It Could Happen Here Weekly 111

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about a
world sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host,
Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel
and Nagaza strip rages on, and the moral authority of
Biden in his liberal cohort crumbles day by day. A
new generation of right wing media grifters have seized on

(00:49):
Palestine as a way to boost their own reactionary brand.
But these are not the standard kind of right wing
grifter that we've become accustomed to on this show. They
aren't Chris Ruffo, they aren't of TikTok, and although they
will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they are cut from
that pre existing template. These are our monsters. These are

(01:12):
monsters birth by the left. I grew up in by
the generation of new socialist radicalized by Bernie Sanders, the
Syrianceivil War, and the election of Donald Trump. This is
largely going to be a set up episode to understand
the background of the kinds of people who are going
to come later. But I wanted to start the story

(01:33):
with a taste of where it's going to end. Max
Bluemothal is a left wing journalist with the outlet Gray Zone.
He was for a very long time well regarded in
anti imperialist circles. In many ways, he is the ideological
predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left. In twenty
twenty one, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National

(01:54):
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's chief health official,
went on Face Nation to face allegations and calls by
Senator Ran Paul and Ted Cruz for him to step
down and quote be prosecuted over the course of COVID nineteen.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
After this interview happened, Face the Nation released a tweet
about it. Bluementhal responded with an incredibly disturbing video I'm
going to read the tweet. I'm not going to play
the video because this guy listening to him is a
painful experience. Bluementhal responded, quote Nobel winning inventor of the
PCR test, Carrie Mollus on Anthony quote, I am the

(02:32):
science Fauci quote and this is from Molas Tony Fauci
does not mind going on camera in front of the
people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.
By the way, the part where he says lie instead
of lying, there is a direct quote that is him,
not me. So to understand how absolutely it absolutely absurd,

(02:52):
this is we need to talk about who Carrie Burris
actually is. So Max Bluemoenthal is correct that Carrie Mollis
won the nineteen ninety three Nobel Prize for the invention
of the PCR test, which is now one of the
basic building blocks of biology. Like they let undergrads and
college do this stuff, But he is also an enormous crank.

(03:15):
Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote a profile of him when he
died in twenty nineteen. They described him like this quote,
He'd become a vociferous critic of widely accepted scientific theories
ridiculing the notion that CFCs caused the ozone hole, that
humans caused climate change, and that HIV caused AIDS. Now, okay,

(03:37):
climate change denihilism, I think is something we all understand.
The ozone layer stuff is extremely funny. This interviews from
the nineties. So in the nineties, we were using these
things called CFC's, which is a class of chemical that
we used in like hairspray and refrigerators, and using them
tore a hole in the ozone layer. So the world,
for maybe the last time, actually performed a collective action

(03:59):
stop using them, and the whole fixed itself. So okay, Obviously,
carry mollis unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But
the last part, the part where carrying Mullus claims that
HIV does not cause AIDS, we need to talk about
a bit more because it is absolutely monstrous and it

(04:20):
is going to give molos a body count. Even Kissinger
would not in respect to So, okay, we need to
talk about what HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm I'm
just gonna go to the CDC for this one. HIV
Human and amino deficiency virus is a virus that attacks
the body's immune system. If HIV is not treated, it
can lead to AIDS acquired amino deficiency syndrome. There is

(04:44):
no effective cure. Once people get HIV, they have it
for life, but with proper medical care, HIV can be controlled.
People with HIV who get effective HIV treatment can live long,
healthy lives and protective partners. And this is something that
people fought and died for. If you have HIV, there
are simple and easy tests for it now you can

(05:05):
get treatment and you can live a normal life. On
the other hand, if HIV isn't treated, you can get
acquired immuno deficiency syndrome AIDS, and that can and will
kill you. It is what killed so so many, almost
an entire generation of queer people. It killed them for
decades and decades and decades, and it's still killing them now.

(05:29):
Carrie Mullis, the guy who max bluemitthal is tweeting a
video of to Go After. Anthony Fauci doesn't think that
HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is caused by
malnutrition in poverty, and he is going to spend the
rest of his life telling anyone in everyone he can
getting mainstream press coverage telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

(05:49):
He is the Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS in nihilism.
Lots of people believe him, including for example, the FOO
fighters Dave Gruel. They believe him because he is apparently
a reputable source. The man has a Nobel prize. But unfortunately,
as we've already seen from his climate denial and his
CFC denial, he is spreading unbelievably dangerous lies, and this

(06:10):
specific lie that HIV doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people.
Here's from that Berkeley article. Again, I don't like the
way they're phrasing it. It's the you know, it's Berkeley,
right like, so some stuff going to some stuff's going
to be racist. His views on AIDS don't just look bad,
they may have had deadly consequences. By the late nineteen nineties,

(06:32):
South Africa was in the midst of a catastrophic A's epidemic.
President Thumbo mcbecky, under the spell of AIDS denialist including Mullis,
declared that A's was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many
South Africans were denied access to treatment. A two thousand
and eight study published in the Journal of Acquired Immuno
Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, thirty five thousand

(06:54):
babies were born with HIV and three hundred and thirty
thousand South Africans died of AIDS on it. Necessarily, this
is monstrous. And here is Max Bluementhal, who was up
until very recently, at the very least nominally a left
wing journalist, tweeting a video of this fucking guy to

(07:15):
attack Anthony Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right
wing anti lockdown rules. Now, I especially want to do
this because if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it
is very very easy to do from the left. You
can attack him for his response to the original HIV
AIDS pandemic, and you know, lots of queer people have
done this. Instead, Max Bluementhal is tweeting a guy is

(07:38):
tweeting a video from an unbelievable right wing crank who
was responsible for the death of three hundred and thirty
thousand people. And so the question we're going to be
answering for the next three episodes is how did we
get here and what is happening now, and to do
this we need to talk about the rise of American

(08:00):
Marxist Leninism. I'm going to try to present the ideology
as sympathetically as possible, because it's important to understand how
people came to believe in these things, because part of
the horror and tragedy here is that not all of
these people are the grifters and shills in right wing
fanatics that the IDEOLOGI spawned and who were now having
to deal with people who are on info wars agreeing

(08:23):
with Alex Jones. Most of them were people like us,
people who saw the horrors of this world and wanted
to make it better. A lot of the writing about
this is clinical and antiseptic, largely coming from either academic
journals or very very angry liberals. And I can't be

(08:43):
clinical about this. I can't cover this neutraally, and I
can't do that because some of these people were my friends.
There were people I loved and respected and cared about,
and they're people who have now lost, and so I
owe it to them to be fair about this. So
what is is the modern generation of Marxist Leninism. You
could start with the history of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's

(09:05):
consolidation of power and the development of Marxist Leninism as
an ideology, and you could trace it through the twentieth century,
and you could trace, you know, the ways in which
it is and isn't the ideology that Lenin had originally
been developing. But that really is the wrong place to
start here. If you want to understand how this ideology
came to be and why so many people came to

(09:26):
follow it, the right place to start is America. It's
with a generation of young people who grew up in
the wake of the two thousand and eight financial collapse
and the ruthless suppression of occupy by the Obama administration.
It's a generation of people who grew up on the
Internet who began to learn about the lies we've been
fed our entire lives about the world and America's role

(09:46):
in it. They learned the lies we've been told about
the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about Allende
and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about American imperialism
in Lebanon and Haitian, Guatemala and Honduras and Iran, about
Patrice Labumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharo in
the Killing Fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Shai Guavara, about

(10:09):
the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a thousand
crimes of the American Empire crime as we could spend
an entire episode just listing by name. They learned in
a tremendously short amount of time that the American Empire
was born of genocide. It was built by slavery, and
he is sustained by replicating those genocides across the world
and at home. That the governments, they were taught from

(10:32):
birth to love and respect, slaughtered children in the streets
with health fire and missiles, and then had the unmitigated
gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders of
the free world and the upholder of the rules based
international order. And so they started learning about how our
capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx, and then

(10:52):
they started reading Angles, and it led to other Marxists
into the great international enemies of American imperialism from the
last century ho Chi Minh Castro to Lenin, to struggles
against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like phenomen and
militants like Asada Shakur. It led them to believe, to
really believe in the struggle against capitalism and racism and imperialism,

(11:16):
and that led them to Stalin and Mao, And eventually
it would lead them down a darker path, a path
where anything and everything could be justified if it meant
defeating the American Empire, a path that told them it
was their duty to back every state in the world
who could even conceivably check the advance of American power.

(11:38):
It led them to modern geopolitics, to the belief that
modern China and Vietnam or socialist states still resisting American imperialism.
It would lead them eventually to backing the very Russian
oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. And it would
lead some of them into the very heart of darkness itself,
to an alliance with anyone and everyone who opposed liberal interventionism.

(12:00):
It would lead to the Sekin alliance with the arch
right wing anti communist Donald Trump. But it didn't start
that way. The co option of the ideology is a
process that took almost a decade and comprise a series
of debates inside the left about what capitalism, socialism, and
imperialism really are, and how the left should relate to
nationalism in the state. We'll talk more about how these

(12:23):
debates led to a right wing turn at episode three.
But the core beliefs anti imperialism, objection to capitalism, a
rejection of liberal interventionism, and some of the darker and
more conspiratorial tendencies, like accusing any protest movement against the
government they supported of being CIA assets, spread like wildfire.
There were contradictions from the beginning, of course, how do

(12:45):
you square your opposition to capitalism with your support for China,
a country with almost one thousand billionaires. The solution was
to lie. Lies about China, in particular abound it. Many
Marxist Leninists believe, for reasons that are deeply unclear to me,
that China has public housing that automatically guarantees every citizen
a home. This is not true. This unclear to me

(13:09):
if it's ever been true, even through this so, I mean,
I guess you could argue it was sort of true
during the socialist period. It has not been true for
a very very long time. China has a lot of
homeless people. But you know, these sort of lies persist
because they are what you need to believe in order
to believe that China is a socialist state and not
a capitalist one. Another common line is that China has

(13:31):
a fully socialized healthcare system. This is unbelievably not true. China,
in fact, used to have something like a universal medical
system that they operated in extreme difficulty with groups of
people called the barefoot doctors who would go to rural
villages that had never really received proper medical care before
and attempt to treat them. This was the thing that

(13:53):
China used to have, and then they tore it up
and privatized it, and now Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster.
Calculations by the Chinese Journal Twang estimate that almost the
entire Chinese economy is based on corporations not paying their
required contributions to healthcare plans, and that if corporations actually
paid into the healthcare plans of micro workers, the entire

(14:15):
economies of entire provinces would immediately go under as an
enormous majority of their corporations immediately went underwater. And so
what we're getting this sort of picture of is people
begin to believe things that need to be true in
order for their ant to square their anti imperialism, or

(14:35):
their version of anti imperialism, which is opposing at all
costs the United States with their anti capitalism when the
two began to conflict in terms of, you know, attempting
to support a very obviously capitalist economy, and this leads
to some very very bizarre twists in turns. One very
common thing is for socialists and socialist organizations in the US,

(15:00):
or at least I say socialists, I made Marxist Leninists
organizations to advocate for a fifteen or twenty dollars midiroom
wage in China while simultaneously celebrating thirty two cents an
hour as the end of poverty in China. This has
never actually penetrated the minds of the new Marxist Leninists.
With their endless parades of flags and new countries added
every day, from the genocidal austerity bongers in Ethiopia to

(15:22):
the hardline, murderous anti communists to rule meenmore by baton
and bullet, new Marxist Leninists were able to effectively insulate
themselves from reality. This left them as prey for a
new generation of right wing grifters. Would cynically exploit them
for wealth and status. They also garnered the hatred of
the more internationalist factions of the left, and then, as

(15:43):
their numbers expanded, the increasing ire of liberals, who, stealing
a term from anarchists, began to call the Marxist Leninist tankies. This,
I suspect, if you have heard of these people, is
probably the word you've heard used to describe them. So
we should talk about what this word actually means. But first,
unfortunately some ads, and we're back. To explain what a

(16:10):
tanky is, we have to go back to, bizarrely, the
nineteen fifty six Hungarian Revolution. So all right, in nineteen
fifty six there was a massive uprising in Hungary. The
Hungarians effectively forced their government to break with the Soviets.
The Soviets respond to this by rolling a bunch of

(16:31):
tanks across the border, claiming everyone in the revolution is
the fascist and killing them all. And they were fairly
successfully able to convince a large number of communists that
the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They were aided in
this by the fact that the liberals also lied about
what the Hungarian revolution really was. And this is a
lie that they continue to spread to this day. The

(16:53):
liberal version of the revolution is that it was, you know,
it was a liberal revolution by people who wanted liberal
democracy against the Soviets'll tell Terrrianism, etc. Et cetera, et cetera.
And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising
and what most of it was was a rebellion by
the Hungarian workers' councils, So workers across their factories seized

(17:15):
control of their factories, threw their bosses out, and began
to manage the democratically. The different workers' councils like foreign
regional federations. It is very stunningly, very very similar to
the original Soviets of the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution, which
in theory the USSR is supposed to be named after.

(17:35):
But when they reappeared again, the the Soviets just absolutely
smashed them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned
one party state. And what this actually meant was tanks
rolling up to the gates of factories blasting apart the
very workers' councils who are supposed to be the basis
of communism. This was an attempt in some sense yes,

(17:56):
to implement democracy, but it was an attempt to implement
democracy in the factory, and it was attempted by the
working class to seize control of the means of production
and manage them themselves. Now, the smashing of the Hungarian
Revolution led to a split in enormous numbers of communist
parties all across the world. There are people leave communist
parties and droves. This is a big enough deal that

(18:17):
it spawns effectively like a crisis in China, where there
is a series of bast strikes and people chanting like
here another Hungary, and in particular the British Communist Party
had a guy on the ground in Hungary reporting of
what was happening, and his reports split the party between
the people who supported the Hungarians and the people who
supported the Soviets. The latter faction became known as tankies

(18:40):
for their support of rolling tanks across the border and
slaughtering in the working class. The term was revived in
the twenty tens to describe the return of Marcist Leninists,
so though much of its usage was about Russia and
Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising. Now it is
true that all of these people do actually support they

(19:00):
do actually believe that the Soviets were crushing like the
return of fascism, but that that actual belief, like the
belief in you know, that the Soviets were right to
crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively irrelevant now except as
a sort of marker of loyalty, because you know, the
USSR is gone and the Hungarian Revolution is gone too,

(19:23):
and so what's left is a term that on the
one hand, does correctly, you know, it does correctly describe
a part of their political tradition, but it has it
has a tendency to sort of anchor these arguments in
the past instead of the present. With the substance of

(19:44):
disagreements with the Marxist Leninists actually are now Marxist Leninists,
they're also just yeah, they're called mls to Marxist Leninists
absolutely hate being called tankies except under, you know, the
circumstances where they adopted ironically, and I'm of two minds.
I have called these people's tankies a lot. But the

(20:04):
biggest problem with calling these people tankies is that the
original tankies, the people who supported the Soviets butchering the
Hungarian working class were actually communists. They were Marxist Latinists
who supported the USSR and believe that state ownership of
the means of production was the socialist transition to communism.
These modern quote unquote Marxist Leninists don't even believe that.

(20:25):
Both Stalin and Kruish Chef, for all the differences, would
have had these people's shop for supporting capitalists in their
imperialist market economies. If you tried to explain to Mao
that Deng Jhao Ping, with his people's billionaires and a
trillion dollars of American treasury bond singing it sitting in
his coffers, was doing communism, he would have branded you
a capitalist, wrote and sent you to your re education
camp at the end of the day. Whatever else, the

(20:48):
original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR were communists.
Their modern day equivalents don't even have that to height behind.
They have been reduced to capitalists with a hammer and
sickle fetish. So who are these people really? What they've
become is suicide net socialists, because the suicide nets are
the actual content of their politics. This is the actual

(21:11):
content of backing states like the people's Republic of China.
It is full throated support for the suicide nets to
fly under the roofs of the Fox confactories in Shenzhen.
The reality of their suicide net socialism is that the
Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than live under it.
And it was these suicide net socialists who sins spawned
their bastard children, patriotic socialism, and eventually Maga communism. So

(21:36):
how do we understand what these people are? I am
going to give the final word to Karl Marx, the
man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going to
read from one of Marx's most famous works, the eighteenth
through Mayor. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on the
show before. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like

(21:58):
a nightmare on the mina into the living. And just
as they seemed to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such
epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits
of the past to their service, borrowing from them names,
battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new

(22:20):
scene in world history and time, honor, disguise and borrowed language.
Thus Luther Martin Luther put on the mask of the
apostle Paul. The French Revolution of seventeen eighty nine to
nineteen fourteen draped itself alternatingly in the guise of the
Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of
nineteen forty eight knew nothing better to do than to

(22:41):
parody now seventeen eighty nine, now the revolutionary tradition of
seventeen ninety three, seventeen ninety five. This is precisely the
trap that Marxist Leninis have walked into. Faced with mass
social upheaval, they knew nothing better than the down the
mask of Stalind and Mao. It was a terrible mistake.

(23:02):
Here is Marx again. The social revolution of the nineteenth
century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only
from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it
has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former
revolutionaries required recollections of past world history in order to
smother their own content. The Revolution of the nineteenth century

(23:24):
must let the dead bury their dead in order to
arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond
the content. Here, the content goes beyond the phrase. But
we never buried our dead. The memories of dead generations
still weigh like a nightmare in the minds of the living.

(23:44):
And in the next episode we will walk face first
into that nightmare and behold the abyss within.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Woo All right, guys, I did my job. That could
happen here a podcast that I just opened by saying,
woo ha meyeah, I'm gonna throw to you. Now what
are we talking about today?

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Boy? So, yesterday we did I guess, the sort of
intro legwork to the kind of stuff that you need
to know to understand the sort of new crop of
right wing Palestine grifters. And today we're actually gonna get
into who these people are and how their politics developed,
and how the sort of trajectory of this has shaped

(24:43):
a lot of the left. And to do this, unfortunately,
we need to introduce one of the main characters of this,
for better or for worse, probably for worse, Max Blumenthal.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
I just woke up. We're talking about Max Blumenthal and
I'm just barely starting my coffee for the morning. Son
of a bitch.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
I'm so sorry. I apologize to everyone, but unfortunately, unfortunately
this needs to be done.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, he's the human equivalent of soap scum.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Yeah, so okay, I think the place to start with
Max Bluementhal is a thing that's pretty common among most
of the kind of new crop of these Palestine grifters
is that he used to be a pretty normal progressive.
Now for some of the people were going to be
talking about, pretty normal progressive was a thing they were
in like twenty nineteen. For Max Blumenthal, like, he was

(25:45):
a pretty normal progressive in like the two thousands and
in nine was.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
A real journalist at some point, right, yeah, yeah, Like,
like he wrote this book called Republican Gomorah, Inside the
Movement that Shattered the Part, which is a pretty good
book about the rise of the Christian Right and how
they seize the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
And this is very funny because the place he is
going to end up at the end of this story
is going on Tucker Carlson and being aligned with like
the exact forces he was talking about like a decade
and a half ago. So before we really started to
get into him, we need to talk about his family. Garrett,
do you know who Sid Blumenthal is?

Speaker 4 (26:26):
Oh? Yeah, the name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing
any specific bells for me.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Ye Clinton staffer, right.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Yeah, yeah, he was like Clinton's hatchet man basically, like
this is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but like later
Hillary Clinton too. He's like the guy who does the
Clinton's like political dirty work, and he was like, here's
a big guy in the nineties. The most impactful thing
that he did for modern politics is that he is
the guy who invented birth rhythm is slightly too strong

(26:57):
of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like
Obama birth rhism him like into the mainstream because like
as an attempt basically to kill Obama's campaign so that
Hillary could win the nomination.

Speaker 4 (27:08):
How well did how well did that turn out?

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Well? Gave us Donald Trump, So you know, things going great,
and you know, so so this is Max Bluementhal's dad, right,
like Max, And this is I think I think that's
kind of important about him is that he grows up
very sort of proximal to power. Like he goes to
Georgetown Day School, which is a forty thousand dollars a

(27:30):
year prep school that has like multiple Supreme Court justices,
Like I've sent their kids there now. But he's so
he's like kind of a normal progressive journalist for a
long time. But in the early twenty tens, he takes
a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets

(27:51):
him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive
circles because in twenty twelve thirteen, it was and it
still is to this day, but like it was, it
was very hard to take profalesime positions, and he like
he just ends up in this sort of spiral where
like he loses most of his friends, his girlfriend breaks
up with him, like he's not getting work from the
usual places he'd been getting work from because he's been

(28:12):
sort of like kicked out and isolated for taking this stance.
And the product of this is that he goes he
takes this meeting that is very very weird. So in
twenty fifteen, Russia today has this like week long gala
thing that's for its tenth anniversary. And if you're like

(28:32):
a Mueller investigation fan, this is very famous. If you're
a Nova person, almost no one has ever heard of
this thing. Yeah, so this this gala thing is this
in twenty fifteen. It has a bunch of very very
important like Russian officials. Gorbachev is there, Like there's a
bunch of like senior like senior officials. Very famously, Mike

(28:54):
Flynn gets paid forty five thousand dollars to speak there.
Jill Stein, who the Green Party can in twenty sixteen?
This is where.

Speaker 4 (29:04):
Running again for the Green Party this year?

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Technics. Yeah, I don't know if they're gonna be this year.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
I think they got it. I think they got it.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
On lock Now Jill Jill Jill Stein twenty four? Would
she beat Howie Hawkins? Is he not running again?

Speaker 4 (29:18):
I believe, I believe it's her. That's last last night
I heard Jill Stein is making is making another run
for it?

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Goddamn?

Speaker 4 (29:25):
All right, yeah, yeah, she has one month ago she
launched her twenty twenty four presidential bid.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Oh boy, so yeah, okay, so so Jill Stein. This
is where if you've ever heard the conspiracy stuff, that's
like Jill Stein is like a Russian agent. It comes
from the fact that she was at this meeting and
then started running for president. Now, what's interesting about Max
Bluman thought going here is at this point he's a

(29:52):
pro Syrian revolution guy. He writes, he writes a bunch
of articles like criticizing Western leftists for supporting a Saudid.
I want to read from a little bit of them,
because it's a really interesting look into who he was
before and the fact that he knows exactly what the
playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting

(30:16):
the Palestinian cause, the Assaud apologists have eagerly played the
al Qaeda card to stoke fears of his Islamic takeover Assyria.
Back in two thousand and three, Assaud accused the US
of deliberately overstating the strength of Alkaida in order to
justify it so called war on Terror. But now in
a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world, Asad
insists the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost entirely by

(30:38):
al Qaeda like jahadists who have come from abroad to
place the country under Islamic control, and is addressed to
the Syrian People's Assembly. On June third, the dictator tried
to hammer the theme home by using the terms terrorists
or terrorism a whopping forty three times. That is a
full ten times more than George Bush digit he speech
to Congress. In the aftermath of nine to eleven, enjoining

(31:02):
the Asade regimes campaign that g legitimize the Syrian opposition
by casting it as a bunch off irrational Jahatis. Ironically,
they seem to have little problem with Hesbelah's core Islamist values.
Assaud's apologists have unwinningly underwritten the war on Terror lexicon
introduced by George Bush, Ariel Sharon and the Neo Kon
cabal after nine to eleven. So this is pre twenty fifteen,

(31:24):
like twenty fifteen, like pre this meeting, Max bluementhal So
he goes to this meeting and then after that founds
grey Zone and all of his positions suddenly flip. And
this is the thing you can actually if you want to,
if you go back and trace. So graizone is this
sort of media outlet thing that Max Blumenthal found it.

(31:44):
And it's interesting because there's a lot of like Aaron
Batte too, Like if you go through the journalist in
this outlet, the moment they start working for Greyzone, all
of their positions on stuff like Syria just immediately flip.
There's okay. So there's a conspiracy version of this where
like if you read Liberal Accouncil with Grayzone. They will
argue that maxlely Wenthal went to this meeting, got paid

(32:05):
off by the Russian government and that grey Zone is
like a Russian asset. I I don't know. I don't
think that's true. Well, the thing I can say was,
nobody knows where Grayzone gets his money from. Right, they're
very they're very sort of like like there's Patreon stuff.
But other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it.
There's no evidence, like directly that he's been paid by

(32:26):
the Russian government to do Grayzone. The thing that I
can say is that he has taken a bunch of
money from the Russian government to go on RT like
all the fucking time. That's the part of it that
I can say. I don't know. This is one of
these things that's it's such a sort of like confluence
of like all of these people were in the same
place at the same time. It's one of these things
that generates a trilling conspiracy theories. I'm gonna say that

(32:47):
I don't think that this is like a giant Russian conspiracy.
But he does flip all of his positions almost immediately
after going to this meeting, and the thing that he
starts taking is is the exact same position that he
was he was writing about like before this in twenty fifteen,
he starts talking about how like anyone who opposes a

(33:09):
SAWD is a quote head chopper, and he starts he
starts selling like one of these big things is selling
this line that like a SAWD is the defender of
serious ethnic minorities, which is like a thing that I
think would be newsed to them, and you know, and
he's he starts a podcast called Moderate Rebels, which is
a joke about like, ah, like the US is funding
moderate rebels, but all those people are actually like ol
Kaida supporters, and I don't know, like I think. I

(33:33):
think it's interesting comparing his pre twenty fifteen writing to
his post twenty fifteen writing, because he very clearly understands
what he's doing, Like he he wrote an analysis of
the thing that he's going to be dealing.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
There's no plausible deniability with him.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, and a big part of this whole deal is
like and this is one of the things that Max
Lminthal figures out is that there are there are there's
a very large market in selling a palatable form of
Islamophobia to the left. You're gonna see this in this
is one of the things that he doesn't shing John,
where there's he's he's part of this whole sort of

(34:13):
sphere of people who are like, there's nothing happening in
Chan John, Everything's actually great. And with both that and Syria,
there's exactly the same playbook, which is to go all, like,
you know, all of the resistance to this government is
CIA back Wahabi terrorists. You can find like some people
who suck and go oh hey, like these guys are
all Jahadists, and you know, in Syria this is sort

(34:35):
of bleakly funny because if you know your War on
terror history, like Bashar al Assad like tortured people with
the CIA and the US like held some Weiger guys
for the CCP in Gitmo for allegedly being part of
a separatist group. But this is an important part of
how people sort of launder these right wing dictators. And

(34:58):
this is something that there's a very old sort of
tradition of this on the left that these these a
lot of people are able to sort of raft onto
And I'm going to take an example of this because
I think it's important because one of the the er
sort of moments of all of this politics is the

(35:18):
collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left wing defense
of Melosovic. So I'm going to read from to take
an example of like what this shit looks like. I'm
going to read from an article that Jeremy Skahill wrote,
which is, I think the worst article about Melosovik I've
ever seen. This is this is a Huffington Post piece.
This is I think the worst thing I've ever seen
written about Molosovik in a mainstream outlet. Here is here.

(35:41):
Here is Jeremy's Gayhill quote. Little attention therefore, has been
paid to Melosovic's long term efforts, which predate nine to eleven,
the nineteen ninety nine NATO bombing and his own trial
to expose the presence of Al Qaeda and the Balkans
from Bosnia to Kosovo. With nine to eleven, Melosovic's talk
of al Kaido easily dismissed as laughable, pathetic opportunism. But

(36:03):
those who follow Melosovic's career and importantly the events of
the nineteen nineties in Yugoslavia, no, it was none of these.
The those allegations were based on true events the US
does not want discussed in an international court. Following the
defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the eighties, many
Musha Hadeen eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia, where they

(36:23):
went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs
and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and bin Laden
were on the same team. To this day, there are
reports of trading camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation.
It is also likely a trading ground for future blowback.
So that's like nonsense, Like there are not there are

(36:46):
not all Kaida training camps in Bosnia, Like what the fuck? Like,
it's just it's complete nonsense, And you know, it relies
on a lot of the other sort of like weird
things that leftists like believe and don't believe about this.
There's there's a very if if you want to actually
read about these sort of like transnational Islamist networks, there's

(37:10):
there's a very good book by the anthropologist DARRYL Lee
called The Universal Enemy in Jihad and Jihada Empire and
the Challenge of Solidarity. But like, okay, I want I
want to ask the audience a question, right, why would
members of the muja Hadeen be in Bosnia in the
nineteen nineties, And I want to suggest that it might
have something to do with the fact that Melosivic was

(37:32):
trying to kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He
almost did it. He was pretty close to actually doing it,
you know. But the sort of the sort of like
left conspiracy solutions like no, no, it must have been
the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex Musja Hadeen
guys would have gone to a country where someone was
trying to kill the entire Muslim population, Like what the

(37:54):
fuck did you?

Speaker 4 (37:54):
Like?

Speaker 1 (37:55):
It's it's it's all stuff that's like this, And you know,
he also talks about how like Belosovic would have like
testified about the CIA institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo,
and like what like Belosovic is the guy who presided
like he was one of the architects of of decollectivisation

(38:15):
in Yugoslavia, like he is like before before he was this,
before he was the butcher of Belgrade, he was the
butcher of the Yugoslavian social estate. But you can, you know,
and so and he was he was just a hardline
right wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to
a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting, you know,
by by by doing this thing where you're like, oh

(38:36):
well actually like all of these people were, uh, they
were all al Kaeda. You can use this to sell
the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as like the left to
savor of Yugoslavia. And you know, I think that the
part about this that really said is like you know,
there was you know, the sort of last true believers

(38:56):
of the old Yugoslavia working class right where these the
Yugoslavin anti war protesters and these guys, you know, they
they're they're they're protesting to stop the war. They see
coming that the Serbians are about to win, leash and
they just get murdered in the streets by Melosovic. You know,
well because seven years later the US society that they

(39:18):
didn't like him, like he's become this like hero of
a bunch of these like a bunch of barxsis Leninists
like see this guy as a hero, and this is
you know, this, this is just this is their big
sort of like political trick is using the threat of
like terrifying Muslim like terrorists to just legitimize right wing dictators.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
I mean, you know, speaking of right wing dictators. Yeah,
there's this non zero chance there's an ad for someone
who will be one in the future. Uh, right now,
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
So we're back to this stuff. And Syria and specifically
the way people think about Syria plays a huge role
in the sort of development of the left. And one
of the reasons that the sort of new gray zone line,
which is that the entire opposition is composed of Islamists
and that Asad is the only person who can stop them,

(40:15):
is that, like, you know, part of the reason this
works is that like yeah, like they're and this is
this is the gap that these people always sort of
come in through. Is that like a lot of the
Western media was not covering Syria very well. They weren't
covering the rise of like job Outel news Row very well,
and you know, they use this gap to sort of

(40:35):
like come through and rehabilitate a sod by going like
the media is lying to you a sad who again,
I need to mention like ten years earlier, this guy
was torturing people for the Cia. But you know, now
like Asad is actually Nancy imperialist, and this works, This
works enormously well. This is the sort of breach through
which Bluemithal enters the mainstream. And this, this discourse about

(40:56):
Syria like reshapes everything about the left. This is where
this is where American Marcist Leninism like comes from right,
like a huge portion of ideas from the people who
backed the SOD And this is it's actually really weird,
like almost every big sort of like leftist like podcast
or media thing like came out of the Syrian Civil
War in some way or another, Like the whole Grazo

(41:17):
versus Bellingcat thing is a like is a thing that
was originally about the Syrian Civil War Tropo trap House,
which is like I guess if people who don't know
it's this massive like social democratic podcast also like sort
of came out of there, like it was partially about
like came out of like Turkish politics. But those were
very very similar circles like on Twitter at the time,

(41:39):
and you know, and one of their big things is
like Felix Peterman's like The Truth about Syria, which is
a sort of slightly softer like version of supporting ASAD
that also supports like the revolution in Rojeva. Like I
came out of this because I was on the pro
Rojava side because like I'm an anarchist and I have
a bunch of Kurdish friends. So there's this giant fight
about what the Syrian Civil War is and what the

(42:02):
sides are and what it means. And this is one
of the things that comes to define what the left
is and the grey zone people sort of win. And
the result of this is that this pro acod like
nominally anti imperialist position becomes the default position of a
bunch of sort of like people who aren't like hardline Marxistlenis,

(42:24):
who are just sort of like like kind of edgy
Bernie like Birdie supporters. And this is something that like
you can see the effect of this, like to this
day if you look at left, if you look at
like leftist meme culture, like you can see people who
are otherwise mostly normal making Line of Damascus jokes about
how like a sod is like the line of Damascus

(42:44):
people still make jokes about barrel bombs, which is you
know this thing that ASD would do. Uh, there's the
whole like the one that I see the most, it's
like still very very common, is there is this whole
meme of like Hillary Clinton says, asod must go, and
then there's like the second panel as like who must
go and Hillary Clinton gone, and people still do this
like to this day.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
The other really common one, there's this little girl named
Bana A Labet who was a Syrian girl who got bombed,
and there's like a video of her, you know, reacting
in the way a small child would to being bombed,
and like there's a meme that's basically taking her words
and twisting it into like please America, you know, come

(43:23):
and intervene in Syria. Like turn it basically like this
this girl is CIA propaganda trying to like justify US
intervention in the war. Like that's the that's the bit
you see it posted A lot people repurposed it after
the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians.
It's like it's like pretty fundamentally cruel.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Yeah, And that's that's how a lot of this stuff
worked because it was it's stuff that fits into the
social values of that part of the left at that time,
which is that both the Marxist leninists and what was
called the dirtbag left around Tchapa was completely irony poisoned
and like, I get it. I was around then, like
I did my time in the art trenches, Like it's
really hard not to react to the worlds with ironic

(44:04):
detachment when it's so fucking terrible. But you know the
other side of that was like these people started like
we're doing these Assadmians because they were like because they
were edgy and contrarian, and because you know, like the
like this is like the stuff with the bond. This
is one of the things with the Bonum stuff is

(44:25):
like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is
something that's edgy and contrarian, and like like the performance
of that was this very sort of like powerful emotional
pull that that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff.

(44:47):
And you know, originally, and part of the everything here
too is like everyone everyone in all of these circles,
their big thing is trying to own the Libs, and
this is something that like the Libs cared about and
doing this thing of like how much you don't care
about it and how much you think it's like them
falling for propaganda that was you know, that was something

(45:08):
that was heavily incentivized by the structure of housings like
Twitter work and how like retweets work, and you know
this this is I mean, it's bleak in and of itself,
but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only
other people who support ASAD are like white supremacists, and

(45:32):
this leads to a bunch of very very weird cross
pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between
these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of
the most common sources about Syria for both sort of
Marxist Leninists and like social democratic Twitter users is this
person named Partisan Girl who's, like I still to this day,
like a very big media figure. So she is a

(45:55):
Syrian Australian quote unquote Syria expert. We don't really have
time to get into all of her stuff on.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Munch, I think, yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Yeah, she's been on David Duke's podcast.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
David Duke as a former podcast, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. She was
on Richard Spencer's podcast like she is just a Nazi.
The last post that I saw from her was her
responding to another guy who's just just a straight up
Partland anti Semite who posted this beam that was like
maybe this is why all conservatives support Israel and has
a bunch of faces of conservatives with like us stars

(46:31):
of David on them, like including Max Blumenthal and partisan girls.
Response to this is not too object to the fact
that it's unbelievably anti Semitic, but to be like, no, no, no,
Max Blumenthal is actually an anti Zionist, so you shouldn't
include him with all of the rest of the people
who you've included on here because they're Jewish, even though
some of them aren't. He's just accusing random people of
being Jewish who aren't. But that's the thing. Like she's

(46:52):
straight up in anti semi just actually a fascist. I like,
I literally, like we could sit here for ten minutes
list the names of all of the fascist podcasts she's
been on. And this is one of these things that
people knew, Like people knew that she was a fascist.
And I had arguments with people where I would be like, hey,
this person is a Nazi, like she's been on David

(47:13):
Duke's podcast, and people would be like well, yeah, she's
a fascist, but I like her Syria analysis and this
is you know, one of the things that happens in
this is this is I'm gonna kind of defer to
you on this, Robert, because this is something I know
a lot less about. But one of the things that
the grays On people become really heavily involved about is

(47:37):
the doing a bunch of weird denihalism stuff around chemical
weapons attacks and Duma.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's it. That's a lot of
the nexus of the kind of asshole Left takes on
Syria revolve around is because if if Basha al Assade
was dumping chemical weapons on civil populations and mass which
we know he was, then there's absolutely no way you

(48:06):
can justify or defend him. It doesn't matter how many
of his enemies were quote unquote Islamists. He was pumping
chemical weapons into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to
be that that never happened, right, that that was the
CIA faking it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and
it got blamed on a sod. A lot of it

(48:27):
comes down to there's this group. These guys are civil
defense people. This is there are civil defense units in
any city being bombed made up of civilians in the area.
When I was in Mosul, I was embedded with a
lot of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go
in and they pull people out and bodies out of
wreckage after bombings, right, they're usually locals. They provide some

(48:47):
emergency medical care to the extent that that's possible. There's
people doing this right now. In Gaza and in Syria,
it was the White Helmets, And you know, the White
Helmets were in large part formed by a dude named
James Messia I believe it's the way his name is pronounced.
He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that
long ago. But a big part of this chunk of

(49:12):
the left's line on Syria is that because these guys
are the first responders and they're getting in after these
chemical attacks and providing a lot of the initial evidence
in the wake of them, it's that these guys, the
White Helmets, are a CIA front and they're the ones
who are kind of planting all of the evidence of
these attacks.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Yeah, and this stuff gets really really out of control
very quickly. I mean, this is one of the you
suddenly see all of these people doing the stuff that
the Alex Jones supporters are doing about Sandy Hook were
like they're like taking pictures of like dead bodies and going, oh,
this is like a mannequin or like these are crisis actors,
and it's it's insane because it's like this is all

(49:52):
the stuff that like the Israelis are doing now, where
like they're taking pictures of a dead baby and going
like this is a doll. But so many people were
doing this with like with the shit in Syria, and
it really struck me as like I was kind of
observing it from the outside because I don't know, like

(50:13):
the period this was happening as the period where Occupy
Ice was starting, so I was not super involved in
this stuff, but you could just sort of see like
the kind of the level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing
to the point where like all of the stuff that's
like the modern like conspiracy canon is just getting embedded
in there.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, it's where you see a lot of the stuff
that has been the norm on the right for twenty
years start to take hold in the left default reality
kind of fragmenting conspiratorial angles on verifiable things that are
happening right where you have what's obviously occurring based on

(50:56):
the evidence and the completely errant reality fragment that that
is how you have to perceive events in order to
stay ideologically consistent. That's when a lot of that start
starts to infect the left in a way that is
now you know, pretty widely prevalent.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, one
of the things that he's able to do with this
that becomes one of the staples of a lot of
the left is this this line about color revolutions, where
every single time a protest starts in a country that
he doesn't like, or like the US doesn't like, like
everyone on Twitter would suddenly be like, Oh, it's a
it's a color revolution, it's a CIA op. All the

(51:39):
protesters are being paid by the CIA. And I could
pick like a thousand examples of this from everywhere from
like Lebanon to Hong Kong. Like every time a mass
protest would start, these people would be like, it's a
it's a color revolution. I'm gonna I'm gonna pick one
that I think, I genuinely think is the most egregious
piece of slander they've ever fucking printed or at least
like like slander of a leftist group, which is so

(52:01):
Ben Norton wrote a piece that was about Ecuador because
there been there have been a bunch of like Ecuador
has periodic mass protests, they also had elections. And Ben Norton,
who's another gray Zone guy who eventually like we wouldn't
even have time to cover this, but he's gonna break
with the gray Zone people when they take their hard
right pivot because they start doing like anti vax shit

(52:21):
that's too much.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Even fame, which has been at least a little bit
of fun to watch.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah, yeah, watching them all fighting each other has been
all gone some one of the few pieces of satisfaction
we've gotten out of this. But Norton, so he on
the one of the people he's targeting is the Confederation
of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and so we've talked about
them on this show before. They are one of the

(52:46):
most radical indigenous organizations on the planet. Like they you know,
they they have been literally in the case of Ben Norton,
they have been overthrowing near liberal government since before Ben
Norton was born. Like their big thing is doing is
is they do these days where like they call an
uprising and it uprising happens, hundreds of thousands of people
go into the streets and try to bring down the

(53:08):
government and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But
you know this is this is one of their big things.
And Gray Zone like like Norton calls these people uh
anarchists inspired ultra leftists backed by the US.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
Which is just you know, you're in for a good
political analysis when someone uses the term ultra leftists.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
Yeah, I love it as an insults like what, oh no,
I've been ultra leftists and my politics are too good
you my takes are too based like what this is
supposed to be an insult like baffling stuff. Yeah, but
like and like, in the span of two years, they
went from like praising they went from praising the Confederation
if the Just Nationalities of Ecuador to calling them a

(53:48):
cia OP like again within two years. And and a
lot of a lot of this stuff is based on
the work of this guy named William Engdah. I don't
know how a pounce this Leason. I think I think
it's William Ngdah. So he's he's a Laruchite We've talked
about the Laruchites on this podcast before. They're famous for
like beating up leftists on college campuses in the seventies.

(54:09):
They're also like the most feted up motherfuckers in the
entire world. Like they are. They are snitching on leftist
groups to like federal agencies you've never heard of before,
like they claim to have worked with the CIA, the FBI,
Defents Intelligence Agency, directly cooperated with Reagan's National Security Council,
like they have. They are like the biggest snitches in

(54:30):
the entire world. And you know, Bluementhal's like copying their
stuff right, Like he's this, this is where a lot
of his stuff about what color revolutions are comes from.
And eng Daw is, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to
some research by Emmy bevinse Us, an anti fascist researcher.
So eng Daw thinks that BLM was a color revolution

(54:53):
because he is just a a really really hard line
like right worker. This is actually like a pretty common
thing in these circles of people who think that b
Alema's color revolution, people who think that like occupies a
color revolution, and that's sort of like the far right
of these of these sort of circles, and uh, I

(55:13):
guess speaking of the far right of these circles. Uh,
do you know what is the by far the right
choice for you to.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
To use your consuming power of the of the purchasing dollar.
That's right, these these ads.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Great job.

Speaker 4 (55:32):
Yeah, that was That was wonderful and.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
We are unfortunately back.

Speaker 4 (55:36):
Well my wallet is later and I've never felt happier.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Yeah, So okay, so we The reason we're covering this
in the first place is the sort of right wing
pivot that this circle does. But before we talk about that,
we need to talk about one more thing that is
incredibly bleak, which which is the time he accused a
sexual assault victim of being a co intel pro op.

(56:06):
So this is a story I don't think most people know.
I only know about it because I was there in
the DSA at the time this is happening. In twenty seventeen,
the DSA has its first has his first elections after
the giant surgeon membership from both like Trump winning and

(56:27):
also Bernie, and they have his first elections to its
governing body. And one of the people who's elected is
this guy named Arles Stevens. Arl Stevens is. He's a
very popular leftist leftist at the time he does this
whole podcast circuit. He's very charismatic. He gets the third
most votes of anyone elected to the National Political Committee.
But it turns out he is also an abuser. A

(56:48):
woman publishes an anonymous letter about Stevens sexually assaulting her.
It is fucking brutal. Ben Norton, who's one of his
coworkers that we've talked about before, makes a giant threat
accused the victim of being co intel pro Max Blumenthal
quote tweets it and says quote can't help but be
reminded of cointelprobe while reading this thread, and even people

(57:11):
who are normally Max Plumenthal supporters were like, what the
fuck are you doing? And like the full story of
Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement, and this is actually worse
than I can talk about on air. So after the
first thread where he where Ben Norton calls it a
coen Tel for up, he deletes that one because it's

(57:34):
just not obviously not sure if people are yelling at him,
So he makes a second thread that that threat is
still up to this fucking day. You can find the
thread of Ben Norton talking about how a DSA faction
called Momentum had like manufactured this sexual assault thing to
like destroy its opposition. And I want to make something

(57:55):
very clear, because I was there when, but when, like
during the in this fight inside the DSA, which Momentum
and everyone else in the fucking org And I was
on the anti Momentum side.

Speaker 4 (58:03):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Momentum was basically the right wing of the DSA, not
exactly the right wing, like there's there were some other
people who were further right than them, but they were
they were like the center right of the DSA. They
were electoralists. The only thing they ever wanted to do
was canvassing, like I was on and Arl Stevens was
on the other side, like opposing them, and I was
on like politically, I was in the in like on
the same side as Arl Stevens here right, Like I

(58:25):
fucking hate the Momentum people. I think they destroyed the
DSA one one day I will do a whole thing
about them. Like these these people, like the Domentum people,
literally purged my friends from the York right. And Arl
Stevens is one of their enemies. And that is not
what this shit was fucking about like Arl Stevens is
just a rapist. But you know, Max Blumenthal and Ben

(58:46):
Norton came in and were like, oh shit, this Arl
Stevens guy is like an anti imperialist, so we're going
to accuse the survivor of being a co intel pro
op and it's fucking it's so fucking bl Max has
deleted his tweet, but you can find it if you.
You know, I have screenshots of it, and I have

(59:07):
wayback machine things, right because I was there when this
was happening, and none of these people ever suffered any
professional repercussions for this. They were just fucking allowed to
do this shit and nothing ever happened to them. I
don't know. It makes me just incredibly deeply angry.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Yeah, no, I mean it's it is like there's that
piece that goes around regularly about how like misogynists make
the best informants, and it remains a pretty durable fact
about organizing. Like if you run into people who are
immediately attacking the victim of sexual assault as some sort

(59:43):
of an informant because the person who committed it is
on the quote unquote right ideological side, that might tell
you something about the people who are doing that.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Yeah, and you know, and this is this is this,
I mean, this is the thing that like, like to
this day there are like really shitty left wing groups
who still do this stuff. You know. Okay, so we're
gonna move on from that to some very okay. So
this is you know, all of the stuff that Max
Blumenthal had been doing until that point, that was all
inside of the bounds of what was considered acceptable on

(01:00:17):
the left. And that sucks, right, like that's not good.
But by about twenty twenty one, he is And I
found the exact I'm pretty sure I found the exact
bunth with this happened where in twenty twenty one, like
Bluementhal just loses it like it is it'specifically August twenty

(01:00:39):
twenty one, he very specifically starts like tacking right really fast.
And what he starts doing is he starts he starts
doing anti lockdown stuff. And so he starts ranting about
how like Australian lawmakers or opposing fians for sharing information
about anti lockdown protests and like fans for finans for
attending rallies, and he just gets more and more into

(01:01:01):
hardcore anti lockdown stuff and then into stuff that's effectively
just straight up anti vax stuff. One of the things
that he ends up doing is he writes an article
about like if people back remember in COVID, there was
the whole thing about flattening the curve and trying to
get less people to die, and there was this whole
debate over whether you should just like not have lockdowns

(01:01:22):
to let everyone get COVID and that would give you
like quote unquote herd immunity and everyone would be safe.
And that's like like Sweden tried that and it fucking
killed almost other people. So it was a terrible idea.
But like the whole sort of Gray Zone crew like
starts well except for Ben Norton, who leaves starts like
rallying around this stuff. And it's really weird because like

(01:01:43):
like in twenty twenty, when China was doing the lockdowns,
Ben Norton was really really pro lockdowns, but as as
twenty twenty one goes on, he starts pivoting into this
anti lockdown stuff. And so I first saw the stuff
from this journalist named Walter Bragman back when he goes
on Twitter, is he starts like he he writes an

(01:02:05):
article that has a bunch of claims from this thing
called the Great Barringing Declaration. Do you if you remember that?

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Uh no, not really.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
Yeah, So so this this was this giant anti lockdown
like declaration that a bunch of right wingers were pushing
around that was it's this giant anti lockdown's creed that's
basically saying, like, the way to stop COVID is you
have to like open all the all the businesses again
forced when to go back to work, and then people
will get like infected with COVID and that will get
the immunity to COVID, which is a terrible idea because

(01:02:36):
if you get infected with COVID, there's, you know, the
chance that you die, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
It's yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
And but the interesting thing about the Great Barrying Declorations,
so it's created by the Economic the American Institute for
Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are.
So they are a right wing libertarian think tank, which
Bloominenthal should hate, right he's supposed to be a leftist,
he should hate these people. They received sixty eight thousand
dollars from the Koch Brothers to do an economics conference,

(01:03:06):
a thing that they are very mad about anytime. So
everytime someone tries to bring it up and to talk
about how they're Coke funded, they're like, well, we only
took sixty eight thousand dollars one time to do one
economics conference. You can't call us Coke funded. But then,
like all their website, they admit that they like quote
for the record, aier received sixty eight thousand dollars in

(01:03:27):
Coke funding over the last ten years, and that someone
was used entirely the offset the conference of a single
economics conference in twenty seventeen with no links to the
Great Barrington decoration. But like you know, obviously, so the
reason the Coke's fun this thing is because these guys
have the same economics like politics as they do. And
you know, as someone who has taken zero dollars from
the Koch brothers, I could safely say that it's bullshit

(01:03:49):
to say that we only took money for the Coke
Brothers once. So what happens basically is the American Institute
for Economical Research has a like conference for a bunch
of weirdo hacks who are also technically scientists to put
out this report saying the lockdowns that happened immediately like
after like the disease like COVID really started spreading in

(01:04:10):
the US. They said that that was a mistake, and
they're advocating ending lockdowns, reopening businesses, and this was an
overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of people killed,
Like that's what these people were trying to do. But MATC.
Blumenthal suddenly is like pushing this stuff, like in pieces
that he's writing for grey Zone. It's very deeply weird.

(01:04:30):
And this stuff just and as as like twenty twenty
one goes on, this stuff gets like worse and worse
and worse. By twenty twenty one, the bluementhal is writing
articles about an impending attempt to implement social credits alongside
Jeffrey Lofredo. So, okay, we need to take this in
two parts. We'll get to the social credit stuff at

(01:04:50):
a second. First we need to talk about who Jeffrey
Lofredo is, because this guy, so, this guy used to
work at Rebel News, which is this like I I mean,
like Garrison, I know, you know this is you know,
you two know what Rebel News is.

Speaker 4 (01:05:04):
It's a Canadian Yeah basically yeah, yeah, Canadian art Yeah,
it's like a bright bart info wars type thing. They
have like podcasts and online sight. Yeah, they're like a
Canadian far right news source. Essentially, they also engage in
a lot of like activism.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
It's one of the few relatively few Canadian far right
websites that also regularly goes viral in the US.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:05:25):
Yeah, like I think it's also quite popular in Australia
or they have a in Australia.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
They played a significant role in if you remember the
basically Caravan that drive. We're going to get to that. Yeah, yeah,
we're geting to that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Yeah. So so Bluementhal is writing like an article with
Jeremy Lafrido, who is a guy who like wrote like
a million articles for Rebel News. In fact, as best
I can tell, she was still working for Rebel News
when Bluementhal starts like directly linking to Rebel News articles
about this stuff. Now it turns out she was actually
fine from Rebel Dues after a bunch of tweets surfaced,

(01:06:02):
which like, okay, the kinds of how hard it is
to get fired from Rebel News. I tracked down these tweets.
It is I'm not even gonna read any of them.
There are there are there are seven different tweets where
he talks about how how he wants to rate people.
There's one where he's confascinating that's just about him being
a pedophile. There's a bunch of him saying the N word.

(01:06:25):
There's a bunch of like incredibly racist, like Chinese, anti
Chinese stuff, which is very funny because Max Blumenthal presents
himself as like the big pro China guy, and here
he is like writing articles with this deranged anti Chinese
racist and again like this this got him fired like
from Rebel News, and the Maxi blue Waw article with

(01:06:47):
him is still up now, so that that's insane enough, right,
But the I wanted to talk the reason that was
a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was
looking at this article. The reason I want to talk
about this article in the first place is because he's
writing about social credit. Now. For people who don't recognize
the social credit stuff. Here's the title of this article.

(01:07:10):
Quote the title is the subtitle The Titans of global
capitalism are exploiting the COVID nineteen crisis to institute social
credit style digital idea sisms across the West, So what
is this social credit thing? This is like a this
is a very big right wing conspiracy theory thing, like
Alex Jones is a huge pusher of this. And basically

(01:07:30):
what they're saying is that they're going to import this
system from China that they say exists called social credit,
where like if you say something bad about the government,
you won't be able to like use your credit card
to buy food. And this is not how things work
in China. But it's very interesting because you know, these

(01:07:52):
right wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming
to the US, Like this never happened, It was never
going to happen. But what's interesting about it is that
Gray Zone is specifically writing about this, which is insane
because again, this is this whole thing is an antich
is an anti China conspiracy theory, and like all of
the sort of Marcist Leninism's like whole one of their
whole pitches was that they are the like they they

(01:08:13):
support China against American imperialism, and then like within about
a year, like in like a one year span, they've
just pivoted to publishing like full on right wing social
credit stuff. And you know, by twenty twenty two, it's
gone even further. This is this is this is where
we get at the trucker's convoy. So Garrison covered this
extensively on the show. Yes, Yeah, do you want to

(01:08:35):
do like the really short version of what that was?

Speaker 5 (01:08:39):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:08:39):
This of a few kind of quanon influencers, most of
them based in Alberta, and then a few other kind
of conservative influencers tied to and some of whom were
tied to Rebel News kind of who were based more
throughout Canada, organized this event where a whole bunch of
truckers but mostly just regular people would drive to the
capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau would meet their

(01:09:03):
demands or something like that. They were out there for
for for a few weeks. It really started getting shut
down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to block
one of one of the big trade border crossings between
the US and Canada. At that point, it became enough
of a problem that the government was like, Okay, we're

(01:09:24):
just gonna like make you guys leave, and that was that.
It caused kind of chaos in Ottawa for a few days.
It was compared a little bit to like it's like
Canada's January sixth, not really. I mean it had a
very large mobilization of people, which was unique for Canada.
And we've started to see some of like the the
tactics and stylings of this of this trucker convoy get

(01:09:46):
adopted both in Canada and the States. We've we've had,
you know, versions of this tried to get started in
the States. Never they never really turned cross. There's been
there's been people have tried to do organize it again
in Canada. Hasn't really taken off the same way. But but yeah,
that is kind of the gist. I did a few
episodes as this was ongoing, and then I did a

(01:10:06):
larger kind of piece about the whole thing that was
that was more scripted towards towards the end of it.
You can find those, I think in like if you
go back to like February of twenty twenty two, you'll
you'll find some some of those pieces.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
Yeah, And I think I think the other thing that's
important to amcise about this is these guys are right wingers.
Like I I have pictures of these guys waving Gustaci flags.
What if you saw your like the guys you did
in the Holocaust in Croatia, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
Yeah, there, there there was a mix of like conservatives
to like actual fascists with like not flags there like that.

Speaker 6 (01:10:39):
That.

Speaker 4 (01:10:40):
It was. It was pretty there was a pretty wide
ideological spectrum that was present. Now, some conservatives weren't happy
that they're not that yeah there and try and try
to get them to leave, you know. Others are more ambivalent.
But yes, there was there was a large variety of
of ideological re representation at the trucker convoy.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
Yeah. So here's Max Blumenthal's response to it. The lockdown
Left spent the last week's about academic theory to undercut
support for a trucker strike. Looks on with silent satisfaction.
Is the imperial Trudeau regime imposes the Emergency Act to
freeze bank accounts. They wanted this, So he's just fully
like fully spends his whole time fully on board with

(01:11:22):
a truckers thing. He's trying to convince people as a
trucker strike, which is it's not it's like objectively it's not,
it's it's almost all these people are like anti union
who are participating. Yeah, and they're also they're also like
the actual people who are truckers are the people who
own trucking companies. They're not like they're not the people
who are leasing trucks out. They are like the owners
of these trucks. So he's really doing this sort of

(01:11:45):
like like he's really doing this this sort of like
pivot right, like she was suporting himself. By twenty twenty three,
he's just posting straight up anti VAC stuff, like here's
here's the thing that he wrote about. Uh, Peter Holtz,
who was this guy. He was like this guy who
was I don't know, he's like a science guy. He

(01:12:06):
was like he was a really big target of the
right for a while because he wouldn't he kept for
like there's there's this whole thing where Joe Rogan was
trying to debate him about whether vaccines worked, and it
was it was this whole weird thing meeting of the minds. Yeah, yeah,
it's ffol with all his like Bill Gates made hundreds

(01:12:26):
of millions of dollars off his investment in biotech thanks
to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear campaigns
in history. He called mRNA a miracle, VACS a miracle.
Now he admits the vaccines were semi worthless, big pharma junk.
And then, but after contributing so much social damage with
his unrelenting sanatory in demand for hard lockdowns and the

(01:12:49):
mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including
to small children, Hoates seems desperate to avoid account of building.
So this is just straight up anti vax shit, right,
Like this is like where we are like now. It's
like he spent like a whole bunch of like the
last two years just tweeting anti vax stuff and this
got fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly.

(01:13:13):
And this is the thing I think is really interesting
because it's another demonstration that like he knows what he's doing.
So back in twenty twenty one, back like right after
the Atlanta the Atlanta Spas shootings happened, he like maxlely
menthol'sractionto was like, oh yeah, here's like, well, here's this

(01:13:34):
in light of recent racist attacks. Here's a reminder of
Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump the Washington Post blaming China
for cooking up COVID nineteen. In the Lab, Rogan cited
a US funded dissident as a fake scientist, legitimated propaganda.
Now this is actually the stuff with the LAB leak
is actually true, which is sort of wild. I mean,

(01:13:54):
it's not quite like the lab leak stuff I think
has directly contributed to people getting attacked the Atlanta's shooting.
I don't know. I did a bunch. I did two
episodes about it at the like a bit later. Yeah,
if you want to hear me talk about the full
explanation of that for a very long time. So that's
what he's saying. In twenty twenty one, right, is he

(01:14:14):
has correctly identified that the lab leak stuff is I
like theoconn like Trump like anti China stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
One year later, he has Jeffrey Sachs on the show
to talk about how the US is covering up how
the Pentagon in the National Institute of Health funded biological
research that created COVID nineteen a lab in Wuhan. In
one year, he has gone from calling the lab leak
like a neocon quote a quote Trump dis info dump

(01:14:46):
that was created by a neocon to having Jeffrey Sachs
on his show to talk about how the lab leak
is real and like, like this is bad enough, just
as an ideological shift. Right, But we need to talk
about do you guys know who Jeffrey Sachs is?

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
No, not really, oh boy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
Okay, So Sas is a Columbia University economists. He is
also the guy who did shock therapy both in Russia
and in Poland. Like, this is the guy who privatized
the Russian economy and handed it over to a combination
of like American investors, Russian mobsters, and the guys who
would become Russia's oligarchy. Like, he is the guy who, like,

(01:15:23):
if you are one of these people, he should be
enemy number one, right he is. He is the guy
who like destroyed if like, if you believe this, he's
the guy who destroyed Russian communism, right he is. He
is responsible. And this is this is one of the
things that people will talk about a lot, is how
like all of the shock therapy stuff like caused the
largest drop in life expectancy between World War Two and COVID, right,

(01:15:46):
and like, like Sax is not a bit Like Sax
was literally in the room. He was in the room
in the Kremlin when the USSR was dissolved. This is like,
this is one of the greatest anti communist in human history.
And here is Max Bloem with all a man who
is supposed to like his entire thing is about like
opposing the imperialist you over through communism, like sitting down,
having like a very like a very sort of like

(01:16:09):
having like a very paling around interview about that. That
is sax pushing a conspiracy theory, the lady conspiracy theory
that he was literally calling this info one year ago.
And I don't know, I thought about this for a
long time trying to figure out what was happening here,

(01:16:29):
and the conclusion that I came to is that this
is the soul of a man who believes in nothing.
And you know, you can you can ask the question
why do this? And the short answer people tend to
give is just is money. And that's like true, but
it doesn't go anywhere near far enough because I think
the real, the real answer why these people did these
right wing pivots is much much worse the actual reason

(01:16:53):
people in left media suddenly start taking right wing turns.
And this is something we've seen from like the young
Turks like taking this like anti trans anti homeless pivots.
There have been several other outlets that have done a
right wing turn. And this is a structural problem in
left media, which is that if you're in left media,
you have a massive and you're trying to expand, you

(01:17:14):
have a massive problem. And the problem is that the
left in the US just isn't that big. Right Like,
there are more leftists now than there've been for a
very very long time, but there's only so many leftists
and you can't pull from them all because leftists all
hate each other. So even if you try to corner
like the market of one faction of the left, another
faction to the leftist is going to hate you because

(01:17:34):
this is just how this is just how infighting works.
And so if you're producing something that's designed for the
left and only the left, there is built in a
hard cap on how big your audience can get. And
if you're successful, you can hit that limit. But if
you want to grow more after that, you have to
expand your ideological base, like the ideological base of your audience.

(01:17:57):
But the problem is there's only two directions you can
go right. You can either try to get liberals to
listen to your show, or you could try to get conservatives.
But you know, for people like Max wely monthal or
like Jimmy Dre for example, it's another person who did
this big like anti vax pivot around the same time
maxle Wenthal was doing it. They have a whole thing
where they they're they're talking about how ivromactin is actually

(01:18:18):
a good COVID treatment. Together.

Speaker 4 (01:18:21):
Yeah, he used to be like a like a left
wing YouTuber or.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
Like yeah he was a young guy from the Young
Turks and he went off to his own thing. Is
now like just completely only does anti vax shit. But
the promise if you're if you're a Jimmy dor Like,
you're you're gray zone. Right. Recruiting liberals is really really
hard because your entire brand is based on how much
you hate liberals. And this means that the people who

(01:18:45):
naturally agree with them are conservatives. And the other important
thing here is that leftists don't have that much money right,
like they're there's not there's like us. There's like there
there are there are leftists who are like college students
who have rich families who have some money. There's like
a small number of like leftist business, but they like
they don't have on average, leftists don't have that much

(01:19:07):
money on the other hand, conservatives have an enormous amount
of money and they are very very easily pandered to.
If you just like pump out like bottom barrel anti
vax shit, like, they will flock to you. And you know,
whenever you need to get leftists sort of back on
your side, right, you can just start tweeting with a
Palestine and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done,

(01:19:30):
because any like, any time anytime someone posts posts like
a pro palesiine thing, people just click on it. Right, Yeah,
this has been. This has been like some Maxleen thoals
met the last about two years just doing anti vax stuff.
The moment, like the moment Palestine became something that people
were focusing on again, and you know, and there're gore

(01:19:50):
reasons for that, right, like, but the moment he did that,
he just pivoted back into doing Palestine stuff, and everyone
just completely ignored what he'd been doing this whole time.
And if you do this, and you could you pander
to you pander to the antivactors and making anti vaxed content,
and then also you could just go back and regain
your leftist credentials and get views and support from leftists.

(01:20:12):
By doing Palestigne stuff, you can make a lot of money,
but there's a price. Every time you sell out to
these people, you betray another part of yourself, until one
day you believe in nothing left and the right and
lose all meeting and the only thing that's left is
content in the culture war. And I want to close
this episode by talking by reading something from another Gray

(01:20:36):
Zone contributor, Anya Parimpel, who is she's another Gray Zone journalist,
and she's Maxi blue Wenthal's wife, and she she is
the Gray Zone person who's reached the end of this cycle.
Now I'm just going to read what this looks like quote.
The labels of left and right are outdated in the US.
Case in point, leftist white men now pander to other

(01:20:57):
white men by telling women of color they're biggots for
saying boys wouldn't be able to piss in the girls room.
These same punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily. I
don't know, Okay, her tweet just trails offices bodily. It
says dot dot dot and just moves. I don't know.
She's not a very good writer. Gender ideology has created

(01:21:19):
a dynamic in which a bunch of men can come
into organizing circles, play victim and a certain control over
what is acceptible for others, especially women, to say and think.
Most people know it's just misogyny tied up at a
frilly bow, but are too afraid to it. Just dots
off again. I deeply weird now that participants in the
Impression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti war rally

(01:21:40):
because it didn't fit their tunnel vision for the movement.
Gloves are off. Good luck winning over the people with
your message. The same people who believed workers should not
be mandated to take an experimental injection that did not
quote stop the spread, cried my body, my choice, and
roe was overturned. Yet these same these are the same
people who do not even believe biologue women exist total incoherence.

(01:22:04):
So this is this is just a collection of This
is just.

Speaker 4 (01:22:07):
A collection of like very basic right wing talking points
like this is the the the like the false correlation
between like reproductive health care and like vaccines for public health,
and the stuff a gender gender ideology. All of it
is just very very basic like talking points used used

(01:22:30):
by the right that conflate various issues.

Speaker 1 (01:22:33):
Yeah, it's just like this is indistinguishable from the ravings
of any other right winger, and this is just this
is just where this stuff ends, because this this this
specific line, this is how you fucking make money. And
you know, there's you know, I mean, we could talk
about a million more iterations of how this these stuff
fused together. I mean, maxply went aal goes to like

(01:22:55):
an anti vax rally that has a bunch of like
three percenters and like a bunch of just straight up
right wing fascists. But you know, this is at least
one of the end points of where this stuff goes.
But tomorrow we're going to look at a group of
people who took this even further. Yeah, so get ready

(01:23:16):
for that ship, because it's about to get wildly anti semitic.
Oh great, hooray. It's it's an introduction to the podcast.

Speaker 7 (01:23:44):
I'm your host Bi along with me with these Garrison. Hello, Hello,
welcome to part three of This Nightmare. Yeah, so, okay,
all the way back in episode one, I said that
Marxist Leninism was based at a series of arguments about
the state, the nature of socialism, and the left relation
to nationalism, And today we're going to go through some

(01:24:06):
of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise
of a new kind of nationalist socialism, one that's focused
on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and
from Zionists. They call it baga communism, but you might
almost call it a kind of national socialism. So how

(01:24:27):
do we get from Marxist Leninism in ideology, who's defining
thing is pure total opposition to the American Empire, to
maga communism and think about how great the US is
and how much they.

Speaker 4 (01:24:40):
Like trump patriotic community.

Speaker 1 (01:24:43):
On that path, these are two distant Patriotic socialism and
maga communism are two technically distinct things. Will be getting
into that. It's a it's a long dark road ahead,
but there's no light at the end of it either.
It just it just keeps being long dark. So I
think I think the place to start if you want

(01:25:06):
to understand how this sort of like or a borous
of shit emerged from the left is by talking about
the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things
that Marxist Leninism did, and this is one of its
key political achievements, on the left was to rehabilitate nationalism

(01:25:28):
and talk about it in a way that was very,
very different to what was happening in the left before this.
And you know, because the left around twenty eleven, like
around Occupy, but after that tended to be very skeptical
of nationalism because you know, they had come out of
like the Bush era and where you know, had had
had had first hand experience with like what American nationalism

(01:25:50):
really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks now.
And the Marxis Leninists are something to bring this bring
nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this the
arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. Their argument is effectively that
anti colonial nationalism and anti colonial nationalisms, because there's a
bunch of them, and particularly like non white anti colonial nationalism, like,

(01:26:12):
aren't the same thing as American nationalism, and that these
anti colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary. And this is true
in a lot of cases, right, Like Palestinian nationalism is
like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah, and
you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle,

(01:26:32):
but I'm not going to like tell some Kourdish kid
that they need to like abandon their desire to speak
Krimungi because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever. Right, Like,
but this is where we kind of start running into
problems because you know, okay, so what about like Bathism
For example, Bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement
right and they are opposed at least non lead to

(01:26:55):
American imperialism. But they are one hardline anti communists and
two hardcore Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable
if you were Arab, but like, God help you if
you are like Kurdish or Syria or Yazdi or like
any other national minority under bath Party rule, where you know,
they're going to ban your flags, they're going to ban
your language, they're going to like keep your keep you

(01:27:16):
from like naming your kids like your names. This is
literally a thing, Like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah,
like it was illegal to give your kid like a
Kurdish name in both in both sort of Bathist Syria
and Bathists I Raq. And you know, if you try
to resist, they'll kill you. And I'm using Baphism like

(01:27:37):
as an example for this, because like there are people
now who are genuinely Bathists. But it's like it's really
hard to find people who support the bath Party.

Speaker 4 (01:27:49):
Yes, for for reference, I have never heard of this
despite have you never heard of the bath Party?

Speaker 1 (01:27:55):
This is this is Saddam Hussein's party in Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:27:59):
Well, in terms of of the it's relevancy to the
modern kind of workings of of of the sort of
political spheres I operated, this is not something that has
come up in Yeah, I've in my.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
Conversations, I've ran into them. There. I've ran into a
few neo Bathists who are either like Saddam well so
so the big bastion of kind of like it's not
even really Bathism anymore, but like like Basharo saw, it
technically is like a Batheist. Okay, although his they're not
really Baptists anymore. They just kind of have this party

(01:28:34):
apparatus still around. But like you know, most people are like, Okay,
this sucks, right, but but you know, I'm using Baptism
because it's it's the easy tall. But like this is
this is a question you have to ask with basically
all national liberation movements, and it's one people don't like asking,
which is whose nation is being liberated. And you know

(01:28:56):
what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these
national movements produce? And these aren't abstract questions, right. One
of the big examples of this is West Papua, which
is a place that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia.
But you know Sukarno, who's this great sort of like

(01:29:17):
Sucarno is this great like anti imperialist hero. He's the
guy who did the band Dun Conference, which is the
giant assembly of all of the sort of like Asian
and African states to like join together to resist imperialism.
And but but like, one of the things that that
that this left wing Indonesian nationalism is about is their
right to colonize Papua. So the West Papua wins just

(01:29:37):
get absolutely screwed over by by the Indonesians. And this
is this is this place where you have to ask, like,
whose nation is being liberated? And the answer is not
the West pap Wins. Right, They're just getting absolutely screwed
because the nation that's being liberated is this new nation
of Indonesia and not them. And you know, I mean,

(01:29:57):
I've talked about this on the show before, like I'm
so skeptical of left wing nationalist movements because I'm from China, Like,
like my family is from China, and we had two
left wing national liberation movements traded back by the USSR,
and the first one, which is the Chinese Nationalist Party,
made it about seven years before they turned on the
Chinese working class and bushered them in the streets with

(01:30:18):
machine guns and then spent the next seventy years is
like a fascist desk squad party. And then the other one,
the Chinese Communist Party, lasted yeah, it maybe like forty years.
I mean they lasted like how many years in power,
like seventeen years in power before they get to the
Cultural Revolution where they were also shooting workers in the
streets and bulldozing moss and ching John, which is the
thing that they continue to do to this day as

(01:30:40):
part of what is and I shit you not the
name for the quote unquote counter terrorism operation that China
runs in Ching John is the People's War on Terror.
I wish I was making this up. I'm not right
this and this is a probauct of Chinese nationalism, right,
like like it's Chinese is amophobia and Chinese nationalist some
that sort of do this stuff. I'm very skeptical of

(01:31:03):
nationalism as like a liberatory framework, but like it's complicated, right,
It's genuinely is sure one of these things that's you know,
like there there are there are there's lots of nuances
to it, and you know, I think you have to
take a kind of middle ground of like you have
to keep it kind of under control, but also like
I'm not going to go tele a Palestinian care that
their nationalism is bad, right, like it's you know, I should.

(01:31:26):
I realized that I've never explained this the whole time
I was doing this. So mL is an abbreviation for
Marxist Leninist that people say because saying Marxist Leninists over
and over again, like I've been doing for these past
two episodes is wearying. Yeah, So the MLS decided to
take the other extreme, which is just mainlining every single
non Western nationalism that can get their hands on, because

(01:31:48):
they're trying to hold nationalist positions that are contradictory at
the same time. So for example like that, they're trying
to be both. Okay, I guess I should explain this
a little bit so part of it is people being
nationalists for countries that they're not from, which is deeply weird.
Part of it also, and this is this is part
of the reason this stuff spread is you know, you

(01:32:09):
get like Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists, like in response
to like COVID and anti Asian violence or just sort
of in general as like a pipeline. But you know,
you get people trying to have both being both like
Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese nationalist at the same time, and
that doesn't make any sense. I mean, like the whole
apparatus that all of these sort of revolutionary anti imperialist

(01:32:32):
nationalisms would work together was sha like should have been
shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is
just to pretend that it never happened, you know. And
and but but like like Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists like
don't like each other, like on the Vietnamese side in
like modern Vietnam. So they have like a basically their

(01:32:54):
own vers it's not actually their own version of like
it's not actually like a QAnon branded thing, but they
have a conspiracy theory that like their version of the
like sovereign citizen like q thing, and their version of
it is that it basically says that the Vietnamese government
sold the country to China in nineteen ninety and they're
like embarking on like a forty year plan to like

(01:33:14):
fully sell the country to China, and like the Globe,
like Western House just completely ignore this stuff because it's
not convenient for them, and they just pretend that all
these people get along. But this stuff gets, you know,
it gets incredibly bizarre and like just weird really quickly.

(01:33:37):
Like one of the things I remember from back in
twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, I started I was hearing like
leftists talking about how Ukraine wasn't a real nationality and
how they've been invented by Nazis and that Ukrainians are
inherently fascist, and I was like, what, like why is
some random kid from New Jersey suddenly screaming about how
Ukraine is like a fake nationality? And you know, it

(01:33:57):
turns out, yeah, like it's because these people were like
really getting into Russian nationalism, and like in like twenty sixteen,
it was just deeply weird. And then you get to
like twenty twenty two and all these people are just
straight up supporting like Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the
grounds that like Ukraine isn't a real place and also
is only Nazis and stuff like that. And this has

(01:34:22):
real sort of ideological consequences for what Marxist Leninism becomes,
because it begins to pivot around a collection of nationalism,
so the point where it's not even it's not based
on communism anymore, it's just pure economic nationalism. And this
is a product of these incredibly convoluted justifications they have

(01:34:43):
to put together for supporting China, which is objectively a
market economy and like very obviously a market economy, will
you know, so they have to support China while also
nominally being anti capitalist. I'm not going to go into
these arguments because they're just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just
just weird intellectual posta ring. I think it's more useful
to look at where it ends up, which is have

(01:35:03):
have you ran into the people advocating bricks. It's like
the great anti American thing. Do you know what bricks is? No?

Speaker 4 (01:35:13):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:35:14):
God, okay, so I don't know. Get I don't think
so bricks is a thing. That stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China,
and South Africa.

Speaker 4 (01:35:22):
Oh god, it.

Speaker 1 (01:35:23):
Was originally a asset class developed by the chairman of
asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how you
know it's really anti imperialist, right, Like this.

Speaker 4 (01:35:34):
It's golden golden Sacks, carrier of the red flag.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
Yeah, like it's it's it's an investment, It's an outline
of an investment strategy.

Speaker 2 (01:35:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
But a lot of a lot of these people become
convinced that like bricks is like it's like a real
alliance and these people are like gonna like create the
multipolar world where the US is no longer the only power.
This is anti imperialist and like uhhh yeah, this is
like on a fundamental level if you're pushing bricks as
an anti imperialist formation, Like what are we even doing here?

(01:36:04):
Like who is doing the socialism in Brazil, Russia, India
and China and South Africa? Right? Like is it the
guy who invaded Haiti? Is it the butcher a Gujarat?
Is it Vladimir quote, we will show Ukraine true decommunization
putin is it the African National Congress of selling your
comrades out to Bank of America or is it quote

(01:36:24):
we must combat Welfaism shijianping, Like none of these states
are even remotely socialist, but you know, people are people
are holding them up as like anti imperialist powers because
you know, their their sort of faux anti imperialism has
completely devoured whatever their anti capitalism used to be. And
you know, you shouldn't look too close to yet, like

(01:36:45):
India's relations with the US either, pay no attention to
the fact that Indian and Chinese truth periodically beat each
other to death in the mountains. You know, it's a disaster.
But this is what happens you mix nationalism with your socialism.

(01:37:05):
And because of where this is going, we should talk
about the history a little bit, about the history of
displacing class struggle with the struggle between states. Because one
of the people who does this is a man that
a garrison. I bet you have heard of. His name
is Benito Mussolini.

Speaker 4 (01:37:23):
Oh yes, I'm slightly familiar with his with his work.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
Yeah, And Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in
the beginning is that you know, okay, so like the
Marxist line is that there's class struggle between the proletariat
and the BOURGEOISI. Right, So the capitalists and working class
are fighting it out, and that's the you know, the
logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting
it out, and Mussolini goes no, no, proletarians of bourgeoisie

(01:37:49):
have been replaced by the struggle between like proletarian nations
and capitalists nations. So this is you know, you can
you can start to see the outlines of how we're
going to get to a national socialism from here. But first,
do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is

(01:38:12):
it the products?

Speaker 4 (01:38:14):
Okay this podcast? Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure advertising hates
the tenants of national socialism.

Speaker 1 (01:38:25):
We're back, okay, So we have the nationalism part in
national socialism. And one of the other parts about this
nationalism is that it's the vector by which a bunch
of right wing social values start creeping into these Marxist
lnin spaces, because there are still a lot of like

(01:38:46):
old school MARXISTLINS parties left over from like the sixties,
but a lot of them are just basically right wingers now,
Like they're unbelievably homophobic, they're transphobic, they like scream about
cancel culture all the time, like they're just they're just boomers, right,
but they're boomers who the thing they're a boomer for
is marked just leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing

(01:39:09):
with this was to just ignore it effectively, you know.
And and they're they're they're able, they do a really
good job at ignoring this is happening right, like the
fact that Russia has passed a series of laws that
ban all gender affirming surgery and changing like all They
bann all gender affirming surgery. They banned like anything that
allows would have allowed you to change your gender on

(01:39:31):
like any any like any state identification documents. Uh, they've
banned same sex marriage and the Constitution. They banned anyone
like the recent one is they banned anyone from saying
that same sex relationships are quote normal or good and
those are their words, not mine.

Speaker 4 (01:39:48):
Yeah, I have seen this.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
Yeah, And you know, they've also declared the quote global
LGBTQ movement as an extremist organ immediately started doing raids
on like queer ballers and nightclubs. And this has changed
the minds of zero of the MLS who've been supporting
who've been supporting like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They
just don't care. And because they don't care, because they've

(01:40:14):
been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know. One
of the things that they do too, is like they've
been trying to they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no,
these places are actually good for group people. I see
this with China a lot, where they're like, no, no,
China has one trans person who was a talk show host,
So conditions for trans people there are really good. Meanwhile,
like actually being a transperson and trying to fucking sucks ass.

(01:40:36):
There's really only like a tiny number of of gender clinics,
like you have to like you have to like there's
like this whole thing where you have to like get
approval from a bunch of people to get surgery. You
have to like prove you're not a criminal or something.
You to have like a great it's it's it's completely nuts.
The whole system is just nuts, right, But you know

(01:40:57):
they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or
just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave
a space, like leave room in these Martians lenited spaces
for people who are not really leftists at all, but
are just like hard lined, homophobic, like transphobic, anti American nationalists.
And I started seeing this with because so one of
the problems that Martcis Leninism has is that it's not

(01:41:19):
it's not an ideology that exists outside of like the US, Britain, Australia,
a bit of Europe, right like, it doesn't exist in China.
The closest equivalent to this stuff in China, like people
who are pro like very hardline pro Chinese government and
are also like pro Chinese nationalism. The only people in
China who believe this stuff are hardline right wingers, like

(01:41:42):
people who are people who in the US would be
classified as fascists. And you started to see these people
like moving into like Marcius Lendino spaces because you know,
nobody gave a shit that they were like incredibly homophobic
and transphobic and they were just I mean again, just
objectively right wingers, right, and they start to sort of
creep into these spaces. Now, this may or may not

(01:42:07):
have ever turned into a real thing, we don't know,
but there were two break points that really like kicked
the sort of birth of the the of like maga,
communism and patriarchs and like the sort of right trajectory
of this stuff, like into focus. There was some stuff
that happened in the middle of the twenty twenty uprisings

(01:42:29):
and then surprise, surprise, January sixth. So do you remember
you probably yeah, you were probably busy while this was
going on. Do you remember that the giant outcry over
the book in Defensive Looting? Uh?

Speaker 4 (01:42:45):
Slightly, Yeah, I know that liberals were mad about the
title of the book, that's.

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
Yeah, and and conservative selfiously oh yeah, yeah so yeah.
So so in the middle of the uprising kind of,
I guess, kind of towards the tail end of the uprising,
completely by coincidence, my friend Vicky austinwil had been writing
a book called Indefensive Looting, which people should actually go
read because it's really interesting, and she got an interview
with MPR about it, and people lost their fucking minds

(01:43:13):
about this book. Like everyone from like everyone from Tucker
Carlson who like sitting members of the US Senate were
going on record announcing like I think I think the
Democratic Party like officially denounced it like it was I
have never seen this kind of like cross partisan every
like hate longering about a book, and like the entire

(01:43:35):
time I've been on the left, and you know, and
this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and conservatives
and fascists whore freaking out about this. This extended to
a bunch of the left. There was there's a lot
of like like Ian the editors of the New Republic
right or like writing articles announcing this stuff like it
is it's and it spreads across the social democratic left
because the social Democrats are mad that people are looting

(01:43:57):
small businesses. And the other group that really really comes
out against this is like, are the Marxistlennon is like
as people like the gray Zone. People really come out
against this, And you know, okay, so like why am
I talking about people not liking a book. The reason
I want to talk about this is that what emerges

(01:44:18):
from this specific thing. So Vicky, the author of this book,
is both trans and Jewish, and what emerges here is
this very specific combination of transphobia, anti semitism, anti black racism,
both explicitly anti black racism and in the form of
crime panics. And if you look at all of those

(01:44:39):
elements together, that has been the entire right wing strategy
for you know, putting all of the like uppity minorities
back in their place after the uprising right that was
their entire strategy, the defense of small businesses, you know,
and then and then turning that into crime panic to
rebuild support for the police. This was you know, that
anti semitism and transphobia. That is their entire strategy for

(01:45:02):
post twenty twenty. And this is like, this is the
place where it was first. All of it was put
together in one spot. And again like a lot of
people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist
Londonists like join in on this because even though the
point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property.

Speaker 4 (01:45:23):
Well that is that is ostensibly the point, I think, yeah, but.

Speaker 1 (01:45:27):
In reality, like like the Marxist London is, like they
don't actually oppose capitalism, they just think it should be
run by someone else. So they everyone, like everyone falls
in line and joins this sort of like you know,
joins the sort of ritual denunciation of this book. And
this is one of these things that really sort of
cleaves like it really it cleaves the left in between

(01:45:47):
the people who like actually fully support the uprising, and
the people who are like, oh no, the small business
is oh no, the horror. And the second thing that
really reshapes the environment, like the whole sort of ecosystem
like of the left is January sixth, and so I
don't know if people how much people remember the initial

(01:46:08):
reactions to it. I think the reactions to January sixth
and the left can be divided into roughly three different reactions,
although people have mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny,
reaction two, oh my god, the fascists tried to do
a coup and installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three
January sixth was the white working class having its revenge

(01:46:29):
on the liberal politicians. Now, okay, objectively, we can say
that January safe was not the white working class. It's
revenge with the politicians.

Speaker 4 (01:46:41):
If you are one of the first two opinions, that's fine,
that's normal, that makes sense. If you're the last of one,
you should stop listening to this podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:46:50):
Yeah, and you know I want to Actually so I
spent a bunch of time after this, and some other
people did this too, like trying to figure out the
actual like who from who was arrest student who we
know was there what their actual class backgrounds are. And
it turns out the three most common kinds of people
who were there are troops, cops, the small business owners.
Which is it is as pure of an expression of

(01:47:12):
the social base of fascism as you can possibly get, right,
like it is. The world was just like, hey, this
is what fashions crops like. I mean it is, well,
I think there's I think there's a lot a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:47:23):
Of participants in that crowd who I maybe wouldn't even
consider fascists. But they are a crop of conservatives that
are that have the financial and social resources to be
able to go across the country to this, to this
big event to watch the soon to be ex president
speak like they they have enough capital and sports to

(01:47:47):
be able to do this, which is very different than
a whole bunch of like broke punks writing on trains
to go protests like halfway across the country like these
these are two very different social factions, but yeah, it is.

Speaker 5 (01:48:01):
It is.

Speaker 4 (01:48:02):
It is a grouping of conservatives who are able to
financially support going across the country to hear President Trump speak.
And then in the moment you realize.

Speaker 1 (01:48:13):
Oh wow, where we can just go we're breaking into Congress. Yeah. Well,
I think the thing I would say about that too
is like like part of the process of what fascism
is is turning those people from regular conservatives into into
ground troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, and that's and that's what's
happening here. But but there's a bunch of the left
who like absolutely insist that this was really the working

(01:48:36):
class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing between a
large group of white people and the working class. And
these are the people. Okay, it's not good they keep
doing this like they were. They were doing this with
like a bunch of like like French anti vaxxers. Yeah,
there's like a bunch of people who were convinced like

(01:48:58):
and this is this is one of the everything we
talk on this last episode, like these people support the
Canadian trucker's convoy even though they're just right wingers. The
other big example of this is the Belgian farmers protests.
This is huge farm protests in Belgium that are like
a very big car caused to left on the right,
and literally the thing they are protesting about is that
they're incredibly pissed off that there's environmental regulation to try

(01:49:20):
to get them to not like dump fertilizer in the
fucking rivers. It's like that's the kind of thing that
they're mad about, Like they're mad about environmental regulation. They're
mad about like like not being allowed to completely destroy
the environment completely. But because it's like a large, massive people,
there's all these people who are like, ah, it's the revolution.
It's like no, these guys are like they're small business

(01:49:41):
owners on farms.

Speaker 4 (01:49:44):
Yeah, ooh woo, small bean blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 (01:49:47):
Yeah. One of the products of this is this thing
that becomes known as patriotic socialism. But first, do you
know what else?

Speaker 4 (01:49:54):
Is a product all of the wonderful little snippet of
important messages that it's about to flow right into your
brain as you listen to these ads.

Speaker 1 (01:50:08):
We're back with patriotic socialism. So patriotic socialism is this
thing that emerges in like I think like late. I
think it's like early twenty twenty. I was too late.
I'm obviously I was just gonna admit I was too
lazy to go back and find the first time someone
used the term.

Speaker 4 (01:50:28):
Socialist. You mean yeah, Yeah, I mean, I mean it's
I mean, I'm sure those two words have been combined
many times.

Speaker 1 (01:50:36):
Yeah, I mean, like in the modern context. Yeah, it's
a thing from very like like twenty twenty. Basically is
when it.

Speaker 4 (01:50:42):
Like, yes, this specific ideological strain that we'll be talking
about emerges around twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:50:48):
I think that's fair. Yeah, And it's so patriarch socialism.
It combines all of the elements that we've talked about already, right,
it takes the now she lives in, the homophobia, the
support for capitalist economies. But then it makes one crucial move,
which is it flips the direction of the nationalisms. So
instead of being like hard line anti Americans, you're now

(01:51:10):
like a hard line pro American nationalist, instead of being
an anti.

Speaker 4 (01:51:15):
Imperialist who ignores the war crimes of China and Syria
and blah blah blah blah Blahhia and r yeah obviously Russia. Instead,
now America is the best.

Speaker 1 (01:51:30):
Yeah, like you know, and I mean their line basically
they've adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line that
the American Communist Party took on like the thirties, which
was like, ah, the way we get a revolution in
America is through American nationalism. So we're gonna like post
pictures of us next to Abe Lincoln, and this is
going to make people not hate us, you know. And

(01:51:51):
you can tell how well this worked by tracking the
number of people in the Communist Party as they adopt
the strategy in the late thirties and seeing how it plummets.
So you know, winning ideas great, great, great moves here.
But okay, so the thing about patriotic socialism is that
it never did that well because it sucks because you

(01:52:15):
can't There was originally an attempt to pull in people
from the left right, but everyone who looked at this
was like this is lame and sucks, Like why would
I want to get? Why would I want it?

Speaker 4 (01:52:26):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:52:27):
Did these people suck? I don't like that they're weird
American nationalists. Why would anyone be interested in this? And
so what they were in So that didn't work very well.
The thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core
of like Laruhites and these like very weird third positionist people.
But there's just not that many of them.

Speaker 4 (01:52:47):
I mean, like they definitely the people that were there
were pushing this as like an it's almost like a
memetic ideology. In twenty twenty, there was there was some
of them who were more kind of typical like Marxist Latinists,
people who kind of orbited around, uh, the writers at
grey Zone. Like we mentioned in the last episode, we
had this one YouTuber named Peter Coffin. He was like

(01:53:09):
like a Marxist YouTuber.

Speaker 1 (01:53:11):
Yeah, the guy guy is mostly as for kicking himself
in the balls on Live TV.

Speaker 4 (01:53:14):
Yeah, well I think he was really one of the
guys to kind of uh popularized patriotic socialism as as
a term, even before people like Kinkle came onto the scene,
which I assume will be getting to show. We'll get
to that, yeah, but but yeah, it kind of it
kind of circled around this like Caleb Moppin, Peter Coffin
circle of these sorts of like content creators and writers

(01:53:36):
who were really into like a classical Marxist theory. Yeah,
but like not but I yeah, it's like but from
they were from from very like statist yeah, American imperial aspective.

Speaker 5 (01:53:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:53:48):
The thing is like they suck as theorist right like
and this is this is like a one of the
trends of these people that they're and this is why
it doesn't take off because like one of the other guys,
he's going to become like a maga communism guy later.
Or is this a guy named Hawes or Infrared who
he's like the big theory guy and stuff is unreader essentially,
But yeah, he's like a twits streamers. He's stuff is

(01:54:09):
completely unreadable, like it's nonsense, like to the point where
even when this politics gets big and Hinkle tries to
get people to read it, no one will fucking read it.
His own followers won't read it because it's awful.

Speaker 4 (01:54:21):
I think between like, I don't think that this at
least in my observations of this political subculture. The point
is not to convert people to your politics, because there
really isn't any core political essence of this thing. It's
mostly a visual meme to get eyes on you. Because
all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators.
Like it's all a way just to boost your personal

(01:54:43):
brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal
brand like that. All the guys who are pushing this
really hard, none of them were serious about any kind
of political theory. Tied to this notion. They were all
plugging their twitch stream, plugging their YouTube, their new book
that's coming out, like all of it was just to
sell content. I read on a lot of the guys

(01:55:04):
that at least initially started pushing this thing as a
as like a meme.

Speaker 1 (01:55:09):
Yeah, But I think the thing that's important about this too, though,
is the original guys were fucking losers, Like this is
why this didn't work. Sure, often, like Coffin starts doing
this because his arigest previous seventeen grifts have all fallowed
apart he was, He's been through, He's taken every conceivable
leftist position and tried to make a brand around it,
and it was just failing. Right, he just turned in
to this. It doesn't work and like him and Moppin

(01:55:32):
and like the other people in the space like are
so unbelievably uncharismatic, and so it just doesn't work. The
thing about this too, right, is like the reason it
doesn't work partially because the people aren't charismatic, and partially
it's because they really are obsessed with writing theory bullshit,
like like yeah, like the theory betialty is completely incoherent,
but they're like reading their theory on streams and shit,

(01:55:53):
and like nobody likes that they need to produce some
theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but like husband's
almost time they're fancy about Hagel. It's like, does anyone
want to list Like no, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:56:05):
I mean, I I do like hearing about Hagel, but
not from host. Yeah, but you know, like like he's
like he's also yelling about how like there.

Speaker 1 (01:56:13):
Isn't a real left anymore because I'm like the far
right people want align with Putin. But into this gap
comes Jackson Hinkle. So Hinkle was just like a nobody.
He was some random left Twitter person with like ten
k followers. Yeah, like lost a city council race in

(01:56:34):
to like he was like he was a joke. But
in twenty twenty he starts to crack the formula, which
is he figures out the same thing the gray Zone
people do, which is that you can't pull from the
left right. If you want to actually build a large
scale brand, you have to pull from the right. And
so he's one of the people who first gets really

(01:56:55):
big into this thing called Maga communism, which is like
kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideologies,
like mostly a troll ideology, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:57:05):
It's yeah, yeah, it is, it is.

Speaker 1 (01:57:07):
It is meme based. Yeah. Basically, what they've done is
like they've they've pulled together it's an attempt to build
an ideology based on pure authoritarianism, Like it's based on
like liking both Trump and CHIESI Ping and Putin at
the same time, because all of them are powerful leaders
who like want to restore their nation or whatever. And

(01:57:30):
you know, but like the actual content of it is
kind of nothing. But but what Hinkle does, and this
is the thing he does that's very smart is that
he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less
smart than Hawes. But because he's not smart, he kind
of half stumbles and half figures out into how you
make content for the right, which is just incredibly simple propaganda.

(01:57:52):
Right You reach wheet write wing social media people. You
make posts with very very simple slogans and like sentences
with like words that don't go above two syllables, and
you get You get in every single time a right
wing grievance thing happens. You just get in and you
just keep cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day.

(01:58:12):
He does this on his YouTube channel, he does this
on his Twitter. He now has two point three million Twitter.

Speaker 4 (01:58:17):
Followers, most of which he has made in the past
two months.

Speaker 1 (01:58:21):
Yeah. Yeah, And he was on you know, and he's
now he's now taken like he's done one of these
right wing media tours, like he's been on Carlson, He's
been on fucking Info Wars, He's been on OEMs, the
One American Network. And part of the reason this works
is because right wingers love to find like a nominal
leftists who agrees with them. And Hinkle, you know, he

(01:58:42):
gets into argument with people sometimes, like when he was
on Alex Jones, they're Alex Jones is like, what do
you mean you're a communists? Like what the fuck? And
Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why Americ like communism
is when no globalists, it's just.

Speaker 4 (01:58:59):
Like, in effect, they are doing a form of national
socialism which relies which relies on anti Semitism and this
notion of casting globalists as Jewish Zionists who are secretly
controlling all of industry and We're going to give the
real power back to the average regular working man which

(01:59:20):
is it's it's he can frame it as communism, but
like it is, it is it is just a form
of Nazi theory. Like that is what he fundamentally operates on.

Speaker 1 (01:59:27):
And he's he's interesting because his she is he has
gone you know, as as bad as the like transphobia
stuff in last episode is right like that that is
like an average like COVID grifter things he has. He
has his own own share of transphobia as well. Yeah,
well hekl is way further right than anyone who's ever

(01:59:49):
come out of the left to like do this kind
of thing has ever gone. He is like so there's
a video of him arguing with a guy named sneak
O and who I who just cover was just a
twitch line.

Speaker 4 (02:00:02):
Is just as a twitch streamer who aligns himself with
a whole bunch of kind of influencers for young usually
white men. Like he's like, he's like close like Andrew Tate.
It's it's it's just yeah, he's a fucking twitch influencer
who courts unbelievable misogynist young man. That's the basic of it,
you know, I mean, he he's he's kind of he's

(02:00:25):
gone to the point where he's he's not quite in
the same circles as Nick Flentes, but that's largely because
Flentes is like a hardline Christian fascist, and Sneko's like,
is like a Muslim fascist in the same wow like
fat He's like, he's like a far right wing Muslim
in the same Vein is like, I don't even I don't.
I don't think Sneko is really id politically driven, like

(02:00:45):
like like consciously so he's he's he's just a he's
just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you
say certain things, you can get a twelve year employees
to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's that's
it's really, it's really the I think that the core of.

Speaker 1 (02:01:01):
Of of his of him, I hate politics. He sucks
so much. But like so, Hinko goes on his show
and he spends the entire show trying to convince Sneco
that Hitler was gay and that the reason, and and
Sneko's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the the Mangisrochwelt Institute
for Sexual Research, And sneak Go's like, well that was
a good thing. And Hinkel's response is no, no, no,

(02:01:24):
all of the Nazis were gay in trans so they
had to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover
up the fact, like to hide the evidence that they
were all gay in trans Like this is a level
of like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so
far beyond the like normal shit that like and you know,

(02:01:47):
and and and this, and like even Sneko is like
what are you talking about?

Speaker 4 (02:01:51):
But I just can't take anything Hinkel says as like
a literal thing he believes.

Speaker 1 (02:01:56):
He doesn't believe, he believes that everything. It's Yeah, he
is the pure disillation of a man who believes in nothing. Yeah,
Like like he is. She's not even a person, He's
not even a human being. He is just a content mill. Yeah,
That's that's all he is. He's just a brand. But
what he's discovered, the way he's he's decided to build
his brand is by basically out trying to he's doing. Okay,

(02:02:19):
there was a there was a weird maga communism thing.
He does that less now because it's outlived usefulness and
a lot of this now it's now it's easier to
be a a Palestine. Uh Yeah, like and quote unquote
Anti's Zionist influencer. In reality, he just is extremely anti Semitic.
Like this is yes, that is his actual politics. Yeah,

(02:02:43):
let's talk about well okay, she's like it's genuinely unclear
to me whether he personally is really anti Semitic, Like
I don't know he might be. I mean, like it
doesn't matter. Like that's the thing, Like he's.

Speaker 4 (02:02:57):
The way that he talks about it, the way oh yeah,
he talks about how how how Zionists like rule the world.

Speaker 1 (02:03:02):
It's it's, it's it's you can just like that Intel
Protocols of the Elders. Yeah, so this is the thing
like like Hinkle, Hinkle is not really at this point,
like they're like there there, there is no person behind it, right,
He's just purely a right wing mill that regurgitates stuff
and the stuff. And then the way that he figured

(02:03:23):
out you could do this is by trying to outflank
the traditional hard right on anti Semitism. So let's let's
let's let's take a look at like exactly the kind
of anti Semitic ship that he's on, because he is
just straight up an anti Semite. Right, this is not
a like think I'm saying because of the Palaside stuff,
so grant the Like last week the trailer for Grand

(02:03:44):
Theft Auto six came out. Yeah, and there's like a
bunch of women tworking in it and like having a
good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff, and there's
like this enormous, like really weird, incredibly pathetic right wing
like thing about it, saying that it's like anti Christian
and it's like spreading porn to children and teaching people

(02:04:04):
to do crimes, and that like shooting cops is bad
and no one should ever play it. And because this
is like the current right wing media panic, Hinkle starts
tweeting about it, and his tweet is, so this starts
with an Israeli flag, and it starts with like that
like siren thing that people post when they're about to
do an alert quote, why are the Zionists all capitalized

(02:04:25):
at Rockstar Games releasing this all caps sexualized video game
for children in America? Get hashtag ban GTA six. This
is also in all caps trending right now. So this
is straight up neo Nazi shit, right, This is neo
Nazi shit about the Jews, conspiracy right, Like that's yeah, yeah,

(02:04:45):
it's like this is a right of neo Nazi shit.
And he's been trying to use the fact that he
is more anti Semitic than openly anti semitic, even than
so even than someone like Elon Musk, right sure, and
he's been trying to use this as a way to
basically to o their bases. So like two days ago
when this goes up three uh really recently there was

(02:05:07):
this giant like call, like there's this giant like Twitter
space thing that had Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Trey
and Vivik Ramaswami in it, and Hinkle just like keeps
asking Elon Musk about whether he's gonna turn on the
starlink like internet stuff or Palestine, and these people basically
tell him to shut up and like kick him off.
But then he does that. He starts doing this like
giant like I've been censored like media thing about it.

(02:05:30):
And what he's doing here, this is the thing he
does constantly. He's trying to take the basis from people
like Alex Jones, people like Elon Musk, people of Manedu
Tate who wants more open anti Semitism, right like these
people are anti He's trying to flank them.

Speaker 4 (02:05:44):
You can say, quote unquote from the right, but like
at this point the right less spectrum kind of resolves
into meaningless uh mambo jumbo.

Speaker 1 (02:05:50):
But yeah, he's trying to He's I mean, he's just
a fascist, right, He's he's trying to he's trying to
play like the anti Semite flame from the anti Semitics thing. Yes, yeah,
and you know, and but but he's he's figured out.
This is the thing that actually pushed him really into
the mainstream. Is he figured out a way to do
cover for this that also lets him get a bunch
of like attention and clicks and stuff from the left,

(02:06:14):
which is and also like a lot of support from Palestinians.
And we're going to talk about that in a second.

Speaker 4 (02:06:20):
People who don't understand who he actually is, or maybe
if they do, they just don't really care because because
it doesn't affect them, Because he is currently possibly the
most influential person talking about this conflict right now, like
like at least on the internet, like his his his
impressions is larger than anyone else. His tweets get read

(02:06:43):
aloud in newsrooms across across the country. Like he is
he has succeeded in grifting off of off of this
conflict to promote his personal brand in almost an almost
unparalleled way. Like there's never been someone who's done this
as successfully as Hin called us for any other conflict.
It is, it is. It is quite quite quite surprising

(02:07:05):
that there's just this one guy sitting in sitting in
on his phone in America has has been this successful
by essentially just tweeting NonStop.

Speaker 1 (02:07:17):
Yeah, like to put this in perspective, so like he
has Alex Jones got banned and that kind of like
limited his coverage, but he has more followers on Twitter
of Alex Jones. Alex Jones has just been on band
from Twitter, Like he has more followers at Alex Jones.
Like that's that's how And it's not even just followers too,
it's it's how much his posts are seen and circulated
like he yeah, there was. He was for almost I

(02:07:38):
think the most of the month of October, he was
person with the highest digital impressions on the platform like
he he yea, his stuff was being seen by more
people than anyone else, like he yeah, So let's let's
talk about what that stuff actually is. It's large, It's
like it's a combination of him just retweeting other people,
stealing other people's like videos of like press conferences from

(02:07:59):
a coma. Most of it is dead babies, like it's
a bunch, it's a bunch of dead babies, it's a
bunch of dead Palestinians, just over and over and over
and over again. And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire,
like how could the Zionists do this?

Speaker 4 (02:08:13):
One about misinformations, characterizing attacks events, like a lot of
others basic stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:08:20):
Like it's yeah, and one of one of his tricks
and that this is this has been a thing for
these kinds of like these Marginalonist people for a long time,
is spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the Serians
civil war, yes, features from Palestine, which they do constantly,
and this, you know, and like one of the things
that we haven't sort of toushed on yet is like
yet he so one of the things that's happened with
him is because he's the biggest person tweeting about Palestine.

(02:08:42):
His like a lot of his tweets about Palestine are
translated into Arabic and they're posted all over like Arabic
Instagram of Arabic Twitter, Like it's like they're they're spent
fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either like don't
know who he is, right, because they're only seeing him
Palestine stuff, right, They're not seeing his like raving about

(02:09:04):
how GTA six is anti Christian, right, They're only seeing
that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more
popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is
one of the really grim parts about this, which is
that you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting

(02:09:27):
fucking killed all the time, Like every single day, another
Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed, Like more and more Palestinian
intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle
exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of
people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks
and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill
the void left by the fact that the Israelis have

(02:09:50):
been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own
fucking grifting brands. And he's able to do this because
you know, Kinkle is incredibly safe, just fucking living it
up in the US while the people who's suffering, he's exploiting,
are getting fucking murdered in the streets.

Speaker 4 (02:10:10):
And he's making tons of money doing this.

Speaker 1 (02:10:12):
Enormous amounts of money. Yeah, and I don't know, I
don't I don't really have I don't have a fucking
solution to this. Like he's he's effectively just figured out
how to completely game this system in a way that
hasn't been done before.

Speaker 4 (02:10:30):
I think part of this is like with the way
Twitter's content moderation is working now, Gore can we spread
around in ways that it didn't used to, which is
a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people.
So he's able to to do a whole buntu quote
teet quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images which
draw more people to his platform. He's he's he's just

(02:10:51):
like figured out a specific thing, like he's he's been
trying to do this for a few years with very
with various types of like you know, conflicts or like
little little like bits that he he like tries to
tries to do this media strategy thing on and this
this one has happened to work. There there was there
was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to

(02:11:11):
to get get platformed by many, many, many unwitting people,
and at this point, deplatforming is not even an option,
Like it's it's like, you can't you can't deplatform someone
with three million followers. Really, just that just isn't that
He's strategy and it too, like yeah, yeah, it just
it just that's right, It just doesn't even follow anymore.

Speaker 1 (02:11:33):
Yeah, I guess, I guess. One last thing I want
to say about this is like, and he's he's been
incredibly successful at leveraging, like at leveraging the fact that
he posts not not even good pro pales sign content,
right sucks ass right, it's but he's been incredibly successful
leveraging that to use his defense against any claims of

(02:11:54):
anti Semitism. And this sucks because he's, you know, he's
he's effectively using he's using Palestinians as a human shield
and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to
build a brand.

Speaker 4 (02:12:08):
While that also complaining about the degeneracy of seeing a
whole bunch of non white people having a beach party
in GTA five, right, Like it's like, it's not like
he actually cares about the lives of Palestinians being killed
because he's complaining about black people in GTA five. Like
it's not like, come on, like it's it's he is.
He's just an anti Semitic fascist.

Speaker 7 (02:12:27):
This is y.

Speaker 1 (02:12:28):
This is very very clear. I think I think the
thing that can be done is, like we need to
like these people can't be allowed to fucking get their
start here, Like we can't be having a bunch of
fucking transphobes and anti Semits. We can't be having all
of these fucking homophobic right wing nationalists like in leftist basis,

(02:12:50):
they just like they can't be here because if if
there had actually been you know, a kind of sustained
effort to get these people fucking out before before they
pulled all of this shit, we wouldn't be here right now.
But that wasn't done. Were people were just completely okay
with having all of these right wingers just being there

(02:13:10):
because they supported the same states that they do, and
because of that we're here.

Speaker 4 (02:13:16):
I mean, yeah, I really only see that on like
the heavily communist and statist contingent of the left right,
Like these types of people aren't super popular among most
like social democrats at least recently, there's been kind of
a harder divide, at least from my observation between like
SoC dems, between like socialists libertarian socialists, and the people

(02:13:40):
who are like hardlined. I am a Marxist Leninist. I
am affiliated with these Marxi Leninist organizations, and those are
the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind
of almost like prey on to like gain followers and
gain some poy.

Speaker 1 (02:13:54):
Well, and I would say this, like, this is like
those groups like like the PSL for examples, PSL is
what example shores right, And like they also have a
there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them chasing
down abusers. Like I know people who they liked a
tweet that was talking about how the PSL had had
fucked up a a sexual assault investigation and they were

(02:14:16):
dragged because they had liked to tweet about this. They
were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee where
Gloria Rivera, they're fucking like eternal presidential candidates started doing
a bunch of fucking transphobia shit and then covering it
with the exact same gray zone, Like I'm a woman
of color, thing, you know, but these groups were like
on they were on the edge of colla like basically
becoming a non relevant because they've been supporting Russia during

(02:14:38):
the war in Ukraine for this whole time. But then
Palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like, is
the one issue that their stance is like, you know,
tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all
all of these people have been using Palestine, even all
these people who've been fucking pivoting harder, harder and harder
right for years and years and years now have been
have like have I've been exploiting the exploiting the fucking

(02:15:02):
genocide and Palestine in order to fucking get all their
leftist clicks back. And it's utterly grotesque. Yeah, that's that's
That's what I've got about this.

Speaker 4 (02:15:14):
It is. It is certainly upsetting.

Speaker 1 (02:15:16):
Yeah, free Palestine, Fuck the grifters.

Speaker 6 (02:15:34):
Hello, welcome to it could happen here today. My episode
is going to be a bit more philosophical. I love
me some philosophy. I don't always understand it, but I
do like it. And I read something recently that really
stuck with me, especially in the context of what is
currently going on right now in Palestine and the genocide

(02:15:56):
and Gaza. I read something and I couldn't stop thinking it,
so I thought, let's just make an episode. So today
I wanted to talk about this word I learned called grievability.
It was coined by Judith Butler in this blog post
from twenty fifteen, when Butler is asking the question when
is life grievable? In twenty sixteen, Butler wrote a book

(02:16:20):
called Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? And this
is a quote from this book. One way of posing
the question of who we are in these times of
war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose
lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We
might think of war as dividing populations into those who

(02:16:41):
are grievable in those who are not. An ungrievable life
is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived,
That is, it has never counted as a life at all.
We can see the division of the globe into grievable
and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who weigh
war in order to defend the lives of certain communities,

(02:17:03):
and to defend them against the lives of others, even
if it means taking those latter lives. So that quote
kind of encompasses the idea of grievability. I really just
thought it was poignant to talk about and relevant because
we are being inundated with all these numbers every day
of casualties and death counts and collateral damage. And people

(02:17:28):
accept these things because it's part of being human. It's
just the way war is. But I really don't think
we should accept that as the reality. I think that
makes us callous. And I think accepting human death, no
matter in what context, is a little bit inhuman And
so I think maybe that's why this concept fascinated me,
because tying grief to the concept of being alive, it

(02:17:53):
truly is indicative of if that life is worth something
to you or to the world. And so we're reading
and hearing about all these lives lost, and we're giving
these numbers and stories, and these numbers are repeated every day,
and they increase every day, and this repetition seems endless
and impossible to change. And Butler is saying that we

(02:18:13):
don't often consider the precarious character of the lives lost
in war, and Butler defines precariousness as the following. To
say that a life is precarious requires not only that
a life be apprehended as a life, but also that
precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what
is the living normatively construed. I am arguing that there

(02:18:36):
ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of
recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete
social policy regarding such issues as shelter work, food, medical care,
and legal status. Butler goes on to explain that although
this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot be properly recognized.

(02:19:00):
Butler says it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and
it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition, just
as it can be refused by such norms. But the
main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared condition
of human life, so precariousness being a condition that links

(02:19:21):
human life and humans to non human animals. So, for instance,
to say that a life is injurable, that it can
be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point
of death is to underscore not only the finitude of
a life and that death is certain, but also the
precariousness of life, that life requires various social and economic

(02:19:44):
conditions to be met in order to be sustained as
a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means that one's
life is always, in some sense, in the hands of
the other. It implies exposure both to those we know
and to those we do not know, a dependency on
people we know or barely know, or know not at all.

(02:20:05):
This existential reality that everything ends and everything is temporary.
This encapsulates our relation to death and to life. Precariousness
underscores what Butler calls our quote radical substitution ability and anonymity,
and that dying and death is just as socially facilitated
as humans persisting and flourishing. So Butler is saying it's

(02:20:29):
not that we are born and then later become precarious,
but rather that precariousness is intrinsic with birth itself, and
birth is by definition precarious. It means that it matters
whether a newly born infant survives, and its survival is
dependent on what we might call a social network of hands.
Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary

(02:20:53):
to care for that being so it may live. I
put the following sentence in bold because I think it's
kind of underlying what I'm trying to say, even though
it sounds really simple. But only under conditions in which
the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.
And again, maybe it sounds simple, but I don't think

(02:21:13):
we actually absorb the meaning of what that means to
value a life and to mourn a life. And this
is how we come to the idea of grievability, the
idea that grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.
Butler gives us this example, so let's think about this.
An infant comes into the world, is sustained in and

(02:21:35):
sustained by that world as an infant, and through to
adulthood and old age, and finally eventually it does. We
imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration
at the beginning of life. But there can be no
celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable,
that it would be grieved if it were lost, that

(02:21:57):
this future possibility is installed as the condition of its life.
Life is celebrated because it can be lost. In ordinary language,
Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been
lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the
value of life comes from the reality and certainty that

(02:22:18):
it will end. And if we think about this idea
of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that happens
when death happens, grievability is a condition of a life's
emergence and sustenance this future. Concept that a life has
been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a life
that has only begun to be lived. In other words,

(02:22:40):
Butler says, this will be a life that will have
been lived is the presupposition of a grievable life, which
means that this will be a life that can be
regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know
it sounds heady, and I really had to read this
multiple times to even try to comprehend it. But essentially,

(02:23:01):
without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there
is no life, or rather, there is something living that
is other than life. This other than life thing is
a life that will never have been lived in the
first place, because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by
no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it

(02:23:22):
is lost. The unease and anxiety and apprehension of grievability
precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and apprehension
of precarious life, and so grievability precedes and makes possible
the apprehension of the living being as living exposed to

(02:23:42):
non life. From the start, to put it in maybe
a simpler way for me to understand even is that
a life is worth grieving because we already know it
will die, and that life is worth celebrating because it
has already been to death or the implication of certain death.

(02:24:03):
From the start, it is pretty heady. But maybe I'll
just leave you to marinate with that during a break,
and we can get more heady when we get back. Okay,
we're back. Let's go back to the idea of war.
One way of posing the question of who we are

(02:24:24):
in these times of war is by asking whose lives
are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
are considered ungrievable war is essentially the division of populations
into those who are a grievable and those who are not.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because
it has never lived, that is, it has never counted

(02:24:47):
as life at all. And we see this division of
the entire world into grievable and ungrievable lives when we
look at the perspective of those who wage war in
order to defend their certain communities. Is kind of reiterating
the quote that I'd started with at the top from
twenty sixteen, But essentially to defend these certain communities against

(02:25:07):
the life of others, it usually implies the taking of
those other lives. Butler here makes a reference to nine
to eleven, explaining that after the attacks of nine to eleven,
the media showed us graphic pictures of those who died,
along with their names, their stories, and the reactions of
their families. Public grieving was dedicated to making these images

(02:25:28):
iconic for the nation, which meant that, of course, there
was considerably less public grieving for let's say, non US nationals,
and none at all for illegal workers. Butler says the
differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of
enormous significance, and Butler asks, why is it that governments

(02:25:50):
so often seek to regulate and control who will be
publicly grievable and who will not? Because it means something
to state and to show the name of someone who
has died, to put together some remnants of a life,
and to publicly display and draw attention to the loss.
So Butler is asking, in this context, what would happen

(02:26:11):
if those killed in war were to be grieved in
such an open way? Why is it that we are
not given the names of all the war dead, including
those the US has killed, of whom we will never
have the image, the name, the story, never have a
testimonial shard of their life, nothing to see, to touch,

(02:26:32):
to know. Open grieving is bound up with outrage. Outrage
in the face of injustice or of unbearable loss has
enormous political potential. Butler draws a similarity here to Plato. Apparently,
one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban the poets
from the republic is that he thought that if citizens

(02:26:53):
went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over
the losses they saw, and that such open and public mind.
In disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul would
disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well.
And I didn't know this, but to put it in
that context is really fascinating to me, because it's essentially

(02:27:14):
saying that if we expose human beings to the reality
of tragedy in life, they might care too much and
start to fuck up our politics. Essentially, so, whether we
are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking
about effective or emotional responses that are highly regulated by
regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The

(02:27:39):
blog post I'm referring to that Judith Butler wrote was
written in twenty fifteen, So Butler uses the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of what they're trying to say.
For the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, we saw how
emotion was regulated to support both the war effort and
more specifically nationalists belonging. When the photos of Bougrabe were

(02:28:00):
first released in the US, conservative television pundits argued that
it would be un American to show them because we
were not supposed to have graphic evidence of the acts
of torture the US has committed. We were not supposed
to know that the US had violated internationally recognized human rights.
It was Unamerican to show these photos, an Unamerican to

(02:28:21):
glean information from them as to how the war was
being conducted. Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create
a negative image of the US, and that we had
an obligation to defend a positive image of the country.
Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, suggesting it was anti American
to display the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider,

(02:28:43):
and neither did the vast majority of people in power.
But the American public should have a right to know
about the activities of its military, and it should have
the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a
war on the basis of full evidence is, or at
least it should be part of the democratic tradition of

(02:29:04):
participation and deliberation. So what was this really saying? Butler's
asking they say, it seems to me that those who
sought to limit the power of the image in this
instance also sought to limit the power of effect of outrage,
knowing full well that it could and would turn public
opinion against the war in Iraq as it died, it did.

(02:29:28):
I feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to
what we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting
horrific images of what is happening to them because of
the state of Israel, and how there's selective outrage because
it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images
that only show reality. It really feels like people are

(02:29:52):
only outraged when they consider a life grievable, which takes
us to this whole topic brings us back to the
question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable,
and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose
lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that
should be honored. This ties indirectly to the idea of

(02:30:16):
how effect or emotion is regulated, and what we mean
by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references the
anthropologist Talal Assad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing.
In this book, the first question he poses is why
do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face
of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the

(02:30:36):
same way in the face of state sponsored violence. He
asks this question not in order to say that these
forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even
to say that we ought to feel the same moral
outrage in relation to both. But Asad finds it curious,
as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first

(02:30:57):
take form as effect, are tacitly regular by certain kinds
of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel.

Speaker 1 (02:31:05):
More horror and moral.

Speaker 6 (02:31:07):
Revulsion in the face of lives lost under certain conditions
than under certain others. Assad explains that, for instance, if
someone kills or is killed in war, and the war
is state sponsored, and we invest the state with legitimacy,
then we consider the death lamentable, sad, unfortunate, but ultimately

(02:31:28):
not radically unjust. And yet if the violence is perpetrated
by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, that our emotion invariably changes,
or so Assad assumes. Asad is saying something here that
is really important about how the politics of moral responsiveness
really feed into public perception. That what we feel is

(02:31:51):
in part conditioned by how we interpret the world around us,
that how we interpret what we feel actually can and
does alter the feeling itself. If we can accept our
emotion could be affected and structured by things we do
not fully understand. Can this help us understand why it
is that we might feel horror in the face of

(02:32:12):
certain losses, but in difference or even righteousness in the
light of others. Conditions of war bring something really interesting here,
this feeling of heightened nationalism. In this feeling of heightened nationalism,
it's as though our existence is bound with others, with
whom we find some kind of national affinity for who

(02:32:34):
are recognizable to us, and who can conform to certain
culturally specific notions about what the culturally recognizable human is.
And sure, maybe some of you are like, well, this
is really obvious. Of course, some people care more about
people who look like them or about things that directly
affect them. But what I'm arguing is that I can't
accept that as reality. I don't think we should accept

(02:32:58):
humans as by default. There's no way change happens that way.
I think we have to question why we unconsciously are
more outraged by certain losses than others, or why the
public is this way. Even if you are not, Oh,
that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of information.
Let's take our second break, we can just marinate with

(02:33:18):
all of that, and uh, we'll be right back to
wrap this up. Okay, we're back. So we discussed the
differentiation of the population of the world into grievable and
ungrievable lives, and now we are going to differentiate between
the populations on whom your life and existence depend on
and those populations represent a direct threat to your life

(02:33:39):
in existence. This is a concept that really struck me
as something we don't even give a second thought to
that when a population appears as a direct threat to
your life, they do not appear as lives, but as
a threat to life. Butler asks us to consider how
this is shown with how the world views an intern

(02:34:00):
or Islam. Islam is portrayed and seen by our media,
whether it's implicit or explicit as barbaric or pre modern,
as not having yet conformed to the norms that make
the human recognizable to the West, to the American. So
those who Americans kill by following this line of thought
are not quite human. They are not quite alive, which

(02:34:22):
means that we do not feel the same horror and
outrage over their loss of life as we do the
loss of life that bear national or religious similarity to
our own. And again, this isn't a novel concept. In
simple terms, it can be whittled down to the reality
that most people only care about things that directly affect
them or things that happen to those who look like them.

(02:34:45):
And again, maybe that seems like an obvious realization to
make about our society. But what I'm asking you to
do is not just accept this as part of the
human condition and to question why it is like that
in the first place. True deep understanding of ourselves and
of our humanity is dependent on us excavating ugly truths

(02:35:07):
about ourselves and humanity that we are not even maybe
aware of. I think this is something that bothers me
about how Israel's narrative or desion, this narrative of the
conception of Israel almost makes them seem sinless. They had
done nothing wrong, the Arabs or barbarians that didn't leave
them alone. The same can be said about how American

(02:35:28):
history books talked about Columbus and the Native American people.

Speaker 2 (02:35:32):
Here.

Speaker 6 (02:35:33):
Usually history is written by those who want to appear
in a better light, and by default, I feel like
this makes them sinless and pure and can do no wrong,
but again better understanding. If humanity means accepting that sometimes
it is grotesque, and I think that is something we
need to accept and understand. I think Israeli's need to

(02:35:57):
accept that the Nekba happened in order to move on
from it. Things like that is what I'm thinking about
when I read about this stuff. But anyways, tallal Asad
is wondering why modes of death dealing are apprehended differently,
Why we object to the deaths that are caused by
suicide bombing more forcefully and with greater moral outrage than

(02:36:17):
we do those deaths that are caused by aerial bombings.
And then Butler takes this back to how we differentiate populations,
how some are considered from the start very much alive
and others more questionably alive or as living figures of
the threat to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as quote
socially dead, which is the term that Jamaican American historian

(02:36:41):
and sociologist Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of
the slave war relies on and perpetuates a way of
dividing lives into those who are worth defending, valuing, and
grieving when they are lost, and those that are not
quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it

(02:37:01):
should come as no surprise that the death of ungrievable
lives would cause deep outrage on the part of those
who understand and are seeing that their lives are not
considered to be lives in any meaningful sense of the
word in this world. Butler explains that although the logic
of self defense portrays such populations as threats to life

(02:37:22):
as we know it, they are themselves living populations with
whom our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us.

Speaker 1 (02:37:32):
What does that.

Speaker 6 (02:37:33):
Mean, Well, it's about how interdependency is interpreted and executed,
and how it has concrete implications for who survives, who thrives,
who barely makes it, and who is eliminated or left
to die. Butler writes, I want to insist on this
interdependency precisely because when nations such as the US or

(02:37:55):
Israel argue that their survival is served by war, a
systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to
deny the ongoing, irrefutable ways in which we are all
subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other,
and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements
based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason

(02:38:20):
I am not free to destroy another, and indeed why
nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is
not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences.
That is doubtless true. But what may be finally more
true is that the subject I am is bound to
the subject I am not. That we each have the

(02:38:41):
power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we
are bound to one another in this power and in
this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.
That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article
as a whole, or this blog post as a whole,

(02:39:02):
kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're
all the same and our divisions are truly man made.
Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives, or just
this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining.
I think it's worth examining how now in real time,
we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This

(02:39:26):
is across the board. I'm not just talking about one
group of people. Grievable lives, I think are this concept
for me, and tying grief intrinsically to life is essential
to understanding why it is life is valuable at all.
It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't
valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking

(02:39:48):
at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it.
And I think this also can go back to how
we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right
now describe Palestinians or Arabs or most This all leads
to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem
inhuman and in a way unlive. So well, all of that.

(02:40:11):
I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah,
until next time, you know how it goes through. Kalsteine.

Speaker 5 (02:40:37):
Hello, hello Mia, Hello you lot. Hello podcast fans, this
is it could happen here a podcast about how the
world is falling apart and some people who are trying
to pull it back together. Today, we are not talking
about people who are pulling it back together. We are
talking about a guy who is constantly struggling to hold
it together. And that, my friends, is Joseph Robinette Biden,

(02:40:59):
old guy United States president and a border fascist. And
what's happening. Why are we talking about Joseph robin and
Biden today, Well, because you will remember that Biden made
some promises when he was campaigning in twenty twenty, and
it will shock you to hear that he is throwing
migrants under the bus again. In an attempt to get

(02:41:22):
Republicans in the Senate to stop stamping their feet and
whaling and having a tantrum, specifically, the Senate failed to
pass an emergency spending bill which would fund military Among
other things, it would fund military a to Ukraine, Taiwan,
and Israel. And the reason they did that is because
these Republicans are having a little tantrum about quote unquote
border security. Border security probably doesn't mean what you think

(02:41:47):
it means. In practical terms, what border security means is
killing more innocent people, more people who are fleeing the
worst things that are happening in this world at our
southern border. It is making America a more deadly place
for the most desperate people on earth. That is what
border security means. That is what I want you to

(02:42:07):
think of when you hear people saying we should secure
our border because the people you're securing it against are
the Azd mother I saw carrying her children to try
and come to a safer place. They are the Afghan
grandmother who I saw walking through the mountains last weekend.

(02:42:31):
Those are the people who we're securing our border against. Right,
And this is sorry, this just pisses me off to
an unfathomable degree for many of you. But the reason
we're talking about this today is because whatever happens at
the border, right, whatever policy we have at the border,
migration won't change because what people are leaving is worse

(02:42:54):
than that, and so they will still come here because
they believe the lies in America tells the world, and
it tells its citizens about itself too, that this is
a safe place. And for some people that has been
a safe place, and that's a good thing. But what
will change is how people are treated when they get here.
Because what Biden has proposed is a return to Title

(02:43:14):
forty two. I made a whole series on Title forty
two that you can listen to. But what he's proposing
this time is a very similar policy by which the
border patrol agent who meets people after they cross the
border in between ports of entry, can send them directly
back to Mexico without them having a chance for an
asylum hearing. Right, this is illegal under international law and

(02:43:37):
parts of the US law. It doesn't It's not clear
what Biden's proposing or what the administration is proposing to
do about it. Maybe they could change the immigration law.
They could probably get enough vote for that, given that
people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants.
But this isn't a well fleshed out proposal. But what
it very clearly shows, right, is the intent to throw

(02:43:58):
some of the most desperate people but on earth bit
a buth and that is It's disgusting, it's ab horror,
and it shouldn't be unexpected either.

Speaker 1 (02:44:07):
The executive is a branch in democratic control that is
utterly incapable of helping a single person, but has the immense, terrible,
and powerful authority to kill any person on Earth, and then,
secondarily to I'm just going to call it, effectively perform
ethnic cleansings by continually removing populations from the US.

Speaker 5 (02:44:26):
They could just do this, yeah, and all they used
the executive for yes it is yeah, yeah, yeah. They
have never once waived that executive power in defense of
the little guy or people who desperately needed help. It
would seem certainly not in the last couple of administrations
shouts or the former Bomber administration staff. It's by the way,
for showing their whole ass by the screaming racist shit

(02:44:49):
at Muslim people in the last few weeks for people
who hadn't already kind of worked out how terrible the
Bomber administration's policy was. So I want to talk a
little bit about the thing that they're trying to do.
So the first and foremost would be allowing border patrol
to summarily expel migrants. Let me explain to you exactly

(02:45:09):
how fucking stupid this thing is. I was present with
a border patrol agent last week who was trying to
discern who was a child or not. Who was hampered
in this by not being able to count in Spanish.
Border patrol agents do take a Spanish class in their academy, right,
but how the fuck are we expecting this guy to
discern the veracity of someone's asylum claim when he can't

(02:45:32):
count to eighteen like this person? Right under this proposed
Democratic proposal would have the effectively life or death choice
of whether someone can make an asylum claim or they
get immediately bounced back to Mexico. Right, this person would,

(02:45:53):
for instance, have the choice to send a trans woman
who would not be safequote unquote remaining in Mexico while
she applied for asylum here back to Mexico to apply
for asylum here. Right, this person will be able to
send someone who has very credible fears of violence in
Mexico back to Mexico where they often have no network,

(02:46:16):
they have no resources. It once again be putting the
strain of our foreign policy and the fucked up shit
we've done all around the world that is destabilized regimes,
specifically across South America, but also all around the world.
As a consequence of that, people aren't safe there. They're
coming here to find safety, and we're placing it in

(02:46:36):
the hands of a random border patrol agent who may
very well not speak the language. You understand anything they're
saying to bounce them back. That's not how we should
do think I think it probably goes without saying. They
also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal.
This allows immigration officials to deport people without court hearings

(02:46:57):
if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail
there an asylum interview. Again like this treating of people
seeking asylum like they don't have rights or right like
they have to they're guilty and to proven innocent almost
in this system, right and to be proven to get
these court hearings to do well in these court thinks

(02:47:19):
they need money, They need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost
anywhere from six to twelve thousand dollars from what I've heard.
But these people aren't allowed to work in the United States.
So we're creating a de facto system that privileges wealthier migrants. Right,
ten twelve thousand United States dollars is a lot of
money if you're coming from large parts of the world.
We're waging so much lower, Right, So having that kind

(02:47:41):
of money isn't something that people who may be in
desperate need of help would have. For instance, yesterday I
was speaking to a USD family. Is ed however you
want to say it who people will be familiar with
the way their community was treated by isis right.

Speaker 7 (02:47:58):
There.

Speaker 5 (02:47:59):
Some of the worst genocidal and misogynist violence that we've
seen this century was enounted upon that community. They're coming
to the United States to be safe, and I don't
think those people would have had the money to get
together for a hearing. Right they speak Kurdish. I've never

(02:48:20):
encountered about a patrol agent who speaks Kurdish. Right, So
they would have to make their claim on arrival. They
could be immediately rejected. They could if they fail their
asylum interview, they could be placed in this expedited removal
process by which they wouldn't have a right to a
court hearing, a lawyer or translator, all those things. And
the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do,

(02:48:44):
and I think this is the most bizarre one, is
that they have decided that they want to mandate the
detention of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated. This one,
it seems like obviously like a massive session into this
sort of insane Republican right wing sort of demand that

(02:49:04):
we criminalize all asylum seekers.

Speaker 1 (02:49:06):
And I think, which I want to say something like
for a second about this too, because like, yeah, you know,
one of the ways that all this whole anti migranting
is ramped up, like when I was a kid, like
because there was, you know, I was like growing up
when this this first sort of like anti immigration hysteria
was like ramping up. And back then the hysteria was
illegal immigration. It's like this stuff is all legal, Like

(02:49:29):
you have the legal Like these are literally people doing
legal immigration. Yeah, they and we're just here now where
it's like no, like like you try you, if you
attempt to come into the US legally, we are going
to fucking put you in a camp. Like it's fucking insane.
It's like like this is shit that like even like
fifteen years ago people would have been like what the

(02:49:50):
fuck are you talking about. But the way that the
way that this has been accelerated and this is something
that's and you know, and like the fact that Biden
is fucking just like just going like oh yeah, yeah,
yeah we should this is this is fine, Like we're
gonna like this is this is stuff that would have
been unimaginable for a Republican president in the two thousands. Yeah.
Like the thing about this too, is that none of
this would have been possible without democratic implicity. This is
this is just the way the system has worked this

(02:50:12):
entire time. Right there is the reason they called a
bomb of the deporter in chief, because he was the
guy who could could have actually turned the tide against
this stuff and just didn't and was just like, fuck you,
We're gonna deport millions of people. And that's that's how
we're fucking here with this shit over again. People who
are literally coming through the country legally, which is what
all these people said, spent all this fucking time saying
you're supposed to be doing.

Speaker 5 (02:50:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think the claim of Biden administration
is I don't fucking know, like they want people to
use CBP one, right. CBP one is the biggest fucking
disaster in applications. I can't think of anything. I don't know.
It's like as bad as fucking Testa's auto pilot, if
Testa's auto pilot got to decide your whole future. Right,
Every single person I have met at the Southern border

(02:50:57):
has tried CBP one. People but an't Like, no one
wants to pay someone to drive them off road across
the desert to a shitty hole in the wall in
the middle of the freezing mountain range eighty miles east
of here, and then to sit with their children while
it rains, snows, freezes, and wait for one, two, three

(02:51:21):
nights in this shitty conditions, with maybe a tent that
we dumps to dive from a Susan g Comen event, right,
or maybe if they're really lucky, like a yurt that
me and my friend's built from palaps right. And no
one in their right mind would want to do that.
These people don't want to do that. They've tried fucking
CBP one. Most of them who I have spoken to

(02:51:44):
are carrying visa rejection letters, right. They've been to embassies
all around the world, have just been summarily dismissed. They
don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right, and
they've exhausted all their options. No one wants to spend
their life savings and walk across the desert. It's dangerous, right,
but that is the only way they can do it.

(02:52:07):
And as you say, it is perfectly legal to enter
the country between ports of entry and immediately surrender to
the first law enforcement agent you see to claim asylum.
That that is how one claims asylum when one is
fleeing persecution. And when we have shut the door through
this stupid app that only recognizes white faces and crashes

(02:52:27):
all the time and isn't in those languages, and it's
entirely understandable that people are taken this route. We have
cooked the bottler of migration and then shaken it up
right for three years with Title forty two, which is
this Trump era policy that co opted the COVID pandemic,
which they allowed to rip through large segments of the

(02:52:48):
United States community and pretended that by expelling migrants are
protecting us. It didn't have any provisions for vaccination, it
didn't have any COVID testing. It was just a cynical
attempt to use the pandemic, and we've seen through public
records request is something they've planned long in advance to
evict people from this country without giving them a chance
of an asylum hearing, and now Biden is doing it

(02:53:11):
without even the pretense of an excuse. Right, at least
Trump made up some bullshit it was transparent, but Biden
isn't even bothering to do that, and he's just going
to boot these people back into a place where they're
going to be vulnerable. I've spoken to migrants who have
been abused, who have been robbed in Mexico. It's not

(02:53:33):
a safe place of vulnerable people, and the more vulnerable
people you put into it, they're less safe. It's going
to get and nor is it. Mexico's a fucking problem, right,
Like Henry Kissinger didn't fucking run Mexican policy and then
get to live to one hundred and die in his bed. Right.
It's a lot of these countries people are coming from.
They're coming from because we fucked up their policy as

(02:53:53):
a country. We fucked up their future.

Speaker 4 (02:53:55):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:53:55):
We did this neo colonial thing where we stole everything
we thought was a value. We impose dictators upon them
when they chose socialist or more progressive regimes, and then
we'd split our hands up in the air and said, no,
you can't come here to no space. Sorry, and it's
it's fucking inexcusable and it's abhorrent me. Do you know

(02:54:15):
what else is inexcusable and abhorrent?

Speaker 1 (02:54:18):
Is it the products and services that it is marketing
on the show?

Speaker 2 (02:54:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (02:54:23):
Yes, the products and services that we so greatly loath.
Oh hang on, I got something say about the fucking
products and services. We're doing this now because we've got time.
There was an advert for Novo Nordiskingna podcast the other day,
and I just want to take this opportunity to say
an extra special fuck you to them, because I have
held in my hands a little fucking children who have

(02:54:44):
died because they can't afford insulin. And the reason they
have died is because these fucking ghouls want to extract
every penny out of those of us who have diabetes.
So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you
won't ever again. But here's some other adverts we are
back without, hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me

(02:55:05):
and me and we're talking about Joe Brandon and his
terrible immigration policy. So the final part of this, and
perhaps the most bizarre one, is that the White House
mandating the detention of these migrants pending their claims. The
US has never had enough enough detention space to do this,

(02:55:27):
and we don't now. It remains extremely fucking unclear how
this will be done. I will say that there was
a big fuss made me and maybe remember this, that
Biden was canceling private prison contracts when he first came
into our office. Do you remember his executive order on
this vaguely? Yeah, yeah, I think it got a lot

(02:55:48):
of attention that may have specifically applied to people who
are in federal criminal incarceration, it's certainly never applied to
people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained
by third party contractors like cor Civic right, and they
continue to be so into the Biden administration because again, right,
it is seemingly the implicit policy of the Democratic Party

(02:56:11):
that these people are of less value and have fewer
rights than US citizens or then people seeking permanent residents
in this country through other means.

Speaker 1 (02:56:25):
You know, one of the things I was, I was
doing this for other reasons for not this story, but
I was going back through when I was reading the
Democratic Party platform from twenty twenty And if you go
back and read the Democratic Party platform from twenty twenty eight,
the opening thing is them talking about how they're they're
when they're in power, they're going to do us need

(02:56:47):
to dismantle structure of racism in this country.

Speaker 7 (02:56:51):
Fuck me.

Speaker 1 (02:56:52):
And it's like my ass, like and this is one
of these these really really sort of grim things about this, right,
is like the Democrats really really cynically capitalized off of, like, uh,
like people's revulsion at the fucking horrible stuff doing it
at the border, and then they got into power, they
did all the same shit, and nobody fucking cares now,

(02:57:14):
because that's that's literally what the Democrats are there for, right,
They're there to the diffuse people's ability capacity a desire
to resist doing the exact same fucking things Republicans are doing,
and it's really effective. And the consequence of this is
that now we're fucking here with like trying to bring
fucking the same shit Trump was doing back.

Speaker 5 (02:57:35):
Yeah, and you're right, like so many people poured so
much rage and passion into like I'm sure you can
remember the whole no More Kids and cagey think, yeah,
I will.

Speaker 1 (02:57:47):
I will say this. I was always kind of cynical
about that because I fucking remember Occupy Ice. Now, I
remember all those fucking liberals who told me they'd be
marching in the streets just fucking abandoning us and leaving
us to like deal with the fucking cops on our own.
So like, I think, I think it is like there's
been a sort of mythologization to some extent of how
willing people were to actually do shit it or Trump,
but they sure is fuck not here under Biden. So

(02:58:08):
then yeah, there.

Speaker 5 (02:58:09):
Ain't no one in the street saying no more kids
in cages now, right, Like then, here for the little
children I've met, you know, day in day out for
the last six months, who are going to be detained,
who might be separated for their families.

Speaker 1 (02:58:24):
Yeah, and I want to this is kind of off
topic too, but like, so this is this is a story.
Like at some point I'm going to do an actual
episode about this. There's been I've been I've been trying
to get to talk to people about this for a bit.
But so there's been a whole bunch of shit with
a lot of So one of these subsequent things that
was happening with all these people is that like the

(02:58:47):
government in Texas has been like shipping them to random cities.
So a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago
and it turned and there they're eventually were protests here.
But like our fucking progressive mayor tried to have a
basically a concentration camp company set up like a camp
for these people on land that it turned out have

(02:59:08):
been a toxic waste dump and only just didn't do
I I don't even think he ever backed up the
A story here is kind of I think what happened,
if I'm remembering correctly, is that the governor was like,
like pritz Crew was like, what the fuck are you doing?
You can't have this stuff beyond a toxic waste site.

(02:59:28):
But so that's like temporarily been stopped. Like that's that's
the kind of shit that's happening, like in you know,
like like Brandon Johnson like nominally is one of the
most left wing mayors in the US, And this is
what is fucking happening even in this from of the
sort of progressive wing the Democratic Party, like the concern
like the the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even

(02:59:50):
worse on this stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:59:52):
Yeah, and like the entire Democratic Party in so much
is ass And there was a time when it genuinely
did show up for people trying to come to this
country to seek asylum. At least it wouldn't. This is
like the immigration system is like a ratchet and it
only moves to the right, and under democratic government it

(03:00:13):
wouldn't move to the right. It does now. And this
means that there is not an electoral option for you, right,
you cannot just vote if you give a single fuck
about innocent people living outside of this country wanting to
come here and be safe.

Speaker 4 (03:00:29):
You don't.

Speaker 5 (03:00:30):
There is nothing on the ballot box for you to
tick that represents a serious option. And that's sad. Yeah,
it's a pretty fucked reflection of our electoral politics. But
I think it also impels us to look look at
someone who believes that there is not a ballot box
option that is going to deliver us a system with

(03:00:50):
dignity and democracy and justice. Anyway, I think this is
where we have to step up and do the stuff
we always talk about. Like this happened a little bit
in twenty twenty, it happened a little bit under Trump,
but like now, more than ever, the need to do
mutual aid, especially for migrants, but also for and house

(03:01:11):
people within your community, for all the fucking human detritus
of Joe Biden's dogshit governance. It's right now, and like
it is as I've seen personally, within the power of
a very small group of people to impact the lives
of a very large group of people through organizing. I've
participated in mutual aid for a while. I'm sure many

(03:01:33):
of the people are listening have as well. But like
if you if you haven't found the play or the
way to do so, Like it's it's a great time
to start organizing something. The options in the next electoral
cycle are that things get worse or that things get
much worse. I don't think we have an option which
is dismantling the structural racism that is within the United States,

(03:01:58):
or even just not hunching down on some of the
most vulnerable people in the world, it would appear. And
so to protect those people, it follows upon our communities.
And that's that's a big burden to shoulder, right, When
the state has enough money to send one thousand pound
bomb States rail, that means that we have to pay
for beans for hungry children.

Speaker 1 (03:02:19):
Yeah. Well, And I mean the thing that this too,
right is like if you if you spent the amount
of money that the US was spending on trying to
keep people out of the country on just like giving
like if you just gave that money to the same
those same people, we wouldn't be having this problem right now.
Like it isn't like putting people in a prison is

(03:02:40):
like the least cost efficient way to do possibly do anything.
And it doesn't matter because the whole point of this,
like and this is one of these things with the
sort of ratchet, right is, eventually you're going to get
to fucking like you know, I mean, like the situation
we have now right now in Greece where you have
effectively a fascist government who's up like pot Like when
like when when boastload boatloads and people go down to

(03:03:02):
the Mediterranean, like go down to the Mediterraneans, ever a hundred
people die, their popularity goes up because you know, and
then and this is the thing you're gonna, We're gonna,
We're We're not that far away from in the fucking us.
Is the Republican demand in like maybe like eight maybe
ten years is going to be just shooting like literally
just machine guns at the border like that. This is

(03:03:22):
this is, this is where this is fucking going, right.

Speaker 5 (03:03:24):
You haven't seen the replies to my to my posts.

Speaker 4 (03:03:27):
Don't like when.

Speaker 1 (03:03:28):
When I when I say, I mean like like this
is gonna be the demand of the fucking House, like
Republican caucus, right like this is this is, this is
where this is fucking going. And the Democrats, like you know,
and the Democrats will take power fucking twelve years later
and be like, well, we're only going to shoot some
of the people at the border. People are gonna call
this progress, right, and the only way that this can
be and this this cannot be stopped by voting for

(03:03:49):
the Democrats. This is like, you know, and like people
people thought this about Obama and people also thought this
about Biden, was that we're going to vote for these
people because they're going to be good on immigration, and
like this is the reason why we're all fucking are
where we are now. So like there is no solution
to this that doesn't revolve around like fundamental systemic change

(03:04:12):
to what the US is, because otherwise we're just going
to every single fucking year, we're going to be back here.

Speaker 5 (03:04:18):
Yeah. Talking of being back here, we weed to a
second advertising pivot. I think right that there are two
mid roles in these yeah. Yeah, So we are back
here once again lamenting the fact that we have to
introduce these adverts for you here. You are all right,
and we have returned to lament the decline of the

(03:04:38):
United States. I wanted to talk briefly about what title
forty two does to migration flow.

Speaker 4 (03:04:44):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:04:45):
As many of you will be aware, Donald Trump has
built a big, beautiful wall along the southern border of
the United States. The caveat to that being only some
of it, and that they didn't do the hard parts.

Speaker 7 (03:04:55):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:04:55):
So the places in Hakumbo where people are entering our
gaps in the war, right, there are camps at three
of these gaps over about a fifteen mile area. There
are gaps all up and down the wall. Right, And
you'll very often see people saying, oh, you couldn't climb
this war. Doesn't matter. You just walk along until you
find a gap and get through. You also can climb

(03:05:16):
the war. We've seen people climb the war. We've seen
people cut it with angle grinders. Right. But what happens
with Title forty two, what happens right now, under what's
called Title eight of the United States Immigration Law, people
enter the country through a gap in the wall, and
they wait and they surrender to a border patrol agent
and say I'm here to claim the silent Right. Then

(03:05:36):
they end up in these open air detention sites in Cucumber,
et cetera. What happens in a Title forty two is
that if you think you're going to be bounced directly
back to Mexico, and you believe that you aren't safe there,
you attempt to avoid border patrol right, And so you
go to the places where they're going to be watching
these gaps in the war, one would issue. So you

(03:05:57):
go to the furthest places and the hardest places, highest places,
in the most rugged places, right, and you try and
walk through those routes instead, you try and walk through,
for instance, Value of the Moon, which is just to
the east of the Cumber where just last week, some
of my friends are involved in the search and rescue
operation for a four year old child who'd become separated
from their family coming from Afghanistan, and then they found

(03:06:19):
that child, fortunately, but fucking no one else would have
done if they hadn't been there, right. The result of
this is that people will die in greater numbers crossing
our border. And that's what we saw rounder title forty
two hunder Trump, and it's what we saw in title
forty two on Biden, because there was that like I

(03:06:41):
have attended, that you've heard about on this podcast, and
the ones that they haven't and that you haven't heard
about on this podcast are not going to stop because
Joe Biden offered a concession to the Republicans. They will
keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much
of the world is not going to stop. It will
keep happening. Transfer a thing that we have exported culturally,

(03:07:04):
that film Branton Too, which definitely yeah, island of terms.

Speaker 1 (03:07:09):
It's a it's a colla. It's been a collaborative effort between.

Speaker 5 (03:07:12):
Yeah, that's what a special relationship is about it.

Speaker 1 (03:07:16):
JK.

Speaker 5 (03:07:17):
Rowling and Temple if there.

Speaker 1 (03:07:19):
The French are also complicit in this too. They're not
getting sucking off the hook for this ship.

Speaker 5 (03:07:23):
But yeah, this is not the podcast and it's fronts
off the hook for anything.

Speaker 1 (03:07:26):
But you know, like I mean, this is something I
think you're getting at too. But like we in large part,
like the US and the UK, are responsible for why
transphobia is as bad as it is in Mexico right now,
which is it is so much more like as bad
as it is to be trans in the fucking US,

(03:07:46):
it is so much worse in Mexico. Like the odds
of you being killed are indescribable. Even if you're not
fucking killed, there's you know, like, well, this is actually
like the one of the episodes now third, what week
will that be? The week after next? Like, yeah, I'm
gonna we're going to replay the epithet like the interviews

(03:08:08):
that I did with Maxice trans organizers talking about the
turfs there because they are armed and they will fucking like,
actually they will attack people.

Speaker 5 (03:08:20):
Yeah, it's like they United Nations says, yeah, it's bleak.
The UNS that life expectancy for trans people in Central
America is thirty five or less. Right, that's a di
am older than that. That is abhorrent. Right, that you
are extremely likely to die young if you're trans in

(03:08:43):
places not so far from here, right, And I think
that's what I want to get at, And it's the
fundamental conceit of this whole thing is that border policy
doesn't change migration. Migration happens because people aren't safe where
they are, and that's why they leave. They don't take
this journey because it seems easy, because even right now,

(03:09:06):
it's incredibly hard. People walk thousands of miles, They walk
across mountains, they run and they take risks and hop
on trains. They get extorted, they get robbed, that they
get assaulted. Young women often get sexually assaulted. Like it's
a terrible and dangerous journey, and people won't stop taking

(03:09:29):
that journey because Joe Biden decided to do something different.
The things that are driving them to leave their homes
will still keep happening, and they will now have to
take a more dangerous journey.

Speaker 4 (03:09:43):
And all that.

Speaker 5 (03:09:44):
This does is make it more likely that there's people
will die on the way here, or that when they
get here they have to live their whole lives always
wondering if they're going to get sent back, right, never
really feeling safe. It rubs people of what some of
us can take for granted, right, which is being able
to go sleep at night in feelix safe. And yeah,

(03:10:06):
that that's I guess what we all voted for when
we chose an anti fascist guy in twenty twenty. Like,
it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of politics in this
country and the impact it has for people who don't
get a choice to vote in this country.

Speaker 1 (03:10:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's you know, it is a it
is a functional, definitional totalitarian regime, and it will never
be fucking described as that by the academics who fucking
use this language. But you know, how how how else
do you describe living in a condition where you can
at any point be removed and are spending literally all
of your time attempting to flee a police date Like, yeah, yeah,

(03:10:47):
the w US, the US is and has always been
an unbelievably authoritarian state, and it's getting more so fucking
every day. And you know, and this is also one
of these things where it's like, I mean we literally
saw this in twenty twenty. The people who got sent
in to put down the uprising in Portland, it was
fucking Bortac right, it was. It was it was the

(03:11:07):
the it was, it was it was the border patrols
like special forces units, right, Like that's that's the inevitable
logic of this state, is that you any person who
wants to resist the state, eventually one day these people
will fucking come for you too. And the question is
whether you know, it's whether you start. Because Portak didn't

(03:11:27):
win really and like the stuff that they were trying
to do in twenty two, like they they basically kind
of got beaten, but you know they're still there. They're
still getting fucking money, like they're getting I mean to
give more money. Yeah, So you know, either either we
stopped them now before they fucking have another trillion dollars
to spend on this shit, or you know, we fight
them again in like five years when there's more of

(03:11:49):
them and they're better funded.

Speaker 5 (03:11:51):
Yeah, And like the final thing I'll say with regard
to that finding is, maybe you're meeting your family over
the holidays, right, maybe hanging out with people he didn't
often hang out. Even if you don't care about you
know that their mother bringing her baby from Shingaal in
Iraq to hear who I met last night, Right, even

(03:12:11):
if that doesn't bother you and you're so somehow heartless
that you don't care. I will say that, like every
single time we put more money into border security to
ends up with all of us being surveiled more. If
you attended a protest in twenty twenty, you might have
been surveiled by border patrol.

Speaker 4 (03:12:29):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:12:30):
If you walk around in the desert where I live,
you're probably being surveiled by border patrol.

Speaker 1 (03:12:35):
If you use your.

Speaker 5 (03:12:36):
Cell phone without encryption, you might be being surveiled at
the border. Right. The companies, many of them are based
in the US and then based in Israel, that are
surveilling Palestinians are the same ones that are surveiling us
at our border. And this will come back to bite
you at the ass. In the ass, this will come

(03:12:57):
back to bite you in the ass, even if you
don't care about migrants, because the moment you are not
in lockstep with the government, you become a potential victim
of that surveillance. Right, And a big thing with undocumented
immigration is it essentially makes you a legible and therefore
untaxable to the government.

Speaker 2 (03:13:16):
Right.

Speaker 5 (03:13:16):
What would the government state at its very core want
people to be is legible and taxable and accountable. If
you think that it isn't going to bounce back on
trans folks, right and making them specifically lon binary folks too, Right,
Like the idea that you don't have a box to
tick on a form and that makes you harder to
be legible and statistically quantifiable by the government. All of

(03:13:38):
this will come back and hurt you, even if you're
just a super right wing libertarian who doesn't want to
pay their taxes. Like this border of security is a
thing that will eventually be used against you. And I
don't think it's in any of our interests to just
keep handing these tools to the state that end up
being used against the most desperately in the world. And

(03:14:02):
so hopefully I know there's no one you can fucking
vote for to change that. Yeah, yeah, you can feel
free to write your legislators. I have been on the
phone to my legislators about individual cases of people who
I care about very deeply, who are in a very
grave amount of danger and they haven't done shit. So

(03:14:24):
instead I go to the border and I build shelters,
add of palettes and tops for people because it's the
only thing that makes me feel like I'm not completely
fucking powerless. And so if you want to take that
paradynamic back, you know, cook some beans, make some rice,
buy some tops with your holiday money, and go out

(03:14:44):
there and start doing mutual aid. You don't even have
to go on x dot com or Reddit to do it.
Just fucking go out and start helping people. You'll find
other people who want to help. You can organize and
it's bad. The only way I can see that you
can make things meaningfully better right now?

Speaker 1 (03:14:58):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think that's a good message
to end on.

Speaker 2 (03:15:04):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 5 (03:15:05):
If you want to give your money to my little
mutual laid gang of wonderful people, you can go to
GoFundMe dot com, slash Hercumber, hyphen migrant hyphen camps. He
Cumber is ja c U N b A. But you
can also keep it. And I would love it if
you started something yourself and told us what you were doing.

(03:15:26):
That would make things less shitty for us.

Speaker 2 (03:15:32):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 6 (03:15:38):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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