Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, But
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Hi, Scheren, Hi James, I was alarming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I went in to like twenty tens YouTube boys.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, Hi, James is excited today I am excited.
Speaker 3: I'm always excited to make a podcast, you know, I
Speaker 3: love to cast a pod, but today I am especially
Speaker 3: especially with an X like Expresso the coffee drink. I
Speaker 3: am especially excited to talk to you, Cherene, because we
Speaker 3: are talking about a subject which I have wasted far
Speaker 3: too much of my life reading and writing about. What
Speaker 3: are we talking about, Sharen? Sports? Sports?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sports. I'm going to explain to Sharen sports why
Speaker 3: they're fun or I did too many of them? Okay,
Speaker 3: we're talking about the Olympics, the Olympic Games specifically. I
Speaker 3: guess they're happening in Paris this year. They may be
Speaker 3: happening in Paris by the time you listen to this.
Speaker 3: But I want to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 3: history of Olympics because I wrote a book about it,
Speaker 3: and so I get to drawing on about it for
Speaker 3: half an hour and you have to listen to me
Speaker 3: while you drive your cars to work. Cool. The mon
Speaker 3: Olympic Games is it draws links to ancient Greece, right,
Speaker 3: And it does that because at the time that the
Speaker 3: modern Olympic Games in the late nineteenth century were being
Speaker 3: created by a guy called Baron Pierre de Kubitain, the
Speaker 3: aristocracy of Europe were obsessed with drawing links to the
Speaker 3: classical period.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: This is the same time when we see all those
Speaker 3: like neoclassical buildings going up, and people were trying to
Speaker 3: draw links between themselves and the ancient Greeks and to
Speaker 3: sort of posit themselves as the new Greco Roman font
Speaker 3: of civilization.
Speaker 2: And hey, I took our history, and I minor to that,
Speaker 2: so I know stuff too.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, because I did not take our history. Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you know more kinds of stuff about like
Speaker 3: impressionists and Shure I understand. So if we're looking at like,
Speaker 3: to understand the Olympics, we have to understand sport, right,
Speaker 3: and to understand sport, we have to understand play. So
Speaker 3: I was right about sports. You don't have to Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 3: you agree, you're right on it. Yeah, but first we
Speaker 3: do play, right. So if we're looking at like kind
Speaker 3: of the classic text on this, it's it's a book
Speaker 3: called Homo Ludens, but we probably don't need to read that.
Speaker 3: It's not a banger. We very few academic books are bangers.
Speaker 3: I like to think mine's in a sort of semi
Speaker 3: banging category. But yeah, it's also overpriced and you shouldn't
Speaker 3: buy it. Just go to your library and get it
Speaker 3: for free. Play is it's pretty obvious what play is.
Speaker 3: It's the difference between play and sport is that sport
Speaker 3: is bounded. It happens in a certain place, within a
Speaker 3: certain set of rules. Play doesn't. So the archetypal kind
Speaker 3: of example of transitioning from play to sport would be
Speaker 3: folk football in Britain. So back in the day, in
Speaker 3: the place where I come from, for holidays, the Saints'
Speaker 3: Days and other days when people didn't work, they would
Speaker 3: have a game of football which consisted of a ball
Speaker 3: inflated pigs bladder or a similar similar device, and you
Speaker 3: have to get it from one village into the other village.
Speaker 3: And those are about all the rules, right. Sometimes they
Speaker 3: had specific rules against stabbing. There have been like an
Speaker 3: outbreak of stabbing incidents, but other than that, it was
Speaker 3: pretty much you do what the fuck you wanted, right.
Speaker 3: You want to go on a five mile detour and
Speaker 3: come around people come in the back way, no problem.
Speaker 3: You're on a form of phalanx of all your mates
Speaker 3: and just kind of go through like a wedge style.
Speaker 3: Not a problem at all. You know, you want to
Speaker 3: start hitting people with sticks, yeah, not an issue. It
Speaker 3: was very loose, right, and every village or pair of
Speaker 3: villages that will play had their own kind of understanding
Speaker 3: of the rules, but it wasn't a codified set of
Speaker 3: rules in existed across all incidences of folk football. And
Speaker 3: we go from there to association football. Right, That's where
Speaker 3: soccer comes from, right, ass soccer soccer association becomes assoc
Speaker 3: assoc becomes a soccer that becomes soccer. Does that make sense, kin, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm going to say yes. It's a very like nineteenth
Speaker 3: century posh British effect that takes the word association football
Speaker 3: and comes out with soccer. That's so funny. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: where it comes from. So association football codifires the rules. Right,
Speaker 3: there's a pitch that pitches the same size as a goal.
Speaker 3: The goal is the same size. You can't pick it
Speaker 3: up now, And from that comes rugby football, right, So
Speaker 3: rugby football is type where you pick up the ball.
Speaker 3: There's a kind of founding myth for rugby football that
Speaker 3: this guy called William ware bellis with a glorious disregard
Speaker 3: for the rules. Quote, picked up the ball and ran
Speaker 3: with it. It's a bit weird that, like they've created
Speaker 3: a founding this for due to effectively just like sucked
Speaker 3: at football. So he picked it up and ran with it.
Speaker 3: Like it doesn't seem like he deserves a literal statue
Speaker 3: that he has. Yeah, and that happened at Rugby School, right,
Speaker 3: which was one of these English boarding schools that existed
Speaker 3: to prepare young men to be officers and administrators in
Speaker 3: the British Empire. And that is really what's the codification
Speaker 3: of sport as far as we can sort of create
Speaker 3: like a reason for it is to prepare young men
Speaker 3: and just men to be administrators in the British Empire. Right,
Speaker 3: it's supposed to make them physically strong. It's supposed to
Speaker 3: make them obey the rules and learn to do what
Speaker 3: they're told, even in stressful situations. Right, it's part of
Speaker 3: an idea called muscular Christianity. And like, as far as
Speaker 3: we can attribute this whole combination of things to one person,
Speaker 3: it would be Thomas Arnold. Right, Thomas Arnold being the
Speaker 3: headmaster at Rugby School, he develops his idea of educating
Speaker 3: young Christian men and doing so using sport as well
Speaker 3: as academia and sports very quickly develop a set of
Speaker 3: rules around amateurism. Amateurism like sometimes we just use amateur
Speaker 3: now to me not very good, but at the time
Speaker 3: its specifically meant not paid to do the sport. And
Speaker 3: so yeah, this is the early Olympics. Actually, the Olympics
Speaker 3: still relatively recently have an amateurism rule, right that people
Speaker 3: can't participate if they are paid to do the sport.
Speaker 3: They have exemptions for fencing coaches, which I think tells
Speaker 3: you about everything you need to know that this isn't
Speaker 3: this isn't there for any purity reason. It's there to
Speaker 3: serve as a class barrier, right, And we see it
Speaker 3: used as a class barrier first of all in football, right,
Speaker 3: Like that's why we have rugby league at rugby union
Speaker 3: because the rugby league people tended to be working people
Speaker 3: and they needed to be paid. It's the rugby league
Speaker 3: allowed for professionalism. Rugby union did not, and those tended
Speaker 3: to be wealthier people, right. But it's used at the
Speaker 3: Olympics extensively to police class. Like probably the most prominent
Speaker 3: example would be Jim Thorpe. You're familiar with Jim Thorpe.
Speaker 3: Jim Thorpe's the cool guy. Actually, I got to read
Speaker 3: some of his correspondents. He actually wrote a history of
Speaker 3: the Olympic Games, which is very sad when you consider
Speaker 3: that Jim Thorpe himself he's a member of the sac
Speaker 3: and Fox Nation, right, so he's indigenous to North America.
Speaker 3: He won a medal for the United States in the
Speaker 3: nineteen twelve Semmer Olympics who went to Gold Males actually
Speaker 3: won in pentathlon and won decathlon. So like decathletes are
Speaker 3: kind of like the uber athletes, right, Like you're doing
Speaker 3: ten ten different sports that you have to just be
Speaker 3: good at exercising, and Jim Thorpe was good at exercising.
Speaker 3: He also played collegiate and professional football, professional baseball, and
Speaker 3: professional basketball. See he's an all around sport to dad. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: he lost his Olympic title because he had been paid
Speaker 3: at some point for playing baseball, even though he didn't
Speaker 3: do baseball in the Olympics. That's all fucked. Yeh. It's
Speaker 3: very clearly used as a way to class and race
Speaker 3: police the games, right, And I think this gets to
Speaker 3: our point about what the Olympics are. So the early
Speaker 3: Olympics tend to coincide with what are called World's Fairs.
Speaker 3: Familiar with worlds Fairs shreen Yeah, yeah, yeah. People sort
Speaker 3: of get together and they have these big exhibitions and
Speaker 3: they show off there you know if you really got
Speaker 3: yeah us whatever, Yeah, look what I stole from this
Speaker 3: country that I have colonized and under force extracted these
Speaker 3: the following things. If you're in Britain, like the most
Speaker 3: famous sort of Worlds Fair site would be Crystal Palace, right,
Speaker 3: Crystal Palace was built, burned down, but it was built
Speaker 3: for the Worlds Fair. If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park,
Speaker 3: right was built fourteen. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I
Speaker 3: knew that somewhere in my head. Yeah, when you go
Speaker 3: to Balboa Park, little niche San Diego diversion for the
Speaker 3: millions of you are not in San Diego, you can
Speaker 3: just tune out for ten seconds. Those are little cottages
Speaker 3: like the Internet national Cottages and Palestine House and yeah,
Speaker 3: Palestine House. Cool that they got recognition in San Diego.
Speaker 3: At least those are from the World's Fair. Each country
Speaker 3: would have that little exhibition in their house right and
Speaker 3: all down the Prado. So yeah, that's actually has zoo
Speaker 3: started as well. Someone in their exhibition had lions and
Speaker 3: then fucking left them when they left, and they were like, uh,
Speaker 3: I guess we better start a zoo. Got a couple
Speaker 3: of lions on our hands. Yeah, incredible, incredible vibes. So
Speaker 3: the Olympics happen at the same time as Worlds for
Speaker 3: its a long time, and that is because the Olympics
Speaker 3: are essentially a gathering of transnational borche worse he That's
Speaker 3: not a phrase I came up with myself. It's from
Speaker 3: my friend David Goldblat, who's written a really excellent history
Speaker 3: of Olympics. That's called the Games. And if you're going
Speaker 3: to read one book about the Olympics, that it should
Speaker 3: be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure he's
Speaker 3: not listening, hello, David. If you are, I would recommend
Speaker 3: his book because I think his analysis is great, right,
Speaker 3: that what these become is a place where the sort
Speaker 3: of the that people who make money from finance capital
Speaker 3: all around the world can gather together and share their
Speaker 3: little ideas and play their little games. And we see that,
Speaker 3: for instance, in the nineteen oh four Saint Lewis Olympics.
Speaker 3: Saint Louis. In addition to like the World's Fair, they
Speaker 3: have the Olympics and they have something called the Anthropological Days.
Speaker 3: Have you heard about this, Sharne oh Willieve, I have no.
Speaker 3: It's one of the more fuck things happen in Saint Louis,
Speaker 3: which I think is saying a lot. They essentially kidnapped
Speaker 3: people from around their various imperial possessions, brought them to
Speaker 3: Saint Louis, which in itself is a crime, and then
Speaker 3: forced them to compete in events that they didn't fully
Speaker 3: explain to them. What the fuck yeah, and then concluded
Speaker 3: from this that like white people were better.
Speaker 2: It's like some gladiator shit that's like, yeah, yes, what
Speaker 2: are you doing? That's too modern, that's too hard to happen.
Speaker 3: This is nineteen oh four, yeah, not so long ago. Yeah,
Speaker 3: very yeah, And this kind of exhibits what the world's
Speaker 3: fairs we're into and to agree to a degree like
Speaker 3: what the Olympiad became, which was like a way for
Speaker 3: the colonizing powers to get together. Right, right, do you
Speaker 3: know what will not kidnap you from your home country
Speaker 3: and fly you to Saint Louis and then force you
Speaker 3: to compete in games that you don't understand? Gold? Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're probably right. Well, indirectly it will, you know, because
Speaker 3: as a sort of source of wealth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, okay, whatever, I was trying to make a
Speaker 2: trying to think of something that I might hear next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's probably gold.
Speaker 6: You're right, we're back, and we hope you have bought
Speaker 6: your gold, the only the only metal that you can
Speaker 6: make an Olympic medal out of.
Speaker 3: Incidentally, really, and we'll go over to gold. Oh really,
Speaker 3: deturned green. I get like you're like, it's it's not
Speaker 3: good for my skin.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll get like infections, but like I'll get like
Speaker 2: an exemer kind of reaction.
Speaker 3: Oh well, what do you? Uh? Did you have an
Speaker 3: alternative jewelry?
Speaker 2: I don't wear a lot of jewelry. I wear rings
Speaker 2: the most, but I can't wear ear rings anymore. They're
Speaker 2: too My ears are too sensitive. I usually like stick
Speaker 2: with silver if I have to. But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Not meant to be rich, no shame. Maybe maybe platinum
Speaker 3: is what's Oh yeah I could do platinum. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: listeners sen cherine platinum do hickeys? Well yeah, to wear? Yeah? Gold?
Speaker 3: They so they lipic metals are not solid gold, they're
Speaker 3: just gold coated. Interesting. Yeah, it's a little cheap. Yeah yeah, right,
Speaker 3: like you spend your whole life something. Then they did
Speaker 3: chips off. Yeah, yeah, you drop it and it's just
Speaker 3: plastic in the middle. I guess they have more values
Speaker 3: on pic metals than they do as lumps of gold. Anyway,
Speaker 3: you can sell them, and people have sold them online because,
Speaker 3: as it turns out, like spending your entire youth exercising
Speaker 3: and then getting to a point where you're too injured
Speaker 3: or old to compete, it's sometimes not great for your
Speaker 3: future career prospects and I've unfortunately seen lots of friends
Speaker 3: take that path. And so I want to talk about
Speaker 3: like the Olympics in the twentieth century, and specifically I
Speaker 3: want to talk about the Olympics in the nineteen thirties. Right,
Speaker 3: so when the Olympics. By the time we come to
Speaker 3: the nineteen thirties, the Olympics have really become like they're
Speaker 3: an American thing. The Los Angeles Olympics gives us a
Speaker 3: lot of the modern Olympics, and the rest of the
Speaker 3: mode Olympics we get from friend of the podcast Adolf
Speaker 3: Hitler and his Nazi party. Of course, yeah, I knew
Speaker 3: that you were expecting them. We never never don't expect Hitler.
Speaker 3: So nineteen thirty two is great. Like nineteen thirty two
Speaker 3: Olympic village. They build this Olympic village. They haven't patrolled
Speaker 3: by cowboys, just like Hollywood cosplay Dude joh On horses
Speaker 3: cowboy and around. It's the first. It's very weird. It's
Speaker 3: the first Olympic village. And it's it becomes a real
Speaker 3: estate investment, right like as soon as the Olympics are
Speaker 3: done there in classic Los Angeles fashion, flipping the houses
Speaker 3: for more than they were paid. So it also creates
Speaker 3: this idea of like the Olympics as a mass spectacle
Speaker 3: in nineteen thirty two is sometimes called the Hollywood Olympics, right,
Speaker 3: and it really changes the game from rich people getting
Speaker 3: together for rich people to a spectator event and a
Speaker 3: mass spectator event. In nineteen thirty one, Spain's Dicta Blander
Speaker 3: collapses and Dicta Blander is like a soft dictatorship as
Speaker 3: opposed to Dictadoro as a hard dictatorship. Right, So, and
Speaker 3: Spain becomes a republic. Nineteen thirty one. It's also the
Speaker 3: time when the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona,
Speaker 3: and for geographically challenged listeners Barcelona, it's in Catalonia, but
Speaker 3: Catalonia is within Spain at this time. So the IOC
Speaker 3: is all most entirely comprised of very rich people, and
Speaker 3: many of them are like barons, counts, princes, other people
Speaker 3: who like their job is being someone's kid, right, and
Speaker 3: they just do things like being on the IOC to
Speaker 3: occupy them what they spend their parents' money. So they're
Speaker 3: in Spain at the time when Spain has just deposed
Speaker 3: a monarch and it has this revolutionary republic, right, the
Speaker 3: anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin a
Speaker 3: campaign of two years of removing the church from its
Speaker 3: official position, like anti clericalism and of land reform. These
Speaker 3: are things which rich people do not like. And so
Speaker 3: the vote happens in Barcelona about where to hold the
Speaker 3: next Olympics, and the two leading candidates are Berlin and Barcelona.
Speaker 3: After Barcelona, I think a little weird happens. See IOC
Speaker 3: members all go home and not everyone has come to Barcelona,
Speaker 3: right because of the because of the change in the situation,
Speaker 3: and instead of being like, okay, well we had a
Speaker 3: vote in Barcelona one, the IOC makes an interesting and
Speaker 3: relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram, and
Speaker 3: in the telegram vote they instead of going for the
Speaker 3: unstable Spanish Second Republic, up for a more stable and
Speaker 3: liberal democracy, which is of course viy my Germany. Of course, yeah,
Speaker 3: good choice by their better rich folks. They really helped
Speaker 3: us out there, and it's very interesting, Like I've spent
Speaker 3: a lot of time with these telegrams, like the actual
Speaker 3: paper telegrams in the International Olympic Committee archive in Lausanne,
Speaker 3: trying to ascertain did they just like did the vote happen.
Speaker 3: And then they were like, no, fuck, we can't go
Speaker 3: to Barcelona, like we got to redo, We've got to
Speaker 3: work out way to dig this, like we can't go
Speaker 3: to this republican place, or that they claimed that there
Speaker 3: weren't enough votes, right, that they didn't have like a quorum.
Speaker 3: But I've looked at previous and subsequent votes, and there
Speaker 3: are there are plenty of other votes that have fewer participants,
Speaker 3: And it was relatively normal at this time for not
Speaker 3: everyone to show up at a meeting, right Because it's
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty one, Traveling is hard, and so I can't
Speaker 3: categorically say what's happened. But maybe that's what I suspect
Speaker 3: has happened. I can't really see any way I could
Speaker 3: find out now, and as I went to every member
Speaker 3: of the International Olympic Committee at the time and looked
Speaker 3: in their personal archive. But either way, they decided to
Speaker 3: give the Olympics to this little place called firemar Germany
Speaker 3: in between ninety thirty one and nineteen thirty six. History
Speaker 3: fans will know that the Nazis game to parent Germany.
Speaker 3: Nazis not very nice people and no bad Many people
Speaker 3: are saying, yeah, many people are saying the mosquitoes of
Speaker 3: the world. Not sorry, we just recorded the Mosquito episode. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: in any ways, like the mosquito could be eradicated, maybe
Speaker 3: wouldn't be bad. Yeah, my favorite georgiowelline one of my
Speaker 3: favorite joints or all lines. I joined the militia to
Speaker 3: kill a fascist because if all of us did so,
Speaker 3: then there wouldn't be any of them left. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: very prescient. So the Olympics, when the Nazis going to power,
Speaker 3: first they want to do away with it. Right then
Speaker 3: when they're like, fuck this, this is some bougie shit.
Speaker 3: We're not into it. We don't want to see other people,
Speaker 3: we don't care about other nations with arians. And then
Speaker 3: over time the administrators of the Olympics, including guy called
Speaker 3: Carl DM who would be classified, according to the nazis
Speaker 3: own sort of standards, as a Jewish person, they persuade
Speaker 3: the Nazis that having the Olympics will be good for them.
Speaker 3: It will let them exhibit their shit on a world scale.
Speaker 3: And they are not wrong. Right, The Olympics turned into
Speaker 3: a massive boon for Nazi Germany. We don't have enough
Speaker 3: time in this short episode to explain the whole boycott movement.
Speaker 3: There was a substantial boycott movement, including in the United States.
Speaker 3: The United States very nearly boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but
Speaker 3: in the end it ended up not doing so you
Speaker 3: had opposition from really interesting groups. Actually had opposition obviously
Speaker 3: from Jewish groups, right because Nazis. You have opposition from
Speaker 3: elements of an NAACP, but not from other elements because
Speaker 3: they have this very reasonable objection. They're like, well, America
Speaker 3: is also racist as fuck. Actually, like we also like
Speaker 3: this is a time where we exclude black folks from
Speaker 3: a lot of yeah, not yeah, And so you have
Speaker 3: black folks boycotting, and you have black folks being like, now,
Speaker 3: fuck it, like we'll take the chance, you know. And
Speaker 3: then you have the opposition from an interesting group like
Speaker 3: the liberal Catholics, right, because the Nazis had their own
Speaker 3: ideas on religion, and so a lot of Catholics were
Speaker 3: anti Nazi at that point, including Jeremiah Mahony, who was
Speaker 3: president of the Amateur Athletic Union at the time, who
Speaker 3: was kind of leading the boycott movement. The United States
Speaker 3: decides not to boycott, lots of other places in the
Speaker 3: world decide that they are going to boycott, right, and
Speaker 3: lots of other people around the world. And that's where Barcelona.
Speaker 3: They had a conference in Paris, actually the International Conference
Speaker 3: for the Respect of the Olympic Ideal, and that is
Speaker 3: the conference out of which the bars that remember bars
Speaker 3: Oonner applied in thirty one. Right, So they have all
Speaker 3: their shit together. They actually have the site of a
Speaker 3: former World's Fair and that's what they're going to use.
Speaker 3: So the Catalans come to this conference in April of
Speaker 3: thirty six and are like, hey, we can have another Olympics,
Speaker 3: which isn't shit, And they go ahead and have their
Speaker 3: Olympics and shit, now first happened the Nazi Olympics, Right.
Speaker 3: The Nazi Olympics give us so much of what we
Speaker 3: consider to be the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay,
Speaker 3: you know, the torch relay. They go to Olympia and
Speaker 3: bring the flame. Yeah, that's a Nazi thing. Actually, it
Speaker 3: comes from the Nazis. The idea of drawing a link
Speaker 3: from ancient Greece to Berlin was a Nazi idea. Why
Speaker 3: don't we still do it? Yeah, that's a good question, Sharen.
Speaker 3: Isn't it a good question. As we enter the Paris Olympics.
Speaker 3: One thing they have done away was the Olympic salute
Speaker 3: because it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazis. So
Speaker 3: they also start in no, the Olympic salute predates it.
Speaker 3: So you have these interesting mark people march like were
Speaker 3: they the parade at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, right,
Speaker 3: and lots of these The pageantry of the opening ceremony
Speaker 3: also comes from the Nazis, by the way, And we
Speaker 3: got people walking in and the French come in and
Speaker 3: they're doing a salute, and people like, is that the
Speaker 3: Nazi salute they're doing? It's at the Olympic salute. I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure it's the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 2: If it's too close, I think it's bad. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think getting confused for something else.
Speaker 3: I think I think you should stop. Yeah. I just
Speaker 3: tried to not do things that look like gunsi kilink like.
Speaker 3: That is how I how I live my life. You
Speaker 3: have other nations who don't do it, right. You have
Speaker 3: the Americans. The Americans traditionally in the so they're supposed
Speaker 3: to dip their flag. The Americans have never dipped their
Speaker 3: flag and Olympic opening ceremonies. So sometimes you'll see this written
Speaker 3: as like, yeah, the Americans said, fuck, hey, they didn't.
Speaker 3: They just did what they'd always done and which was
Speaker 3: to not dip their flag, and that that Olympiad is
Speaker 3: a great success for Hitler, right, Like this is where
Speaker 3: a lot of this like, oh, but yeah, he's very efficient.
Speaker 3: He makes a trains run on time. Kind of shit
Speaker 3: comes from, right. They use it as a pageant and
Speaker 3: they downplay their racism. They include a couple of Jewish
Speaker 3: athletes on their team, which is one of the demands
Speaker 3: of Avery. Brandage, head of the American Olympic Committee. Brandage
Speaker 3: Brandish is an interesting dude. Brandage. You can read more
Speaker 3: about Brandage in my book Rubber Did Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 3: On Brandage, I don't think he begins the nineteen thirties
Speaker 3: is an anti Semite. But after the boycott campaign, which
Speaker 3: he calls a Jewish Communist conspiracy, well yeah, he absolutely
Speaker 3: becomes an anti Semite. Like he grows closer to Hitler
Speaker 3: when other because like his idea is that politics shouldn't
Speaker 3: influence the games, which is inherently a political choice. When
Speaker 3: the games have been given to fucking Adolf Hitler. So
Speaker 3: the ninety thirty six Olympics go ahead in Germany, lots
Speaker 3: of fascism, lots of zeg hiling, a real success for Hitler.
Speaker 3: Ninety thirty six Olympics in Barcelona don't go ahead because
Speaker 3: the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona Olympics are like an
Speaker 3: alternative to the Berlin Olympics. Yeah, at this time, also,
Speaker 3: it should be pointed out that you got the Winter
Speaker 3: Olympics when you've got the Olympics. So the Nazi had
Speaker 3: already had their garments part in Kirshen Winter Olympics and
Speaker 3: had predicted to be done a bunch of Nazi shit right,
Speaker 3: which didn't stop anyone going to the Summer Olympics. Saran,
Speaker 3: do you know what won't do a bunch of Nazi
Speaker 3: ship what? James, it's the products and services that support
Speaker 3: this show, Saran. I found it.
Speaker 2: It's easier instead of trying to come up with something
Speaker 2: just to give you the question right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, damn foiled again way back. So yeah, these Olympics
Speaker 3: they're supposed to have in Barcelona, they don't happen because
Speaker 3: of Spanish Civil war starts at the same time. Right,
Speaker 3: lots of these anti fascist athletes go on to participate
Speaker 3: as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, about four hundred
Speaker 3: of them. The popul Olympics are call The main reason
Speaker 3: they're call is because I've written a book about them,
Speaker 3: but other reasons include that they had like elite amateur
Speaker 3: and then provincial races, so like you could just show
Speaker 3: up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to
Speaker 3: fucking check my hand the ring one hundred meters, let's
Speaker 3: see how I do, and there would be a place
Speaker 3: for you to compete.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: It wasn't about who was a freak athlete. They were
Speaker 3: really interested in working class health. So for that reason,
Speaker 3: they also had like these mass relay events where you'd
Speaker 3: have like the fifty by twenty five meters or the
Speaker 3: ten by fifty meters, and you couldn't have all runners.
Speaker 3: So the idea was that the country that would win
Speaker 3: or the nation that would win. Right, They competed as
Speaker 3: nations rather than states, So the exiled Jews of Europe
Speaker 3: competed together for the obvious reason that, like, if you're
Speaker 3: a German Jew in nineteen thirty six, you don't want
Speaker 3: to compete for fucking Germany, so even at the Populalympics,
Speaker 3: they competed to Jewish workers sports associations. And you have
Speaker 3: exiled and anti fascists from Germany and Italy competing under
Speaker 3: their own banners. And you have Glicia, Catalonia Skendy, the
Speaker 3: Basque country competing s own ould nations, right, and the
Speaker 3: same with the colonized people of North Africa. And you
Speaker 3: have the women students of the world with their own
Speaker 3: old team, which is nice. They also made a big
Speaker 3: deal of including women, allowing women to do sports that
Speaker 3: men do at the time in nineteen thirty six women
Speaker 3: can run more than two hundred meters. Well, but they
Speaker 3: actually could, as it turns out, Yeah, yeah, right, they
Speaker 3: just weren't allowed to c Yeah, shocking discovery. They didn't
Speaker 3: just involve that capacity since thirty six. But these Olympics
Speaker 3: don't go ahead because the Spanish evil War starts. Lots
Speaker 3: of the anti fascist affete who came state to fight, right,
Speaker 3: including people I've written about in my book. We did
Speaker 3: a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this.
Speaker 3: So you can listen to more if you want to.
Speaker 3: In Margaret's feed. I'm sure if you search popular Olympics
Speaker 3: will be there. By the way, you sometimes see it
Speaker 3: translated as People's Olympics. I prefer popular because it's inherently
Speaker 3: tied to the idea of a popular front, right, which
Speaker 3: is a policy of like united front between everyone from
Speaker 3: the liberals to the communists to the anarchists against fascism.
Speaker 3: Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular Front because
Speaker 3: it is dominated by communists, and the communists, in fact
Speaker 3: love to kill anarchists a lot more than they love
Speaker 3: to kill fascists, and they use the Popular Front as
Speaker 3: cover for doing that, as we see in Spain. But
Speaker 3: the anarchists did participate in workers or popular sport in Barcelona,
Speaker 3: at least to an extent. So these games that said,
Speaker 3: they don't happen. You can read about that in my book,
Speaker 3: or you can listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But
Speaker 3: I want to talk about what the Olympics represent today,
Speaker 3: the modern Olympics. Right, they have become as they always were. Right,
Speaker 3: they continue to be a spectacle that they've been since
Speaker 3: thirty two, and they continue to be a vehicle for
Speaker 3: capitalism as they have been forever. Right, if we look
Speaker 3: at their research, Olympic Games. Right, we look at London,
Speaker 3: we look at Rio. I think Rio is a really
Speaker 3: great example, right the Olympics, that they were able to
Speaker 3: clear areas of the city using the potential Olympics. Right,
Speaker 3: displace favela communities, displace poor and excluded and marginalized people,
Speaker 3: and take advantage of incredibly underpaid labor. And there's probably
Speaker 3: it's a bit rarer now. But for like most of
Speaker 3: the last eight years, you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana
Speaker 3: mostly right, the US has been especially racist and bigoted
Speaker 3: towards Haitians, and you can I wrote a piece for
Speaker 3: NBC about Biden's hypocracy on Haitian immigration. But there were
Speaker 3: people who had worked on the Olympic Stadium in Brazil. Right,
Speaker 3: So they've gone from Haiti, like after the earthquake or
Speaker 3: the economic and political issues, so they've had ever since
Speaker 3: the earthquake, they've gone to Brazil. And then they've worked
Speaker 3: in Brazil building the stadia, getting paid fuck all and
Speaker 3: doing dangerous work. And then eventually I've been able to
Speaker 3: find work that visas had run out or they'd otherwise
Speaker 3: chosen to come north to the United States, and they
Speaker 3: often end up not being able to they end up
Speaker 3: stuck in Tijuana or living in Tijuana and find finding
Speaker 3: work there. Right, So often Olympics take advantage of migrant labor.
Speaker 3: They are used as a means of like reshaping the
Speaker 3: city into like sculpting it under capitalism, right, pushing folks
Speaker 3: out of their neighborhoods. They don't do the Olympics in
Speaker 3: bougie neighborhoods. They use it as an excuse to gentrify
Speaker 3: a neighborhood, to remove in trenched working class communities. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like it's really sad. It's when I read so much
Speaker 3: of the stuff about, like specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games,
Speaker 3: Like we see these people who are unquestionably good people, right,
Speaker 3: Like they genuinely believe that through what they see is
Speaker 3: the ideal of the Olympics, they can liberate women. They
Speaker 3: the Barcelona organizers so like, they didn't have much money, right,
Speaker 3: they were putting people up. And I found these forms
Speaker 3: in the arch if they'd go around people's houses and
Speaker 3: be like, hey, do you have a spare bedroom? And
Speaker 3: in the form you can tick I have one, two,
Speaker 3: three spare bedrooms. I can serve breakfast. I can't serve
Speaker 3: breakfast and that's how they would bill at the athletes, right,
Speaker 3: the athletes didn't have an Olympic village. They had a
Speaker 3: hotel and then any surp plus you would just stay
Speaker 3: with with a local person. It was a very different
Speaker 3: vision of what the Olympics could have been. Right. They
Speaker 3: really believed in the youth of the world coming together.
Speaker 3: They really thought that at the popul Olympics they could
Speaker 3: show the strength of anti fascism, that anti fishing wasn't
Speaker 3: just a talking point, that it was that it was
Speaker 3: young and it was healthy, and like most importantly, that
Speaker 3: they could fucking kill you, right, like that that sport
Speaker 3: all Well again double or Well quote episode or Well
Speaker 3: called sport War without the shooting, and I think he's
Speaker 3: spot on. Actually it is good. He's got some bangos
Speaker 3: sharene you do say that, Yeah, he's a word guy,
Speaker 3: George Orwell. People do love to misquote George your Well,
Speaker 3: but I like to quote him correctly. You know you
Speaker 3: can you can always when someone misquote Georgia Will you
Speaker 3: can always just quote tweet them with the I had
Speaker 3: joined them Unlicia to kill a fascist, right or the
Speaker 3: other absolute banger from all Well. I have no particular
Speaker 3: love for the idealized worker as he exists in the
Speaker 3: mind of the bourgeois communists. But when I see a
Speaker 3: real flesh and bug worker in conflict with his natural enemy,
Speaker 3: the policeman, I don't have to ask myself which side
Speaker 3: them on. Ooh, it's a banger, that's that's poetry. Yeah
Speaker 3: it is. It's great. Like it's something that when I
Speaker 3: get around, will have tattooed on my body maybe like
Speaker 3: maybe when I have to cross fewer borders. It's probably
Speaker 3: not something you want to be showing after the intelligence
Speaker 3: agencies of various countries. Yeah, it's really sad to see
Speaker 3: this thing, and I think it does have potential. I
Speaker 3: think it's a potential. What I want to end on
Speaker 3: is like I think we can recover that potential, Like
Speaker 3: we can take the Olympics away from the people who
Speaker 3: did nineteen oh four and the people who did nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty six, and like it doesn't mean to have to
Speaker 3: use that obviously that the IOC is not fucking coming
Speaker 3: with us, right, I've been to the IOC, very nice building,
Speaker 3: but like this is the you know, the the interests
Speaker 3: of finance, capital and the interesting iOS here inherently tied
Speaker 3: coca coat. Every massive corporation in the world is a
Speaker 3: massive spot for the Olympics, right, And it's also been
Speaker 3: a platform for some really good things that we think about.
Speaker 3: Tommy Smith and John Carlos right at the ninety sixty
Speaker 3: eight Olympics giving a raise fist salute on the podium.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you've seen it. There's a statue of them,
Speaker 3: several statues of them, I think, actually, but yeah, very
Speaker 3: famous Olympic moment. The whole ninety sixty eight Olympics actually
Speaker 3: kind of gave a platform for protest, and Parisians have
Speaker 3: been protesting against this Olympics, and Angelino's are already protesting
Speaker 3: against what it's going to happen in twenty eight. You
Speaker 3: can look up no Olympics LA for those folks, and
Speaker 3: I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I
Speaker 3: don't think that the idea is inherently bad, the idea
Speaker 3: of coming together to play and like sports are, where
Speaker 3: we decide who's on our team and who's not on
Speaker 3: our team, right, And what the popular Olympics did was
Speaker 3: said working people are all on the same team. And
Speaker 3: they've played that out right. The day the games were
Speaker 3: supposed to start. Some of those athletes were in the
Speaker 3: streets killing fascists and they weren't. Right that day, that
Speaker 3: minitary coup failed in Barcelona, and a lot of them
Speaker 3: left really feeling like they got something out of the
Speaker 3: games that they couldn't have got, or that they came
Speaker 3: to play and then they saw like what they were
Speaker 3: playing for acted out. And I think there's still something
Speaker 3: really powerful in that, but we can only get there
Speaker 3: by acknowledging how fucked up the Olympics have always been.
Speaker 3: I see this like liberal narratives that the Libs the
Speaker 3: Olympics were once great and about sportsmanship and now they're
Speaker 3: about capitalism. No fuck that, Like they have always been
Speaker 3: inherently about capitalism, they've been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics. Right,
Speaker 3: the medal table. We don't do the medal table for
Speaker 3: shits and giggles. The medal table is there to prove
Speaker 3: like the superiority of one race. Like that is why
Speaker 3: Hitler is obsessed with the medal table. Right, He's extremely
Speaker 3: worried that like either they like folks in the United States,
Speaker 3: or like God forbid, the Japanese do well in the Olympics.
Speaker 3: It's like, and then the Olympics trying to sort of
Speaker 3: posit itself as inherently pro human rights I think is
Speaker 3: very problematic when yeah, we look at like how Olympics
Speaker 3: Stadia get constructed by whom they get constructed and where
Speaker 3: they get constructed, Yeah, who they effect and yeah, and
Speaker 3: who who they're for and who who they take from.
Speaker 3: So I know, I'm not saying don't watch the Olympics.
Speaker 3: Like when I was a kid, the Olympics were like
Speaker 3: fucking formative in me wanting to do sports, and when
Speaker 3: I was an athlete, the Olympics I wanted to do.
Speaker 3: I have friends who are going to be at the Olympics,
Speaker 3: and like, I guess I wish them the best, but
Speaker 3: still a bad thing. And like I certainly don't blame
Speaker 3: folks who come from like resource coorse settings for taking
Speaker 3: that chance.
Speaker 2: Of course, but it is like, yeah, the way it
Speaker 2: currently is and the way it's always been is just.
Speaker 3: Doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. But maybe
Speaker 3: there's a.
Speaker 2: Different timeline where I don't know, Barcelona's idealism of an
Speaker 2: Olympics is like.
Speaker 3: True, Yeah, I know, I think we can bring it back.
Speaker 3: I think like antio fascism is having a moment that
Speaker 3: it probably hasn't had it in to Nineteen's true, that's
Speaker 3: very true in the last four years. Can we can
Speaker 3: get together and we can have our own institutions too, Like,
Speaker 3: I don't think we should abandon sport to the chuds,
Speaker 3: of course, the chuds of like sport, Like, yeah, there's
Speaker 3: a way.
Speaker 2: But I also don't want anyone to use it as
Speaker 2: a way to like not sports wash, but like kind
Speaker 2: of focus on something that is not as relevant as
Speaker 2: the bigger picture.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense? Like it yeah, totally, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it shouldn't be used to distract exactly, that's what that's
Speaker 3: the short word. Yeah, And like it has been like
Speaker 3: global sports are increasingly going to like Petro states in
Speaker 3: the Middle East. Yeah, right, Like, and that is a problem.
Speaker 3: I think if you're an athlete, I would encourage you
Speaker 3: to really consider what your role is. I know some
Speaker 3: of my friends listen who are still like professional athletes
Speaker 3: and there just think about out what you can do,
Speaker 3: and like, I will tell you that when you stop
Speaker 3: getting paid to exercise, all of it seems very unimportant
Speaker 3: and like you suddenly realize that in my case, but
Speaker 3: there's important shit that you can do if you have
Speaker 3: a chance to do it, and you should do it
Speaker 3: if you get the chance. But yeah, I think hopefully,
Speaker 3: you know, if people want to know more about the Populalympics,
Speaker 3: I will fucking talk Carreer of med Email. Yeah, my book,
Speaker 3: I think it might be on libcom now as well.
Speaker 3: I think you can. I think it's been pirated, which
Speaker 3: is good to see. You can get it from your library.
Speaker 3: I'd love you to get it from your library, because
Speaker 3: the it's fair for someone else libraries. Yeah, I do
Speaker 3: love a library. Yeah, we should do a library episode.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I was trying to get the library San Diego
Speaker 3: Library Association on because we've been defunding the libraries here
Speaker 3: in San Diego to have more cops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fucking great. Yeah, no, I love the libraries.
Speaker 2: Are just this I don't know, pure little place. We
Speaker 2: got to do some library episodes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll do, and we we'll get them back. We'll
Speaker 3: get the library. So if you work in a library
Speaker 3: and the police are takeing away the money used to
Speaker 3: read books of little children, you can you can DM
Speaker 3: me on x dot com. Yeah, and we will fight
Speaker 3: the good fight for you. Yeah, all right, that's uh,
Speaker 3: that's that's been the Olympics. No, go, go forth, do
Speaker 3: a little decathlon. Here's a fine Olympic fact for you,
Speaker 3: a fun fun facts. End the episode. A general pattern, right,
Speaker 3: American war guy entered the pentathlon at the Olympics and
Speaker 3: used such a large pistol that they were unable to
Speaker 3: determine the size of his grouping of shots on the
Speaker 3: target because he just viscerated the whole target his handcannon. Yeah. So,
Speaker 3: embody that the pentathlon a sport that was designed to
Speaker 3: train offices. Right, you have to run, swim, ride a horse,
Speaker 3: sword fight, and shoot. Yeah, so make a better pentathlon,
Speaker 3: make make an anti fascist to cathalon. Yeah, send us
Speaker 3: your You can tag us with your your decathlon ideas
Speaker 3: on on x dot com. We both use at I write, Okay,
Speaker 3: bizarrely we have the same the same Twitter handle. Yeah,
Speaker 3: send us your sporting ideas. Enjoy your little Olympic viewing.
Speaker 3: Now that I've ruined it all for you, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's good to know context.
Speaker 2: But yeah, until next time, Until the next time you
Speaker 2: and dreams talk about something either terrible or fun.
Speaker 3: Or somewhere in between. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll yeah, we'll
Speaker 3: be back seeing with something else. You'll never know what
Speaker 3: These will always fucking just these must just come out
Speaker 3: of left field for people like, what the fuck are
Speaker 3: they talking about today?
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I'll ever know until you listen.
Speaker 3: That's listen every day.
Speaker 4: Bye bye bye.
Speaker 7: Welcome to it up Here a podcast where I Lea
Speaker 7: Wong have Readamala Harris's dad, Donald Harris's book. This is
Speaker 7: This is the podcast that you're listening to now with
Speaker 7: me to experience this actually genuinely fairly interesting work of
Speaker 7: political economy.
Speaker 3: Is James Stout. Hi, man, I'm so excited to know
Speaker 3: what Donald has for us today. Me too.
Speaker 7: I'm you know, I'm I'm of a bunch of minds
Speaker 7: of this book because I think the the actual key
Speaker 7: element of this book, which is called Capital Accumulation and
Speaker 7: Income Distribution, is that it is unbelievably technically dense.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: Okay, we're going to get into the book. First, we
Speaker 7: sort we should talk a bit about who Donald Harris is.
Speaker 7: So a lot of the focus around this is Kamala Harris,
Speaker 7: the presumptive Democratic nominees dad. So a lot of the
Speaker 7: media coverage around him is around him being a Marxist.
Speaker 7: This is debatable obviously, is what I'm like the conclusion
Speaker 7: I'm going to come out of this, But.
Speaker 3: I'm shocked that people plan on media today might misunderstand
Speaker 3: basic things about Marxism and who is and he's not
Speaker 3: a Marxist, Yeah, I mean I think.
Speaker 7: But so the thing about this book, So this book
Speaker 7: is from nineteen seventy eight, which is actually after he
Speaker 7: had broken up with Kamala's mom, and so Kamala doesn't
Speaker 7: like know him super well.
Speaker 3: Was he like not present in her younger life. Kamala's
Speaker 3: mom and.
Speaker 7: Dad divorced when she was like five, in like four
Speaker 7: or five, So this is this is written about a
Speaker 7: decade after that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, much like the New American Communist Party, like a
Speaker 3: lot a lot of divorce guys just love to be Communists.
Speaker 3: It's the thing about divorce guys. Oh god.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So you know, one of the sort of the
Speaker 7: thing everyone kind of cites about, like Donald Harris's politics,
Speaker 7: that he was in this sort of like Black Studies,
Speaker 7: like I guess proto Black Studies group that produced a
Speaker 7: bunch of like black panthers produced a lot of very
Speaker 7: radical people. But you know, the interesting thing about Donald
Speaker 7: Harris is that he is not the Marxist that you
Speaker 7: would expect to see coming out of sort of like
Speaker 7: that Miliu, because those people's Marxism, you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: he is very interested in sort of underdevelopment and you know,
Speaker 7: sort of like imperialism, but he's he's not well from
Speaker 7: one of the sort of like Baoists inflected kinds of Marxism,
Speaker 7: which are the kinds that tended to be sort of
Speaker 7: floating around.
Speaker 3: Like that time.
Speaker 7: He in fact, he is a very very rare kind
Speaker 7: of Marxist, which is to say, well, A, he doesn't
Speaker 7: call himself a Marxist. He calls himself a Marxi in
Speaker 7: the entire time. But b yeah, in tolerable and we
Speaker 7: don't understand what this is. So there's a very famous
Speaker 7: marx quote where he's complaining about I think it was
Speaker 7: something the German Social Democratic Party did or something where
Speaker 7: he where people are calling themselves Marxists, and he goes,
Speaker 7: and this is what if this is what Marxism is,
Speaker 7: and I am not a Marxist. And so for one
Speaker 7: hundred years, since then, one hundred and fifty years, people
Speaker 7: have been calling themselves Marxians instead of Marxists.
Speaker 3: But this is all over that book. I'm developing a
Speaker 3: picture of a kind of guy, Oh yeah, panting me
Speaker 3: a rich portrait man. Yeah so.
Speaker 7: But the interesting part is he's what's known as a
Speaker 7: post Kanesian and weirdly, dear listeners, you are you are
Speaker 7: some of the only people in this entire country. You
Speaker 7: have a prayer of knowing who these people are because
Speaker 7: we've actually had a bunch of them on the show.
Speaker 7: If if people remember the episodes that I did about
Speaker 7: inflation over the last sort of like year, I guess,
Speaker 7: like two years. I don't know it, it's been it's
Speaker 7: been a long time. But the episode's about inflation that
Speaker 7: we did with the with the folks over at Strange Matters.
Speaker 7: Those people are the sort of the int one of
Speaker 7: one of the groups that are the intellectual heirs to
Speaker 7: sort of post Kanesianism. It's a you know, I guess
Speaker 7: it's post Kansianism, is kind of it's I guess it's
Speaker 7: like the largest of what's called the heterodox economics UH schools.
Speaker 7: We're gonna get more into what it is later, because
Speaker 7: it's not just like you know, so it's post Kanesian
Speaker 7: after like John Vader Kanes, it's not really Canes and
Speaker 7: that that's that's gonna become very important as second. But
Speaker 7: you know this, this is sort of an issue because
Speaker 7: it means that it's actually it's really really hard for
Speaker 7: a normal person to figure out what the fuck is
Speaker 7: going on with this book book. And this is something
Speaker 7: that I discovered, you know, partially just from reading it,
Speaker 7: and partially also I mean this like, I have a
Speaker 7: pretty good background to do this, because I know a
Speaker 7: lot of Postcansian economics, and I also have studied a
Speaker 7: lot of Marks, and you need both of those to
Speaker 7: be able to write about this. However, come I discovered
Speaker 7: two hours to put this recording. I discovered that the
Speaker 7: economist had set some hack who they refused to name,
Speaker 7: to write about this book, and this person managed, okay,
Speaker 7: on top of just like straight up, like not literally,
Speaker 7: their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong.
Speaker 7: In just four paragraphs, they managed to make an error
Speaker 7: so egregious that if I had turned this shit into
Speaker 7: my professor's in college, it would have failed before it
Speaker 7: So okay, okay, So one of the things the author
Speaker 7: talks about is this thing called the Cambridge capital controversy.
Speaker 7: And this author claims that this controversy was fought between
Speaker 7: the neo and post Kansians. Now, this is probably gibberish
Speaker 7: to like nineteen percent of people listening to this, but
Speaker 7: in terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent of
Speaker 7: not knowing who fought in World War Two. Like this
Speaker 7: is the Cambridge cancer controversy. Is It's it's basically these
Speaker 7: single moments in which this kind of like this kind
Speaker 7: of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in a
Speaker 7: way that like they were able to force the sort
Speaker 7: of mainstream neoclassical economists to take to pay attention to.
Speaker 7: And this battle should, like intellectually should have completely destroyed
Speaker 7: all of neoclassical economics. Right, everything you've ever heard about
Speaker 7: how price equal supply and demand like so all those curves,
Speaker 7: all of that is fucking bullshit. All of it was
Speaker 7: destroyed by one single happening about the course of a
Speaker 7: decade between the sort of post Knesians, mostly Serappha but
Speaker 7: also Joe and Robinson I think actually started it. We're
Speaker 7: gonna talk about those people more later. This is a
Speaker 7: battle between them, and there is specifically the neoclassical economists,
Speaker 7: and by the end of it, the neoclassical economists were
Speaker 7: forced to admit that they couldn't they couldn't figure out
Speaker 7: a way to like measure the value of a bundle
Speaker 7: of like capital goods. So if you have two different machines,
Speaker 7: neoclassical economy cannot tell you the value of And this
Speaker 7: this completely annihilates neoclassic economics. All of it is fucking
Speaker 7: fake because you know, they need this for the production function.
Speaker 7: Without the production function, like you can't even get to
Speaker 7: supply and demand, right, every literally everything, all of their
Speaker 7: stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to like attempt
Speaker 7: to an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy was what
Speaker 7: it was actually about here, because it's it's a little
Speaker 7: bit it's something that you can understand, but it's a
Speaker 7: little bit technical and it's hard to explain in podcast
Speaker 7: form if you if you're really curious about this, the
Speaker 7: book Capital as Power. Capital as Power has a really
Speaker 7: great explanation of it in chapter five that's pretty short.
Speaker 7: You can just literally find a PDF of Capital as
Speaker 7: Power by just googling it. But this is a level
Speaker 7: of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're
Speaker 7: like the person the economist assigned to write this like
Speaker 7: knows so little about it that and you know, the
Speaker 7: other thing about this, this whole controversy is that the
Speaker 7: Cambridge Cancel capital controversy is in the book, and in
Speaker 7: the book, Donald Harris very specifically talks about the There's
Speaker 7: an entire chapter of the book that it's just him
Speaker 7: using the products of the Cambridge capital controversy to completely
Speaker 7: destroy a classical economics.
Speaker 3: This is an entire chapter of the book. And this
Speaker 3: guy got who was about wrong? Right?
Speaker 7: So this is a book that is is very very
Speaker 7: easy to misinterpret and very very easy to sort of
Speaker 7: not like you know, just to sort of like completely
Speaker 7: misunderstand or bounce off of.
Speaker 8: I it was.
Speaker 7: It was hard for me, and like I'm pretty well
Speaker 7: set up to deal with it. So, Okay, what what
Speaker 7: the fuck is this book about? The very the shortest
Speaker 7: answer I can possibly give is it's an attempt to
Speaker 7: build a sort of mathematical model of how how of
Speaker 7: of sort of like that measures the growth of an
Speaker 7: economy and can sort of like determine based on like
Speaker 7: different sort of inputs of uh, you know, we'll get
Speaker 7: to the bore of the second and like in terms
Speaker 7: of like inputs of capital and like parts of labor,
Speaker 7: like how how you can have an economy that grows
Speaker 7: stably over time. But in order to like get into
Speaker 7: really what this is, we need to do something that
Speaker 7: actually is the first part of this book. We need
Speaker 7: to do a brief survey of the last two hundred
Speaker 7: and thirty two hundred and forty years of economics. But
Speaker 7: before we do that, do you know what economics exist
Speaker 7: to sell you?
Speaker 3: I do? Actually that is a fantastic transition. Mayah, That
Speaker 3: is it goods and services. It is in fact goods
Speaker 3: and services, price less capital goods.
Speaker 7: All right, and we are back, So okay, in order
Speaker 7: to understand literally what this fundamental project is, we have
Speaker 7: to talk about sort of the three broad categories of economists.
Speaker 7: So the first sort of original in we're not gonnare
Speaker 7: there's a couple there's people before this, but like the
Speaker 7: the in terms of like economists whose work is important
Speaker 7: to now, there's three broad categories, and we're going to
Speaker 7: start with the classical economists broadly. There's also about three
Speaker 7: important classical economists. This is this is an argument, and
Speaker 7: this is one of the arguments that Donald Harris makes
Speaker 7: in the opening of this book is about who these
Speaker 7: people are. So his argument is it's Adam Smith, Malthus,
Speaker 7: and Ricardo. We don't care about Mauthus for our purposes.
Speaker 7: He's most well known for being the like the the
Speaker 7: like out of control population growth will kill one on Earth.
Speaker 7: We need to like slow populate stuff like. That's not
Speaker 7: super relevant for us. Everyone, I think kind of has
Speaker 7: a has a basic familiarity with Adam Smith. But for
Speaker 7: our purposes, the important one is Ricardo, who is not
Speaker 7: very well known at all. Ricardo is sort of concerned
Speaker 7: with basically the distribution of surpluses between the classes. So
Speaker 7: for him, that there's there's there's three major classes, right,
Speaker 7: there's landlords as capitalists, and there's workers. And he's concerned
Speaker 7: about how the sort of the the surplus product of
Speaker 7: a society, which is like all of the sort of
Speaker 7: stuff that's produced in an economy that isn't literally directly
Speaker 7: necessary for everyone to survive. How is that sort of
Speaker 7: surplus like distributed and how does this sort of impact
Speaker 7: economic growth? The post Kanesian tradition that Donald Harris is
Speaker 7: in is in a real sense they are successors to Ricardo, right.
Speaker 7: A lot of I've mentioned Piero Siraffa, who is like
Speaker 7: probably the central figure of post Kanesian economics. He's a
Speaker 7: really interesting guy. He knows like everyone, like he knew Canes.
Speaker 7: He was weirdly friends with Antonio Grampsi, the former head
Speaker 7: of the Italian Communist Party, who's enormously influential work was
Speaker 7: like new him, And a lot of what Sarafa's work
Speaker 7: is is kind of like getting Ricardo's economics to like
Speaker 7: work properly and then turning that into sort of a
Speaker 7: new framework for how you model economies. Now, the other
Speaker 7: part of this, you know, so okay, who isn't isn't
Speaker 7: the classical economist is also a huge source of debate
Speaker 7: because there's a lot of people who throw marks in
Speaker 7: as part of the classical economy, that's a traditional way
Speaker 7: to view it. Harris doesn't think that he's a classical economist.
Speaker 7: He thinks that he's his own thing. So for our purposes,
Speaker 7: you know, it's and and Harris is also I mean,
Speaker 7: I think he considers himself a Marxist, even in this
Speaker 7: period and a lot of this book is an attempt
Speaker 7: to sort of merge Marxian political economy with like the
Speaker 7: sort of neo Ricardi and stuff that s Rafa is doing.
Speaker 3: Does he change later? Do you know? Is Harris one
Speaker 3: of these guys who goes on like intellectual journey and
Speaker 3: becomes Oh, we'll get there, We'll get to where all
Speaker 3: this ends up at the end of this episode.
Speaker 7: But you know, it's interesting because you can actually see
Speaker 7: it kind of happening in the middle of this book
Speaker 7: in ways that we're going to get to.
Speaker 3: I love that. I love a book where your thic
Speaker 3: sort of personal journey.
Speaker 7: It's also very funny because the economist guy, I was like,
Speaker 7: oh my god, he's so Marxist. He's concerned with the
Speaker 7: value for him and like, okay, I to put my
Speaker 7: Marxist cards on the table.
Speaker 3: Maybe six people will understand this.
Speaker 7: But like I was like brought up in terms of
Speaker 7: learning like Marxist theory, like through the through the value
Speaker 7: form school.
Speaker 3: He is not a value form guy. He plays really
Speaker 3: fast and loose. What value is? Uh, it's it's I
Speaker 3: was reading this and I was going, oh god, oh no,
Speaker 3: what is this. He's so wrong? He's so bafflingly wrong.
Speaker 3: The What the the Economists is subtitled A Combative Marxist
Speaker 3: Economists with White House Influence, which like, thanks God.
Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, so so the the the basis of Marxist
Speaker 7: Marxian political economy is the labor theory of value. We're
Speaker 7: gonna explain this briefly because it actually winds up mattering
Speaker 7: a lot to this book. So value is the product
Speaker 7: of the labor time socially necessary to produce a commodity. Right,
Speaker 7: It's like how long does it take like a specific
Speaker 7: place to produce a watch? You know, workers are paid
Speaker 7: enough to reproduce themselves or paid enough to sort of
Speaker 7: like eat, sleep and like have kids. There are more workers,
Speaker 7: but the rest of their labor time is stolen by
Speaker 7: capitalists and is thus unremunerated. This unpaid labor time is
Speaker 7: called surplus value. And this is what capital has made off.
Speaker 7: So this is like a very very basis of sort
Speaker 7: of what Marxism is, and you know, in in sort
Speaker 7: of Marxism. And this is sort of different than Ricardo,
Speaker 7: which is like work. Ricardo understands that there are classes
Speaker 7: and that they are in conflict to some extent. But
Speaker 7: you know, for marx the central dynamics of capitalism is,
Speaker 7: you know, is the conflict between the bourgeoisie or the
Speaker 7: capitalists who own the means of production and then you know,
Speaker 7: and buy that ownership, like extract surplus value from the
Speaker 7: proletariat and the proletariat or the working class or forced
Speaker 7: to sell their labor to capitalists, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Something very interesting.
Speaker 7: Two ideas run into each other very quickly in Harris's work,
Speaker 7: because you know, so there is a thing called surplus
Speaker 7: in in the tradition of sort of Ricardo and in
Speaker 7: the tradition of like Serapha and this of the post Kansians, right,
Speaker 7: and that surplus is very critically not the same thing
Speaker 7: as Marxian surplus value. So you know what part of
Speaker 7: part of what's happening here is that Harris is trying
Speaker 7: to square the circle base between these two approaches to
Speaker 7: like to what surplus is and sort of what the
Speaker 7: nature of value is. So you know, in the Marxist tradition, right,
Speaker 7: surplus value is still in labor time, and the value
Speaker 7: of producer sort of flows through the economy, and it's
Speaker 7: what turned you know, like stealing this labor time is
Speaker 7: what turns capital into more capital. Right in the post
Speaker 7: in post Cantine economics, surplus is you know, so so
Speaker 7: in in sort of like a seraf in work or
Speaker 7: in this book too, right, you have basically a production matrix,
Speaker 7: which is like as a MATC that models how production works,
Speaker 7: and it's what it's doing is modeling the entire output
Speaker 7: of society at one time. And in this model, so
Speaker 7: there there's sort of like you know, there's all the
Speaker 7: commodity and labor inputs that compose the economy and they
Speaker 7: come back out and there's a certain amount of commodities.
Speaker 7: This is the thing we talked about with the Kardo, right,
Speaker 7: there's there's certain amount of commodities you need to produce
Speaker 7: so that everyone can the entire system can reproduce itself,
Speaker 7: and beyond that is surplus. So what you're dealing with
Speaker 7: is this weird mixture because Harris is trying to work
Speaker 7: with both of these at the same time, where like,
Speaker 7: on the one hand you have surplus as like like
Speaker 7: stolen value in a form of like stolen labor time,
Speaker 7: and on the other hand you have it in this
Speaker 7: regarded sense of like there's a bunch of commodities that
Speaker 7: we've produced that's like access to our like ability to
Speaker 7: to like our needs to reproduce ourselves. And he's trying
Speaker 7: to square these and it doesn't work. It just sort
Speaker 7: of breaks down, like.
Speaker 3: Does he like actively address this like dual meaning and
Speaker 3: then explain like, y.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well so his basic issue is that so the
Speaker 7: way he does this mostly is by just moving back
Speaker 7: and forth between the two systems and not trying to
Speaker 7: reconcile them. And then the one time he has to
Speaker 7: kind of do it, he has to, oh god, do
Speaker 7: I want to try to explain the transformation problem?
Speaker 3: He has to do this thing where.
Speaker 7: Okay, so if theoretically, if you want to convert surplus value,
Speaker 7: like in the Marxist Marxian sense into the sort of
Speaker 7: like neo Ricardian thing, you need to turn it into prices.
Speaker 7: And there's a long running controversy in in Marxism over
Speaker 7: whether or not you can actually do that because the
Speaker 7: math is weird, it doesn't work very well. I'm not
Speaker 7: gonna he doesn't solve it. He just gives up and
Speaker 7: says that you can't do it because they're in two
Speaker 7: separate spheres, which is the most compound answer I've ever
Speaker 7: seed in my entire life.
Speaker 3: It's I love that. Yeah, it's it's it's it's wild.
Speaker 7: But you know, so, so back to the sort of
Speaker 7: main arc of what the fuck is smoke about here,
Speaker 7: I'm probably probably I'm promost we're reaching.
Speaker 3: The promised lamp. We have to do this stuff first.
Speaker 7: Okay, so those are, you know, the the two kinds
Speaker 7: of economics that that Donald Harris is trying to work
Speaker 7: with are this sort of post Canesian stuff, which is
Speaker 7: derived from like Ricardo and classical economists, and then like
Speaker 7: Marxian stuff. There's also the third school, which is neoclassical economics,
Speaker 7: which this is all the economics that you've learned in school, right,
Speaker 7: This is supplied demand. This is like your production functions.
Speaker 7: This is your like every time someone starts lecturing you
Speaker 7: about how the economy works.
Speaker 3: This is all this stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah. What's very important for our purposes, and this is
Speaker 7: something that Harris brings up is the single largest difference
Speaker 7: between neoclassical economics and whatever came before. It isn't that like,
Speaker 7: I don't know, everything's about marginal utility or whatever the
Speaker 7: fuck's that. It's that in neoclassical economics, there are no classes.
Speaker 7: They just pretend that classes don't exist.
Speaker 3: Yeah wow, And in much of American politics, yeah, Germany
Speaker 3: politics sadly well.
Speaker 7: And this is also why like the American conception of
Speaker 7: class is so nuts and why everyone's running around in
Speaker 7: circle is trying to measure it by like income levels,
Speaker 7: because all the economics they use don't have a thing
Speaker 7: that establishes what class is.
Speaker 3: It is one of the jarring differences between the United
Speaker 3: Kingdom and the United States, how like we are hyper
Speaker 3: aware of class and like it's something that like arguably,
Speaker 3: like Britain is obsessed with to detriment of other Like yeah,
Speaker 3: and you go to America and fucking like like if
Speaker 3: if you have a job that pays you occasionally, your
Speaker 3: middle class and then fucking everyone is apparently and like
Speaker 3: it becomes a meaningless term. I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 7: This is very explicitly for political reasons, right. Neoclassical economics
Speaker 7: is developed as an attack on Marxism, like this is
Speaker 7: this is this is its actual sort of origin, and
Speaker 7: it's originators are like very explicit about this right now,
Speaker 7: And this is where we get back to Sarafa, because
Speaker 7: Sarraffa's work effectively is an attack on neoclassical economics, and
Speaker 7: Sarraffa in ninety nine pages literally destroys everything they'd ever produced.
Speaker 7: But you know, the new classical solution to this is
Speaker 7: basically to get everyone who talked about it fired. And
Speaker 7: this actually worked, Like they's basically massive social cleansing campaign
Speaker 7: of like all of the sort of heterodox economists they
Speaker 7: got they got the ball fired and it worked. And
Speaker 7: Harris actually weirdly was kind of was like one of
Speaker 7: the last holdouts into the nineties, but he just like
Speaker 7: retires in like the late nineties, and that's like basically
Speaker 7: ever all of them get rent out.
Speaker 3: Uh, there's a good we'll talk about him later. There's
Speaker 3: there's another uh.
Speaker 7: Postcanesian economists named Frederick Lee who my friends estrange matter
Speaker 7: really like, who's an anarchist who's in this school, and
Speaker 7: he has like an excruciatingly detailed account of all of
Speaker 7: these economists getting runt out by the neoclassical people. And
Speaker 7: so you know, like neoclassical economists like in in some
Speaker 7: sense they there there. Their strategy is a strategy of capitalism,
Speaker 7: which is like obviously we're not right here, but we
Speaker 7: have money and we have force. So we're going to
Speaker 7: defeat your ideas by simply destroying you all tightlightly actual
Speaker 7: physical force.
Speaker 3: So incredible, Yeah, the cultural revolution in economics.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but it's interesting because Harris Harris is writing this
Speaker 7: in seventy eight, and in seventy eight, it's still the
Speaker 7: battle hasn't been settled yet, right, there's still kind of
Speaker 7: like the fight going on between like who is going
Speaker 7: to be like in control of economics? And I mean,
Speaker 7: the you know, the answer is to Theokanzian is that
Speaker 7: the post Kansians lose.
Speaker 3: But you know that wasn't necesarily the case of this time.
Speaker 7: There's also a really weird artifact of this that I
Speaker 7: want to talk about a little bit, which is that, like,
Speaker 7: you know, so remember at the beginning of this, I
Speaker 7: said that that stupid economist person has said that it
Speaker 7: was neo Kandians versus post Kansians. Yeah, so those two
Speaker 7: groups are not the same thing. The post Kandians are
Speaker 7: the people who we've been talking about this whole time, right,
Speaker 7: Like they're they're like they're basically neo Ricardans, right, They're
Speaker 7: they're like based on classical economics. The neo Kansians are
Speaker 7: just regular Kansians basically, but they had to change the
Speaker 7: math to be shittier and make themselves more right wing
Speaker 7: to like survive.
Speaker 3: She reads plain like John maynol Keynes and supply side economics. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if if you want to yeah, if you want to
Speaker 3: give back, I mean, go ahead. Fucking I am a historian,
Speaker 3: but it's a it differs from classical economics. I guess
Speaker 3: in the idea that the state can make interventions, am
Speaker 3: I ukotomby after as I fucked up? The state interventions
Speaker 3: can be beneficial for the economy, And it emerges like
Speaker 3: in the I guess post Great Depression, Like I guess
Speaker 3: maybe from the from like you know, the New Deal
Speaker 3: and these these and then post World War two, right,
Speaker 3: like it's very influential in the kind of build up
Speaker 3: after World War Two. The idea that like the state
Speaker 3: shouldn't necessarily be like what's happen Adam handed the invisible hand,
Speaker 3: the fucking invisible hand, maybe isn't killing it and we
Speaker 3: needn't stead the hand of the state.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I mean, well, you know, it's worth mentioning
Speaker 7: that like in Adam Smith, the hand of the state
Speaker 7: is explicitly God, sorry, exquisitely God. Unfortunately, unfortunately there was
Speaker 7: no God to bail out the markets of the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 7: So Kids was like shit, yeah, And I mean, you know,
Speaker 7: he's like in sort of like more detail, like his
Speaker 7: thing basically is about like he's he's obsessed with sort
Speaker 7: of like like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by using states,
Speaker 7: betting to like, you know, like his things basically is that,
Speaker 7: like capital will misallocate resources, you have to use the
Speaker 7: state to like kick the bastards into line, like the
Speaker 7: stable economy. And the problem is that by by the
Speaker 7: late seventies, the Kansians are in crisis because in in
Speaker 7: original likea Kansian theory, it wasn't supposed to be possible
Speaker 7: for there to be both rising unemployment and rising inflation,
Speaker 7: but that was like happening over the entire world, and
Speaker 7: so they got kind of annihilated. And this is the
Speaker 7: thing that like the neoliberals used to like take power.
Speaker 7: And it's interesting because the post Kansians like they use
Speaker 7: you know, and like the beginning of this book is
Speaker 7: a bit of like Kansian stuff. But then he just
Speaker 7: like you know, they go off and do other more
Speaker 7: interesting things. But it's very funny because because this is
Speaker 7: still seventy eight, he Harris calls himself a neo Kansian,
Speaker 7: and he calls all of his collaborators Theokansians because the
Speaker 7: real Neokansians hadn't like developed yet.
Speaker 3: Oh he's just trying to he's just trying to find
Speaker 3: can claim it, like he's trying to get his like
Speaker 3: stick in the ground. First.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, but I mean that's the thing, like at
Speaker 7: that point they were the neo like the there.
Speaker 3: There wasn't like there.
Speaker 7: Their school had had as good acclaim to it as anyone.
Speaker 7: It's just that they got kicked out later by the
Speaker 7: sort of board. Like yeah, it makes sense, ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: It's also a thing that's also important about this, for
Speaker 7: reasons we're gonna get to in a second, is that
Speaker 7: the post Kanesene tradition also has a lot of very
Speaker 7: eclectic Marxists in it. We're gonna get the Joe and Robinson,
Speaker 7: who's a very close collaborator of a very good Marxist philosopher.
Speaker 7: She's actually the person who like kicks off the Cambridge
Speaker 7: Captural Capital controversy. And she's she's a very kind of
Speaker 7: esoteric Marxist kind of in a similar way to uh
Speaker 7: to what Donald Harris is. But you know, you know
Speaker 7: what Marxism in theory isn't supposed to support.
Speaker 3: Would that be the sale of goods and services?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's product and services that support this podcast. We're
Speaker 3: distributing the amusing the price mechanism. Yeah, we're back. So yeah,
Speaker 3: there's there. There's also you know, there's got.
Speaker 7: A Galecki who's very important to this too, so that
Speaker 7: there are Marxists kind of on the ground of this,
Speaker 7: and they're they're trying to sort of their their goal
Speaker 7: is to try to like explain an economy that has
Speaker 7: monopolies in it, because Marxist theory sort of like assumed
Speaker 7: that there weren't and that there was like actual competition
Speaker 7: in markets and so part of what but this this
Speaker 7: comes to the sort of fundamental project of of what
Speaker 7: this book is about, which is that it's it's it's
Speaker 7: about developing a sort of growth model that you can
Speaker 7: sort of you know, that that that that accounts that
Speaker 7: that can be modified to account for all of these things.
Speaker 7: So the initial thing that they're trying to produce. Is
Speaker 7: is like a model of what they call a Golden age,
Speaker 7: which is a thing that's from Joan Robinson. Yeah, that's
Speaker 7: basically like it's the Golden age is a theoretical like
Speaker 7: economic configuration. You have, you have full employment, you have constant,
Speaker 7: stable economic growth, and the system can reproduce itself. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and you know, I'm going to read a passage from
Speaker 7: this book so you can understand. Partially so you can
Speaker 7: because it's about this, right, and partially so you can understand,
Speaker 7: like this isn't even a particularly technical paragraph.
Speaker 3: We're talking about hit me. Steady state.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Golden age is also kind of similar thing to
Speaker 7: a concept called steady state economies he's writing about. A
Speaker 7: particular steady state is based on a given set of
Speaker 7: conditions and interrelations among them, a given rate of accumulation
Speaker 7: of capital, given rates of savings from the stream of
Speaker 7: net income, a given state of technological knowledge or rate
Speaker 7: of technological innovation, a given rate of increase of the
Speaker 7: labor force, and a given set of expectations. To ask
Speaker 7: whether such a situation exists is to ask whether the
Speaker 7: conditions which define it are mutually compatible or self consistent.
Speaker 7: So this is Basically what he's doing, right, is you
Speaker 7: can you can build these models of like these sort
Speaker 7: of Kanzian models that like and I started a post
Speaker 7: Kansian model that you know, if you if you, if
Speaker 7: you set up all the elements right, you can theoretically
Speaker 7: generate stable growth. But then you know, obviously his thing
Speaker 7: is like this doesn't work, right, Like, no, no, no
Speaker 7: economy will ever generate this because there's only really like
Speaker 7: it's extremely hard to actually get you know, your sort
Speaker 7: of like input levels and your technological development whatever the
Speaker 7: fuck like at the same rate to do this. But
Speaker 7: he's he's using this as basically the model for as
Speaker 7: like as like a sort of toy model that you
Speaker 7: can then sort of warp to fit the rest of
Speaker 7: the the rest of the capitalist economy. But in order
Speaker 7: to do this, he has to generate a crisis theory.
Speaker 7: And this is where he just like suddenly all the
Speaker 7: marks comes back in and he's like, so his he's
Speaker 7: the product he's trying to do is he's trying to
Speaker 7: use a post Kinesian model of how economic growth works
Speaker 7: and then and then combine that with Marxist crisis theory
Speaker 7: to produce basically a model of you know, what, what
Speaker 7: kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like crisis state? Now, ooka,
Speaker 7: the every thing is very weird about this, right, It's
Speaker 7: like he doesn't do normal, Like there's like an entire
Speaker 7: school of Marxist crisis theory, and he doesn't do it.
Speaker 7: He instead like rewrites a bunch of Marxist equations and
Speaker 7: then comes up with his own like version of crisis
Speaker 7: theory of like different kinds of crises. And I like what,
Speaker 7: it's so weird, it's so baffling.
Speaker 3: Maybe he wanted to make him make his mock you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I guess it's weird because it's like this whole
Speaker 7: thing is interesting, but it's like I don't think anyone
Speaker 7: ever followed up on it.
Speaker 3: Really, right, It's just like this dead end of academic theory.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I think it's also you know, I mean
Speaker 7: it's partially like a rude Nott travel thing. It's partially
Speaker 7: because as as the post Kanesians went on, they got
Speaker 7: less and less Marxist. So like a lot of the
Speaker 7: original people are like Seraphison a Marxist, but like a
Speaker 7: lot of the original like Joan Robinson is definitely a Marxist,
Speaker 7: but they get like less and less over time, and
Speaker 7: so there's less interest in kind of like folding in
Speaker 7: Marxism to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so he's losing interest in that. Yeah.
Speaker 7: But this is where we get to the final question,
Speaker 7: like is he a Marxist? And my answer is I
Speaker 7: don't even in even in sixty eight and seventy eight,
Speaker 7: which is pretty early, I don't think he's a Marxist.
Speaker 7: I don't think he's a Marxist in this book. I
Speaker 7: think he's using Marxist theory, but I don't think he's
Speaker 7: actually a Marxist, like politically. And the reason I don't
Speaker 7: think this is because, you know, so we talk about
Speaker 7: surplus value, right, the surplus value is supposed to be
Speaker 7: this value it's extracted, but it's the magnitude of it.
Speaker 7: One of the things like how much value you extract,
Speaker 7: like how many hours of the day you can steal
Speaker 7: from a worker, depends on how many hours of the
Speaker 7: day you'd need to pay them for in order for
Speaker 7: them to survive. Right, And one of the crucial things
Speaker 7: about this is that that and then Marx is very
Speaker 7: explicit about this that rate of like how much you
Speaker 7: need to pay them to survive is determined by social struggle, right,
Speaker 7: because like you know what what a worker quote unquote
Speaker 7: needs to survive in like in different places in context
Speaker 7: is different, and you can fight in order for that
Speaker 7: rate to be higher. And this is like an incredibly
Speaker 7: basic part of Marxism, right, It's the part of Marxism
Speaker 7: where the economy is also determed, like the function of
Speaker 7: the capitalist economy is produced by class struggle.
Speaker 3: This is like this is like this is even one.
Speaker 7: This is Marxism zero zero zero, like this this is
Speaker 7: this is the ship they hand you on the flow
Speaker 7: on like your fucking tour of Marxism school before you
Speaker 7: holding classes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so when you get that very you know,
Speaker 3: there's very short introductions you can get where it's like
Speaker 3: like a tiny little booklet that explains so like the
Speaker 3: sene Quan on the little elements of things.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and Harris writes pages and pages and pages of
Speaker 7: stuff about like about about like the rate of surplus
Speaker 7: value extraction. And do you know how many times he
Speaker 7: mentions class fucking once in like and it's it's like
Speaker 7: the thirty eight thing he mentions after like the technical
Speaker 7: composition of capital and like it's all other crisis, Like
Speaker 7: it's all of this ship and he just doesn't mention it.
Speaker 7: And this is this is the thing that like fundamentally
Speaker 7: has convinced me that what what he's doing isn't substantively Marxism.
Speaker 7: He's using the tools of merchistpolitical economy, but he's he's
Speaker 7: he's he's viewing capitalism as purely a sort of like
Speaker 7: top down thing, right as and not something that's actually
Speaker 7: like you know, like he he acknowledges there are classes,
Speaker 7: but he doesn't see them as actors at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like the struggle between the classes is is And.
Speaker 7: It's funny because he has this thing that he calls
Speaker 7: the rate of exploitation, right, which is this calculation of
Speaker 7: sort of surplus value extraction. But he's like, well, obviously
Speaker 7: because the rate is going to change over time due
Speaker 7: to the condition to struggle. But he's like an Oscar,
Speaker 7: I'm just putting his one number, like it's just like right, yeah.
Speaker 3: It I'm too lazy to figure that out. And I'm like,
Speaker 3: what what are you doing? Like you this is this
Speaker 3: is the basis of Marxism. Yeah, I mean, maybe he
Speaker 3: was just an economics guy, but even still no, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is.
Speaker 7: This is this is the thing that I've been sort
Speaker 7: of realizing because one of the issues Sarafha is that,
Speaker 7: you know, Sarafa is a genius economist, right, he is
Speaker 7: genuinely and unbelievably brilliant. But he's also a pure economist.
Speaker 7: Like here's here is how the start of his most
Speaker 7: influential book, Production of Commodities and Means of Commodities starts.
Speaker 7: Let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just
Speaker 7: enough to maintain itself. Commodities are produced by separate industries
Speaker 7: and are exchanged for one another, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Culture.
Speaker 7: So, okay, what is he he he he just has
Speaker 7: like created a mental model. And this is the basis
Speaker 7: of like of his major economic theories. Him just creating
Speaker 7: a mental model where somehow, out of nowhere has appeared
Speaker 7: a simple society that produces like one commodity, which is
Speaker 7: like just enough commodities, separaties in the station. And you know,
Speaker 7: if you think about sort of like Marx, right, Marx
Speaker 7: is also a sociologist, right. He cares about you know,
Speaker 7: like like the actual point of production, right, he cares
Speaker 7: about the production process. He cares about the sort of
Speaker 7: like like that there are he cares that there are
Speaker 7: workers that are doing the production. He cares about the
Speaker 7: sort of historical conditions that created you know, these these things.
Speaker 7: Don't like as Kamala Harris's mom, this is actually very important.
Speaker 7: The Kamala Harris you didn't just follow out of the
Speaker 7: coconut tree exist in the context of all that came
Speaker 7: before you. That's Kamala Harris's mom, who is like, I think,
Speaker 7: a better Marxist than Noel Harris's and Harris will occasionally,
Speaker 7: like Donald Harris will occasionally gesture to this one. He'd
Speaker 7: be like, well, yeah, obviously this is all determined by
Speaker 7: historical conditions, and then he just has no interest in
Speaker 7: ever pursuing any of that. He's just like, yeah, this
Speaker 7: is we left a later book that he never wrote.
Speaker 7: And what you get to is is this this is
Speaker 7: like a real issue with sort of Postkansianism is that
Speaker 7: it doesn't have like Marxism at least in theory, has
Speaker 7: politics embedded into it. Postkansianism kind of doesn't it. Just
Speaker 7: like I have a lot of friends who I like,
Speaker 7: I deeply care about who are Postkansians, right, they are
Speaker 7: political like you know, they're they're leftists because they're leftists, right,
Speaker 7: Like it's it's not something that's an automatic generation of
Speaker 7: your theory, and you know you can kind of write
Speaker 7: it that way, right, Like this is the thing about
Speaker 7: Frederick Lee, who's the sort of the a lot of
Speaker 7: my like a lot of the Traine writers people sort
Speaker 7: of like learn economics from, like I mean indirectly, but
Speaker 7: like through his book. But you know Lee Lee is
Speaker 7: a committed anarchist and that shows up in his work.
Speaker 7: But he has to like add that in pure like
Speaker 7: pure Sarraffa by itself, you could theoretically like run any
Speaker 7: form of government you want with it.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 7: And I think I've been vindicated in this whole process
Speaker 7: because Donald Harris writes a couple more books on one
Speaker 7: of which is a book that is like commissioned by
Speaker 7: the Jamaican government.
Speaker 3: Okay, he's Jamaican descent or he was born himself directly
Speaker 3: in Jamaica, you.
Speaker 7: Know, Like he's just like he's he's Jamaica and he
Speaker 7: lives in Jamaica. Okay, I think I think he currently
Speaker 7: lives in Jamaica.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure. Yeah, And this came to the US
Speaker 3: for his graduate like for his academic yeah.
Speaker 2: One.
Speaker 7: One he lived in the US for a long time
Speaker 7: because he was at Stamford, but then he kind of
Speaker 7: like left and one I think went back at Jamaica.
Speaker 3: I'm good. I'm going to read.
Speaker 7: So he wrote a book called a Growth This is
Speaker 7: in twenty eleven, A Growth Inducement Strategy for Jamaica and
Speaker 7: the shortened term. I'm going to read you the bullet
Speaker 7: points under a section called guiding Principles. Okay, unleash entrepreneurial
Speaker 7: dynamism by unlocking latent wealth, tied up and idle assets.
Speaker 7: Infrastructure investments is catalysm for job creation through strengthening resiliency
Speaker 7: of the built in natural environments. Build an innovative and
Speaker 7: competitive modern economy of big and small firms by strengthening
Speaker 7: business networks and removing supply side constraints. Modernize and improve
Speaker 7: the efficiency of government. Social inclusion through community renewal, expand
Speaker 7: as south agency in equity and proactive partnership between government
Speaker 7: and private sector ALSOSO A giant thing in this about crime.
Speaker 7: So what has happened is that these two people have
Speaker 7: circled back around and they now have the same politics
Speaker 7: which is like tough on crime, austerity.
Speaker 3: Public private partnership, fucking infrastructure spending. Yeah, they circled back around.
Speaker 7: It's funny because the person writing the economists was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 7: they actually have.
Speaker 3: Circles back around because they're a bouth.
Speaker 7: They're both concerned about wealth inequality, and this book is
Speaker 7: not concerned about wealth inequality at all. Like, that's not
Speaker 7: that's not what it's about. It's about like capital accumulation,
Speaker 7: and you know, it's sort of about distribution of surplus,
Speaker 7: but it's it doesn't it's concerned with the distribution of surplus.
Speaker 7: Is that Seraphan economics like doesn't have a fixed race
Speaker 7: like way for it to be distributed. It can be
Speaker 7: distributed in an enormous number of ways, and the trick
Speaker 7: is finding out how it's actually done.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a point in here.
Speaker 7: There's a point in this book too that like is
Speaker 7: the thing that's like really first struck me about it.
Speaker 7: Where he's talking about how he's talking about surplus value
Speaker 7: and he's talking about how this is an objective measure
Speaker 7: of exploitation. But then he goes and he says, contrary
Speaker 7: to vulgar readings, this does not actually indicate who deserves
Speaker 7: like it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not a moral argument about who should
Speaker 3: have the value that's and stolen. And this this right here, this,
Speaker 3: this is the roade.
Speaker 7: This is the road that is going to lead this
Speaker 7: man from a kind of interesting book about like the
Speaker 7: dynamics of economic growth and like building economic models and
Speaker 7: like using marks in theory to sort of make it
Speaker 7: work to straight up I writing investment documents for the
Speaker 7: Jamaican government.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like he seemed like it's very like in a way,
Speaker 3: like you know, there are looks like edmller Bands Stabs
Speaker 3: and Marxist right, but like it reminds me a lot
Speaker 3: of like the New Labor thing in the UK, you know,
Speaker 3: which grew out of a party which genuinely had a
Speaker 3: commitment to socialism and became like, yeah, this sort of
Speaker 3: very neoliberal like like sort of really like peak neoliberal
Speaker 3: kind of. Yeah. That there was some Kinesian influence, I guess,
Speaker 3: but certainly nothing the one would call combus or even
Speaker 3: really socialist.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, And I don't know, it's it's sad because
Speaker 7: it's like because the interesting thing about that.
Speaker 3: Was twenty twelve, he wrote The Growth in strategy fuck me, okay,
Speaker 3: in the game.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but he's still the game in the sense that
Speaker 7: he's doing like this is you know, reading that it
Speaker 7: very much felt like I was reading like a modern
Speaker 7: Chinese five year plan, exceptly it was like less weird slogans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it reads like a like a fucking
Speaker 3: like a new labor policy document, like a think tank.
Speaker 3: It's it's a lot of like a analyst guy think
Speaker 3: tank guy kind of talk right, like, which was extremely
Speaker 3: like it looks like he left stand for in the
Speaker 3: late nineties, which is when this ship was fucking everywhere, right,
Speaker 3: Like what is he called Joseph Stiglitz? Is that right?
Speaker 3: And like yeah, yeah, yeah, like yeah, this was the
Speaker 3: economic fucking theory of the day. You know, this was
Speaker 3: very popular then. But it is absolutely just like this.
Speaker 3: This is not like black Panther, black panther inflected Marxism.
Speaker 3: This is not what I trists by the economists here.
Speaker 7: Yeah, no, this is this is this is something genuinely
Speaker 7: very sad because it doesn't have to go that. We
Speaker 7: know that it's possible to like do this kind of
Speaker 7: economics not be like this. Because Frederick Lee was an
Speaker 7: IWW member until the day he died, Like he's he's
Speaker 7: like out there to occupy given like like the first
Speaker 7: days of all Like he's out there, like there are
Speaker 7: videos of him giving speeches to crowds that occupy right,
Speaker 7: like you don't have to do this, but he did.
Speaker 7: And this is also like, you know, I think that
Speaker 7: this kind of political trajectory is kind of also you
Speaker 7: can see in it like how his child, even though
Speaker 7: he wasn't in her life, Munch is going to end
Speaker 7: up as the person she is. And I think that's
Speaker 7: why that's my final conclusion from this is he's.
Speaker 3: Not a Marxist and him and his child are libs. Yeah,
Speaker 3: these are things that Tanya does to motherfucker. They you
Speaker 3: start to hang out with a bunch of other rich
Speaker 3: people who have ten and you'd be in too identify
Speaker 3: with him and.
Speaker 7: Yeah, stripped you away from who you Yeah, so this
Speaker 7: has been It could happen here. Don't become a daughter
Speaker 7: and capitalist bastard in.
Speaker 3: Your old age, yeah or your young age. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. My name
Speaker 2: is Sharene and today is the first part of a
Speaker 2: two part series where I'm going to give you all
Speaker 2: a general Palestine update and also talk about how Joe
Speaker 2: Biden's legacy that will endure long after the end of
Speaker 2: his shitty presidency and his life is first and foremost
Speaker 2: the genocide in Gaza. On Sunday, July twenty first, Biden
Speaker 2: said that he was ending his presidential re election campaign
Speaker 2: after a week's pressure from party officials, donors, Democratic Congress members, voters,
Speaker 2: and pro Palestinian organizers and advocacy groups. This move comes
Speaker 2: months after organizers led a nationwide campaign to vote uncommitted
Speaker 2: during Democratic primary elections to push Biden to end his
Speaker 2: unconditional support for Israel during his genocide in Gaza or
Speaker 2: risk losing their vote in the general election. In several states,
Speaker 2: uncommitted or no preference received far more votes than other
Speaker 2: candidates challenging Biden, and so Biden dropped out surprise. Ever
Speaker 2: since his announcement to withdraw, Democratic politicians and commentators in
Speaker 2: the US have come out to heat praise and laud
Speaker 2: the president's character, and draw attention to all his contributions
Speaker 2: over the years. None of that matters to me, though,
Speaker 2: and it shouldn't matter to you, because for me and
Speaker 2: many others, Biden will be remembered for nothing else than
Speaker 2: his support for Israeli crimes. But let's hear from our
Speaker 2: us ridiculous public servants, shall we. Senate Majority leader Chuck
Speaker 2: Schumer said, Joe Biden has not only been a great
Speaker 2: president and a great legislative leader, but he's truly an
Speaker 2: amazing human being. His decision, of course, was not easy,
Speaker 2: but he once again put his country, his party, and
Speaker 2: our future first. House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries called the
Speaker 2: president quote one of the most accomplished and consequential leaders
Speaker 2: in American history. Representative Maxine Waters called Biden a kind
Speaker 2: and decent man. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised his vision,
Speaker 2: values and leadership. She said in a statement, his legacy
Speaker 2: of vision, values in leadership make him one of the
Speaker 2: most consequential presidents in American history. She also called Biden
Speaker 2: quote a patriotic American who has always put our country first.
Speaker 2: I did find it a little funny that multiple people
Speaker 2: described Biden as consequential, because out of all the words
Speaker 2: you can choose to describe him, that one doesn't necess
Speaker 2: Saily screamed positive to me, so that did amuse me
Speaker 2: quite a bit. Former President Barack Obama issued a statement
Speaker 2: acknowledging the difficulty of the decision that Biden faced.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: For him to look at the political landscape and decide
Speaker 2: that he should pass the torch to a new nominee
Speaker 2: is surely one of the toughest in his life. But
Speaker 2: I know he wouldn't make this decision unless he believed
Speaker 2: it was right for America. It's a testament to Joe
Speaker 2: Biden's love of country, an historic example of a genuine
Speaker 2: public servant once again putting the interests of the American
Speaker 2: people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders
Speaker 2: will do well to follow. Gandhi Audiada. Democratic governors also
Speaker 2: latted Biden. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called him a great
Speaker 2: public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes
Speaker 2: to defeat Donald Trump. California Governor Gavin Newsom thanked Biden,
Speaker 2: calling him a quote extraordinary history making president. Kentucky Governor
Speaker 2: Andy Basheer said Biden's decision is quote in the best
Speaker 2: interest of our country and our party. Several Democrats who
Speaker 2: had publicly called on Biden to step aside also issued
Speaker 2: statements praising the president's decision. Representative Jerry Nadler said, Joe's
Speaker 2: announcement today reflects what we've known all along. He is
Speaker 2: an American patriot who was willing to put America's interests
Speaker 2: over his own. Senator SHIROD. Brown from Ohio thanked Biden
Speaker 2: for his years of committed service, and his son Hunter
Speaker 2: Biden issued a statement lauding his father as a selfless leader,
Speaker 2: writing he is unique in public life today in that
Speaker 2: there is no distance between Joe Biden the man and
Speaker 2: Joe Biden the public servant of the last fifty four years. Well, yikes.
Speaker 2: I also wanted to mention an end with how his wife,
Speaker 2: the First Lady Joe Biden responded, which was with a
Speaker 2: heart's emoji in response to his announcement on X. But
Speaker 2: while political leaders and I guess his family showered Biden
Speaker 2: with compliments, bombs continued to rain down on Gaza, killing
Speaker 2: dozens to add on to the nearly forty thousand Palestinians
Speaker 2: killed and sparking another wave of mass displacement in ran Yunis.
Speaker 2: For many Palestinian rights advocates, the carnage and abuses in
Speaker 2: Gaza will define Biden's place in history books, especially as
Speaker 2: the US remains steadfast in its support of Israel's onslaught
Speaker 2: on the Palestinian land. Nadine Kaswani, an organizer with the
Speaker 2: Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, said, nine months of
Speaker 2: saying genocide Joe has got to go, he finally got
Speaker 2: the message, but not before committing a heinous genocide against
Speaker 2: the Palestinian people. I bet Eyub, the executive director of
Speaker 2: the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee the ADC, said He'll
Speaker 2: be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured and
Speaker 2: displaced in Gaza. There is no way around it. Genocide
Speaker 2: Joe is what he's going to be remembered as. And
Speaker 2: before continuing to shit on Biden, because trust me, I
Speaker 2: would love to do that, let's talk about what is
Speaker 2: currently happening in Gaza since Israel's genocide Gaza started on
Speaker 2: October seventh, while really escalated starting October seventh, because the
Speaker 2: genocide of the Palestinian people has been ongoing since Israel's
Speaker 2: inception in nineteen forty eight. But since October seventh and
Speaker 2: well before that, Biden has offered the government of Israeli
Speaker 2: Prime Minister Benjamin and Yahoo unconditional military and diplomatic support.
Speaker 2: Only once did Biden withhold a shipment of bombs to
Speaker 2: Israel over humanitarian concerns, and even then he released part
Speaker 2: of that cargo a couple months later amid pressure from
Speaker 2: n Yahoo. Israel's genocide meanwhile has killed at least thirty
Speaker 2: nine thousand Palestinians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and fueled a
Speaker 2: man made famine, and also has destroyed nearly all of
Speaker 2: the territory. United Nations experts and other observers have outright
Speaker 2: called what is happening in Gaza as a textbook case
Speaker 2: of genocide, and the cumulative effects of Israel's genocide could
Speaker 2: mean that the true death toll is much much more.
Speaker 2: Ordering to a study recently published from the journal Lancet,
Speaker 2: the death toll could reach more than one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty six thousand people. The study pointed out that the
Speaker 2: death toll is likely higher because the official death toll
Speaker 2: does not take into account the thousands of dead buried
Speaker 2: under rubble and indirect deaths due to destruction of health facilities,
Speaker 2: food distribution systems, and other public infrastructure. Conflicts have indirect
Speaker 2: health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, the study said,
Speaker 2: and even if the God's genocide ends immediately, it will
Speaker 2: continue to cause many indirect deaths in the coming months
Speaker 2: and years through things like disease. The study said. The
Speaker 2: death toll is expected to be far larger given that
Speaker 2: much of God's infrastructure has been destroyed. There are shortages
Speaker 2: of food, water, shelter medicine. The United Nations Relief and
Speaker 2: Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRA has also seen its
Speaker 2: funding cut. Israel's relentless bombs has collapsed Gaza's health care infrastructure,
Speaker 2: and the destruction of Gaza's water infrastructure in particular is
Speaker 2: more than just a little significant. One reason for this
Speaker 2: is that Israel just reintroduced polio to Palestinians, but of
Speaker 2: course Israel's only providing vaccinations to the Israeli army, and
Speaker 2: this is according to Herot's Polio is a fecal oral
Speaker 2: disease and infections can be linked to contaminated and poor
Speaker 2: sewage systems, and it can lead to paralysis. On June
Speaker 2: twenty third, twenty twenty four, samples were collected from two
Speaker 2: environmental surveillance sites in kan Uness and Dead and Badach.
Speaker 2: Polio variant two was found in six wastewater samples. According
Speaker 2: to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, currently only sixteen of
Speaker 2: the thirty six hospitals are partially functional and forty five
Speaker 2: out of one hundred and five primary health care facilities
Speaker 2: are operational. The impact on health systems insecurity, in excessive ability,
Speaker 2: population displacement, and the shortages of medical supplies, coupled with
Speaker 2: poor quality of water and weakened sanitation, have contributed to
Speaker 2: routine immunization rates and an increased risk of many vaccine
Speaker 2: preventable diseases, including polio. The World Health Organization considers there
Speaker 2: to be a high risk of spread of polio within
Speaker 2: Gaza and internationally, particularly given the impact that the current
Speaker 2: genocide continues to have on public health services, and even
Speaker 2: if vaccines were able to be given to Palestinians in Gaza,
Speaker 2: the continued bombing and a decimated health care system, coupled
Speaker 2: with the intentional devastation of water and sanitation infrastructure, would
Speaker 2: render the vaccines close to useless without an immediate ceasefire.
Speaker 2: The threat from polio being reintroduced in Gaza will disproportionately
Speaker 2: affect Palestinian babies and eventually Israeli babies as well. In
Speaker 2: November twenty twenty three, the World Health Organization warn Israel
Speaker 2: of diseases spreading due to Israel's indiscriminate bombing and attack
Speaker 2: on health care infrastructure. And then on July twenty second,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, three days after the news came out
Speaker 2: about polio being reintroduced to Gaza by Israel, the Israeli
Speaker 2: Parliament voted to declare UNRA a terrorist organization and UNRA
Speaker 2: is a key partner in vaccine campaign distribution. With this
Speaker 2: and with many other things, Israel has shown its genocidal
Speaker 2: intent calculating the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, because
Speaker 2: if there is any war on Gaza, it's an epidemiological war,
Speaker 2: weaponizing health and medicine and the incidents, distribution and control
Speaker 2: of disease. Back to the Lancet study, it said, quote
Speaker 2: in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to
Speaker 2: fifteen times the number of direct deaths, and after they
Speaker 2: applied a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per wark
Speaker 2: undirect death, they said it is not implausible to estimate
Speaker 2: that up to one hundred and eighty six thousand or
Speaker 2: even more deaths could be attributable to the Gaza quote
Speaker 2: unquote war. Such a number would represent almost eight percent
Speaker 2: of Gaza's pre war population of two point three million people,
Speaker 2: half of which, may I remind you, are children. The
Speaker 2: Lancet study also noted that Israeli intelligence services, the UN,
Speaker 2: and the World Health Organization all agree that claims of
Speaker 2: data fabrication leveled against Palestinian authorities in Gaza over its
Speaker 2: death toll in particular, are implausible. It pointed out that
Speaker 2: the toll is likely much higher because the destruction of
Speaker 2: infrastructure in Gaza has made it extremely difficult to maintain
Speaker 2: account that is not lower than the actual death toll.
Speaker 2: It said, quote Documenting the true scale is crucial for
Speaker 2: ensuring historical accountability and acknowledging the full cost of the war.
Speaker 2: It is also a legal requirement. The STU pointed out
Speaker 2: that the International Court of Justice said interim rulings in
Speaker 2: January in a genocide case brought against Israel that it
Speaker 2: needs to quote take effective measures to prevent the destruction
Speaker 2: and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of
Speaker 2: acts under the Genocide Convention. Before we continue on, let's
Speaker 2: take our first break and we'll be right back, and
Speaker 2: we'rebec I was talking about the International Court of Justice earlier,
Speaker 2: and speaking of the International Court of Justice. On July nineteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, the ICJ said Israel's presence in the
Speaker 2: Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel's policies in the
Speaker 2: occupied Palestinian Territory amount to annexation. It ruled that Israel's
Speaker 2: continued presence in the occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and
Speaker 2: should come to an end as quote rapidly as possible.
Speaker 2: The judges pointed to a why list of policies, including
Speaker 2: the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West
Speaker 2: Bank in East Jerusalem, the use of the area's natural resources,
Speaker 2: the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands, and
Speaker 2: discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated
Speaker 2: international law. As of July twenty twenty four, and since October,
Speaker 2: Israel has killed one hundred and forty three Palestinian children
Speaker 2: in the West Bank on Palestinian land that is occupied
Speaker 2: by Israel. Because since Israel began committing genocide in Gaza
Speaker 2: over nine months ago. It has been attacking and killing
Speaker 2: hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank, including these one
Speaker 2: hundred and forty three children. UNICEF reported that Israel has
Speaker 2: killed an average of one Palestinian child every two days
Speaker 2: in the West Bank. UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said,
Speaker 2: we are seeing frequent allegations of Palestinian children being detained
Speaker 2: on their way home from school or shot while walking
Speaker 2: on the streets. This report by UNICEF came out just
Speaker 2: days after the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel
Speaker 2: is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and that
Speaker 2: its occupation of the West Bank is illegal and must end.
Speaker 2: The Court went on to say that Israel has no
Speaker 2: right to sovereignty in any of its territories and it
Speaker 2: is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force, as
Speaker 2: well as impeding Palestinian's right to self determination. It said
Speaker 2: that other nations were obliged not to quote render aid
Speaker 2: or assistance in maintaining Israel's presence in the territory. It
Speaker 2: said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and existing settlements
Speaker 2: must be removed. And this is all according to a
Speaker 2: summary of the more than eighty page opinion read out
Speaker 2: by the Court President Nawaf Saddam, The Court said, Israel's
Speaker 2: abuse of its status as the occupying power renders its
Speaker 2: presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful Israeli settlements in
Speaker 2: the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the regime associated
Speaker 2: with them have established and are being maintained in violation
Speaker 2: of international law. Mind You, Israeli settlements in the West
Speaker 2: Bank and East Jerusalem have always been illegal under international law,
Speaker 2: but that has never stopped Israel from continuing to expand
Speaker 2: its illegal settlements. Since nineteen sixty seven, when the borders
Speaker 2: of what is currently seen its occupied Palestine, which are
Speaker 2: the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, were established,
Speaker 2: Israel has since built settlements in the West Bank and
Speaker 2: East Jerusalem and steadily expanded on them. It also had
Speaker 2: settlements in Gaza before a two thousand and five withdrawal.
Speaker 2: And I said what is currently seen its occupied Palestine
Speaker 2: because in reality, the whole of Israel is occupied Palestine.
Speaker 2: But as far as the UN and the majority of
Speaker 2: the international community goes, they consider the Palestinian territory as
Speaker 2: defined in nineteen sixty seven as Israeli occupied Palestinian Foreign
Speaker 2: Minister Riyad Maniki told reporters in The Hague that the
Speaker 2: ruling signaled a quote watershed moment for Palestine, for justice
Speaker 2: and for international law. He said the ICJ fulfilled its
Speaker 2: legal and moral duties with this historic ruling. All states
Speaker 2: must now uphold their clear obligations. No aid, no assistance,
Speaker 2: no complicity, no money, no arms, no trade, no nothing,
Speaker 2: no actions of any kind to support Israel's illegal occupation.
Speaker 2: Riad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said the
Speaker 2: ruling was quote a significant step in the direction of
Speaker 2: ending the occupation and attaining the inalienable rights of the
Speaker 2: Palestinian people, including their right to self determination, the statehood
Speaker 2: and the right of return. The right to return for
Speaker 2: those who don't know, is it demands that Palestinians who
Speaker 2: were forced from their homes in the nineteen forty eight
Speaker 2: Nekba as well as the nineteen sixty seven Nexa, be
Speaker 2: allowed to return to them. Monsour said his team would
Speaker 2: study the entire opinion and dissect every sentence. We will
Speaker 2: consult with an army of friends at the UN and
Speaker 2: in all corners of the globe. We will produce a
Speaker 2: masterpiece of a resolution at the UN General Assembly and
Speaker 2: then Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the opinion as
Speaker 2: fundamentally wrong and one sided. Nhennyahu's office issued a statement
Speaker 2: in which it called the ruling a decision of lies
Speaker 2: that distorted the truth and asserted that the Jewish people
Speaker 2: are not occupiers in their own land. Jeffrey NICs, a
Speaker 2: human rights barrister, told El Jazeira that it will be
Speaker 2: hard for world leaders to completely disregard the ICJ ruling,
Speaker 2: even though it is non binding. This is one part
Speaker 2: of the legal system saying enough is enough, he said.
Speaker 2: He also said it would be difficult for the interested, informed,
Speaker 2: concerned public not to say its time is reel put
Speaker 2: its house in order. El Jazeera's senior political analyst, Marwan
Speaker 2: Dishada said there is a lot of room for hope
Speaker 2: that this ruling will support a movement, an international movement
Speaker 2: across the board in the West and elsewhere in the world,
Speaker 2: in favor of more sanctions, more pressure on Western governments
Speaker 2: to put more pressure on Israel. In a separate case
Speaker 2: brought by South Africa, the ICJ is also considering allegations
Speaker 2: that Israel's committing genocide into war on Gaza. And yes,
Speaker 2: a preliminary ruling has been made in that case, with
Speaker 2: the court ordering Israel to prevent and punish incitement to
Speaker 2: genocide and to increase its provisions of humanitarian aid, and
Speaker 2: of course Israel has done nothing to do this. In May,
Speaker 2: the ICJ had also ordered Israel to halt its offensive
Speaker 2: on Rapah, the border city in southern Gaza, citing immense
Speaker 2: risk to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians taking shelter there.
Speaker 2: But Israel has continued its attacks on Gaza, including Raphah,
Speaker 2: defiance of the UN court. So it's clear Israel doesn't
Speaker 2: give a shit about international law. But it's also clear
Speaker 2: that no one is doing anything to actually stop them
Speaker 2: from continuing their genocide on the Palestinian people. Before I forget,
Speaker 2: let's take our second break here and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Let's go back to abed Au, the executive director of
Speaker 2: the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, who said Biden will
Speaker 2: be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured and
Speaker 2: displaced in Gaza.
Speaker 3: That genocide.
Speaker 2: Joe is what he's going to be remembered as he
Speaker 2: told Al Jazeera that despite Biden's domestic achievements, the president
Speaker 2: will rank among the worst in US history due to
Speaker 2: his unconditional support for Israel. The US Campaign for Palestinian
Speaker 2: Rights the USCPR, echoed that comment, saying nothing will erase
Speaker 2: the fact that Biden's legacy is and always will be genocide,
Speaker 2: and the US President has been an annoyingly loyal supporter
Speaker 2: of Israel throughout his too many decades too long political career.
Speaker 2: Biden frequently calls himself a Zionist proudly and argues that
Speaker 2: Jews across the world would not be safe without Israel.
Speaker 2: He infamously said in June nineteen eighty six, over thirty
Speaker 2: seven years ago, when Biden was just a young chap
Speaker 2: of forty three, that quote. Were there not in Israel,
Speaker 2: the United States of America would have to invent an
Speaker 2: Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United
Speaker 2: States would have to go out and invent in Israel.
Speaker 2: I want to just throw it out there that even
Speaker 2: in this quote, Israel exists to protect America's interest in
Speaker 2: the region, not to protect the Jewish population, because it
Speaker 2: never has done that in the first place.
Speaker 3: But I digress.
Speaker 2: Biden put his worldview into policy during his presidency as
Speaker 2: he pushed on with form Represident Trump's pro Israel doctrine.
Speaker 2: Biden kept US embassy in Jerusalem, and he refused to
Speaker 2: reverse the Trump era decision to recognize Israel's claims to
Speaker 2: the occupied Goal and heights in Syria. He also aggressively
Speaker 2: pursued formal ties between Israel and Arab states, a goal
Speaker 2: that Trump advanced with the twenty twenty Abraham Accords. That
Speaker 2: push for normalization, however, came without progress toward the recognition
Speaker 2: of an independent Palestinian state or the dismantling of the
Speaker 2: systemic anti Palestinian discrimination that has existed since the jump
Speaker 2: a Ka apartheid. And then the outbreak for the genocide
Speaker 2: in Gaza further underscored Biden's pro Israel policies, and then
Speaker 2: mere weeks after October seventh, Biden traveled to Israel and
Speaker 2: publicly embraced n Yahou in what many critics described as
Speaker 2: a bear hug, and that sign of friendliness was widely
Speaker 2: understood to be an endorsement of Natanyahu's response in Gaza.
Speaker 2: Even early in the conflict, human rights groups accused Israel
Speaker 2: of horrific violations rising to the level of genocide, a
Speaker 2: push to destroy the Palestinian people, and within the first
Speaker 2: week alone, the Israeli military said it had unleashed twenty
Speaker 2: thousand strikes across Gaza, a strip of land. May I
Speaker 2: remind you that is roughly the size of Las Vegas.
Speaker 2: According to ap WS January twenty twenty four, the Israeli
Speaker 2: military campaign in Gaza now sits among the deadliest and
Speaker 2: most destructive in modern history. In just over two months,
Speaker 2: researchers said that the offensive caused more destruction than the
Speaker 2: raising of Sirius Aleppo between twenty twelve and twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: Ukraine's Mariupil, or proportionally the Allied bombing of Germany in
Speaker 2: World War II. Israel has killed more civilians than the
Speaker 2: US led coalition did in its three year campaign against Isis.
Speaker 2: An analysis was done of data from the Copernicus Sentinel
Speaker 2: I satellite by Corey Scherr of the Kuni Graduate Center
Speaker 2: and Jaman Vanderhoek of Oregon State University, both of whom
Speaker 2: are experts in mapping damage during wartime. Corey Scherr said
Speaker 2: Gaza is now a different color from space, it's a
Speaker 2: different texture, and he has worked with Vanderhoek to map
Speaker 2: destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol. They
Speaker 2: say the visible damage in Gaza is worse than they
Speaker 2: have found in both places. But how does the destruction
Speaker 2: of Gaza stack up historically? By some measures, destruction in
Speaker 2: Gaza has outpaced the Allied bombings of Germany during World
Speaker 2: War II. According to Robert Pape, a US military historian,
Speaker 2: between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty five, the Allies
Speaker 2: attacked fifty one major German cities and towns, destroying about
Speaker 2: forty to fifty percent of their urban areas. Pape said
Speaker 2: that this amount to ten percent of buildings across Germany,
Speaker 2: compared to the thirty three percent across Gaza, a densely
Speaker 2: populated territory of just one hundred and forty square miles.
Speaker 2: Pape said Gaza is one of the most intense civilian
Speaker 2: punishment campaigns in history. It now sits comfortably at the
Speaker 2: top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns.
Speaker 3: Ever.
Speaker 2: The US led coalition's twenty seventeen assault to expel the
Speaker 2: Islamic State group from the Iraqi city of Mosul was
Speaker 2: considered at the time one of the most intense attacks
Speaker 2: on a city in generations. That nine month battle killed
Speaker 2: around ten thousand civilians, a third of them from coalition bombardment,
Speaker 2: according to an Associated Press investigation at the time. During
Speaker 2: the twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen campaign to be Isis
Speaker 2: in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly fifteen thousand strikes
Speaker 2: across the country, according to air Wars, a London based
Speaker 2: independent group that tracks recent conflicts by comparison. The Israeli
Speaker 2: military said itself that in a single week in January,
Speaker 2: it conducted twenty two thousand strikes in Gaza. Again, compared
Speaker 2: that to the fifteen thousand in the three years the
Speaker 2: US was fighting Isis three years compared to one week.
Speaker 2: One week had more strikes in Gaza than three years
Speaker 2: in Iraq. To further put it in perspective about how
Speaker 2: alarming this is from the jump that what is happening
Speaker 2: is not fucking normal warfare and instead it is genocide.
Speaker 2: On October twelfth, twenty twenty three, merely days after October seventh,
Speaker 2: the Israeli air force had dropped about six thousand bombs
Speaker 2: throughout the Gaza Strip. At the time, military experts stated
Speaker 2: that the number of strikes carried out by the IDF
Speaker 2: since the outbreak of hostilities was quote striking, and it
Speaker 2: said it was greater in number than the US military
Speaker 2: used in the month of the campaign against ISIS in
Speaker 2: Iraq in Syria. Mark Duralsko, a Dutch military adviser and
Speaker 2: former UN war crimes investigator in Libya, said in less
Speaker 2: than a week, Israel dropped the number of bombs that
Speaker 2: the US dropped in Afghanistan in a year, in a
Speaker 2: much smaller and denser area where the margin of error increases.
Speaker 2: During the most intense year of the American fighting in Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: a little more than seven thousand, four hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: three bombs were dropped during the entire war in Libya,
Speaker 2: NATO reported dropping more than seventy six hundred bombs and
Speaker 2: missiles from aircraft and not even a month after October seventh.
Speaker 2: On November two, twenty twenty three, Euromed Human Rights Monitor
Speaker 2: said in a press release that Israel had dropped more
Speaker 2: than twenty five thousand tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip,
Speaker 2: equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The press release said that
Speaker 2: due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the
Speaker 2: explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as
Speaker 2: a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of
Speaker 2: the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb
Speaker 2: dropped in Hiroshima, noting that the area of the Japanese
Speaker 2: city is nine hundred square kilometers, while the area of
Speaker 2: Gaza does not even exceed three hundred and sixty square kilometers.
Speaker 2: The rights group's statement underlines that Israel uses bombs with
Speaker 2: huge destructive power, some of which range from one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty to one thousand kilograms, and they cited a
Speaker 2: statement at the time in November by Israeli war Minister
Speaker 2: Yoev Galant that declared that more than ten thousand bombs
Speaker 2: had been dropped on Gaza City alone and then Israel's
Speaker 2: use of internationally banned weapons in its attacks on the
Speaker 2: Gaza Strip has been documented, said EUROMED Monitor, especially the
Speaker 2: use of cluster and phosphorus bombs, which are waxy, toxic
Speaker 2: substances that react quickly to oxygen and cause severe sound,
Speaker 2: second and third degree burns. The Euromed Monitor team also
Speaker 2: documented injuries among Gossins due to Israeli airstrikes that are
Speaker 2: similar to those caused by the aforementioned cluster bombs. These small,
Speaker 2: high explosive bombs cause penetrating shrapnel, wounds and explosions inside
Speaker 2: the body, leaving victims with severe burns that lead to
Speaker 2: skin melting off and sometimes to death. Fragments from these
Speaker 2: bombs cause unusual swelling and poisoning of the body, plus
Speaker 2: internal injuries from transparent fragments that do not even appear
Speaker 2: in X rays. Euromed Monitor said Israel's use of highly
Speaker 2: explosive bombs in densely populated areas poses the single greatest
Speaker 2: threat to civilians and modern armed conflicts, and explains the
Speaker 2: complete leveling of residential neighborhoods in Gaza and the overall
Speaker 2: severity of the widespread devastation there. According to euromed Monitor,
Speaker 2: which is a Geneva based human rights organization, the Israeli
Speaker 2: Army as admitted to bombing over twelve thousand targets in
Speaker 2: the Gaza Strip, with a recordality of bombs exceeding ten
Speaker 2: kilograms of explosives per individual. It highlighted that the weight
Speaker 2: of the nuclear bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima
Speaker 2: and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War
Speaker 2: II in August of nineteen forty five was estimated to
Speaker 2: be about fifteen thousand tons of explosives. The Rights organization
Speaker 2: further stressed that Israel's destructive and arbitrary attacks are in
Speaker 2: violation of international humanitarian law, which stipulates that the protection
Speaker 2: of civilians is obligatory in all cases and under any circumstances,
Speaker 2: and that killing civilians is considered a war crime in
Speaker 2: both international and non international armed conflicts and may amount
Speaker 2: to a crime against humanity. The Hague Conventions of eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine and nineteen oh seven and the nineteen forty
Speaker 2: nine Geneva Convention both regulates fundamental human rights in times
Speaker 2: of war to prevent lethal health effects from weapons that
Speaker 2: are prohibited by international law, some of which because they
Speaker 2: have the potential to cause quote unquote genocide. According to
Speaker 2: Article twenty five of the Hague Regulations relating to the
Speaker 2: Laws and Customs of Land Warfare, quote, the attack or
Speaker 2: bombardment by whatever means of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings
Speaker 2: which are undefended is prohibited, So think of all of
Speaker 2: that as you listen to this next bit. Biden has
Speaker 2: since authorized continuous arms transfers and more than fourteen billion
Speaker 2: dollars in additional aid to sustain Israel's Gaza offensive. Moreover,
Speaker 2: Biden's administration has vetoed three UN Security Council proposals that
Speaker 2: would have called for a ceasefire. Hatem Abudeya, the chair
Speaker 2: of the US Palestinian Community Network, said Biden will be
Speaker 2: remembered above all for enabling Israel's crimes against humanity.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: He could have turned and the tap of money and
Speaker 2: weapons off in October, but he allowed this genocide to happen.
Speaker 2: He is complicit and that's what will be written on
Speaker 2: his tombstone. And with that, we'll be continuing this discussion
Speaker 2: in the next episode, where we will talk about the
Speaker 2: relationship between Biden and Palestinians and will also cover to
Speaker 2: and Yahoo's deranged speech that he gave in Congress last week.
Speaker 2: Until then, pre Palestine, Hello and welcome back to it
Speaker 2: could happen here. My name is Sharene Still, and today
Speaker 2: is part two of our two part series about a
Speaker 2: Palestine update as well as a testament as to why
Speaker 2: Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. In the last episode,
Speaker 2: we talked about the amount of weapons that Biden had
Speaker 2: has been sending to Israel and what this destruction has caused,
Speaker 2: as well as the reactions to his withdrawal from his campaign.
Speaker 2: So I want to get into a brief history of
Speaker 2: Biden's history and politics, as well as what his relationship
Speaker 2: has been like with Palestinians in general. So let's start
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy. Following his entry into politics in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 2: Biden quickly rose from local to national prominence, mounting a
Speaker 2: successful dark horse campaign to represent Delaware in the US
Speaker 2: Senate in nineteen seventy two. After nearly four decades in Congress,
Speaker 2: he became vice president under Barack Obama, and in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, he won the presidency himself. So the current
Speaker 2: president does not hail from a political dynasty, and he
Speaker 2: is not an exceptional orator. His success in politics is
Speaker 2: often credited to his interpersonal skills and his ability to
Speaker 2: project empathy. That sense of compassion, however, has never extended
Speaker 2: to Palestinians. After Biden's announcement of withdrawing from the race,
Speaker 2: Jewish Voice for Peace Action said in a statement quote,
Speaker 2: for nine and a half months, President Biden has funded
Speaker 2: and armed the brutal Israeli genocide of Palestinians and Gaza,
Speaker 2: making the US directly complicit in the killing of at
Speaker 2: least thirty nine thousand people, including over fifteen thousand children.
Speaker 2: Americans have watched in horror and outrage as Biden sent
Speaker 2: to the Israeli government the weapons it used to wipe
Speaker 2: out entire generations of Palestinian families, to destroy hospitals, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, universities,
Speaker 2: refugee camps, homes, and Gaza's entire healthcare system and electricity
Speaker 2: and water grids, and beyond policy. Even Biden's rhetoric at
Speaker 2: times seemed dismissive of Israeli atrocities and Palestinian suffering. Last October,
Speaker 2: he said, I have no notion that the Palestinians telling
Speaker 2: the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure
Speaker 2: innocens have been killed, and it's the price of waging
Speaker 2: a war. It's terrible, fucking terrible. But that stance has
Speaker 2: clearly caused Biden issues both domestically and abroad. Even before
Speaker 2: Biden delivered a disastrous debate performance on June twenty seventh,
Speaker 2: he had started to trail Trump in public opinion polls.
Speaker 2: Parts of his Democratic base, including young people, progressives, Arabs,
Speaker 2: and Muslims, voiced for months their frustration and anger over
Speaker 2: Biden's support for Israel. Groups like the USCPR the US
Speaker 2: Campaign for Palaicing in Rights argued that Biden's age and
Speaker 2: debate performance were only one factor in the pressure that
Speaker 2: forced him from the presidential race. I'm going to read
Speaker 2: their statement because it's quite good quote. Nothing will erase
Speaker 2: the fact that Biden's legacy is and always will be genocide.
Speaker 2: It was not Biden's failed debate that showed he is
Speaker 2: unfit to lead. It was the tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: bombs he sent to kill Palestinian families. It was his callous,
Speaker 2: dystopian disregard for Palestinian lives as he ate an ice
Speaker 2: cream cone while speaking of a potential ceasefire that he
Speaker 2: took no action to make Israel agree to. It was
Speaker 2: his condemnation of thousands of student protesters on college campuses
Speaker 2: demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Other commentators
Speaker 2: likewise argued that Biden failed to show enough concern for
Speaker 2: the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. Aaron David Miller, a
Speaker 2: veteran former US official, described the situation bluntly in an
Speaker 2: interview with The New Yorker in April. Do I think
Speaker 2: that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and
Speaker 2: empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for
Speaker 2: the Israelis. No, he doesn't, nor does he condicate. I
Speaker 2: don't think there's any doubt about that. Additionally, Biden's withdrawal
Speaker 2: from the race followed a particularly deadly month of violence
Speaker 2: in Gaza. Two Israeli airstrikes killed more than sixty people
Speaker 2: the week leading up to his withdrawal, including in Israeli
Speaker 2: designated quote unquote safe zones and at a UN's school
Speaker 2: where families were sheltering, and then the ICJ, the UN's
Speaker 2: top court, ruled only a few days before his withdrawal
Speaker 2: that Israel must end its illegal occupation of the West Bank,
Speaker 2: East Jerusalem and Gaza, removing settlers from the Palestinian territories,
Speaker 2: and pay reparations to Palestinians. The court also found that
Speaker 2: Palestinians under occupation suffer quote systemic discrimination based on race, religion,
Speaker 2: or ethnic origin, and it urged other states to stop
Speaker 2: supporting Israel in maintaining the current situation, which is also
Speaker 2: called apartheid. USCPR Action executive director Ahmad Abuznid in the
Speaker 2: group's statement, the millions of people who have mobilized in
Speaker 2: the streets and the voting booth demanding a permanent cease
Speaker 2: fire and an end to military funding to Israel have
Speaker 2: been clear. There is no going back to the status quo.
Speaker 2: It remains unclear how differently the next Democratic nominee might
Speaker 2: approach Israel. Harris, the most likely nominee as of now, obviously,
Speaker 2: has repeatedly asserted Israel's right to defend itself while expressing
Speaker 2: sympathy for Palestinians when calling for at least day six
Speaker 2: weeks ease fire in March, which is a little hypocritical.
Speaker 2: But she was also part of the Biden administration that
Speaker 2: sent all those bombs to Israel. She does not get
Speaker 2: a pass. She does not get to be distanced from that.
Speaker 2: And on the other side of things, Trump called Biden
Speaker 2: quote a very bad Palestinian during the first presidential debate
Speaker 2: on June twenty seventh for not helping Israel quote finish
Speaker 2: the job in God's During Trump's presidency, he moved the
Speaker 2: US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he recognized
Speaker 2: Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Syrian region of the Golan Heights,
Speaker 2: Whorrena Enyahu named a Jewish only settlement after Trump. But
Speaker 2: as the genocide in Gaza continues, organizers are quick to
Speaker 2: point out the Democratic Party's complicity as a whole. Hu
Speaker 2: Taifa Ahmad, spokesperson for the Abandoned Biden Campaign, said, we
Speaker 2: don't think this is solely a Joe Biden problem. This
Speaker 2: is an institutional problem. In an online statement, the group
Speaker 2: invited Harris to meet with its organizers. The Abandoned Biden
Speaker 2: Campaign was one of the first coalitions to call for
Speaker 2: Democrats to replace Biden. We were mocked, denigrated, spoken down to,
Speaker 2: he said, but organizers stood firm in their principles as
Speaker 2: they gained momentum, and they will continue to do so
Speaker 2: as the quote disastrous and criminal approach to Gaza continues
Speaker 2: under the Biden foreign policy, with officials like Anthony Blinken,
Speaker 2: Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGirk. Ahmed said, abandon Biden means
Speaker 2: abandoning this legacy and the decisions Biden made surrounding Israel.
Speaker 2: Given the Democratic Parties lionizing the president since his exit
Speaker 2: from the race, its becoming increasingly clear we may have
Speaker 2: to extend this to whoever becomes the next nominee. He
Speaker 2: indicated that they will continue to call on voters not
Speaker 2: to support any candidate who maintains Biden's blanket support for Israel.
Speaker 2: The Abandoned Biden Group released a statement referencing the June debate,
Speaker 2: during which Biden at times was noncoherent to say the least.
Speaker 2: It was largely his performance that triggered a wave of calls,
Speaker 2: including from prominent Democratic Congress members, for Biden to step aside.
Speaker 2: The statement read, it is clear that the DNC machinery
Speaker 2: pressure Joe Biden to step down only after losing confidence
Speaker 2: in his ability to lead due to his cognitive decline.
Speaker 2: This action came not when he was enthusiastically supporting and
Speaker 2: sponsoring the genocide in Gaza, but when his declining capabilities
Speaker 2: could no longer be concealed. Biden's departure from the race
Speaker 2: comes ahead of the party's upcoming national convention, which is
Speaker 2: slated for August nineteenth, through the twenty second in Chicago,
Speaker 2: and now with just under three months before the general election. Harris,
Speaker 2: whom the Clintons and other Democratic leaders have also endorsed,
Speaker 2: will need to gain the support of the majority of
Speaker 2: the nearly four thousand delegates to win the party's nomination.
Speaker 2: But for many voters pushing for an end to the
Speaker 2: Gaza genocide, the path forward remains the same. A coalition
Speaker 2: of more than one hundred and twenty five anti oppression
Speaker 2: organizations said in a statement that it is still preparing
Speaker 2: to gather tens of thousands to march on the Democratic
Speaker 2: National Convention on August nineteenth. The Coalition to March on
Speaker 2: the DNC said when it comes to the genocide and Gaza,
Speaker 2: there is no difference between Biden, Harris or any of
Speaker 2: the likely candidates for the nomination. They are all complicit.
Speaker 2: This protest is about more than the name at the
Speaker 2: top of a ballot. It is about stopping the most
Speaker 2: horrific crime against humanity that we have seen in this century.
Speaker 2: The statement said that the organizations that joined the coalition
Speaker 2: quote recognize the links between the Palestinian liberation struggle and
Speaker 2: their own struggles involving issues like police accountability, immigration, labor,
Speaker 2: reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA plus rights. They also recognize that
Speaker 2: Democratic Party higher ups often neglect their communities in favor
Speaker 2: of serving the rich and powerful. Quote those responsible for
Speaker 2: the genocide and not just Biden are often obstacles to
Speaker 2: progress in the same movements they pay lip service to
Speaker 2: in order to boost their campaigns. USCPR Action said the
Speaker 2: masses of millions of Americans protesting in the streets will
Speaker 2: certainly not wait for the next president. While US made
Speaker 2: bombs paid for with our tax dollars are dropping in Gaza.
Speaker 2: Regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee and candidate elect is,
Speaker 2: the next steps are clear. The group called on all
Speaker 2: members of Congress to disrupt or protest the Nyaho's plan
Speaker 2: addressed to Congress which happened last week, and they urge
Speaker 2: lawmakers to pass an arms embargo against Israel. The group said, quote,
Speaker 2: as Israel kills a Palestinian every four minutes and escalates
Speaker 2: regional war, justice could not wait another day. Let's take
Speaker 2: a break ry here before we jump into speech.
Speaker 3: That Nanyaho gave last week.
Speaker 5: So be right back.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 2: So I had written the bulk of both of these
Speaker 2: episodes before Prime Minision and Enya who gave his deranged
Speaker 2: speech at Congress last week, but of course I had
Speaker 2: to mention it because it was worse than I ever imagined. Actually,
Speaker 2: this speech was then Enya whose fourth appearance before the
Speaker 2: legislative body of Congress, and several high profile Democrats were
Speaker 2: noticeably absent, an apparent protest to Israel's war on Gaza
Speaker 2: and the humanitarians crisis that it sparked. Rashida Talib, though
Speaker 2: the representative of Michigan's twelfth congressional district, was present. She is,
Speaker 2: mayor remind you, the first Palestine American woman to serve
Speaker 2: in Congress and one of the first two Muslim women
Speaker 2: elected to Congress. She was there sitting during the Enyahu's speech,
Speaker 2: wearing a coffea and holding a sign that read war
Speaker 2: criminal on one side and guilty of genocide on the
Speaker 2: other side, and she was holding the sign up throughout
Speaker 2: his speech. July twenty fourth, the day of Nan Yahoo's speech,
Speaker 2: also happened to be her birthday. So if my blood
Speaker 2: was boiling thousands of miles away watching on my little
Speaker 2: computer screen, I could only imagine how she felt sitting
Speaker 2: in that room as everyone cheered and applauded and stood
Speaker 2: up for this war criminal who was spewing lie after
Speaker 2: lie in the entirety of his speech, as our tax
Speaker 2: dollars are supplying him with more weapons to kill innocent people.
Speaker 2: The almost certain Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris, was
Speaker 2: also not present. Though she would ordinarily preside over such
Speaker 2: a speech in Congress as vice president, her campaign cited
Speaker 2: scheduling conference. I guess she gave a speech in Indianapolis
Speaker 2: earlier that day. I also just wanted to highlight quickly
Speaker 2: the hypocrisy of the vast majority of Democrats right now,
Speaker 2: especially the ones that criticized the speech that the nayah
Speaker 2: who gave it Congress or said that he should have
Speaker 2: given speech at all. How much stronger would it have
Speaker 2: been if they sat by Rashida in that room instead
Speaker 2: of leaving the only Palaestini member of Congress sitting by
Speaker 2: herself on her fucking birthday listening to the person that
Speaker 2: has genocided her people. It would have been such an
Speaker 2: amazing demonstration of support and strength to have her colleagues
Speaker 2: sitting with her, but instead she was alone Naenyah who
Speaker 2: gave this speech seeking to rally support for continuing Israel's
Speaker 2: military campaign aka genocide in Gaza. He was greeted by
Speaker 2: anti war protesters outside the Capitol understandably so. The day
Speaker 2: before the speech, over five hundred Jewish people flooded the
Speaker 2: Capitol building demanding arms embargo to Israel and demanding a ceasefire.
Speaker 2: They shouted things like let Gaza live, free Palestine, not
Speaker 2: in our name, and stop genocide. And then during the
Speaker 2: Enyahu's speech, he blasted these protesters from his podium, calling
Speaker 2: them Iran's useful idiots and calling pro Palestinian protester as
Speaker 2: broadly as Hamas supporters and as nt Enyah who praise
Speaker 2: Israeli military members as lions of Judah. Capital police was
Speaker 2: using pepper spray against pro Palestinian protesters just outside the doors.
Speaker 2: The irony of this speaks for itself, and we all
Speaker 2: know by now. I hope that our police trains with
Speaker 2: the Israeli military. Adam Abusala, a Arab American activist from Dearborn, Michigan, said,
Speaker 2: it is a shame that the Enyaho was invited to
Speaker 2: speak to Congress. It's a disgrace that members from both
Speaker 2: parties have invited him to speak here. It's a disgrace
Speaker 2: that Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party,
Speaker 2: will meet with him. Abu Salah told Al Jazeira this
Speaker 2: at an anti na Enya who protest that was near
Speaker 2: the Capitol. He said, we are here to say enough
Speaker 2: is enough. As Americans, we will not stand for that.
Speaker 2: In his speech, Naenyahoo praised the US Congress as a
Speaker 2: citadel of democracy and described the genocide and Gaza as
Speaker 2: a clash between barbarism and civilization. He said and repeated
Speaker 2: lie after lie, and people stood up and applauded after
Speaker 2: practically every sentence he repeated, proven untrue, hasbar propaganda lies,
Speaker 2: repeating false claims about October seventh about how men were
Speaker 2: beheaded and babies were burned. Alive investigations, including those done
Speaker 2: by Israel, have found that little evidence has emerged to
Speaker 2: substantiate some of the most gruesome stories pushed by Israeli
Speaker 2: leaders like Naan Yahoo. And these lies were a part
Speaker 2: of a methodology that was designed to bolster a false
Speaker 2: notion of Palestinian's being an inherently subhuman people. I'm going
Speaker 2: to play this clip from Mehdi Hassan about the most
Speaker 2: egregious lie, in my opinion, that was spread around for
Speaker 2: months and is still being spread around today as we
Speaker 2: see from Danyahu's speech. But it's about the forty headed babies.
Speaker 10: Forty beheaded babies. How can we forget the most emotive
Speaker 10: and most defensive lie of this entire conflict, A lie
Speaker 10: that went viral and was repeated by the President of
Speaker 10: the United States, who falsely said he saw pictures of
Speaker 10: beheaded babies, even though there weren't any, nor were their
Speaker 10: babies burned in ovens. As Israeli newspaper Haretes proved in
Speaker 10: their investigation, they were all lies. In fact, according to
Speaker 10: data released by Israel's Social Security Agency, Tragically, there was
Speaker 10: one baby killed on October the seventh, ten month old
Speaker 10: Miela Cohen. Maye her memory be a blessing, but in
Speaker 10: the interests of facts, she was not beheaded. Now, one
Speaker 10: baby killed is one baby too many, a tragedy, a crime,
Speaker 10: But forty beheaded babies is just a cynical, reckless, repulsive
Speaker 10: lie that was then used to justify the killing of
Speaker 10: hundreds of Palestinian babies.
Speaker 2: Eljazerra released documentary called October seventh that goes into the
Speaker 2: potential source of a lot of these lies. It's a
Speaker 2: man named Josie Lindell who was an ultra Orthodox first
Speaker 2: responder who operates throughout Israel and occasionally in South Face.
Speaker 2: He was interviewed in this documentary and he is the
Speaker 2: original source of the beheaded babies lie, and he was
Speaker 2: a source of what formed the basis of the New
Speaker 2: York Times now debunked investigation into the alleged systematic sexual
Speaker 2: abuse perpetrated by Hamas October seventh. In these interviews, len
Speaker 2: Dau comes off as almost like a used car salesman.
Speaker 2: One of his claims is that he found a pregnant
Speaker 2: woman whose quote, stomach was butchered open and whose baby
Speaker 2: that was connected to the cord was stabbed. And he
Speaker 2: insists in the reporter that if you want to see
Speaker 2: their picture, I have a picture of it. And then
Speaker 2: the reporter apologizes when looking at this photo because they
Speaker 2: can't see a baby there, and then Lendau's stammers and
Speaker 2: tries to cover his tracks because the photo, as it
Speaker 2: turns out, depicts what the narrator of this documentary describes
Speaker 2: as a quote unidentical piece of charred flesh, which, as
Speaker 2: it happens, is not some unlike many of the bodies
Speaker 2: that phil Lendau's accounts of unspeakable depravity, and as the
Speaker 2: documentary further notes, the IDF has repeatedly debunked those stories
Speaker 2: on the bay of basic forensic evidence, most notably when
Speaker 2: it revised its total death count by two hundred because
Speaker 2: it realized that some of the dead bodies were Palestinian.
Speaker 2: And even though the IDF lies a lot, it does
Speaker 2: concede eventually with enough pressure the truth. By November, the
Speaker 2: IDF conceded that it had actually deployed Apache helicopters and
Speaker 2: tanks to the Nova Music Festival that may have killed
Speaker 2: some of the Nova Festival concertgoers in accordance to something
Speaker 2: that is called the Hannibal directive, which I will also
Speaker 2: mention in a bit, but it's a doctrine named for
Speaker 2: a general who poisoned himself rather than be questioned by
Speaker 2: his robin captors, and in a similar vein this directive
Speaker 2: is basically when the Israeli army is ordered to fire
Speaker 2: upon its own troops to prevent the enemy from taking
Speaker 2: those troops hostage around noon on October seventh. According to
Speaker 2: Israeli newspapers that were cited in this documentary, the IDF
Speaker 2: may have invoked a version of the Hannibal Directive and
Speaker 2: expanded it to include Israeli citizens, and in accordance to this,
Speaker 2: began to blindly open fire with rockets and helicopter gunships
Speaker 2: on any person or a vehicle seen moving across the
Speaker 2: border to Gaza. In particular, the documentary visits Kabbutz be Air,
Speaker 2: where a munitions expert demonstrates very strong evidence that some
Speaker 2: of the houses had been hit with IDF tank fire.
Speaker 2: It was Israeli troops, not Hamas murderers, according to one resident,
Speaker 2: who killed twelve longtime residents there. But let's go back
Speaker 2: to Nanyahu's speech. He also lied about civilian casualties and
Speaker 2: Israel's liberate starving of Gaza. He said in his speech,
Speaker 2: this is not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash
Speaker 2: between barbarism and civilization. It's a clash between those who
Speaker 2: glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces
Speaker 2: of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together,
Speaker 2: because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win,
Speaker 2: they lose. Of course, he didn't mention the most daming
Speaker 2: part of October seventh, the Hannibal Directive. Earlier this month,
Speaker 2: Haretes reported that the IDF ordered the Hannibal Directive on
Speaker 2: October seventh to prevent Hamas from taking soldiers captive. It
Speaker 2: said there was a crazy hysteria and decisions started to
Speaker 2: be made without verified information. Documents and testimonies obtained by
Speaker 2: Heretes revealed the Hannibal operational Order, which directs the use
Speaker 2: of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, and
Speaker 2: it was employed at three army facilities that were infiltrated
Speaker 2: by Hamas. And this potentially endangered civilians as well, which
Speaker 2: we know Israel has killed. We know Israel killed some
Speaker 2: of its own citizens on October seventh, and now we
Speaker 2: know that it killed some of its own soldiers.
Speaker 3: And of course these.
Speaker 2: Deaths are lumped into this overall death toll that keeps
Speaker 2: being repeated as being due to only Hamas's attack. I
Speaker 2: highly recommend reading the Harets report in full. It is
Speaker 2: damning and important, especially as you see these leaders spouting
Speaker 2: lies and then the NYAHUO praised the families of captives
Speaker 2: being held in Gaza, and these families are a group
Speaker 2: that has consistently expressed frustration with the n Yaho back
Speaker 2: in Israel, but they of course figure prominently in his
Speaker 2: messaging overseas because he uses them for his own benefit.
Speaker 2: Believing this whole genocide or a war, if you want
Speaker 2: to call it that, whatever about the hostages is disingenuous
Speaker 2: at best.
Speaker 3: At this point.
Speaker 2: Several reporters who cover Israel reported that relatives of captives
Speaker 2: were arrested for wearing shirts calling for a deal that
Speaker 2: would bring the remaining captives home, an effort that critics
Speaker 2: of the Nyahu have accused him of working to sabotage.
Speaker 2: So you have his own people criticizing him and accusing
Speaker 2: him of lying. I'm getting heated. Okay, let's take our
Speaker 2: second break and we'll be right back.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: So Republican House leader Mike Johnson had previously warned that
Speaker 2: anyone who attempted to disrupt Naenyaho's speech could face arrest.
Speaker 2: Jacob McGee, a correspondent with the Times of Israel, reported
Speaker 2: that several relatives of captives held in Gaza, walked out
Speaker 2: of nan Yahoo's speech. In a social media post, he
Speaker 2: said several relatives of the hostages being held in Gaza
Speaker 2: have walked out of nan Yaho's address to Congress. The
Speaker 2: PM goes on to pledge not to rest until the
Speaker 2: hostages are home, leading the vast majority in the room
Speaker 2: to stand and applaud, save for roughly a dozen or
Speaker 2: so hostage families. Israeli opposition leader air Lapede bashed nan
Speaker 2: Yaho's speech in a social media post, saying that the
Speaker 2: Israeli leader went through his speech without endorsing the deal
Speaker 2: to bring the remaining captives home on x He called
Speaker 2: speech a disgrace and to use an exclamation point for emphasis, disgrace,
Speaker 2: that's how it read. Nanna, who also said that a
Speaker 2: regional alliance must be forged to counter the influence of Iran,
Speaker 2: and he thanked Biden for his efforts to that effect
Speaker 2: and for calling for an extension of the so called
Speaker 2: Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords were signed on September fifteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, during Trump's presidency, and it's something that Trump,
Speaker 2: of course often takes credit for. The accords in brief,
Speaker 2: normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE as well
Speaker 2: as Bahrain, and then later a renewal in ties with Morocco.
Speaker 2: So as part of the two agreements, both the UAE
Speaker 2: and Bahrain recognized Israel's sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full
Speaker 2: diplomatic relations. During his speech, n'annah who said, I have
Speaker 2: a name for this new alliance. I think we should
Speaker 2: call it the Abraham Alliance. And then he also thanked Trump,
Speaker 2: of course for Trump's efforts promoting normalization efforts between Israel
Speaker 2: and other countries in the region. And as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: his speech was filled with nothing but lies. Some that
Speaker 2: I've already mentioned, here are some more highlights. Nn Yaho
Speaker 2: said the majority of Americans support Israeli actions, but polling
Speaker 2: says otherwise. He said, quote, the vast majority of Americans
Speaker 2: have not fallen for this Hamas propaganda. They continue to
Speaker 2: support Israel. But a recent Gallup poll showed that forty
Speaker 2: eight percent of people in the US disapprove of Israel's
Speaker 2: actions in Gaza, compared to the forty two percent who
Speaker 2: are supportive. A May poll by Data for Progress also
Speaker 2: found that about seventy percent of all voters support a
Speaker 2: permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which Natnyahu has firmly rejected time
Speaker 2: and time again. And many things men Yaho said made
Speaker 2: me pray that I would get an aneurism. And one
Speaker 2: of those things is when he said that Israel is
Speaker 2: going quote beyond what international law requires to avoid civilian casualties. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: of course, numerous rights groups have said Israel is flaunting
Speaker 2: international law and targeting civilians in Gaza, where it has
Speaker 2: systematically cut off supplies of food and water, displacing more
Speaker 2: than ninety percent of the population and wiping out entire
Speaker 2: neighborhoods and generations of families. And then you have media
Speaker 2: outlets reporting that the Israeli forces in Gaza see large
Speaker 2: swaths of the strip as quote free fire zones. And
Speaker 2: then there was a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza
Speaker 2: who recently spoke to a reporter and he accused Israeli
Speaker 2: snipers of targeting Palestinian children. He said, the children are
Speaker 2: being shot right in the heart and in the head,
Speaker 2: so much so that a stethoscope was unable to go
Speaker 2: over their heart. That's how precise these shots were. I'm
Speaker 2: talking about Doc Mark pearl Mutter about his medical mission
Speaker 2: in Gaza, and I want to play a clip of
Speaker 2: him here because I think what he has to say
Speaker 2: is very important and needs to be heard.
Speaker 9: All the disaster zones you've seen, how does Gaza compare?
Speaker 9: All of this disasters I've seen combined, combined, forty mission trips,
Speaker 9: thirty years, ground zero, earthquakes, all of that combined doesn't
Speaker 9: equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians.
Speaker 3: In just my first week in Gaza.
Speaker 9: And when you say civilians, is it mostly children? Almost
Speaker 9: exclusively children. I've never seen that before, never seen that.
Speaker 9: I've seen more incinerated children than I've ever seen in
Speaker 9: my entire life combined. I've seen more shredded children in
Speaker 9: just the first week. Shredded, shredded what do you mean?
Speaker 3: Missing body parts?
Speaker 9: Being crushed by billings the greatest majority, or bomb explosions
Speaker 9: the next greatest majority. We've taken shrapnel as big as
Speaker 9: my thumb out of eight year olds. And then they're
Speaker 9: sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice. Wait,
Speaker 9: you're saying that children and Gaza are being shot by
Speaker 9: snipers definitively. I have two children that I have photographs
Speaker 9: of that were shot so perfectly in the chest. I
Speaker 9: couldn't put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately and
Speaker 9: directly on the side of the head in the same child,
Speaker 9: No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's
Speaker 9: best sniper and they're dead center shots.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's that. And again n Yahoo slammed college
Speaker 2: protesters and administrators in his speech, leaning into the attacks
Speaker 2: on student protesters who demonstrate against Israel's genocide and Gaza.
Speaker 2: He blasted college administrators who resistant calls to crack down
Speaker 2: on the protests. He also mocked queer activists who support
Speaker 2: Palistinian rights and accuse them of ignorance, comparing them to
Speaker 2: chickens who support the restaurant of KFC. And this bit
Speaker 2: might have been my favorite quote, just because the level
Speaker 2: of stupidity reached a level I didn't know what was possible. Quote,
Speaker 2: these protesters hold up signs saying gaze for Gaza, they
Speaker 2: might as well hold up signs that say chickens for KFC.
Speaker 2: And then, of course, after he said this, nearly every
Speaker 2: member of Congress stood up and clapped Naen Yahoo, for
Speaker 2: whom the ICC prosecutors are currently seeking an arrest warrant
Speaker 2: for for his alleged war crimes. Has said that pro
Speaker 2: Palestinian protesters stand with evil. In his speech, he said
Speaker 2: they stand with hamas they stand with rapists and murderers,
Speaker 2: adding that they should be ashamed. He also said quote
Speaker 2: the outrageous Slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal
Speaker 2: are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish state,
Speaker 2: to demonize Jews everywhere, and no wonder, no wonder, we
Speaker 2: witnessed an appalling rise and anti Semitism in America and
Speaker 2: around the world. And of course, Dan Yahoo praised Biden
Speaker 2: for his heartfelt support for Israel in his speech, Dan Yah,
Speaker 2: who said quote, after the savage attack on October seventh,
Speaker 2: Biden rightly called hamas sheer evil, and then he played
Speaker 2: up their more than forty year relationship because they're both
Speaker 2: fucking old and shouldn't be in power anymore. I guess
Speaker 2: one of them won't be, he said. Biden dispatched two
Speaker 2: aircraft carriers to the Middle East to deter a wider war,
Speaker 2: and then he came to Israel to stand with us
Speaker 2: in our darkest hour, a visit that will never be forgotten.
Speaker 2: And yet it won't be forgotten because Biden's legacy will
Speaker 2: forever be his complicity and assistance in the genocide of Palestine.
Speaker 2: After the speech was concluded, Hamas said that the speech
Speaker 2: shows n En Yahu's lack of interest in a ceasefire.
Speaker 2: Hamas senior official Sammy Abuzuhui said that Natanyahu's remarks demonstrate
Speaker 2: that he is not interested in ending the war, and
Speaker 2: this is according to the US news outlet Reuters. He
Speaker 2: said Nahnyahu's speech was full of lies and it will
Speaker 2: not succeed in covering up for the failure and defeat
Speaker 2: in the face of the resistance. He added that the
Speaker 2: address would also not quote cover up for the crimes
Speaker 2: of the war of genocide his army is committing against
Speaker 2: the people of Gaza. In a statement, Zat Oldish, a
Speaker 2: member of the Palestinian Group's political bureau, slammed the speech
Speaker 2: by the quote unquote criminal Naanyahu as a party of lies.
Speaker 2: At that Yusef, a thirty two year old Palestinian American,
Speaker 2: told Al Jazeera that she traveled to Washington, d C.
Speaker 2: From New York to voice her concerns by Nanyahu's address
Speaker 2: to Congress, and she called the Prime minister, a quote
Speaker 2: war criminal who should stand trial. Yes he should, that's
Speaker 2: what international quote wants, she said, quote. We are just
Speaker 2: here to cause a disruption, shut it down, and say
Speaker 2: not in our names, not with our consent. She called
Speaker 2: the N Yahoo's invite to Congress disgusting.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes it was.
Speaker 2: She said, I don't get how people get to a
Speaker 2: level where they detach themselves so much from their humanity
Speaker 2: that they can't see what's been happening in Gaza. She
Speaker 2: also expressed surprise that US lawmakers still continue to entertain
Speaker 2: the N Yahoo and invite him here. And I'm really
Speaker 2: hoping this next part is true, because while Naanyahu's speech
Speaker 2: sought to shore up support for Israel, El Jazeera correspondent
Speaker 2: rosalind Jordan reported that it is unlikely to alter the
Speaker 2: political landscape in the US, where the opposition to the
Speaker 2: war in Gaza slash the genocide in Gaza is widespread.
Speaker 2: She said, it's not going to change the political reality
Speaker 2: here in the United States. There are many millions of
Speaker 2: people who are disgusted by what they see how happening
Speaker 2: in the war in Gaza. They see the mounting death
Speaker 2: toll nearing forty thousand, men, women, and children, and many
Speaker 2: thousands more injured, the entire population essentially homeless inside Gaza.
Speaker 2: She also added that schisms have emerged within the Democratic
Speaker 2: Party over support for Israel, while the Republican Party remains
Speaker 2: largely united around calls for continued and even increased support.
Speaker 2: My good friend and yours, Robert Evans said about Nanyahu's
Speaker 2: speech at Congress, this is both the most resistance to
Speaker 2: Israel I have seen from US political leadership and the
Speaker 2: most public embrace of Israel I have seen.
Speaker 3: And He's right.
Speaker 2: It's disturbing and baffling behavior that is so divided it
Speaker 2: seems impossible to bridge. It's hypocritical and frankly, quite dangerous
Speaker 2: to normalize the support of someone who the Chief prosecutor
Speaker 2: of the International Criminal Court, Kadim Khan, announced that he
Speaker 2: was seeking an a rest war for to allow this
Speaker 2: man to address Congress in any way is dangerous. The
Speaker 2: Center for Constitutional Rights has also urged the Justice Department
Speaker 2: to investigate an n Yahoo for genocide, war crimes, and torture,
Speaker 2: which have all been well documented and plentiful. But that
Speaker 2: doesn't matter though, because then Yahoo still gave his ridiculous
Speaker 2: speech and bombs are still raining down on Gaza. And
Speaker 2: with that we have concluded this two part series about
Speaker 2: why Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. Until next time,
Speaker 2: please continue to talk about Palestine and what's happening there.
Speaker 3: And the Palestine.
Speaker 8: Grinder. I hardly this is it could happen here where today?
Speaker 8: The it is gay flirting and or harassment, and the
Speaker 8: here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the twenty twenty four Republican
Speaker 8: National Convention. I'm gay also known by my undercover alias
Speaker 8: Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be one
Speaker 8: of our on the ground RNZ correspondence. A few weeks ago.
Speaker 8: We provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation festival based
Speaker 8: on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think tank ghoules,
Speaker 8: and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by
Speaker 8: popular speakers at the event. We'll have some more in
Speaker 8: depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come,
Speaker 8: using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention.
Speaker 8: But on top of our regular coverage, I also had
Speaker 8: a special assignment that I'm more or less assigned to
Speaker 8: myself on this show. We often talk about right wing
Speaker 8: extremism and issue facing gay and trans people, including the
Speaker 8: various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make
Speaker 8: life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment,
Speaker 8: and physical violence. As these are two of our most
Speaker 8: frequently covered topics, being at the Republican National Convention provided
Speaker 8: me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between
Speaker 8: conservatism and homosexuality. For years, I've heard rumors and urban
Speaker 8: legends about a massive influx of Republicans flocking to the
Speaker 8: gay hookup app Grinder to get laid during the RNC.
Speaker 8: Whether they be twenty year old Republican twinks from Miami
Speaker 8: or fifty three year old self hating, closeted gay men
Speaker 8: from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages, Curiosity has often gotten
Speaker 8: the better of me, and I needed to know how
Speaker 8: many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grinder. In case
Speaker 8: you're unfamiliar, Grinder is technically a dating app that serves
Speaker 8: the LGB community, but in actuality, it is a mediocre
Speaker 8: hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers
Speaker 8: in their forties to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures
Speaker 8: of their penis. Grinder was launched in two thousand and
Speaker 8: nine and is arguably the largest and most popular gay
Speaker 8: dating app, especially among men. Grinder has only been around
Speaker 8: for two in person RNCs prior to this point, twenty
Speaker 8: twelve and twenty sixteen, since all convention activities moved online
Speaker 8: during twenty twenty for the pandemic. So this July, for
Speaker 8: the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around
Speaker 8: the country could gather in one city and once their
Speaker 8: wives fell asleep, log on to Grinder and this episode,
Speaker 8: I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience.
Speaker 8: Before traveling to the city that was about to be
Speaker 8: invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country,
Speaker 8: I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety
Speaker 8: and success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers
Speaker 8: liked that terrible place. Based on the massive increase in
Speaker 8: violent anti trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already
Speaker 8: knew that I would be dusting off my old boy
Speaker 8: motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male. Although
Speaker 8: my ability to pass as a straight mail is debatable,
Speaker 8: I can at least easily pass as a not quite
Speaker 8: straight male. My trans feminine fashion taste has been skewing
Speaker 8: more mask lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really
Speaker 8: an issue. I packed up basically all my button up
Speaker 8: collar shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige
Speaker 8: London fog trench coat. Basically, the vibe I was going
Speaker 8: for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy dressed
Speaker 8: as a nineteen fifties FBI agent. I refer to this
Speaker 8: as Dale Cooper Moting. I was unwilling to cut my
Speaker 8: hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys,
Speaker 8: so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like
Speaker 8: Baron Trump meets Total Swinton. In Constantine, I was kind
Speaker 8: of Gabriel maxing for most of the convention, and though
Speaker 8: most attendees were unable to pick up on my diikish undertones,
Speaker 8: the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did
Speaker 8: get she heard by the Secret Service when entering the
Speaker 8: convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke, So that
Speaker 8: was my general look for the convention. I also completely
Speaker 8: remade my grinder profile for the RNZ for Simplicity's sake,
Speaker 8: I got to emphasize my twinkish past and removed the
Speaker 8: explicitly non binary transgender aspects of my profile, replacing some
Speaker 8: of my more trans coded photos with pictures of my
Speaker 8: light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay. Perhaps next rn C
Speaker 8: I can experiment with discovering how many of the RNC
Speaker 8: attendees are chasers. But for safety's at sake, I went
Speaker 8: to more stealth, both online and in person at RNZ
Speaker 8: related events. For my main profile picture, I chose a
Speaker 8: pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a
Speaker 8: light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted.
Speaker 8: I chose the yet elegant user name Twink, and for
Speaker 8: my bio wrote gen z in town for convention, which
Speaker 8: I thought was pretty funny and signals to people that yes,
Speaker 8: I am here for the RNC, but leaves the exact
Speaker 8: reason why still a bit mysterious. So this was my bait.
Speaker 8: On my way to the airport, I was already dressed
Speaker 8: for the part, as I suspected the flight from Atlanta
Speaker 8: to Milwaukee would be part of the whole RNC experience.
Speaker 8: I arrived at the gate and the vibe shift was immediate.
Speaker 8: Older white men with even whiter hair, wearing a mix
Speaker 8: of poorly tailored suits and country club polo shirts fit
Speaker 8: for the driving range. They all kind of looked like
Speaker 8: my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were
Speaker 8: all cause playing their favorite female Fox and News anchor
Speaker 8: with bleached blonde hair. There were a handful of delegates
Speaker 8: as well as Republican super fans wearing Trump buttons and
Speaker 8: mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention,
Speaker 8: the way a nerd would be excited to go to
Speaker 8: San Diego Comic Con. Others at the gate were more subdued,
Speaker 8: perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the
Speaker 8: Atlanta airport, but I could still overhear them getting into
Speaker 8: quiet small talk about their RNC expectations and in hushed
Speaker 8: tones asking others at the gate if they were going
Speaker 8: to the convention. And that's what everyone called it, not
Speaker 8: the Republican Convention, not the GOP convention or the RNC
Speaker 8: the convention. As I was bording the plane, an older
Speaker 8: woman with straw like blonde hair sitting a few rows
Speaker 8: in front of me waves me and asked, young man,
Speaker 8: are you going to the convention. I gave my best yes, ma'am,
Speaker 8: took my seat, and then heard her remark to her
Speaker 8: friend about how happy she was that more young people
Speaker 8: are attending the convention, and I would suspect she would
Speaker 8: be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the
Speaker 8: convention and what I was doing there, mainly trying to
Speaker 8: collect as much information about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans
Speaker 8: as I can. And you will hear more about those
Speaker 8: weird Grinder RNC Republicans after the break. This episode is
Speaker 8: brought to you in part by the top Gun soundtrack,
Speaker 8: which I was listening to as I was coming out
Speaker 8: from adderall while writing the second half of this episode,
Speaker 8: as well as these products and sponsors. Okay, back to
Speaker 8: the Grind. Most convention activities took place in the Peiser Forum,
Speaker 8: which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce.
Speaker 8: This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the
Speaker 8: Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most
Speaker 8: of my grinder cruising so I could see other profiles
Speaker 8: within the radius of the convention area. Every time I
Speaker 8: walked into the Pfeiser Forum, which was multiple times a
Speaker 8: day for four days in a row, I would find
Speaker 8: a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly
Speaker 8: boot up Grinder and refresh my feed to see what
Speaker 8: profiles were in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grinder,
Speaker 8: one of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector,
Speaker 8: telling you what users are near you, whether that be
Speaker 8: five miles away or five feet away. Every night, when
Speaker 8: I got back to the hotel after recording with Robert
Speaker 8: and Sophie, I would once again check a Grinder to
Speaker 8: see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the
Speaker 8: hotels by the airport. The hotel we were staying at
Speaker 8: was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates,
Speaker 8: and though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was
Speaker 8: on Grinder, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two,
Speaker 8: there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby
Speaker 8: hotels roughly fifteen hundred feet away from my bed. The
Speaker 8: Grinder proximity detector was quite useful to me and locating
Speaker 8: profiles active around the footprint of the R and C,
Speaker 8: as well as when sorting through all my messages back
Speaker 8: home to confirm who attended the RNC from out of state.
Speaker 8: Because Milwaukee is about six hundred and fifty miles away
Speaker 8: from Atlanta. If someone's distance marker was substantially different from that,
Speaker 8: I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the
Speaker 8: rn C from out of state, even if I wasn't
Speaker 8: able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've also
Speaker 8: done my best to follow up with certain profiles to
Speaker 8: rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons
Speaker 8: for why their distance markers might not line up exactly.
Speaker 8: And I think they have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay,
Speaker 8: you've been very patient, and now I think it's time
Speaker 8: to read through the highlights from my grinder in box.
Speaker 8: And I gotta say I think I started off pretty strong.
Speaker 8: While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the
Speaker 8: convention officially started, I got one of the very first
Speaker 8: messages I received from a twenty one year old Republican
Speaker 8: with the profile picture that's just a close up picture
Speaker 8: of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and
Speaker 8: vegenta tie. Already frendous vibes. He asked me if I
Speaker 8: was quote unquote with the GOP, and I said, I
Speaker 8: was attending with friends, and then I got no further response.
Speaker 8: I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then
Speaker 8: after the convention was over, he moved like three hundred
Speaker 8: miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for
Speaker 8: the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified
Speaker 8: himself as a local conservative quote but not a hardcore
Speaker 8: Republican unquote, and he was excited the convention was in town,
Speaker 8: hopeful that he would quote meet my future husband unquote.
Speaker 8: The first chaser I encountered with the bio looking for
Speaker 8: some lady dick to feel in my ass, saw through
Speaker 8: my sister gender disguise and messaged me cock question mark.
Speaker 8: I got one other message from a chaser who was
Speaker 8: pretending to be Tea for Tea, who asked me if
Speaker 8: I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an anime convention
Speaker 8: in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me, quote hope
Speaker 8: you're finding what you're looking for smiley face, which was
Speaker 8: very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider
Speaker 8: that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking
Speaker 8: for some other gay Republican. Another local with the name
Speaker 8: Older for Young sent me the message quote boomer who
Speaker 8: will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.
Speaker 8: I asked him if the quote unquote talk politics pickup
Speaker 8: line works very often, and he replied, quote less often
Speaker 8: than I would hope for on here zero unquote. He
Speaker 8: mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the
Speaker 8: app telling me that they have infiltrated grinder. He then
Speaker 8: asked me what exact hotel I was staying at. So
Speaker 8: that was the end of that conversation. A minority of
Speaker 8: the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives
Speaker 8: and were largely excited that the RNC was in town.
Speaker 8: They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going,
Speaker 8: as most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend. One
Speaker 8: such fellaw, who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric
Speaker 8: and a very emotional moment for him and the entire
Speaker 8: crowd unquote, would have liked to attend, but he was
Speaker 8: busy working at the hospital because they needed quote extra
Speaker 8: staffing just in case unquote. Now, the worst profile picture
Speaker 8: I found was an older guy wearing a baseball camp
Speaker 8: and one of those half faced skull masks like Adam
Speaker 8: Offfen used to wear. He said he was from Florida
Speaker 8: and claimed to be in town not for the RNC
Speaker 8: but to visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely
Speaker 8: sold out his morals for the VP spot. This guy's
Speaker 8: politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average
Speaker 8: Florida independent. Very baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me
Speaker 8: asking you're a Republican and I said not really, putting
Speaker 8: it lightly, and he never got back to me. I
Speaker 8: did find a thirty one year old chaser named Greg
Speaker 8: I do believe with attending the convention, and his bio
Speaker 8: read quote anon come drain me trans CD as crossdresser
Speaker 8: sissy fem to the front of the line. I asked,
Speaker 8: you like trans and he responded yes. We had no
Speaker 8: further conversation. I did talk with two other people who
Speaker 8: happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who
Speaker 8: thought I was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor
Speaker 8: put me near the CNN area when I was actually
Speaker 8: using Grinder at the Heritage Foundation party. And lastly, really
Speaker 8: the only guy I saw who openly claims to be
Speaker 8: attending the RNC in his public bio was a thirty
Speaker 8: two year old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the user name
Speaker 8: suck me Off one word. He described the convention as
Speaker 8: exhausting but awesome and told me he was quote proud
Speaker 8: to support President Trump unquote and called Trump's speech on
Speaker 8: the final day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers,
Speaker 8: including Trump, talked about Corey Compretour, the man who was
Speaker 8: killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So
Speaker 8: after mister suck me off talked about how awesome Trump's
Speaker 8: speech was, I just replied to him, poor Corey, and
Speaker 8: he messaged me back Corey Who, and that he told
Speaker 8: me what exact hotel he was staying at. Now, part
Speaker 8: of the danger of trying to use Grinder directly in
Speaker 8: the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that even
Speaker 8: if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a
Speaker 8: non zero chance that some passer by or persons sitting
Speaker 8: right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited
Speaker 8: dickpic that fills my phone screen as I try to
Speaker 8: check my messages. And this is simply a non negotiable
Speaker 8: part of the Grinder experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering,
Speaker 8: bizarrely angled photos of some Balding, forty three year old
Speaker 8: married man will appear in your inbox ordinarroly. I would
Speaker 8: check the profile first to see who might be sending
Speaker 8: me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before
Speaker 8: even considering to open up a DM. Unfortunately, multiple factors
Speaker 8: prevented me from doing this. For one, this was research,
Speaker 8: so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible.
Speaker 8: But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for
Speaker 8: applicable profiles in my dms, this was impossible without opening
Speaker 8: up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile
Speaker 8: from the chatlog. Due to one of the many glitches
Speaker 8: I experienced using Grinder at the RNC, about halfway through
Speaker 8: the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently. But the
Speaker 8: main glitch I had to deal with, which has since
Speaker 8: been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile
Speaker 8: from the DM's page. I had to click into each
Speaker 8: individual chat log to open up a user profile, which
Speaker 8: meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited
Speaker 8: dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.
Speaker 8: So there I was watching Ted Cruise's speech sitting underneath
Speaker 8: about fifty Republicans and right next to both of my bosses,
Speaker 8: scrolling through an endless stream of Dick pics to see
Speaker 8: who was local and who was here for the r
Speaker 8: and C, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't
Speaker 8: looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit
Speaker 8: hog But I was far from the only one reporting
Speaker 8: issues with the app during the r and C. Around
Speaker 8: midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over
Speaker 8: one thousand users reported a Grinder outage in the Milwaukee
Speaker 8: area on the website down detector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Speaker 8: wrote on the final day of the r and C
Speaker 8: that quote reports that the Grinder app crashing increased by
Speaker 8: more than ninety percent in the past forty eight hours
Speaker 8: across the country unquote. The down detector heat map showed
Speaker 8: Grinder outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as
Speaker 8: well as a hot spot of outages in Milwaukee near
Speaker 8: the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues
Speaker 8: with the app, possibly due to an increase in act
Speaker 8: and you will hear more about that activity after this
Speaker 8: ad break. This episode of It could Happen Here is
Speaker 8: brought to you in part by the Challenger's soundtrack remix
Speaker 8: by Boys Noise, which I was listening to as I
Speaker 8: wrote most of this episode while on the plane back
Speaker 8: to Atlanta. This episode is also brought to you by
Speaker 8: these products and services. We once again returned to the grind.
Speaker 8: We got to keep on grinding. We're almost done, but
Speaker 8: we got to grind a little more. Just one more
Speaker 8: grind bro I swear about addictors. One more grind broach,
Speaker 8: one more grind. During the influx of reports about the
Speaker 8: Grinder app breaking during the RNC, a post from the
Speaker 8: Twitter account for the Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering
Speaker 8: claims of a massive increase in activity. Quote breaking, an
Speaker 8: executive of the gay dating app Grinder says the Republican
Speaker 8: National Convention is quote basically Grinder's super Bowl unquote. This
Speaker 8: quote from a Grinder executive went super viral, prompting discussions
Speaker 8: all over the Internet about five different articles, and even
Speaker 8: a disgraced former New York Congressman, George Sentos, commented on
Speaker 8: the phenomenon, content warning gay Republican.
Speaker 5: So Grinder executives are calling the RNC convention the Grinder
Speaker 5: super Bowl.
Speaker 3: Folks.
Speaker 5: Look, I'm openly gay. No qualms about it. Proud conservative Republican.
Speaker 5: I met my husband on Grinder and we've been together
Speaker 5: for six years going on seven, married for almost three.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something. Just come out the closet, boys,
Speaker 3: come on, it's fun. You can be gay and conservative.
Speaker 5: But look, Grinder's already out of you anyway. Based on
Speaker 5: the hits, and guess who's in town. It's all you
Speaker 5: conservative by.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 8: I certainly did observe a lot of blank or anonymous profiles,
Speaker 8: at least more than I'm used to. I also received
Speaker 8: messages containing variations of hey sexy from at least five
Speaker 8: accounts that have since been deactivated. And this does line
Speaker 8: up with a report from a Milwaukee area Grinder user
Speaker 8: who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying that he
Speaker 8: noticed a major bump in anonymous users.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 8: On any given day, you'll go on there and see
Speaker 8: a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source,
Speaker 8: who did not want to be named. The Grinder user said,
Speaker 8: on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe ten users with
Speaker 8: no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app,
Speaker 8: he said he stopped counting at fifty blank profile photos.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Now we don't have any official data yet on Grinder
Speaker 8: usage near the twenty twenty four r and C only
Speaker 8: the down detector reports which our user submitted, but we
Speaker 8: do at least have data from the last in person
Speaker 8: convention in Cleveland, Ohio, all the way back in twenty six.
Speaker 8: A Vice article by Candice Brian spoke with sources from
Speaker 8: Grinder and wrote that quote, Grinder usage near the Quick
Speaker 8: and Loans Arena showed a sixty six percent increase during
Speaker 8: the RNC. Other active destinations including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland,
Speaker 8: South Beach, and Trump Tower showed no comparable increase in
Speaker 8: active users. Unquote. Many of the local twinks and trans
Speaker 8: folks certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks hiding on
Speaker 8: the app. People would often first ask me if I
Speaker 8: was a Republican or why I was in town before
Speaker 8: trying to hit on me. One such twink told me, quote,
Speaker 8: I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something,
Speaker 8: but I had to check. As the week progressed, more
Speaker 8: locals told me that they had found a handful of
Speaker 8: out and proud patriots online, but really not many. In fact,
Speaker 8: multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim
Speaker 8: to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local
Speaker 8: users who were online for the same reason than I was,
Speaker 8: to see if there was an influx of closeted Republicans.
Speaker 8: Someone told me, quote for the record, it's like three
Speaker 8: times busier here than normal. Everyone is out to see
Speaker 8: what the Republicans are up to, and the chasers have
Speaker 8: come out of the woodwork unquote. Far from being the
Speaker 8: app's super Bowl. According to Weiss, the twenty sixteen rnc's
Speaker 8: sixty six percent bump in activity is less than one
Speaker 8: half of the increase in Grinder activity that was seen
Speaker 8: at the last in person DNC, an event, which was
Speaker 8: also a whole day shorter. I'lade from Wes Quote. However,
Speaker 8: from Sunday to Monday, the week of the Democratic National Convention,
Speaker 8: there was an even higher one hundred and forty eight
Speaker 8: percent increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 8: It's also worth noting that of that sixty six percent
Speaker 8: increase in activity around the twenty sixteen r and C,
Speaker 8: only about forty percent of those users were visiting Cleveland,
Speaker 8: most were local. Meanwhile, sixty percent of Grinder users active
Speaker 8: near the DNC in Philadelphia. We're visiting the city. Oh,
Speaker 8: and that quote from a Grinder executive calling the RNZ
Speaker 8: grinders a super Bowl, as well as George Sandos's other
Speaker 8: claim about Grinder purposely outing gay conservatives. Both of those
Speaker 8: claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.
Speaker 3: It is totally made up, pure fiction. It's fiction.
Speaker 4: It's fiction.
Speaker 3: We made it up. We made this one up. It's
Speaker 3: a made up tail. It's a total fabrication. It never happened.
Speaker 8: It's an urban legend that never happened. So no, the
Speaker 8: RNC is not Grinders a super Bowl. I got messages
Speaker 8: from over one hundred and fifty different people. Over ninety
Speaker 8: percent of the messages I received and profiles visible online
Speaker 8: even while inside the Pfizer forum were from locals completely
Speaker 8: unaffiliated with the RNZ, and any boost activity that can
Speaker 8: be attributed to people visiting for the r and C
Speaker 8: is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the
Speaker 8: proverbial orgy festival of out of town gay Democrats who
Speaker 8: travel to the DNC, and like, if you think about
Speaker 8: this logically, this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican
Speaker 8: Party has spent the past two years screaming about how
Speaker 8: all drag queens are child groomers. And though this was
Speaker 8: the first year the GOP has removed opposition to gay
Speaker 8: marriage from their party platform, they have massively increased their
Speaker 8: opposition to and attacks against trans people and really any
Speaker 8: display of a visible queerness, like, come on, this is
Speaker 8: the Republican Party. There's this kind of fucked up cultural
Speaker 8: conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are
Speaker 8: secretly gay. And while there is the occasional like Lindsey
Speaker 8: Graham or repressed homosexual preacher, this is not the norm,
Speaker 8: and all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving
Speaker 8: force of legislative homophobia. It is an ideological drive, largely
Speaker 8: in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism, and now for people
Speaker 8: like Elon Musk and more, young Republicans of fascistic notion
Speaker 8: of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people white
Speaker 8: people aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute
Speaker 8: to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people,
Speaker 8: resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex. Never
Speaker 8: mind the fact that queer and trans people oftentimes can
Speaker 8: and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please
Speaker 8: these conservatives, as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view
Speaker 8: of the family unit. So no, Grinder wasn't flooded with
Speaker 8: closeted Republicans because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans
Speaker 8: that are going to be attending the RNC. And while
Speaker 8: there may not be as many Republicans as I thought
Speaker 8: there might be, I do believe that I have the
Speaker 8: bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored. Basically
Speaker 8: figured out based on my anecdotal experience and the reports
Speaker 8: of a handful of local Grinder users and journalists I
Speaker 8: talked with who were online during the twenty twenty four
Speaker 8: rn C, and considering the twenty sixteen Grinder data, I
Speaker 8: can report that merely a small minority of activity was
Speaker 8: due to ordinary RNZ attendees. The majority of activity was
Speaker 8: from locals who either regularly used Grinder or were specifically
Speaker 8: curious about who might be online during the RNC. I
Speaker 8: observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable
Speaker 8: increase in activity. Not everyone who attends the RNC are
Speaker 8: guests or delegates. A lot of people work at the
Speaker 8: convention center or work tech, and a sizeable chunk of
Speaker 8: people are like myself, researchers, pollsters or journalists who attend
Speaker 8: conventions like this for work. And lastly, the final group
Speaker 8: that fills out the bump in grinder activity, one that
Speaker 8: for some reason didn't really expect to see upon arrival,
Speaker 8: but in retrospect makes total sense.
Speaker 3: Are cops?
Speaker 8: So many cops? There were so many cops online at
Speaker 8: the RNC, just like delegates or reporters. They are coming
Speaker 8: to town from all around the country. There was cops
Speaker 8: or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana,
Speaker 8: and many more states, as well as US Capitol Police,
Speaker 8: Secret Service, TSA, DHS.
Speaker 3: And FBI.
Speaker 8: They were all in town as a part of the
Speaker 8: security detail. A few of the guys that messaged me
Speaker 8: I can absolutely confirm are one hundred percent police or
Speaker 8: some kind of military police. A thirty three year old
Speaker 8: cop or military guy quote looking for sexy bottoms with
Speaker 8: the tag's jock military discreete and weightlifting, as well as
Speaker 8: many pictures of him in the gym. Said it in
Speaker 8: his bio that he was quote really into slim skinny
Speaker 8: toned and muscular people. He messaged me saying, hey, now
Speaker 8: I got a lot of Hayese in my inbox, which
Speaker 8: is not unusual for Grinder. You will probably mostly get
Speaker 8: hay as a message as well as just like, you know,
Speaker 8: a picture of someone's penis, but between a penis and hey,
Speaker 8: those are probably the two most received messages you will
Speaker 8: get on Grinder. There was another guy with a username
Speaker 8: DL military who said in his bio he was working
Speaker 8: security for the week and that Grinder messages had completely
Speaker 8: broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat.
Speaker 8: The DL in DL military stands for down low. It's
Speaker 8: a tag that only the worst people on Grinder will use,
Speaker 8: mainly like self hating gay men who are closeted and
Speaker 8: it's download because they don't want to be like publicly
Speaker 8: seen being gay. Just absolutely the worst. We do not
Speaker 8: fuck with DL, both literally and figuratively. There were a
Speaker 8: bunch of other non locals who I would describe as
Speaker 8: cop types. I can't one hundred percent say for sure
Speaker 8: that they are cops, but they have like the look,
Speaker 8: you know, like the look, the cop look. I don't know.
Speaker 8: They could also be like a bodyguard or working private security.
Speaker 8: But one of these cop looking guys message to me
Speaker 8: asking if I was a trans guy, which I always
Speaker 8: love to see. It means I'm doing gender very well.
Speaker 8: And a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages.
Speaker 8: So yeah, a lot of cops, which is not completely
Speaker 8: surprising considering the fact that basically half the cops in
Speaker 8: the country were at the Republican National Convention in some
Speaker 8: form or another. A few final notes, Now this didn't
Speaker 8: really make up a sizeable chunk of the Grinder population,
Speaker 8: but after saying I was just covering the RNC, a
Speaker 8: couple people on Grinder just completely unprompted told me that
Speaker 8: they were attending the protests against the RNC.
Speaker 3: Please do not do this.
Speaker 8: That's a horrible idea for multiple reasons. You gotta stop
Speaker 8: talking about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grinder,
Speaker 8: especially at the RNC. Horrible idea. Do not do this.
Speaker 8: And despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised
Speaker 8: online profile, a few too many people did recognize me
Speaker 8: from Twitter or the pod, but they they were very nice.
Speaker 8: They gave me some recommendations for gay bars to check
Speaker 8: out after convention hours, and one person told me this
Speaker 8: interesting anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't
Speaker 8: think Trump is going to win. I can missed for
Speaker 8: Hillary in twenty sixteen, and at least here it doesn't
Speaker 8: feel the same.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: I thought that was a little interesting tinbit that I
Speaker 8: received at probably round three am on grinder.
Speaker 3: So there you go.
Speaker 8: Anyway, that was my RNC Grinder experience.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry to.
Speaker 8: Report it is not the hotbed of closeted Republicans that
Speaker 8: we mean it to be. It's mostly local gaze, a
Speaker 8: few reporters and a few more cops. I do not
Speaker 8: think I'll be reporting on the DNC grinder, but I
Speaker 8: am curious to see if there is a sizeable increase
Speaker 8: in activity as compared to the RNZ Grinder. So I
Speaker 8: guess I will maybe posted by that on Twitter at
Speaker 8: Hungry bow Tie if you want updates on that. Anyway,
Speaker 8: Stay safe out there. Be careful if you're ever on grinder,
Speaker 8: please especially I don't tell someone covering the RNC that
Speaker 8: you're attending any protests, but in general, be careful on
Speaker 8: these types of dating apps, and I will see you
Speaker 8: on the other side. Message from Quickie Grinder said you
Speaker 8: were super close yesterday. Wasn't stalking?
Speaker 3: I promise?
Speaker 8: Message from birthday present emoji. I almost thought you were
Speaker 8: Josh Thomas. Message from anonymous. Wait are you pro or
Speaker 8: anti Republican? I'm not gonna lie. I mainly asked your
Speaker 8: politics because I thought you were cute, but I didn't
Speaker 8: want to hit on a Trumper message from older for
Speaker 8: young aren't all the delegates propositioning you?
Speaker 3: You're cute?
Speaker 8: Message from anonymous? Why establish a detlitarian state if I
Speaker 8: can't breed It's a dictator message from suck me off?
Speaker 8: I'm down for anything.
Speaker 3: Lol.
Speaker 8: Are you supporting Trump?
Speaker 2: Ha ha?
Speaker 6: Hey.
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 2: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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