: from twenty fifteen, when Butler is asking the question when
Speaker 6: is life grievable? In twenty sixteen, Butler wrote a book
Speaker 6: called Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? And this
Speaker 6: is a quote from this book. One way of posing
Speaker 6: the question of who we are in these times of
Speaker 6: war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose
Speaker 6: lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We
Speaker 6: might think of war as dividing populations into those who
Speaker 6: are grievable in those who are not. An ungrievable life
Speaker 6: is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived,
Speaker 6: That is, it has never counted as a life at all.
Speaker 6: We can see the division of the globe into grievable
Speaker 6: and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who weigh
Speaker 6: war in order to defend the lives of certain communities,
Speaker 6: and to defend them against the lives of others, even
Speaker 6: if it means taking those latter lives. So that quote
Speaker 6: kind of encompasses the idea of grievability. I really just
Speaker 6: thought it was poignant to talk about and relevant because
Speaker 6: we are being inundated with all these numbers every day
Speaker 6: of casualties and death counts and collateral damage. And people
Speaker 6: accept these things because it's part of being human. It's
Speaker 6: just the way war is. But I really don't think
Speaker 6: we should accept that as the reality. I think that
Speaker 6: makes us callous. And I think accepting human death, no
Speaker 6: matter in what context, is a little bit inhuman And
Speaker 6: so I think maybe that's why this concept fascinated me,
Speaker 6: because tying grief to the concept of being alive, it
Speaker 6: truly is indicative of if that life is worth something
Speaker 6: to you or to the world. And so we're reading
Speaker 6: and hearing about all these lives lost, and we're giving
Speaker 6: these numbers and stories, and these numbers are repeated every day,
Speaker 6: and they increase every day, and this repetition seems endless
Speaker 6: and impossible to change. And Butler is saying that we
Speaker 6: don't often consider the precarious character of the lives lost
Speaker 6: in war, and Butler defines precariousness as the following. To
Speaker 6: say that a life is precarious requires not only that
Speaker 6: a life be apprehended as a life, but also that
Speaker 6: precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what
Speaker 6: is the living normatively construed. I am arguing that there
Speaker 6: ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of
Speaker 6: recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete
Speaker 6: social policy regarding such issues as shelter work, food, medical care,
Speaker 6: and legal status. Butler goes on to explain that although
Speaker 6: this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot be properly recognized.
Speaker 6: Butler says it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and
Speaker 6: it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition, just
Speaker 6: as it can be refused by such norms. But the
Speaker 6: main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared condition
Speaker 6: of human life, so precariousness being a condition that links
Speaker 6: human life and humans to non human animals. So, for instance,
Speaker 6: to say that a life is injurable, that it can
Speaker 6: be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point
Speaker 6: of death is to underscore not only the finitude of
Speaker 6: a life and that death is certain, but also the
Speaker 6: precariousness of life, that life requires various social and economic
Speaker 6: conditions to be met in order to be sustained as
Speaker 6: a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means that one's
Speaker 6: life is always, in some sense, in the hands of
Speaker 6: the other. It implies exposure both to those we know
Speaker 6: and to those we do not know, a dependency on
Speaker 6: people we know or barely know, or know not at all.
Speaker 6: This existential reality that everything ends and everything is temporary.
Speaker 6: This encapsulates our relation to death and to life. Precariousness
Speaker 6: underscores what Butler calls our quote radical substitution ability and anonymity,
Speaker 6: and that dying and death is just as socially facilitated
Speaker 6: as humans persisting and flourishing. So Butler is saying it's
Speaker 6: not that we are born and then later become precarious,
Speaker 6: but rather that precariousness is intrinsic with birth itself, and
Speaker 6: birth is by definition precarious. It means that it matters
Speaker 6: whether a newly born infant survives, and its survival is
Speaker 6: dependent on what we might call a social network of hands.
Speaker 6: Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary
Speaker 6: to care for that being so it may live. I
Speaker 6: put the following sentence in bold because I think it's
Speaker 6: kind of underlying what I'm trying to say, even though
Speaker 6: it sounds really simple. But only under conditions in which
Speaker 6: the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.
Speaker 6: And again, maybe it sounds simple, but I don't think
Speaker 6: we actually absorb the meaning of what that means to
Speaker 6: value a life and to mourn a life. And this
Speaker 6: is how we come to the idea of grievability, the
Speaker 6: idea that grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.
Speaker 6: Butler gives us this example, so let's think about this.
Speaker 6: An infant comes into the world, is sustained in and
Speaker 6: sustained by that world as an infant, and through to
Speaker 6: adulthood and old age, and finally eventually it does. We
Speaker 6: imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration
Speaker 6: at the beginning of life. But there can be no
Speaker 6: celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable,
Speaker 6: that it would be grieved if it were lost, that
Speaker 6: this future possibility is installed as the condition of its life.
Speaker 6: Life is celebrated because it can be lost. In ordinary language,
Speaker 6: Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been
Speaker 6: lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the
Speaker 6: value of life comes from the reality and certainty that
Speaker 6: it will end. And if we think about this idea
Speaker 6: of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that happens
Speaker 6: when death happens, grievability is a condition of a life's
Speaker 6: emergence and sustenance this future. Concept that a life has
Speaker 6: been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a life
Speaker 6: that has only begun to be lived. In other words,
Speaker 6: Butler says, this will be a life that will have
Speaker 6: been lived is the presupposition of a grievable life, which
Speaker 6: means that this will be a life that can be
Speaker 6: regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know
Speaker 6: it sounds heady, and I really had to read this
Speaker 6: multiple times to even try to comprehend it. But essentially,
Speaker 6: without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there
Speaker 6: is no life, or rather, there is something living that
Speaker 6: is other than life. This other than life thing is
Speaker 6: a life that will never have been lived in the
Speaker 6: first place, because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by
Speaker 6: no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it
Speaker 6: is lost. The unease and anxiety and apprehension of grievability
Speaker 6: precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and apprehension
Speaker 6: of precarious life, and so grievability precedes and makes possible
Speaker 6: the apprehension of the living being as living exposed to
Speaker 6: non life. From the start, to put it in maybe
Speaker 6: a simpler way for me to understand even is that
Speaker 6: a life is worth grieving because we already know it
Speaker 6: will die, and that life is worth celebrating because it
Speaker 6: has already been to death or the implication of certain death.
Speaker 6: From the start, it is pretty heady. But maybe I'll
Speaker 6: just leave you to marinate with that during a break,
Speaker 6: and we can get more heady when we get back. Okay,
Speaker 6: we're back. Let's go back to the idea of war.
Speaker 6: One way of posing the question of who we are
Speaker 6: in these times of war is by asking whose lives
Speaker 6: are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
Speaker 6: are considered ungrievable war is essentially the division of populations
Speaker 6: into those who are a grievable and those who are not.
Speaker 6: An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because
Speaker 6: it has never lived, that is, it has never counted
Speaker 6: as life at all. And we see this division of
Speaker 6: the entire world into grievable and ungrievable lives when we
Speaker 6: look at the perspective of those who wage war in
Speaker 6: order to defend their certain communities. Is kind of reiterating
Speaker 6: the quote that I'd started with at the top from
Speaker 6: twenty sixteen, But essentially to defend these certain communities against
Speaker 6: the life of others, it usually implies the taking of
Speaker 6: those other lives. Butler here makes a reference to nine
Speaker 6: to eleven, explaining that after the attacks of nine to eleven,
Speaker 6: the media showed us graphic pictures of those who died,
Speaker 6: along with their names, their stories, and the reactions of
Speaker 6: their families. Public grieving was dedicated to making these images
Speaker 6: iconic for the nation, which meant that, of course, there
Speaker 6: was considerably less public grieving for let's say, non US nationals,
Speaker 6: and none at all for illegal workers. Butler says the
Speaker 6: differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of
Speaker 6: enormous significance, and Butler asks, why is it that governments
Speaker 6: so often seek to regulate and control who will be
Speaker 6: publicly grievable and who will not? Because it means something
Speaker 6: to state and to show the name of someone who
Speaker 6: has died, to put together some remnants of a life,
Speaker 6: and to publicly display and draw attention to the loss.
Speaker 6: So Butler is asking, in this context, what would happen
Speaker 6: if those killed in war were to be grieved in
Speaker 6: such an open way? Why is it that we are
Speaker 6: not given the names of all the war dead, including
Speaker 6: those the US has killed, of whom we will never
Speaker 6: have the image, the name, the story, never have a
Speaker 6: testimonial shard of their life, nothing to see, to touch,
Speaker 6: to know. Open grieving is bound up with outrage. Outrage
Speaker 6: in the face of injustice or of unbearable loss has
Speaker 6: enormous political potential. Butler draws a similarity here to Plato. Apparently,
Speaker 6: one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban the poets
Speaker 6: from the republic is that he thought that if citizens
Speaker 6: went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over
Speaker 6: the losses they saw, and that such open and public mind.
Speaker 6: In disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul would
Speaker 6: disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well.
Speaker 6: And I didn't know this, but to put it in
Speaker 6: that context is really fascinating to me, because it's essentially
Speaker 6: saying that if we expose human beings to the reality
Speaker 6: of tragedy in life, they might care too much and
Speaker 6: start to fuck up our politics. Essentially, so, whether we
Speaker 6: are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking
Speaker 6: about effective or emotional responses that are highly regulated by
Speaker 6: regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The
Speaker 6: blog post I'm referring to that Judith Butler wrote was
Speaker 6: written in twenty fifteen, So Butler uses the wars in
Speaker 6: Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of what they're trying to say.
Speaker 6: For the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, we saw how
Speaker 6: emotion was regulated to support both the war effort and
Speaker 6: more specifically nationalists belonging. When the photos of Bougrabe were
Speaker 6: first released in the US, conservative television pundits argued that
Speaker 6: it would be un American to show them because we
Speaker 6: were not supposed to have graphic evidence of the acts
Speaker 6: of torture the US has committed. We were not supposed
Speaker 6: to know that the US had violated internationally recognized human rights.
Speaker 6: It was Unamerican to show these photos, an Unamerican to
Speaker 6: glean information from them as to how the war was
Speaker 6: being conducted. Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create
Speaker 6: a negative image of the US, and that we had
Speaker 6: an obligation to defend a positive image of the country.
Speaker 6: Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, suggesting it was anti American
Speaker 6: to display the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider,
Speaker 6: and neither did the vast majority of people in power.
Speaker 6: But the American public should have a right to know
Speaker 6: about the activities of its military, and it should have
Speaker 6: the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a
Speaker 6: war on the basis of full evidence is, or at
Speaker 6: least it should be part of the democratic tradition of
Speaker 6: participation and deliberation. So what was this really saying? Butler's
Speaker 6: asking they say, it seems to me that those who
Speaker 6: sought to limit the power of the image in this
Speaker 6: instance also sought to limit the power of effect of outrage,
Speaker 6: knowing full well that it could and would turn public
Speaker 6: opinion against the war in Iraq as it died, it did.
Speaker 6: I feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to
Speaker 6: what we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting
Speaker 6: horrific images of what is happening to them because of
Speaker 6: the state of Israel, and how there's selective outrage because
Speaker 6: it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images
Speaker 6: that only show reality. It really feels like people are
Speaker 6: only outraged when they consider a life grievable, which takes
Speaker 6: us to this whole topic brings us back to the
Speaker 6: question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable,
Speaker 6: and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose
Speaker 6: lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that
Speaker 6: should be honored. This ties indirectly to the idea of
Speaker 6: how effect or emotion is regulated, and what we mean
Speaker 6: by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references the
Speaker 6: anthropologist Talal Assad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing.
Speaker 6: In this book, the first question he poses is why
Speaker 6: do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face
Speaker 6: of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the
Speaker 6: same way in the face of state sponsored violence. He
Speaker 6: asks this question not in order to say that these
Speaker 6: forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even
Speaker 6: to say that we ought to feel the same moral
Speaker 6: outrage in relation to both. But Asad finds it curious,
Speaker 6: as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first
Speaker 6: take form as effect, are tacitly regular by certain kinds
Speaker 6: of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel.
Speaker 1: More horror and moral.
Speaker 6: Revulsion in the face of lives lost under certain conditions
Speaker 6: than under certain others. Assad explains that, for instance, if
Speaker 6: someone kills or is killed in war, and the war
Speaker 6: is state sponsored, and we invest the state with legitimacy,
Speaker 6: then we consider the death lamentable, sad, unfortunate, but ultimately
Speaker 6: not radically unjust. And yet if the violence is perpetrated
Speaker 6: by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, that our emotion invariably changes,
Speaker 6: or so Assad assumes. Asad is saying something here that
Speaker 6: is really important about how the politics of moral responsiveness
Speaker 6: really feed into public perception. That what we feel is
Speaker 6: in part conditioned by how we interpret the world around us,
Speaker 6: that how we interpret what we feel actually can and
Speaker 6: does alter the feeling itself. If we can accept our
Speaker 6: emotion could be affected and structured by things we do
Speaker 6: not fully understand. Can this help us understand why it
Speaker 6: is that we might feel horror in the face of
Speaker 6: certain losses, but in difference or even righteousness in the
Speaker 6: light of others. Conditions of war bring something really interesting here,
Speaker 6: this feeling of heightened nationalism. In this feeling of heightened nationalism,
Speaker 6: it's as though our existence is bound with others, with
Speaker 6: whom we find some kind of national affinity for who
Speaker 6: are recognizable to us, and who can conform to certain
Speaker 6: culturally specific notions about what the culturally recognizable human is.
Speaker 6: And sure, maybe some of you are like, well, this
Speaker 6: is really obvious. Of course, some people care more about
Speaker 6: people who look like them or about things that directly
Speaker 6: affect them. But what I'm arguing is that I can't
Speaker 6: accept that as reality. I don't think we should accept
Speaker 6: humans as by default. There's no way change happens that way.
Speaker 6: I think we have to question why we unconsciously are
Speaker 6: more outraged by certain losses than others, or why the
Speaker 6: public is this way. Even if you are not, Oh,
Speaker 6: that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of information.
Speaker 6: Let's take our second break, we can just marinate with
Speaker 6: all of that, and uh, we'll be right back to
Speaker 6: wrap this up. Okay, we're back. So we discussed the
Speaker 6: differentiation of the population of the world into grievable and
Speaker 6: ungrievable lives, and now we are going to differentiate between
Speaker 6: the populations on whom your life and existence depend on
Speaker 6: and those populations represent a direct threat to your life
Speaker 6: in existence. This is a concept that really struck me
Speaker 6: as something we don't even give a second thought to
Speaker 6: that when a population appears as a direct threat to
Speaker 6: your life, they do not appear as lives, but as
Speaker 6: a threat to life. Butler asks us to consider how
Speaker 6: this is shown with how the world views an intern
Speaker 6: or Islam. Islam is portrayed and seen by our media,
Speaker 6: whether it's implicit or explicit as barbaric or pre modern,
Speaker 6: as not having yet conformed to the norms that make
Speaker 6: the human recognizable to the West, to the American. So
Speaker 6: those who Americans kill by following this line of thought
Speaker 6: are not quite human. They are not quite alive, which
Speaker 6: means that we do not feel the same horror and
Speaker 6: outrage over their loss of life as we do the
Speaker 6: loss of life that bear national or religious similarity to
Speaker 6: our own. And again, this isn't a novel concept. In
Speaker 6: simple terms, it can be whittled down to the reality
Speaker 6: that most people only care about things that directly affect
Speaker 6: them or things that happen to those who look like them.
Speaker 6: And again, maybe that seems like an obvious realization to
Speaker 6: make about our society. But what I'm asking you to
Speaker 6: do is not just accept this as part of the
Speaker 6: human condition and to question why it is like that
Speaker 6: in the first place. True deep understanding of ourselves and
Speaker 6: of our humanity is dependent on us excavating ugly truths
Speaker 6: about ourselves and humanity that we are not even maybe
Speaker 6: aware of. I think this is something that bothers me
Speaker 6: about how Israel's narrative or desion, this narrative of the
Speaker 6: conception of Israel almost makes them seem sinless. They had
Speaker 6: done nothing wrong, the Arabs or barbarians that didn't leave
Speaker 6: them alone. The same can be said about how American
Speaker 6: history books talked about Columbus and the Native American people.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 6: Usually history is written by those who want to appear
Speaker 6: in a better light, and by default, I feel like
Speaker 6: this makes them sinless and pure and can do no wrong,
Speaker 6: but again better understanding. If humanity means accepting that sometimes
Speaker 6: it is grotesque, and I think that is something we
Speaker 6: need to accept and understand. I think Israeli's need to
Speaker 6: accept that the Nekba happened in order to move on
Speaker 6: from it. Things like that is what I'm thinking about
Speaker 6: when I read about this stuff. But anyways, tallal Asad
Speaker 6: is wondering why modes of death dealing are apprehended differently,
Speaker 6: Why we object to the deaths that are caused by
Speaker 6: suicide bombing more forcefully and with greater moral outrage than
Speaker 6: we do those deaths that are caused by aerial bombings.
Speaker 6: And then Butler takes this back to how we differentiate populations,
Speaker 6: how some are considered from the start very much alive
Speaker 6: and others more questionably alive or as living figures of
Speaker 6: the threat to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as quote
Speaker 6: socially dead, which is the term that Jamaican American historian
Speaker 6: and sociologist Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of
Speaker 6: the slave war relies on and perpetuates a way of
Speaker 6: dividing lives into those who are worth defending, valuing, and
Speaker 6: grieving when they are lost, and those that are not
Speaker 6: quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it
Speaker 6: should come as no surprise that the death of ungrievable
Speaker 6: lives would cause deep outrage on the part of those
Speaker 6: who understand and are seeing that their lives are not
Speaker 6: considered to be lives in any meaningful sense of the
Speaker 6: word in this world. Butler explains that although the logic
Speaker 6: of self defense portrays such populations as threats to life
Speaker 6: as we know it, they are themselves living populations with
Speaker 6: whom our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us.
Speaker 1: What does that.
Speaker 6: Mean, Well, it's about how interdependency is interpreted and executed,
Speaker 6: and how it has concrete implications for who survives, who thrives,
Speaker 6: who barely makes it, and who is eliminated or left
Speaker 6: to die. Butler writes, I want to insist on this
Speaker 6: interdependency precisely because when nations such as the US or
Speaker 6: Israel argue that their survival is served by war, a
Speaker 6: systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to
Speaker 6: deny the ongoing, irrefutable ways in which we are all
Speaker 6: subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other,
Speaker 6: and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements
Speaker 6: based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason
Speaker 6: I am not free to destroy another, and indeed why
Speaker 6: nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is
Speaker 6: not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences.
Speaker 6: That is doubtless true. But what may be finally more
Speaker 6: true is that the subject I am is bound to
Speaker 6: the subject I am not. That we each have the
Speaker 6: power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we
Speaker 6: are bound to one another in this power and in
Speaker 6: this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.
Speaker 6: That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article
Speaker 6: as a whole, or this blog post as a whole,
Speaker 6: kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're
Speaker 6: all the same and our divisions are truly man made.
Speaker 6: Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives, or just
Speaker 6: this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining.
Speaker 6: I think it's worth examining how now in real time,
Speaker 6: we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This
Speaker 6: is across the board. I'm not just talking about one
Speaker 6: group of people. Grievable lives, I think are this concept
Speaker 6: for me, and tying grief intrinsically to life is essential
Speaker 6: to understanding why it is life is valuable at all.
Speaker 6: It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't
Speaker 6: valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking
Speaker 6: at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it.
Speaker 6: And I think this also can go back to how
Speaker 6: we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right
Speaker 6: now describe Palestinians or Arabs or most This all leads
Speaker 6: to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem
Speaker 6: inhuman and in a way unlive. So well, all of that.
Speaker 6: I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah,
Speaker 6: until next time, you know how it goes through. Kalsteine.
Speaker 5: Hello, hello Mia, Hello you lot. Hello podcast fans, this
Speaker 5: is it could happen here a podcast about how the
Speaker 5: world is falling apart and some people who are trying
Speaker 5: to pull it back together. Today, we are not talking
Speaker 5: about people who are pulling it back together. We are
Speaker 5: talking about a guy who is constantly struggling to hold
Speaker 5: it together. And that, my friends, is Joseph Robinette Biden,
Speaker 5: old guy United States president and a border fascist. And
Speaker 5: what's happening. Why are we talking about Joseph robin and
Speaker 5: Biden today, Well, because you will remember that Biden made
Speaker 5: some promises when he was campaigning in twenty twenty, and
Speaker 5: it will shock you to hear that he is throwing
Speaker 5: migrants under the bus again. In an attempt to get
Speaker 5: Republicans in the Senate to stop stamping their feet and
Speaker 5: whaling and having a tantrum, specifically, the Senate failed to
Speaker 5: pass an emergency spending bill which would fund military Among
Speaker 5: other things, it would fund military a to Ukraine, Taiwan,
Speaker 5: and Israel. And the reason they did that is because
Speaker 5: these Republicans are having a little tantrum about quote unquote
Speaker 5: border security. Border security probably doesn't mean what you think
Speaker 5: it means. In practical terms, what border security means is
Speaker 5: killing more innocent people, more people who are fleeing the
Speaker 5: worst things that are happening in this world at our
Speaker 5: southern border. It is making America a more deadly place
Speaker 5: for the most desperate people on earth. That is what
Speaker 5: border security means. That is what I want you to
Speaker 5: think of when you hear people saying we should secure
Speaker 5: our border because the people you're securing it against are
Speaker 5: the Azd mother I saw carrying her children to try
Speaker 5: and come to a safer place. They are the Afghan
Speaker 5: grandmother who I saw walking through the mountains last weekend.
Speaker 5: Those are the people who we're securing our border against. Right,
Speaker 5: And this is sorry, this just pisses me off to
Speaker 5: an unfathomable degree for many of you. But the reason
Speaker 5: we're talking about this today is because whatever happens at
Speaker 5: the border, right, whatever policy we have at the border,
Speaker 5: migration won't change because what people are leaving is worse
Speaker 5: than that, and so they will still come here because
Speaker 5: they believe the lies in America tells the world, and
Speaker 5: it tells its citizens about itself too, that this is
Speaker 5: a safe place. And for some people that has been
Speaker 5: a safe place, and that's a good thing. But what
Speaker 5: will change is how people are treated when they get here.
Speaker 5: Because what Biden has proposed is a return to Title
Speaker 5: forty two. I made a whole series on Title forty
Speaker 5: two that you can listen to. But what he's proposing
Speaker 5: this time is a very similar policy by which the
Speaker 5: border patrol agent who meets people after they cross the
Speaker 5: border in between ports of entry, can send them directly
Speaker 5: back to Mexico without them having a chance for an
Speaker 5: asylum hearing. Right, this is illegal under international law and
Speaker 5: parts of the US law. It doesn't It's not clear
Speaker 5: what Biden's proposing or what the administration is proposing to
Speaker 5: do about it. Maybe they could change the immigration law.
Speaker 5: They could probably get enough vote for that, given that
Speaker 5: people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants.
Speaker 5: But this isn't a well fleshed out proposal. But what
Speaker 5: it very clearly shows, right, is the intent to throw
Speaker 5: some of the most desperate people but on earth bit
Speaker 5: a buth and that is It's disgusting, it's ab horror,
Speaker 5: and it shouldn't be unexpected either.
Speaker 1: The executive is a branch in democratic control that is
Speaker 1: utterly incapable of helping a single person, but has the immense, terrible,
Speaker 1: and powerful authority to kill any person on Earth, and then,
Speaker 1: secondarily to I'm just going to call it, effectively perform
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansings by continually removing populations from the US.
Speaker 5: They could just do this, yeah, and all they used
Speaker 5: the executive for yes it is yeah, yeah, yeah. They
Speaker 5: have never once waived that executive power in defense of
Speaker 5: the little guy or people who desperately needed help. It
Speaker 5: would seem certainly not in the last couple of administrations
Speaker 5: shouts or the former Bomber administration staff. It's by the way,
Speaker 5: for showing their whole ass by the screaming racist shit
Speaker 5: at Muslim people in the last few weeks for people
Speaker 5: who hadn't already kind of worked out how terrible the
Speaker 5: Bomber administration's policy was. So I want to talk a
Speaker 5: little bit about the thing that they're trying to do.
Speaker 5: So the first and foremost would be allowing border patrol
Speaker 5: to summarily expel migrants. Let me explain to you exactly
Speaker 5: how fucking stupid this thing is. I was present with
Speaker 5: a border patrol agent last week who was trying to
Speaker 5: discern who was a child or not. Who was hampered
Speaker 5: in this by not being able to count in Spanish.
Speaker 5: Border patrol agents do take a Spanish class in their academy, right,
Speaker 5: but how the fuck are we expecting this guy to
Speaker 5: discern the veracity of someone's asylum claim when he can't
Speaker 5: count to eighteen like this person? Right under this proposed
Speaker 5: Democratic proposal would have the effectively life or death choice
Speaker 5: of whether someone can make an asylum claim or they
Speaker 5: get immediately bounced back to Mexico. Right, this person would,
Speaker 5: for instance, have the choice to send a trans woman
Speaker 5: who would not be safequote unquote remaining in Mexico while
Speaker 5: she applied for asylum here back to Mexico to apply
Speaker 5: for asylum here. Right, this person will be able to
Speaker 5: send someone who has very credible fears of violence in
Speaker 5: Mexico back to Mexico where they often have no network,
Speaker 5: they have no resources. It once again be putting the
Speaker 5: strain of our foreign policy and the fucked up shit
Speaker 5: we've done all around the world that is destabilized regimes,
Speaker 5: specifically across South America, but also all around the world.
Speaker 5: As a consequence of that, people aren't safe there. They're
Speaker 5: coming here to find safety, and we're placing it in
Speaker 5: the hands of a random border patrol agent who may
Speaker 5: very well not speak the language. You understand anything they're
Speaker 5: saying to bounce them back. That's not how we should
Speaker 5: do think I think it probably goes without saying. They
Speaker 5: also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal.
Speaker 5: This allows immigration officials to deport people without court hearings
Speaker 5: if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail
Speaker 5: there an asylum interview. Again like this treating of people
Speaker 5: seeking asylum like they don't have rights or right like
Speaker 5: they have to they're guilty and to proven innocent almost
Speaker 5: in this system, right and to be proven to get
Speaker 5: these court hearings to do well in these court thinks
Speaker 5: they need money, They need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost
Speaker 5: anywhere from six to twelve thousand dollars from what I've heard.
Speaker 5: But these people aren't allowed to work in the United States.
Speaker 5: So we're creating a de facto system that privileges wealthier migrants. Right,
Speaker 5: ten twelve thousand United States dollars is a lot of
Speaker 5: money if you're coming from large parts of the world.
Speaker 5: We're waging so much lower, Right, So having that kind
Speaker 5: of money isn't something that people who may be in
Speaker 5: desperate need of help would have. For instance, yesterday I
Speaker 5: was speaking to a USD family. Is ed however you
Speaker 5: want to say it who people will be familiar with
Speaker 5: the way their community was treated by isis right.
Speaker 7: There.
Speaker 5: Some of the worst genocidal and misogynist violence that we've
Speaker 5: seen this century was enounted upon that community. They're coming
Speaker 5: to the United States to be safe, and I don't
Speaker 5: think those people would have had the money to get
Speaker 5: together for a hearing. Right they speak Kurdish. I've never
Speaker 5: encountered about a patrol agent who speaks Kurdish. Right, So
Speaker 5: they would have to make their claim on arrival. They
Speaker 5: could be immediately rejected. They could if they fail their
Speaker 5: asylum interview, they could be placed in this expedited removal
Speaker 5: process by which they wouldn't have a right to a
Speaker 5: court hearing, a lawyer or translator, all those things. And
Speaker 5: the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do,
Speaker 5: and I think this is the most bizarre one, is
Speaker 5: that they have decided that they want to mandate the
Speaker 5: detention of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated. This one,
Speaker 5: it seems like obviously like a massive session into this
Speaker 5: sort of insane Republican right wing sort of demand that
Speaker 5: we criminalize all asylum seekers.
Speaker 1: And I think, which I want to say something like
Speaker 1: for a second about this too, because like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the ways that all this whole anti migranting
Speaker 1: is ramped up, like when I was a kid, like
Speaker 1: because there was, you know, I was like growing up
Speaker 1: when this this first sort of like anti immigration hysteria
Speaker 1: was like ramping up. And back then the hysteria was
Speaker 1: illegal immigration. It's like this stuff is all legal, Like
Speaker 1: you have the legal Like these are literally people doing
Speaker 1: legal immigration. Yeah, they and we're just here now where
Speaker 1: it's like no, like like you try you, if you
Speaker 1: attempt to come into the US legally, we are going
Speaker 1: to fucking put you in a camp. Like it's fucking insane.
Speaker 1: It's like like this is shit that like even like
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago people would have been like what the
Speaker 1: fuck are you talking about. But the way that the
Speaker 1: way that this has been accelerated and this is something
Speaker 1: that's and you know, and like the fact that Biden
Speaker 1: is fucking just like just going like oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah we should this is this is fine, Like we're
Speaker 1: gonna like this is this is stuff that would have
Speaker 1: been unimaginable for a Republican president in the two thousands. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like the thing about this too, is that none of
Speaker 1: this would have been possible without democratic implicity. This is
Speaker 1: this is just the way the system has worked this
Speaker 1: entire time. Right there is the reason they called a
Speaker 1: bomb of the deporter in chief, because he was the
Speaker 1: guy who could could have actually turned the tide against
Speaker 1: this stuff and just didn't and was just like, fuck you,
Speaker 1: We're gonna deport millions of people. And that's that's how
Speaker 1: we're fucking here with this shit over again. People who
Speaker 1: are literally coming through the country legally, which is what
Speaker 1: all these people said, spent all this fucking time saying
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think the claim of Biden administration
Speaker 5: is I don't fucking know, like they want people to
Speaker 5: use CBP one, right. CBP one is the biggest fucking
Speaker 5: disaster in applications. I can't think of anything. I don't know.
Speaker 5: It's like as bad as fucking Testa's auto pilot, if
Speaker 5: Testa's auto pilot got to decide your whole future. Right,
Speaker 5: Every single person I have met at the Southern border
Speaker 5: has tried CBP one. People but an't Like, no one
Speaker 5: wants to pay someone to drive them off road across
Speaker 5: the desert to a shitty hole in the wall in
Speaker 5: the middle of the freezing mountain range eighty miles east
Speaker 5: of here, and then to sit with their children while
Speaker 5: it rains, snows, freezes, and wait for one, two, three
Speaker 5: nights in this shitty conditions, with maybe a tent that
Speaker 5: we dumps to dive from a Susan g Comen event, right,
Speaker 5: or maybe if they're really lucky, like a yurt that
Speaker 5: me and my friend's built from palaps right. And no
Speaker 5: one in their right mind would want to do that.
Speaker 5: These people don't want to do that. They've tried fucking
Speaker 5: CBP one. Most of them who I have spoken to
Speaker 5: are carrying visa rejection letters, right. They've been to embassies
Speaker 5: all around the world, have just been summarily dismissed. They
Speaker 5: don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right, and
Speaker 5: they've exhausted all their options. No one wants to spend
Speaker 5: their life savings and walk across the desert. It's dangerous, right,
Speaker 5: but that is the only way they can do it.
Speaker 5: And as you say, it is perfectly legal to enter
Speaker 5: the country between ports of entry and immediately surrender to
Speaker 5: the first law enforcement agent you see to claim asylum.
Speaker 5: That that is how one claims asylum when one is
Speaker 5: fleeing persecution. And when we have shut the door through
Speaker 5: this stupid app that only recognizes white faces and crashes
Speaker 5: all the time and isn't in those languages, and it's
Speaker 5: entirely understandable that people are taken this route. We have
Speaker 5: cooked the bottler of migration and then shaken it up
Speaker 5: right for three years with Title forty two, which is
Speaker 5: this Trump era policy that co opted the COVID pandemic,
Speaker 5: which they allowed to rip through large segments of the
Speaker 5: United States community and pretended that by expelling migrants are
Speaker 5: protecting us. It didn't have any provisions for vaccination, it
Speaker 5: didn't have any COVID testing. It was just a cynical
Speaker 5: attempt to use the pandemic, and we've seen through public
Speaker 5: records request is something they've planned long in advance to
Speaker 5: evict people from this country without giving them a chance
Speaker 5: of an asylum hearing, and now Biden is doing it
Speaker 5: without even the pretense of an excuse. Right, at least
Speaker 5: Trump made up some bullshit it was transparent, but Biden
Speaker 5: isn't even bothering to do that, and he's just going
Speaker 5: to boot these people back into a place where they're
Speaker 5: going to be vulnerable. I've spoken to migrants who have
Speaker 5: been abused, who have been robbed in Mexico. It's not
Speaker 5: a safe place of vulnerable people, and the more vulnerable
Speaker 5: people you put into it, they're less safe. It's going
Speaker 5: to get and nor is it. Mexico's a fucking problem, right,
Speaker 5: Like Henry Kissinger didn't fucking run Mexican policy and then
Speaker 5: get to live to one hundred and die in his bed. Right.
Speaker 5: It's a lot of these countries people are coming from.
Speaker 5: They're coming from because we fucked up their policy as
Speaker 5: a country. We fucked up their future.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: We did this neo colonial thing where we stole everything
Speaker 5: we thought was a value. We impose dictators upon them
Speaker 5: when they chose socialist or more progressive regimes, and then
Speaker 5: we'd split our hands up in the air and said, no,
Speaker 5: you can't come here to no space. Sorry, and it's
Speaker 5: it's fucking inexcusable and it's abhorrent me. Do you know
Speaker 5: what else is inexcusable and abhorrent?
Speaker 1: Is it the products and services that it is marketing
Speaker 1: on the show?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yes, the products and services that we so greatly loath.
Speaker 5: Oh hang on, I got something say about the fucking
Speaker 5: products and services. We're doing this now because we've got time.
Speaker 5: There was an advert for Novo Nordiskingna podcast the other day,
Speaker 5: and I just want to take this opportunity to say
Speaker 5: an extra special fuck you to them, because I have
Speaker 5: held in my hands a little fucking children who have
Speaker 5: died because they can't afford insulin. And the reason they
Speaker 5: have died is because these fucking ghouls want to extract
Speaker 5: every penny out of those of us who have diabetes.
Speaker 5: So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you
Speaker 5: won't ever again. But here's some other adverts we are
Speaker 5: back without, hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me
Speaker 5: and me and we're talking about Joe Brandon and his
Speaker 5: terrible immigration policy. So the final part of this, and
Speaker 5: perhaps the most bizarre one, is that the White House
Speaker 5: mandating the detention of these migrants pending their claims. The
Speaker 5: US has never had enough enough detention space to do this,
Speaker 5: and we don't now. It remains extremely fucking unclear how
Speaker 5: this will be done. I will say that there was
Speaker 5: a big fuss made me and maybe remember this, that
Speaker 5: Biden was canceling private prison contracts when he first came
Speaker 5: into our office. Do you remember his executive order on
Speaker 5: this vaguely? Yeah, yeah, I think it got a lot
Speaker 5: of attention that may have specifically applied to people who
Speaker 5: are in federal criminal incarceration, it's certainly never applied to
Speaker 5: people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained
Speaker 5: by third party contractors like cor Civic right, and they
Speaker 5: continue to be so into the Biden administration because again, right,
Speaker 5: it is seemingly the implicit policy of the Democratic Party
Speaker 5: that these people are of less value and have fewer
Speaker 5: rights than US citizens or then people seeking permanent residents
Speaker 5: in this country through other means.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things I was, I was
Speaker 1: doing this for other reasons for not this story, but
Speaker 1: I was going back through when I was reading the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party platform from twenty twenty And if you go
Speaker 1: back and read the Democratic Party platform from twenty twenty eight,
Speaker 1: the opening thing is them talking about how they're they're
Speaker 1: when they're in power, they're going to do us need
Speaker 1: to dismantle structure of racism in this country.
Speaker 7: Fuck me.
Speaker 1: And it's like my ass, like and this is one
Speaker 1: of these these really really sort of grim things about this, right,
Speaker 1: is like the Democrats really really cynically capitalized off of, like, uh,
Speaker 1: like people's revulsion at the fucking horrible stuff doing it
Speaker 1: at the border, and then they got into power, they
Speaker 1: did all the same shit, and nobody fucking cares now,
Speaker 1: because that's that's literally what the Democrats are there for, right,
Speaker 1: They're there to the diffuse people's ability capacity a desire
Speaker 1: to resist doing the exact same fucking things Republicans are doing,
Speaker 1: and it's really effective. And the consequence of this is
Speaker 1: that now we're fucking here with like trying to bring
Speaker 1: fucking the same shit Trump was doing back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you're right, like so many people poured so
Speaker 5: much rage and passion into like I'm sure you can
Speaker 5: remember the whole no More Kids and cagey think, yeah,
Speaker 5: I will.
Speaker 1: I will say this. I was always kind of cynical
Speaker 1: about that because I fucking remember Occupy Ice. Now, I
Speaker 1: remember all those fucking liberals who told me they'd be
Speaker 1: marching in the streets just fucking abandoning us and leaving
Speaker 1: us to like deal with the fucking cops on our own.
Speaker 1: So like, I think, I think it is like there's
Speaker 1: been a sort of mythologization to some extent of how
Speaker 1: willing people were to actually do shit it or Trump,
Speaker 1: but they sure is fuck not here under Biden. So
Speaker 1: then yeah, there.
Speaker 5: Ain't no one in the street saying no more kids
Speaker 5: in cages now, right, Like then, here for the little
Speaker 5: children I've met, you know, day in day out for
Speaker 5: the last six months, who are going to be detained,
Speaker 5: who might be separated for their families.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to this is kind of off
Speaker 1: topic too, but like, so this is this is a story.
Speaker 1: Like at some point I'm going to do an actual
Speaker 1: episode about this. There's been I've been I've been trying
Speaker 1: to get to talk to people about this for a bit.
Speaker 1: But so there's been a whole bunch of shit with
Speaker 1: a lot of So one of these subsequent things that
Speaker 1: was happening with all these people is that like the
Speaker 1: government in Texas has been like shipping them to random cities.
Speaker 1: So a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago
Speaker 1: and it turned and there they're eventually were protests here.
Speaker 1: But like our fucking progressive mayor tried to have a
Speaker 1: basically a concentration camp company set up like a camp
Speaker 1: for these people on land that it turned out have
Speaker 1: been a toxic waste dump and only just didn't do
Speaker 1: I I don't even think he ever backed up the
Speaker 1: A story here is kind of I think what happened,
Speaker 1: if I'm remembering correctly, is that the governor was like,
Speaker 1: like pritz Crew was like, what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 1: You can't have this stuff beyond a toxic waste site.
Speaker 1: But so that's like temporarily been stopped. Like that's that's
Speaker 1: the kind of shit that's happening, like in you know,
Speaker 1: like like Brandon Johnson like nominally is one of the
Speaker 1: most left wing mayors in the US, And this is
Speaker 1: what is fucking happening even in this from of the
Speaker 1: sort of progressive wing the Democratic Party, like the concern
Speaker 1: like the the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even
Speaker 1: worse on this stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like the entire Democratic Party in so much
Speaker 5: is ass And there was a time when it genuinely
Speaker 5: did show up for people trying to come to this
Speaker 5: country to seek asylum. At least it wouldn't. This is
Speaker 5: like the immigration system is like a ratchet and it
Speaker 5: only moves to the right, and under democratic government it
Speaker 5: wouldn't move to the right. It does now. And this
Speaker 5: means that there is not an electoral option for you, right,
Speaker 5: you cannot just vote if you give a single fuck
Speaker 5: about innocent people living outside of this country wanting to
Speaker 5: come here and be safe.
Speaker 4: You don't.
Speaker 5: There is nothing on the ballot box for you to
Speaker 5: tick that represents a serious option. And that's sad. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's a pretty fucked reflection of our electoral politics. But
Speaker 5: I think it also impels us to look look at
Speaker 5: someone who believes that there is not a ballot box
Speaker 5: option that is going to deliver us a system with
Speaker 5: dignity and democracy and justice. Anyway, I think this is
Speaker 5: where we have to step up and do the stuff
Speaker 5: we always talk about. Like this happened a little bit
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty, it happened a little bit under Trump,
Speaker 5: but like now, more than ever, the need to do
Speaker 5: mutual aid, especially for migrants, but also for and house
Speaker 5: people within your community, for all the fucking human detritus
Speaker 5: of Joe Biden's dogshit governance. It's right now, and like
Speaker 5: it is as I've seen personally, within the power of
Speaker 5: a very small group of people to impact the lives
Speaker 5: of a very large group of people through organizing. I've
Speaker 5: participated in mutual aid for a while. I'm sure many
Speaker 5: of the people are listening have as well. But like
Speaker 5: if you if you haven't found the play or the
Speaker 5: way to do so, Like it's it's a great time
Speaker 5: to start organizing something. The options in the next electoral
Speaker 5: cycle are that things get worse or that things get
Speaker 5: much worse. I don't think we have an option which
Speaker 5: is dismantling the structural racism that is within the United States,
Speaker 5: or even just not hunching down on some of the
Speaker 5: most vulnerable people in the world, it would appear. And
Speaker 5: so to protect those people, it follows upon our communities.
Speaker 5: And that's that's a big burden to shoulder, right, When
Speaker 5: the state has enough money to send one thousand pound
Speaker 5: bomb States rail, that means that we have to pay
Speaker 5: for beans for hungry children.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, And I mean the thing that this too,
Speaker 1: right is like if you if you spent the amount
Speaker 1: of money that the US was spending on trying to
Speaker 1: keep people out of the country on just like giving
Speaker 1: like if you just gave that money to the same
Speaker 1: those same people, we wouldn't be having this problem right now.
Speaker 1: Like it isn't like putting people in a prison is
Speaker 1: like the least cost efficient way to do possibly do anything.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't matter because the whole point of this,
Speaker 1: like and this is one of these things with the
Speaker 1: sort of ratchet, right is, eventually you're going to get
Speaker 1: to fucking like you know, I mean, like the situation
Speaker 1: we have now right now in Greece where you have
Speaker 1: effectively a fascist government who's up like pot Like when
Speaker 1: like when when boastload boatloads and people go down to
Speaker 1: the Mediterranean, like go down to the Mediterraneans, ever a hundred
Speaker 1: people die, their popularity goes up because you know, and
Speaker 1: then and this is the thing you're gonna, We're gonna,
Speaker 1: We're We're not that far away from in the fucking us.
Speaker 1: Is the Republican demand in like maybe like eight maybe
Speaker 1: ten years is going to be just shooting like literally
Speaker 1: just machine guns at the border like that. This is
Speaker 1: this is, this is where this is fucking going, right.
Speaker 5: You haven't seen the replies to my to my posts.
Speaker 4: Don't like when.
Speaker 1: When I when I say, I mean like like this
Speaker 1: is gonna be the demand of the fucking House, like
Speaker 1: Republican caucus, right like this is this is, this is
Speaker 1: where this is fucking going. And the Democrats, like you know,
Speaker 1: and the Democrats will take power fucking twelve years later
Speaker 1: and be like, well, we're only going to shoot some
Speaker 1: of the people at the border. People are gonna call
Speaker 1: this progress, right, and the only way that this can
Speaker 1: be and this this cannot be stopped by voting for
Speaker 1: the Democrats. This is like, you know, and like people
Speaker 1: people thought this about Obama and people also thought this
Speaker 1: about Biden, was that we're going to vote for these
Speaker 1: people because they're going to be good on immigration, and
Speaker 1: like this is the reason why we're all fucking are
Speaker 1: where we are now. So like there is no solution
Speaker 1: to this that doesn't revolve around like fundamental systemic change
Speaker 1: to what the US is, because otherwise we're just going
Speaker 1: to every single fucking year, we're going to be back here.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Talking of being back here, we weed to a
Speaker 5: second advertising pivot. I think right that there are two
Speaker 5: mid roles in these yeah. Yeah, So we are back
Speaker 5: here once again lamenting the fact that we have to
Speaker 5: introduce these adverts for you here. You are all right,
Speaker 5: and we have returned to lament the decline of the
Speaker 5: United States. I wanted to talk briefly about what title
Speaker 5: forty two does to migration flow.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: As many of you will be aware, Donald Trump has
Speaker 5: built a big, beautiful wall along the southern border of
Speaker 5: the United States. The caveat to that being only some
Speaker 5: of it, and that they didn't do the hard parts.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 5: So the places in Hakumbo where people are entering our
Speaker 5: gaps in the war, right, there are camps at three
Speaker 5: of these gaps over about a fifteen mile area. There
Speaker 5: are gaps all up and down the wall. Right, And
Speaker 5: you'll very often see people saying, oh, you couldn't climb
Speaker 5: this war. Doesn't matter. You just walk along until you
Speaker 5: find a gap and get through. You also can climb
Speaker 5: the war. We've seen people climb the war. We've seen
Speaker 5: people cut it with angle grinders. Right. But what happens
Speaker 5: with Title forty two, what happens right now, under what's
Speaker 5: called Title eight of the United States Immigration Law, people
Speaker 5: enter the country through a gap in the wall, and
Speaker 5: they wait and they surrender to a border patrol agent
Speaker 5: and say I'm here to claim the silent Right. Then
Speaker 5: they end up in these open air detention sites in Cucumber,
Speaker 5: et cetera. What happens in a Title forty two is
Speaker 5: that if you think you're going to be bounced directly
Speaker 5: back to Mexico, and you believe that you aren't safe there,
Speaker 5: you attempt to avoid border patrol right, And so you
Speaker 5: go to the places where they're going to be watching
Speaker 5: these gaps in the war, one would issue. So you
Speaker 5: go to the furthest places and the hardest places, highest places,
Speaker 5: in the most rugged places, right, and you try and
Speaker 5: walk through those routes instead, you try and walk through,
Speaker 5: for instance, Value of the Moon, which is just to
Speaker 5: the east of the Cumber where just last week, some
Speaker 5: of my friends are involved in the search and rescue
Speaker 5: operation for a four year old child who'd become separated
Speaker 5: from their family coming from Afghanistan, and then they found
Speaker 5: that child, fortunately, but fucking no one else would have
Speaker 5: done if they hadn't been there, right. The result of
Speaker 5: this is that people will die in greater numbers crossing
Speaker 5: our border. And that's what we saw rounder title forty
Speaker 5: two hunder Trump, and it's what we saw in title
Speaker 5: forty two on Biden, because there was that like I
Speaker 5: have attended, that you've heard about on this podcast, and
Speaker 5: the ones that they haven't and that you haven't heard
Speaker 5: about on this podcast are not going to stop because
Speaker 5: Joe Biden offered a concession to the Republicans. They will
Speaker 5: keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much
Speaker 5: of the world is not going to stop. It will
Speaker 5: keep happening. Transfer a thing that we have exported culturally,
Speaker 5: that film Branton Too, which definitely yeah, island of terms.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a colla. It's been a collaborative effort between.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what a special relationship is about it.
Speaker 1: JK.
Speaker 5: Rowling and Temple if there.
Speaker 1: The French are also complicit in this too. They're not
Speaker 1: getting sucking off the hook for this ship.
Speaker 5: But yeah, this is not the podcast and it's fronts
Speaker 5: off the hook for anything.
Speaker 1: But you know, like I mean, this is something I
Speaker 1: think you're getting at too. But like we in large part,
Speaker 1: like the US and the UK, are responsible for why
Speaker 1: transphobia is as bad as it is in Mexico right now,
Speaker 1: which is it is so much more like as bad
Speaker 1: as it is to be trans in the fucking US,
Speaker 1: it is so much worse in Mexico. Like the odds
Speaker 1: of you being killed are indescribable. Even if you're not
Speaker 1: fucking killed, there's you know, like, well, this is actually
Speaker 1: like the one of the episodes now third, what week
Speaker 1: will that be? The week after next? Like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna we're going to replay the epithet like the interviews
Speaker 1: that I did with Maxice trans organizers talking about the
Speaker 1: turfs there because they are armed and they will fucking like,
Speaker 1: actually they will attack people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like they United Nations says, yeah, it's bleak.
Speaker 5: The UNS that life expectancy for trans people in Central
Speaker 5: America is thirty five or less. Right, that's a di
Speaker 5: am older than that. That is abhorrent. Right, that you
Speaker 5: are extremely likely to die young if you're trans in
Speaker 5: places not so far from here, right, And I think
Speaker 5: that's what I want to get at, And it's the
Speaker 5: fundamental conceit of this whole thing is that border policy
Speaker 5: doesn't change migration. Migration happens because people aren't safe where
Speaker 5: they are, and that's why they leave. They don't take
Speaker 5: this journey because it seems easy, because even right now,
Speaker 5: it's incredibly hard. People walk thousands of miles, They walk
Speaker 5: across mountains, they run and they take risks and hop
Speaker 5: on trains. They get extorted, they get robbed, that they
Speaker 5: get assaulted. Young women often get sexually assaulted. Like it's
Speaker 5: a terrible and dangerous journey, and people won't stop taking
Speaker 5: that journey because Joe Biden decided to do something different.
Speaker 5: The things that are driving them to leave their homes
Speaker 5: will still keep happening, and they will now have to
Speaker 5: take a more dangerous journey.
Speaker 4: And all that.
Speaker 5: This does is make it more likely that there's people
Speaker 5: will die on the way here, or that when they
Speaker 5: get here they have to live their whole lives always
Speaker 5: wondering if they're going to get sent back, right, never
Speaker 5: really feeling safe. It rubs people of what some of
Speaker 5: us can take for granted, right, which is being able
Speaker 5: to go sleep at night in feelix safe. And yeah,
Speaker 5: that that's I guess what we all voted for when
Speaker 5: we chose an anti fascist guy in twenty twenty. Like,
Speaker 5: it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of politics in this
Speaker 5: country and the impact it has for people who don't
Speaker 5: get a choice to vote in this country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's you know, it is a it
Speaker 1: is a functional, definitional totalitarian regime, and it will never
Speaker 1: be fucking described as that by the academics who fucking
Speaker 1: use this language. But you know, how how how else
Speaker 1: do you describe living in a condition where you can
Speaker 1: at any point be removed and are spending literally all
Speaker 1: of your time attempting to flee a police date Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the w US, the US is and has always been
Speaker 1: an unbelievably authoritarian state, and it's getting more so fucking
Speaker 1: every day. And you know, and this is also one
Speaker 1: of these things where it's like, I mean we literally
Speaker 1: saw this in twenty twenty. The people who got sent
Speaker 1: in to put down the uprising in Portland, it was
Speaker 1: fucking Bortac right, it was. It was it was the
Speaker 1: the it was, it was it was the border patrols
Speaker 1: like special forces units, right, Like that's that's the inevitable
Speaker 1: logic of this state, is that you any person who
Speaker 1: wants to resist the state, eventually one day these people
Speaker 1: will fucking come for you too. And the question is
Speaker 1: whether you know, it's whether you start. Because Portak didn't
Speaker 1: win really and like the stuff that they were trying
Speaker 1: to do in twenty two, like they they basically kind
Speaker 1: of got beaten, but you know they're still there. They're
Speaker 1: still getting fucking money, like they're getting I mean to
Speaker 1: give more money. Yeah, So you know, either either we
Speaker 1: stopped them now before they fucking have another trillion dollars
Speaker 1: to spend on this shit, or you know, we fight
Speaker 1: them again in like five years when there's more of
Speaker 1: them and they're better funded.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And like the final thing I'll say with regard
Speaker 5: to that finding is, maybe you're meeting your family over
Speaker 5: the holidays, right, maybe hanging out with people he didn't
Speaker 5: often hang out. Even if you don't care about you
Speaker 5: know that their mother bringing her baby from Shingaal in
Speaker 5: Iraq to hear who I met last night, Right, even
Speaker 5: if that doesn't bother you and you're so somehow heartless
Speaker 5: that you don't care. I will say that, like every
Speaker 5: single time we put more money into border security to
Speaker 5: ends up with all of us being surveiled more. If
Speaker 5: you attended a protest in twenty twenty, you might have
Speaker 5: been surveiled by border patrol.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: If you walk around in the desert where I live,
Speaker 5: you're probably being surveiled by border patrol.
Speaker 1: If you use your.
Speaker 5: Cell phone without encryption, you might be being surveiled at
Speaker 5: the border. Right. The companies, many of them are based
Speaker 5: in the US and then based in Israel, that are
Speaker 5: surveilling Palestinians are the same ones that are surveiling us
Speaker 5: at our border. And this will come back to bite
Speaker 5: you at the ass. In the ass, this will come
Speaker 5: back to bite you in the ass, even if you
Speaker 5: don't care about migrants, because the moment you are not
Speaker 5: in lockstep with the government, you become a potential victim
Speaker 5: of that surveillance. Right, And a big thing with undocumented
Speaker 5: immigration is it essentially makes you a legible and therefore
Speaker 5: untaxable to the government.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: What would the government state at its very core want
Speaker 5: people to be is legible and taxable and accountable. If
Speaker 5: you think that it isn't going to bounce back on
Speaker 5: trans folks, right and making them specifically lon binary folks too, Right,
Speaker 5: Like the idea that you don't have a box to
Speaker 5: tick on a form and that makes you harder to
Speaker 5: be legible and statistically quantifiable by the government. All of
Speaker 5: this will come back and hurt you, even if you're
Speaker 5: just a super right wing libertarian who doesn't want to
Speaker 5: pay their taxes. Like this border of security is a
Speaker 5: thing that will eventually be used against you. And I
Speaker 5: don't think it's in any of our interests to just
Speaker 5: keep handing these tools to the state that end up
Speaker 5: being used against the most desperately in the world. And
Speaker 5: so hopefully I know there's no one you can fucking
Speaker 5: vote for to change that. Yeah, yeah, you can feel
Speaker 5: free to write your legislators. I have been on the
Speaker 5: phone to my legislators about individual cases of people who
Speaker 5: I care about very deeply, who are in a very
Speaker 5: grave amount of danger and they haven't done shit. So
Speaker 5: instead I go to the border and I build shelters,
Speaker 5: add of palettes and tops for people because it's the
Speaker 5: only thing that makes me feel like I'm not completely
Speaker 5: fucking powerless. And so if you want to take that
Speaker 5: paradynamic back, you know, cook some beans, make some rice,
Speaker 5: buy some tops with your holiday money, and go out
Speaker 5: there and start doing mutual aid. You don't even have
Speaker 5: to go on x dot com or Reddit to do it.
Speaker 5: Just fucking go out and start helping people. You'll find
Speaker 5: other people who want to help. You can organize and
Speaker 5: it's bad. The only way I can see that you
Speaker 5: can make things meaningfully better right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think I think that's a good message
Speaker 1: to end on.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is.
Speaker 5: If you want to give your money to my little
Speaker 5: mutual laid gang of wonderful people, you can go to
Speaker 5: GoFundMe dot com, slash Hercumber, hyphen migrant hyphen camps. He
Speaker 5: Cumber is ja c U N b A. But you
Speaker 5: can also keep it. And I would love it if
Speaker 5: you started something yourself and told us what you were doing.
Speaker 5: That would make things less shitty for us.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 6: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 6: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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