Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 53: Evil Twinsies, with Naomi Klein

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Matt and Daniel talk with author and social activist Naomi Klein (Doppelganger, The Shock Doctrine) about the discouraging developments in Lebanon, the unconscious zionist drive to embody every anti-semitic stereotype, and Matt’s comprehensive understanding of Canadian identity.Please donate to Mercy Corps: https://www.mercycorps.org/Keep up with Naomi Klein at https://naomiklein.org/Subscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get  your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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White foster us Zabrahamas Asvaras us Hello and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The world's most moral podcast. That's right. My name is Matt Lieb. I am going to be your most moral co-host for this podcast.

And I am Daniel Matte. I'm the other most moral co-host. Welcome. Welcome. To our last, if not one of our last episodes of the podcast. Not, well, maybe. Who knows? Depends how far this.

limited operation in the south of Lebanon goes, you know what I'm saying? You really never know. I was, I was just going to say the last of the lunar year. I forget what year we're in, but we're about to hit Russia Shana. That's right. And, you know, high holidays, everyone. High holidays. Time of Jewish repentance and self-examination, which, especially since the advent of nationalism,

we really love to do. Oh, yeah. It's a time to really reflect on how we've affected others and how the things that are happening in our lives might be a consequence of things that might be our responsibility and that we could do something about and something called Cheshbon Nefesh, you know, doing an accounting of the soul and just an opportunity really to get things right. We love accounting. That's one of those things. We're accountants, yeah. I was born. They gave me a little visor. It was clear neon. They said, are you ready to account? And I said, for sins, you got that right. I said. Just a reminder to give us five stars in review on all of the podcast platforms. Now, more than ever, actually, if you're on Spotify, this is a Hasbar alert.

So apparently our podcast was called out inside of an Israeli telegram or what is it, telegraph group? What's the name of that app? Telegram, yeah. Yeah, telegram. And they were telling They told everyone Hey, I don't know if you guys know this But there's a podcast out there called Bad Hasbara

That makes fun of our Hasbara And they're not wrong They called us harsh and cynical But they did it in Hebrew Not in English with a bad Hebrew accent But no yeah Harsh and cynical In fact

A friend of the pod What is the name of the friend of pot Because he's such a good friend. It was Ido. It was Edo, the Reliable. Edo the Reliable sent us the post itself and did some translation for people like me. It points out that this was definitely written either with Hebrew as a second language or an English speaker who put it inside of a Google translate. The podcast, Bad Hasbar, the world's most moral podcast, is a cynical podcast that comes out harshly against Israel and condemns Israel's Hezbarra efforts.

while in contrast to them they are angels who do not lie I was just like wait are they admitting to lying anyways but that's such a typical defensive Israeli has via response like when they get criticized

they claim that you're claiming that you're perfect yes exactly I mean listen we never said we're angels who don't lie we never said we're angels who don't lie that is never words that have ever left our mouths but I do love the idea that they're out here. What they're really mad about is that they've worked so hard

on the Hasbara. And they're like, what are they doing making fun? Sinically making fun of our Hasbara. We work so hard for the hashtag, would you hide me? Adam says, I'm rubber. You're in apartheid demos. Yeah. So anyways, they brigaded on Spotify are like they made a video of here's how you can give them one star. And so basically you go in, you click an episode, you click the button that says already watched and then you give it one star i'm still fucking figuring out how to leave five stars every time i go it's like would you like to watch this episode yeah and i i guess i need to do the thing they're saying it's just a because i i usually listen on some other app or i don't listen because i fucking record the thing right exactly why should i have to listen to you should not

why should i have to listen to myself to leave myself a fraudulent five star review six times exactly um and unfortunately uh they figured it out they you know um unlike our our boy here Daniel Matte who couldn't get past the how they figured it out um you know they made the desert bloom well because they had the why they didn't need that once you have the why you have the how and they had the they got to get our ratings down how's that going that how's our how's our rating i mean our rating is went from like 4.7 to like 4.0 or like 3.8 or something which that's harsh talk about a good GPA um but uh if you want to help us out maybe in your family yeah in my i mean listen my family we were not good at school point is if you are someone who wants to give us five stars

in review please do it now on spotify just fight against the fight against the hesbarah machine uh and finally shout out to producer adam we need to get into this episode because we have a great one we have a fantastic guest and a lot of things have happened since you know we last spoke with y'all so many things yeah it's so One of those things where people ask us constantly, why do you do so few episodes? We do at least one a week, and they're right. There's just too much going on. In terms of what's going on this week, oh boy, the last few days have seen an increase in the bombings and mass destruction in southern Lebanon.

and it has been something where here just here's a rundown timeline the last few days September 24th, Hezbollah and Israel continued to trade fire overnight. Dozens are killed, including two UN workers. Next day, there's long-range missiles that are shot down over Tel Aviv. And then next day at the UNGA, the U.S. and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire between Israel, Lebanon, Israel and Lebanon and Israel rejects it. And then Netanyahu says that Israel is winning. And then Israel announces on the 28th that they had killed Hassan Nasrallah.

On my fucking birthday of all days. On your birthday. Which was, you know, something that was largely celebrated online by both the like Washington, like D.C. political class who have no problem celebrating the death of you know anyone who has ever resisted Israeli occupation and then of course those inside of Israel who were doing the same thing they've been doing for the last 12 months making crass videos cheering at what was not just the death of Nasrallah but hundreds of others who were killed by a 2,000 pound bomb given to them by yours truly the bad has borough podcast no by the united states it's been um it's been insane to watch and of course

as is tradition in the u.s um every time we find out that israel has done something that it said it wasn't going to do a bunch of articles come out in which they say oh what damn they tricked us something just something just hit me about because i keep hearing these two thousand pound bombs 2,000-pound bombs, that number 2,000 was ringing strangely in my ears. And then I realized in the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikva, which means the hope, when they sing about the hope, Hatikva bat schnot al-Paim, which means the hope of 2,000 years, i.e. the 2,000 years of exile. In other words, a pound per year. A pound per year has been, the weight of explosive rage has been accumulating for every single one of those years since the destruction of

the Second Temple. Yeah, it's a, you know, poetic in a genocidal way. But there was an article that came out in which they, once again, we've seen this over and over again, but this claim that they tricked us, this claim that like, oh, man, I didn't know they were going to do all that from the New York Times. A White House. So the headline, the White House, thought Israel was, quote, on board with a three-week ceasefire plan in Lebanon and in the body. Adam says they pulled away the 2,000-pound football. Like Lucy and actually what happened is that they Biden misheard. They weren't on board.

Yeah. One of the Israeli envoys said, I'm bold. I'm bold. I'm bold of all this negotiating. Italy day, it's the same thing. We pretend to want to ceasefire. And every day we do the same thing. Sure.

And then don't do it. So it said a White House spokesperson said the Biden administration believed Israel's government was, quote, on board with a proposed ceasefire for 21 days between Israel and Hezbollah when the United States and 10 other countries unveiled the idea Wednesday night. John Kirby, a friend of the pod, the White House's national security spokesperson, said the Allies would not have made the proposal public otherwise, which I love. because they're just like, listen, we're down for the death, but we just don't like being humiliated in public. It's as if this doesn't happen every single time, just like Lucy and the football. I mean, in fact, it's true.

They wouldn't have made it public unless they knew that Israel would then completely contradictory, which is the entire Kfeb. It's the entire schick. Yeah. Oh, we just can't control these good friends of ours. And it's a communication thing, you know? It must be a language thing. It's happened so often that you're just you just can't like the real humiliation here is how much they trust the Israeli government not to publicly humiliate them like that to me is more almost more humiliating it's the fact that you keep having to write these articles and they're like hey man I really I really thought that this time they weren't going to like lie to us to our face they're like okay promise promise just promise you won't you won't you won't

Bon Lebanon, well, during the ceasefire talks, and, and, and, sorry, Israel looks them in the face like Kevin McDonald's, the kids in the hall and says, we'll do. Yeah. And then they're like, you said, you promised you the king of your promises. And they go, slip my mind. Yeah, it is, it is just like, and, you know, you see now, you know, Biden, not even attempting damage control. I don't, I don't see any attempts at damage control anywhere. I just see the same, uh, the same. tired, you know, hey, we want to, saying we want to ceasefire while continuing to give them money for aid. I mean, Israel says it has secured $8.7 billion in a U.S. aid package. It's just at this point, why even have PR? And finally, this is all led up to today, Netanyahu,

giving a brief speech to the people of Iran. Oh, that's so, nice. I bet they were feeling left out because all the other countries in the region were getting little, you know, messages from the school principal. Exactly. Everyone else getting a note. It's like Valentine's Day when you're just like, wait, how come I haven't gotten a note that says I love you with some candy on it? And that's what they got. Why haven't I got a note saying it's not you. I'm after. It's your parents and your entire family. So just stay at school a little later today. don't go home and when you get home there'll be there'll be some nice men yeah take you to a new home yeah it is kind of crazy this time i feel like um you know as opposed to others you know direct

addresses to the people of wherever he's about to bomb uh it felt almost uh explicitly threatening rather than implicitly and uh let me play a little bit of that for all y'all i want to address you the people of ira every day you see a regime that subjugates you make fiery speeches about defending Lebanon, defending Gaza. Every day, their puppets are eliminated. Ask Muhammad Dev. Ask Nasrallah. There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach. There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country. You deserve better. Your children deserve better. The entire world deserves better. I know you don't support the rapists and murder.

of Hamas and Hezbollah. But your leaders do. You deserve more. The people of Iran should know, Israel stands with you. May we together know a future of prosperity and peace. He could barely keep in the maniacal after.

I know. I know. It's like at this point, he should be doing these addresses from like a, sort of like a, I don't know, wherever the Joker's layer is in Batman. You know what I mean? It just, it's, there's, there's such a just this feeling regarding every speech he does in which he is just threatening civilians and saying, you know, it's not you that I'm trying to kill. It's your leaders. But I have to kill a few of you in order to get your leaders. And it's just like, it's just it's like it's getting to a point now where I don't know how anyone,

with the conscience can support this and yet it still happens which is why we have a great guest today a guest who really summarizes all of that that that feeling of living in the shadowlands in alternate realities with mirror selves someone who is an activist and an author of a book called doppelganger which i just read which is one of i think one of the most fantastic summation of the current reality that we live in, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome Naomi Klein. Hey.

Hi. How are you doing? I'm good. I was trying to give you five stars on Spotify. Oh, thank you. We appreciate that. But I listen on another platform. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. I know. I mean, listen, hey, five stars on whatever platform that you listen on, you know, whether it's Spotify or, Anyway, so the point is, is I'm very, I'm flattered that you would listen to this at all because this podcast was born out of just frustration at the world and the feeling of going insane, which you, in your book, Doppelganger, do a great job. I literally go insane in the book. You do.

I mean, we're watching your dissent into, I wouldn't say madness, but I, you know, you go. from someone who is largely the book starts out with you talking about your your own personal doppelkanger Naomi Wolfe who is someone that has people have confused you for for a long time and since kind of Naomi Wolfe's turn into conspiracy and other things the comparison has been less flattering and what's interesting is as I was reading the book I did not know that eventually we're getting to this comparison with Israel. But as I was reading it, I was going, man, this really feels like how it feels to be a diaspora Jew. You know, just having this twin, this doppelganger, this thing that people confuse you for. You know, all Jews are

Zionists. All Jews are Israeli, whether it's by birth or by blood. And how does that? having to try to set the record straight while being drowned by a sea of people giving you, you know, like reinforcing the false narrative. So I want to ask when this book was conceived, did you see it as going to this place of, you know, this comparison with the Jewish state? Hmm. Well, this was, I definitely found the book while writing the book. So I, It wasn't like my previous books where I had like a very clear outline and thesis that I was trying to prove. Like, this is more creative nonfiction. So originally it was going to be an essay.

I knew I wanted it to kind of tackle anti-Semitism as the sort of original conspiracy theory because the book is ultimately about conspiracy culture, right? Because my doppelganger Naomi Wolf is kind of a doppelganger of herself, right? She's one of these people who we all know, who we are like, whatever happened to that person, they used to be this and now they're that, right? And so she's one of those people. There's been many articles like whatever happened to her. She used to be this kind of liberal feminist, and now she's hanging out with Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. And she's, you know, taking pictures of clouds and talking about how, you know, it's a government plot or whatever.

I didn't know she was anti-cloud. She's a cloud truther. She's a cloud truther. So that interests me a lot. And as I talk to people about this, I would have these conversations like, oh, my God, I can't talk to my sister. I can't talk to my uncle, right? So it was feeling, I wrote it during the pandemic of like the world has gotten strange. It's gotten uncanny.

You know, Freud talks about the uncanny as like the familiar, when the familiar becomes strange, right? Doppelgangers are the most uncanny thing that can happen to you because you are the most familiar thing to, you in the world. So if there's another, you know, Matt Lieb walking around who people think is you and you come face to face with that person, that is the, you know, the essence of uncanniness, right? Absolutely. And there used to be another, there was a Matt Lieberman that I would follow online because he was doing very well. This was back when I was in college. And then one day I met him and I was like, I'm taller, so it's fine. You know, there's a, uh, there's a, uh, There's a Spanish billionaire named Daniel Mate, the exact same spelling on my last name.

Yeah, like he's in chemicals or minerals or something. He's like a, yeah, resources. That should be helpful. And I got an email from, I don't know, citations.com being like, Daniel Matte, are you the same Daniel Matte who wrote? And then it's some paper on, I don't know, exploiting workers or I don't know what the fuck. So that's an interesting double. life. Well, there's a Naomi Klein in New Zealand who has so much dirt on me because people are constantly sending her emails that are intended to me for me. And I'm sure she's a Zionist

because she has never forwarded a single one or she's just collecting. She's hoarding it for her the big reveal. Yeah. Yeah. Her adventure much about this woman. Yeah. Her eventual book. Yeah. But so I, you know, I saw this sort of figure. of the double of the doppelganger is a way to get at a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get at. You know, I wanted to get at personal branding. I wanted to get at AI. I want all these ways that we create doubles of ourselves, that other people create doubles of us, right? But then, yeah, one day my mom was like, you know, it's just because you're both basically loudmouthed Jusses, you know, that's like that's. And then I'm like, I guess I'm going to

have to get into the Jewish thing, right? Because that is, it's part of it. It's part of we're You know, my mom said, you're a type. Yeah, you know, you're both a, people see you as a type. Yeah. And so, you know, one of the things I do in the book is read novels about doppelgangers, and there is a whole sort of subgenre fiction about this. And anyway, long story short, this brings me to Roth, which Philip Roth, which brings us to Israel, which brings us to the doppelganger of the new Jew versus the, you know, this is what you're talking about Matt. And it's very rich because, you know, Operation Shylock, which is his best doppelganger novel,

And all of Philip Roth's novels are doppelganger novels in one way or another. And the protagonist is always like, is that Philip Roth? Sure, right, right. But then with Operation Shylock, which is kind of his masterpiece, I would argue. Which is, I would say is an amazing thing to argue because it is, for me, it was one of, it was my favorite Philip Roth novel, but I felt like it was, I'd never heard anyone talk about it. People always bring up like American pastoral or a port noise. Portnoy, yeah. That's the only one that comes to mind for me. And I love Portnoy. I mean, in terms of, you know, I relate to a guy who, you know, will fuck a liver. You know, like I just. Andy Lance, my God. Yeah. Listen, listen. We've all, we've all been there. We've all been, you know, young and horny and saw something and went for it. But this book in particular was something where I felt like he was, he was either outing himself as a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. And I wasn't sure, which you come.

cover in the book. Can we just, can we give a little synopsis of the novel? Because I've, I've never read it. What's the, uh, premise? Why don't you go read it and then we'll just come back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Adam, Adam, you can edit out. 17 days because that, it'll take me at least that long. It's, it's a short read. Um, but essentially Philip Roth, uh, is the, or at least the protagonist of the book is named Philip Roth, who's written all Philip Roth's novels. Uh, and he finds out there's another Philip Roth, someone, who's pretending to be Philip Roth, who's in Israel and is giving speeches about how Jews need to abandon Zionism and go for diasporism. Is that, that's essentially the, um, the thing. That's,

yeah, he, he, he, it's, it's, um, and this, we should say, you know, it's written in the early 90s. Um, and it, he calls himself a dias, a diasporist. And he's arguing for a reverse exodus from the state of Israel. all the jews should go back to poland he actually meets with lequilessa yes um and and it kind of makes a deal as the famous novelist philip rath and he's arguing that israel has become you know a coffin for for for world jewelry and it was a very bad idea and it has to stop and so this becomes a vehicle to look at different kinds of doppelgangers Everything from the, you know, the book is called Operation Shylock because part of the, the big idea of the book is that Shylock, Shakespeare's Shylock, is the doppelganger of all Jews, right?

And, you know, this is a familiar idea for anyone who's written about race and ethnicity, you know, that that is what prejudice is. That's what racial hatred is. It's the world creating a double of you and projecting it onto you, right? They have an idea of what the Jew is. And so they meet you and it's like, well, you seem nice, but I could kind of picture you, you know, getting your pound of flesh or whatever. So it's the character they have in their brain that they're projecting onto you. And and so the, I mean, the other thing that goes on in the book is so, so there's a, there's a trial, a real world trial going on in, in Jerusalem of a man who is thought to be a Nazi war criminal and then this idea of the fascist as a sort of like they have their double, which is the sort of family man, good neighbor, and so on. He's thought to be Ivan the terrible. But then there's a lot, there's a lot of really good

anti-Zionist content in Shylock. It is a mess of a book in that it isn't clear what he thinks. There's all kinds of terrible stereotypes of both women and Palestinians. There's a sort of a Saeed-esque character. But really, it's kind of about how Israel's driven everybody insane. And the book is insane. And it really is quite anti-Zionist. But he sort of pulls his punches at the end, or does he? Anyway, it's worth reading.

It's worth reading as an artifact because he pushed it, I would say, as far as anyone was pushing it in. early 90s. Sure. And he is the original self-hating Jew in the sense that he was he was he was attacked by his but you know by the Jewish establishment and rabbis for failing to represent the Jews properly. Yeah. Yeah. Which I find so funny because it's just the idea that I mean throughout the history of Jews in in arts and you know media and whatnot like the poking fun at ourselves has been something that I think we've done so much, it's almost like you expect it. But imagining Philip Roth going too far, where they're like, listen, we can

take a little self-hatred, but you really seem to loathe yourself. Like, the idea that he is the most self-hating Jew is very funny to me. Yeah. But, you know, you mentioned Shylock, the character in which, you know, from Merchant of Venice and the way that people can kind of look at Jews and, you know, we may be nice, we may be all different in different ways, but there's this racialized thing, right? And that's what a lot of anti-Semitism stems from is, oh, but they're different in a way that is sinister and whatnot. In the book, one of the things I really enjoy is the way in which you don't otherize anti-Semitism as apart from other types of racism. And I think that's something that at least in the last 11 months you've really seen

on overdrive. The idea that what has happened in the history of Jews is somehow transcends all other forms of ethnic hatred or bigotry racism like it is the worst type of racism is the way it's being described and therefore anything is justified in stamping it out and including completely enacting every single one of its core stereotypes like whoever we have to become in order to defeat the anti-Semites including the anti-Semites most feverish fever dream of us yes I know is just I mean I I'm had, this is the hard time I'm having with it, honestly. I'm looking out into the world now and I see Jews and I imagine Zionism going on in their heads. And immediately, I'm seeing them as a prototype of a rather, like, I don't like it.

I was at synagogue the other day. I'll talk about this some of the time. But just being in a room full of Jews for the first time, just being Jews since October 7th, I haven't put myself in rooms like that. And I could feel, I could hear my own internalized or I could hear this thing going on inside of me of a kind of of real suspicion and hostility of these people because if they believe, and it turns out there was many anti-Zionists in the room, I didn't know. I was going to ask, was this a progressive synagogue or?

Well, it was at a kind of, it was kind of a wholesale, so to speak, Jewish gathering of various congregations at the Park Slope Jewish center. So there was a lot of different groups represented, but it was tough to tell. But again, now it's all pure projection, you know, I'm just, I'm looking at all the Kippot, and I'm projecting all of my ideas of what's going on behind those skulls. And it turned out that there were some strong anti-Zionist Jews in the room. There were some more liberal Zionist Jews in the room, probably. And they were keeping the rhetoric away from, at least in English, that, yeah, they were

keeping the conversation away from direct politics. We were talking about everyone's grief and the division and stuff like that, stuff that people could, uncontroversial stuff. Anyway, my point is, I was observing in myself. a high degree of activation where I'm associating my own people with some of the worst things people believe about us and then I'm noticing that

and I'm like, I don't like that and maybe the Zionists are right about me, maybe I am a self-hating Jew, but then I'm thinking there's that fucking Israeli flag at the front of the room, look at that flag. And then there's the U.S. flag. And it was totally uncanny. It was totally uncanny.

And I feel like I've never, I've always lived in a world where anti-Semitism is either a thing of the disastrous, catastrophic thing of the past, or a really absurd thing of some present, but not super close to me. But right now it's like both the horrible reality of anti-Semites and what they believe and what they're capable of, but also the horrible reality of what Jews are capable of and what Jews are publicly performing right now in their fealty to this golden calf, as you called it, of Zionism, is it was almost too much to take sitting there. And I was really glad I was there rather than staying at home and not engaging. Because I said, this is the stuff that's going on in our collective unconscious right now. I hope that makes some kind of sense. There's no question at the end of that, except just to put some stuff. Yeah. And I mean, I'm, you know, I say this like, you know, I was talking earlier about my mom saying it's anti-Semitism.

I mean, I'm not saying I agree. And I'm like you, Daniel. I mean, I feel like I have not experienced a lot of anti-Semitism in my life unless I'm just very naive. And I don't realize that people are thinking. about the fact that I'm Jewish all the time, you know, I, the only time I experienced direct anti-Semitism was when I was living in England when I was 10, where, you know, there was like Jew was a schoolyard taunt along with Irish, you know, I mean, what I experienced more of growing up in Montreal was Jews being anti-Morocan, like Ashkenazi Jews being anti-Morocan Jew, because

there were a lot of Moroccan Jews in Montreal, and there was a lot of race. within the Jewish community. That's what my bat mitzvah speech was about. But, you know, this question around the exceptionalism of anti-Semitism. Every hatred is different. You know, every hatred has its own texture. It has its own tropes. It has every, every hatred is different. But this idea that there's something extra special, right, about Jew hatred that is completely primordial, right? It will always be, is this incredibly pessimistic? You know, I think this would be called Judeo-pessimistic, you know. And there are people who make the same argument about anti-blackness, right? That it's just like, it's outside of time. You know, it's so encoded in what

it means to, you know, in sort of the arc of human history. And very interestingly, that, this is the world Netanyahu grew up in. This is his father's scholarship. His scholar, his father was an academic. And he, his research, I actually nailed this mainly from the novels in Netanyahu's, but I went back and it's true that, you know, his scholarship was all about proving that, that there was, that during the, during the inquisition, you know, even if Jews converted, right? So it wasn't about the thing that it, that supposedly it was about, you know, what Jews did or anything like that. that even when Jews converted, the hatred of Jews was so extreme that they would, you know, be

discovered as closet Jews or whatever and converted the sake and so on. But the point of it is to prove that you can't change it, right? Like the point of it being primordial, the point of it being outside of time, it is the argument for Zionism, right? Because if it's, if it's, like other hatreds, then it can be covered by, you know, the UN Declaration on human rights. I mean, it can be governed by a universalism, right, which is supposed to address all the forms of hatred, right? And it doesn't pretend that someday it's going to wipe any of them out, but we can find ways to minimize the harms and that no one group ever gets to, no one minority group ever gets

to not face the consequences. There's no curing that. There ain't no cure for that. And so I think that the, like you're saying, this specialness of anti-Semitism, right, and needing its own definitions, but not just needing its own definitions, needing its own country,

needing its own special laws. So much so that in protecting that special, all of those exceptions, it's willing to bring down the entire international architecture of universal human rights, right? Which is where we are right now, and it's that incredibly unhinged moment.

I mean, in some ways, that is the sort of ultimate twinning, right? Like out of the Holocaust, you get these two, you get this kind of, I've described it as kind of like the fork in the roads, right? Like, you have the whole architecture of international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, the genocide conventions, all of it. And then you also have. have the ethno state, right? Which is this idea that actually none of that is going to work

against anti-Semitism. So there just can only, there can only be a fortress. You can only just put a gun to its head and force it into submission. I mean, just thinking about that disgusting clip you just played by Netanyahu, right? Just the ultimate sort of like hostage vibe, right? Yeah. Yeah. You will force you. And so you actually can't hedge your bets like that with universalism. You know, like you actually have to go all in. Like we really do believe that one set of rules applies to everyone or the exception becomes the rule. And that's the moment that we're in now. That is so, you know, so terrifying. But yeah, all that doubles with Israel are just, I mean, it is, it gets at the sort of the anti-Semitism at the heart of Zionism, right? Because the new

Jew, the figure of the new Jew, loathes the old Jew. It's full of disdain. It's constantly blaming Jews for the Holocaust, right? Yeah. But yeah, the work of de-exceptionalism, which I think we really need to work on in so many ways, right? It brings us back to the Holocaust because the Holocaust was also lifted out of history, right? And it was treated as a special kind of genocide that can't, in fact, it's anti-Semitic to even put it into dialogue with history, right? And so

that was where what I really didn't expect this research to take me to was this whole body of literature which I'm embarrassed to say I did not know, you know, which was, you know, all of the scholarship from anti-colonial thinkers from, you know,

from W.B. Du Bois to Nehru, to M. Cesar, who were saying at the time, European fascism is a doppelganger, a twin, you know, to use Nero's phrase, a demon to use Cesar's phase of European colonialism and imperialism. And it was treated like so that at the time it was being understood by the allies as, you know, this is such a rupture, this is such an exception. And this is how you've treated black and brown people all over the world. Yeah, and you point that out, you know, in doppelganger, just the amount of ethno-fascism, just in the way that Nazis model themselves after American race science and American genetic. Yeah, so why didn't we get this story in our Holocaust education? I mean, did either of you get this?

No, no, not at all. It's been a shocking, only in the past year have I been exposed to the notion that, oh, the reason Naziism is. so horrifying to why Western is that it that this kind of treatment of human beings came home yes happened on it happened in the wrong place right and that the concentration camps were invented somewhere else you know and and it implicates us in what we have other otherized as the holy greatest act of human depravity in history which is the holocaust and to be implicated in that in the slightest, takes us away from our hero narrative in the West. The West is the hero that came to the rescue of the Jews and then created the state of Israel. Like it is, it is. And if this history is

confronted, which is, I mean, it's not like a hidden history. The Nazis were very open about the fact that they thought that the, you know, Indian resident reserve system, reservation system was a very, it's a model for the ghettos. I mean, yes. Hilary had, there's all of these speeches that I had drawn in the book where he's saying of the Ukrainians, oh, we'll give them beads like they gave to the Indians and, you know, all the things that colonized people like, where it was most influenced, they were most influenced by Germany's own colonial adventures in Africa. And the sort of technologies of genocide and concentration camps came directly from the Naman Herrero genocide. Right.

Someone needs to rewrite that first they came for the Jews, uh, poem, you know, which everyone loves to trot out. Yes. No, first they did not come for the Jews. No. First they came from people way the fuck over there. Daniel, do that. Make a, make a song.

Do something. Yeah. First they came, first they came for the Haida Gai people. First they came, you know, first they came for the Lenape people. And here's something else. I feel like this generation, you know, you mentioned Haidaquai, like, our generation, that's the first nations from from british columbia yeah like like i have a son who's 12 he you know since kindergarten he has had um in the curriculum of his school quite a lot about um the the

residential school system in canada the so-called residential school system and the fact that it's genocide they just actually you know this week is is orange shirt day where all the kids Since kindergarten, for him, they wear their orange shirts, which is in solidarity with indigenous people fighting for justice from the residential school system. The point is, I didn't have this education. You know, and I think what's freaking Zionists out so much is that this generation, like the generation of the encampments, see the obvious connections. My kid learns that they banned indigenous people from speaking their language, from practicing

their ceremonies. And then he hears about the same thing about Jews. He's like, well, it's the same thing. Like, you know, it's a version of the same thing. And so he never got the rules that you're not supposed to compare. You know, it's very obvious. I think it's very obvious to this whole generation. And the problem with that for Zionists is that then you, then they've got,

then they lose their argument for exceptionalism for the state of Israel. So they're running around playing whack-a-mole trying to prevent people from seeing connections. And they're like, no, they just need more Holocaust education. I don't think that's going to fix it for them. And, of course, their rule, their rule functionally has always been, y'all never compare and we will always compare. Right. You know what I'm saying?

Like, you shall never compare anything anyone else goes through to our version of what we went through. But we will always compare anything anyone ever does in response to anything we do to the worst of what we went through. I have trouble stopping myself from doing it. I'm buying a new car. And the financing people said 5.4% APR. And I was just like, this is, this is my Holocaust. You know, I said, this is like, this is the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever heard.

And, yeah, there's just like the amount of people who get called out and who get, I mean, not just like, you know, called out on the internet, but people who have, like, lost employment and people who have lost friends. because they dare to look at the situation in Gaza and see the, see that it is a genocide. And the idea that even the word genocide is owned, you know, is by the Holocaust. I think we need to hold on to the specificities of these different historical events, which are genuinely different. And there is an escalation and it's not a competition, right? I mean, what the Nazis did was the first industrial scale, mass machinery, mass death, right? And I think every genocide is profoundly impacted by the technologies of its time, right? This was the first Fordist genocide.

But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be in conversation. and in history with the previous genocides that informed so many aspects of it, right? And the ways that that genocide is feeding the current genocide, right? Which is also different, right? I mean, I think that there's this desire for things to be the same, which is really boring. I mean, first of all, we have a genocide convention precisely because there isn't just one genocide. And it allows us to identify commonalities across difference, right? And so that we can identify that annihilatory logic, which is absolutely a through line, you know, in human history.

And so, yeah, I mean, I don't, like whether it's capitalized or not, I mean, what's dangerous is if it is exceptionalized and that that exceptionalization, becomes the rationale for further exceptionalization, which it did. Right. There's a reason why it needed to be exceptional. And the reason is multidirectional. Like you mentioned the allies, the allies wanted it to be exceptional because if it wasn't, they'd have to look in the mirror at what Hitler learned from them, and then suddenly they're having to deal with their own genocidal histories and present, right? They don't want to do that. They want to come out, like you said, Matt, they want to come out the heroes, right? They want to come out cleaner than before, right, which they did. They also want to pivot to the Cold War, which they also did. So that, you know, that was, because there

was also a lot of, like, the comparisons that were allowed were comparisons with Stalin, but that's a whole other. Right. That's right. That's right. But, you know, but I, you know, I feel like we're only, because so much of this history was, and so much of the scholarship that did draw these connections was suppressed, not part of Holocaust education. I don't even think we've begun to understand the psychology of why there was that need for that kind of exceptionalism and how that manifests today in this, like what you were talking about earlier, Daniel, about like, what is this drive to fulfill every single anti-Semitic dangerous stereotype? Like, it's almost like a death drive that we're seeing now. And it's terrifying. It doesn't just affect them. It affects

every do in the world, right? If you're, if you're fulfilling out in the open. And I think it has something to do. And this is kind of a tricky thing to talk about. But, you know, if we understand that that European fashions in the 1930s, 40s, is colonialism coming to the heart of Europe and inflicted on people who were saw themselves as white, you know, or were sort of on that sort of border between white and non-white, right? And it also depends on which Jews we're talking about, right? Stettel Jews, different, you know, than rich, you know, city Jews.

You know, and I think for those folks who, as we know, are the architects of Zionism, you know, there's a lot of overlap there. There was something about being treated as black, right? That was a particular kind of humiliation. Yes. And it's a humiliation that that has been metabolized as equality, justice, is us being able to be as fucking racist and genocidal as you white people were. That's why I say in the book that, you know, in Israel, you know, the mantle of whiteness is passed on to the Jews and called reparations. And what's the whitest thing you can possibly do?

Genocide. Yeah. Ethnic cleansing. Yeah. and the destruction of indigenous peoples. Or as we joked on the podcast before, the extra bonus privilege of getting to Hannibal directive ourselves. It's like,

it's like, why should everyone else get to kill Jews? Right, exactly. Now we get to order the killing of Jews under a certain sense. Doing anti-Semitism is the highest level of whiteness that you can attain. And there's a kind of a dare you element to all of this ways, which we're just kind of like, like, you know, there is this fulfilling of all these stereotypes.

It's like, I dare you to say the thing, you know. Rabbi Shmuli did it in his Purim costume. He couldn't wait to dress up as what he thought Candice Owens' idea is of a stereotypical Jew. And in so doing, he gave rise to his imagination of her imagination. Now, I'm certain that her imagination of a stereotypical Jew maybe isn't a place I'd want to hang out. But his imagination of her imagination was this grotesque, hook-nosed, payist.

Yeah. And so here's the... He had a shirt on that said like money or it was just like he's, you know... I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you know who Rabbi Shmuli Botech is? Unfortunately, I do. Yeah. So for...

I haven't seen this latest chapter in his long... Well, this is back in the... He has many chapters. Back in the spring on Purim, he dressed up and put it on Twitter. as his idea of an anti-Semites idea of a typical Jew and it's basically a nightmare version of himself and it was it was like a furry costume it was like his he's getting to live through the imagined id

of someone else who hates him it was incredible is this the ultimate way to prove that you're safe or that you're that you're free that you could you fulfill the worst stereotypes and you're still okay? What is going on? I like to imagine what it is, is it's trying to portray the anti-Semites version of a Jew in which you are looking at a literal demon, right? And say like, and then say, this is what everyone is doing to us.

They are turning us into this being when they see us, when they talk to us, when they tell us that Israel is doing crimes, this is the image that they're, this is the person that they're talking to. It's a way of almost delegitimizing someone's criticism by saying, well, no, in your mind, we are, you know, you are seeing someone with horns and a big hooked nose and a tail and almost like laughing at the idea. I just see it as de-legitimization of criticism. It's a way of like, you're trying to mock someone. Now, in the case of Candace Owens, she might actually believe some really anti-Semitic things. But this is, you know, this kind of caricature of anyone who speaks out against Israel as being an anti-Semite.

It's almost like a way of trying to own them, painting them as being insane. Well, there's a certain degree of painting others as being insane by doing the most insane act you can think of and it breaks everyone's brain. It's trying to do in some ways what gangster rappers were doing in the early 90s, like being like, oh, you're so scared of us, you made us this way, and now you're going to judge us for it. You know, a group like NWA was trolling the country in a sense, but also rebuking the country. Right.

And both celebrating and lamenting the stereotypes that they've been forced to live inside. But for me, like, now when you've got fucking. Warpigs like Schmooley and people pulling this same kind of maneuver. Yeah. Like, hi, I know what you think of me. It's the ultimate power trip is the point. It's the, it's an, it's an idea, I dare you. It is an idea.

The reason why, like, I mean, there are various sort of theories around what made the Holocaust different, right? And like, you know, when people are rationalizing why it deserves to be seen in a category of its own. And it's not the number of people because indigenous people in the Americas, like get that one, right? And it's certainly not the duration of it

because it was relatively quick. And one of the things that you hear is this assimilation, right? They were so assimilated, right? And that is quite unique. That is. But that is, I think, what we're talking about in a way, right? Like when I say, like, there's a humiliation, in thinking you were in the club and then getting kicked out of the club.

Yes. And so how do you metabolize that humiliation? Because humiliation is a very dangerous thing, right? Especially humiliated men are very, very dangerous. And there's a parallel with Hindu nationalism in India, you know, as many people pointed out, right? There's a humiliation of colonialism, particularly for men, you know, who are sort of demoted, right? in the sort of the hierarchy of the family. And I think that there's a ferocity that comes back to prove, you know, that you are in charge.

And, you know, I don't think you can understand Israeli society without sort of contending with injured masculinity as a driving force. Yes, certainly. I mean, you look at the model of the new Jew and you can't help but seeing it only existing in opposition to, the weak diasporic Jew and you can you can only see it as like we will no longer be humiliated by you know uh having allergies and uh and and and reading books about us having sex with livers and eczema and sunburns and of course what was october 7th but a huge humiliation yes that and and that's why you know it that's why it became this fount of morbid fantasy I mean, they had to invent more and more outlandish atrocities.

It's not enough to say we got shocked and hurt and killed and scared on that day. Our bubble got burst and we looked weak. Which is what Nestrallah said, and they'll never forgive him for that. No, no, absolutely. They were revealed, right? That's exactly right. Yeah. That's exactly right.

Well, we need to take a quick commercial break. But Naomi, you'll be able to stick around. Speaking of humiliation. Speaking of humiliations. We need to let people sell you things. Yeah. We don't know what they are. If they're bad, don't do it.

But stick around, everyone. We will be right back. And we're back. I got my orange shirt. on shirt day as Naomi said back in Canada oh look at that this my every child matters every child matters very cool yeah one day the United States will have one too man this is like I'm doing a podcast with two Canadians here and I feel like as bad as Canada is on a lot of stuff you guys have so much you guys are so much better than us it's it sucks I know but literally you guys you guys got a health care

and everything. We do land acknowledgements at the beginning of every first date. I mean, everything, we're so sensitive. When I fly home to Vancouver, I walk through the international terminal and I walk through all the beautiful native art, like there's incredible, they've really commissioned. But I, but I, but a certain, the cynical part of me calls it as I walk through it. I'm like, oh, here's our, we have a great and healthy relationship with our indigenous peoples and the past welcome lounge you know like it's it is yeah yeah nothing this nothing to see here

uh terminal listen i think i would i would take uh just a fraction of that in america i think would be a little bit nice even even if it's uh you know um coming from that liberal uh i just want you to like me yeah at least you'd have some virtue to signal exactly exactly i would love it if, you know, can I ask every time you enter Canada, do they say welcome to Canada, sorry? Do they say sorry right to your face? You're better than that, Matt. I'm sorry. Sorry, Joe.

I'm not better than that. This has always been me. I've always been lame. So moving on, I want to talk about something else you mentioned in doppelganger that always stuck with me was the idea of retramatization and the cycle of retramatization that and almost it's indistinct or distinct from the idea of remembering, the idea of learning from the past, the idea of an education in atrocity to not repeat it. But instead it being this sort of, yeah, a way to keep people in a feeling of fight or flight and a feeling of always feeling impending danger.

You know, the retramatization, I think it's really, it's helpful to understand the difference between remembering and retramatization, which I think if you just have these educations, you just think, you think this is, it's called Memorial Day, it's called commemoration, bearing witness. they don't say we're taking we're here to traumatize you right we're here to honor or whatever it is right i think the main thing that we it keeps coming back to is it's like it's being instrumentalized right it the the the holocaust is a is a plot point in a larger story that is that has this happy ending it has a redemption right and the redemption is the state of israel and that's always the way these museums are structured right like you know whether it's the odd Bashem or the Holocaust Museum in Washington or like, you know, smaller, smaller versions of this. Or birthright?

Yeah, and absolutely birthright. Wrap you in the Israeli flag, right? Trauma tears streaming down these young faces after going Auschwitz Museum and then don't worry, let's listen to Hatikpa, right? So you want to get people to the most heightened state possible. I sort of took this for granted, I guess. I remember being a, I went to Jewish Day School for elementary school and they took us to like a community center.

and there was like a pile of shoes, you know, and it was absolutely horrifying. And, you know, we also had survivors who were teachers at our school, right? So, like, survivors were a big part of our education. We were afraid of the survivors, frankly. Like, they were the, they were the disciplinarians. They were the people who would, like, hit you. Yeah. They're like, hey, take this seriously. Yeah. But we also didn't ask them any questions. Like, there was so much silence around the Holocaust growing up. It was just, like, Like we would whisper like, survivor. Like, you know, we had this one substitute teacher named Mrs. Diane.

And we would whisper to each other, survivor, survivor, you know, because she would slam the desks on our fingers, you know. And it was just generally like understood. Mrs. Diane's not okay, you know. And it wasn't like we were curious to hear her stories, you know. But they would, but that was sort of separate. Like there were like actual survivors who we were afraid of. And then there was like the education, which was making us afraid of what could happen to

us, right? But because I'm older than both of you, like I was, I remember the moment where it really flipped into the immersive stuff. And, you know, actually birthright was born in Montreal, which is where I grew up at the Bronfman's. And I remember, I think I heard a talk or something from Charles Bronfman where he was, they were afraid. It was very clearly articulated. The survivors are dying. This generation, they're intermarrying, they're, you know, they're not connected to Israel, we need to find a way to make them afraid, you know? Like, we need to. And so the goal of our, of these, this new way that came in the 80s of like, walk in cattle cars and like, you know, this like really like, like creating like a bodily experience. I use the phrase retramatization

quoting my friend, Cecily Saraski, who's one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Peace. But actually, I've been talking to scholars more recently who say, you know, it's not really re-traumatization in the sense that it's not your trauma it's somebody else's trauma it's trauma appropriation that's right it's actually you know there's a phrase um that i came across around 9-11 memorials which was prosthetic memory and prosthetic trauma you're taking someone out and so all of these sort of installations and re-experiences it's to implant a trauma that was not there right And we have a whole industry. Why do we have a whole industry?

You know, if you think about other groups with a lot of trauma in their history, I mean, we've been talking about Orange Shirt Day. And, you know, there's a whole curriculum around residential schools. And there's trainings for how to talk to survivors. It's all about avoiding retramatization, you know, touching the trauma as lightly as possible. I mean, you know all this, Daniel. But what's so strange is, like, we gave the world. psychotherapy. We're supposed to be self-aware. Like, why did we never worry about this? Like,

why is none of the understanding around how you inscribe, like, think about like, you know, this is America video, like the Childish Gambino video. Do you remember the debates about what he did in that video around showing black people being gunned down and, you know, re-inscribing the Charleston mask? I remember so many black scholars. Christina Sharp going like, what is going on? Why am I suddenly seeing on my screen black people being murdered? Like, what, why is this okay? Right?

And there's so much of a discussion around, you know, what is ethical around showing black death, right? And that's pop music. Like pop music is an arena where you push, you show extreme things. We're not, Donald Glover was not asked to like curate a museum curriculum for children. He's an artist trying to shock. Museum in Alabama about lynching. It's very careful around it, sort of more elliptical. That's right.

You know, it's not that there's no violence that's shown, but there's a huge literature about how to sort of gesture towards it or like how to, you know, how to give people space to think, you know, hold onto their sense of agency and self, right? Have a sort of a culture of healing. Why was this not part of any of the Holocaust education? I have a possible answer for that, you know. So I'm not myself a trauma expert, but I wrote a book with a guy who is, whom, you know, and Naomi, you know, full disclosure, Naomi and I are family friends.

So there's a lot of our families go back a long way. Well, I just full disclosure, Naomi's done my wife's podcast. So technically we're also family friends. I just wanted to, I didn't want to. Following all the drama between you and her. That's, there's the Canadian right there, drama. not sorry they say welcome to Canada sorry for the drama so what we write about in the myth of normal is that trauma is not what happens to you it's what happens inside of you as a

result of what happens to you it's about an inner constriction an inner fracturing an alienation from self it leaves you diminished or compromised or stuck or separated so that your wholeness is not experienced by you and you can't fully access all parts of you. So a traumatized person can't feel their feelings or can't feel all their feelings. They can't express all parts of themselves. They don't know what's going on in their body.

They can't say no. Things that were born with, right? Talk about birth rights that capacity to fully feel and healing is the movement towards wholeness. So when things happen, shocks to the system, healing naturally wants to happen. Nature knows how to heal. A tree falls over, you know, lightning hits it, another tree grows.

Nature is always healing itself, right? But it's a heal for human beings because we have minds and identities and psyches and egos, we have to participate in the healing process and the mind can get in the way and especially the collective psyche can get in the way. So you ask, why don't we have this awareness about it? Because the intention to heal isn't part of it. No. Now the intention, the intention.

In fact, there's a fear of healing. The fear of healing. Because if we healed, what then? Well, then we might have to be responsible for what we do with it. And we lose our exceptional state. We'd lose our state in both sense of the word. You know, we'd lose our license to act out our trauma in ways that keep us in a sense of semi-security.

We'd have to have the more vulnerable kind of security of, wow, that happened. I mean, do indigenous people? who go to a museum to learn about their trauma get to come out into the world and have a happy ending and be like, okay, well, but now we get to be safe because such and such. Do black people have some kind of big triumph? No, only in culture, only in, you know, only in the creative arts, which is not a, it's not a small thing, it's great. But Jews, because of the Zionist doppelganger that said, we're going to be the vindication, you don't ever have to feel that way again. And if you're saying you never have to feel that again you will never heal because if you healed you'd have to

feel it and if you never want to feel it you better never heal it's interesting because you know I think a lot of people had no idea people who aren't Jewish had no idea um the we are yes a hundred percent though I think post October 7th a lot of people that I was talking to um who knew me as like a safe person to talk to about this stuff because they were being chewed out by their Jewish friends or like a Jewish friend for posting something in support of Gaza or in support of Palestine. People were taken aback by the fervent, like the fervent way in which people would yell at them about something. Like I had a friend of mine who is an actress and comedian out here in L.A., a black woman who said, I have never.

been talked to by white people like this before in my life. And was so taken aback by it that she started questioning herself and going, wait, am I, am I wrong? Is there a justified reason to do what is they're doing to the Palestinian people? And I think a lot of people have been deeply shocked by how activated people became because we have been, you know, reliving these traumas that, you know, I've been, you know, I mean, you use the word activated. I've been thinking about, like, what is the, like, I've been looking for a sort of a metaphor to, to describe what you're describing, right? Like, these people, we talk about doppelgangers, right? Like, these people who were just like seen like normal nice people like you know showing up uh being good allies and like

all of the time are like you know and and like if you're not pro genocide right and and also just kind of like claiming a status as an oppressed person that they don't you know merit and so on and we saw a lot of real really wild examples of that in Hollywood oh yeah it's deep immaturity is this phrase activated. It's almost like a science fiction like Manchurian candidate type thing, right? Where it's like this this thing that called itself education, which was which was prosthetic drama or retramatization, it's like been dormant in in us, right? And then what happened was October 7th happened. It was immediately narrated as pogrom, Holocaust, you know, they're coming for you you thought you like never since the holocaust every it was completely misrepresented like

dan you're talking about severed identity talk about severings right i mean the holocaust first of all is severed from everything else in history right and then it's like transposed to another geography another century and other people like and that people's reaction is severed from their from their from lived from lived experience the actions on october 7th are severed from the territory where those people woke up that morning and what it took for them. Yeah, yeah. And if we understood colonial history, we would know that this is something that happens in colonial history, right?

That people get strangled by colonialism and occupation and there are rebellions, and sometimes the civilians include war crimes. Right. Sometimes the colonize will strangle back. And this was, you know, this was like I, you know, I wrote a piece that a lot of people didn't like after October 7th, which was critical of people who I thought were responding in a way that was overly celebratory. And I was not talking about Palestinians. I was talking about just like random leftists and not just random, some of them with very large platform.

But I mean, part of the reason why I was sensitive to that is because I understand how it re-inscribes these traumatic narratives. Like that is such a gift to Israel, in my opinion, right? Because it helps this story. I mean, why did Israel so like have like a whole, arm of its government, just talking about how leftists had abandoned you, you know. Right. Because, because they want their people to feel that they are abandoned once again, everywhere. The world is against you once again, right? Oh, and how much they love that many of the people killed on the keyboard scene were leftists. Oh, it's their favorite part. Their favorite part is pointing out that leftists, you know, were the first people who were killed. So, you know,

which is it just allows them to you know do their fanfic about what would happen to me and my family you know they they they like the idea and god and god bless the families of the the the the the the victims who didn't give up their yeah shout out to the former guest uh noy catsman no catsman mausinon you know these these people who understand that the the the the the people who actually threw their relatives on the sacrificial fire, the Holocaust fire of this occupation, were not the people who pulled the triggers or, you know, held the weapons. But I think it's important, like, to, you know, if you have responsible leadership in your community, when people are frightened, you know, like what you do is you sort of, like a trigger reaction, right,

is it's like a PTSD reaction is like you hear a truck back firing and you think, you're back in Fallujah, right? Like that's a classic trigger, right? You're not there. So you need someone to say, you're not there, right? That's actually what needed to happen after October 7. You're not back there, you know? And, you know, if there were any cooler heads that could have prevailed, that's what

would have said. That's what they would have said. And instead, it was, you're there, you're back there. You're 100% back there. And the only thing keeping you from, you know, annihilation is. Is yelling at your closest. yelling at your closest black friend about how they're more racist than you are.

And then rationalize it is to try to get inside the head because like you know we have to try to understand this don't we? I mean the fact that when I saw people posting would you hide me? I was like

we are a deeply unsurious people at this point. Like we are a deep we are we are the chosen people and we've been chosen as a psychological experiment to like show the world this is how you don't heal from trauma. And this is what happens when you don't heal from trauma.

Yes. And I think that's why I related so much to your book, Naomi, was because of the fact that I found, like this podcast essentially is us yelling about our doppelganger and trying to get people to be like, understand. No, we're not, that's not us. Please, please, please don't. think that's us. I know they keep saying that they are us, but it is a, it is a different

thing. It is, it's watching people, you know, be activated. I mean, it's, it's hard to talk about, you know, finding the right word for it, because you want to do it without the, um, the anti-Semitic, uh, overtones, uh, with it. But I wish it was as simple as it's not us. You know, I don't know if I've ever said this on this podcast. Right. It, it, it, it, it somehow slips mind to mind every time to mention, but I feel I should actually mention it. I think it's not irrelevant. I have a great uncle who died in the Israeli Air Force or the Haganah Air Force in 1948. Right. He flew planes in that war. He probably bombed Arab villages. My maternal grandfather's youngest son, youngest son, sorry, youngest brother, Ralph Moster. I never knew him, obviously. Died

long before me. But that's in my family. And I don't walk around. I don't walk around thinking of myself as if that's part of my lineage. And it's crazy that I've completely compartmentalized that. And I grew up going to a Zionist summer camp. And I marched around every Friday night singing the Shira Palmaq, the song of the fucking Palmaq terrorist organization.

Now, who sent me there? My anti-Zionist father, who used to be a lifeguard there. Why did you send me there? Because it was the best summer camp experience in town. And a lot of cool people went there and there were some Zionist questioning people, fundamentally it was a Zionist space. I've talked about that a lot on the podcast, but we all have

people in our families who have moved there. We are, like, this is the, and I think this is probably what makes the doppelganger concept interesting. It's not just like, oh, you're mistaken. That's not me. Sorry, you've got the wrong. In fact, we are intimately connected with it. Yes. And all of us during, during this time are like in this wrenching process of inner extrication of like, well, what parts of me, what strands of me are still tied to that? Can I cleanly divorce myself from it? Or is it, are the Zionists right? Then in a sense, they are doing things in my name, whether I like it or not.

Right. It's very disturbing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing about doppelgangers is they are ultimately holding up a mirror to us, to dare to sort of see the parts of ourselves that we, that we, that we, that we, that we, you know, that we have trouble admitting are there. And yeah, within doppelganger literature,

if you, if you think it's just them and you go and try to kill them, you will end up dead on the floor. That's right. The plot line of almost every doppelganger, you know, back to Dostoevsky. But yeah, you have to be careful when confronting your doppelganger because you're in there somewhere. And that doesn't mean that you're going to, it has to be forever. You know, I think that this is the work is sort of a deprogramming, right? I think that's what you're, trying to do. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a combination of the deprogramming, not just for, you know, we're fighting a war on two fronts. One is the deprogramming of, you know, those Zionists close to me are people coming out of Zionism trying to, you know, get them to understand the amount of

propaganda that they've been exposed to and has created a Manchurian candidate-esque type of activation, which they are just like, we must support Netanyahu, who one week ago, I said, was a war criminal. But he's our war criminal. Right, exactly. And also the other front is fighting against the way that Israel and Zionism is characterized Jews of the world, which is being in lockstep together, fighting Hamas, and that we are all together supporters of the, you know, government of Israel. And so it's, yeah, you know, it's. I mean, and I mean, the other piece of this that we haven't talked about is just, you know, in the book, I quote, um, a scholar in the UK named Carolyn Rooney, a Middle East scholar, um, who talks about Israel as having doppelganger politics,

by which she means two things. One, that, that Israel creates a doppelganger of the European nationalisms that had oppressed Jews for centuries in the form of, you know, we've talked about the new Jew, but the whole state, right, is kind of a doppelganger of the nationalist project that was always the enemy of the stateless Jew, right? Like, we've got our state now. And the other form of doppelganger politics is projecting everything that you cannot bear to see about yourself onto the Palestinian other. And that's like, you know, every, every accusation is a confession, right? like that there's this weird mirroring that happened. Yeah.

You know, it's funny. You just brought up something. We have a state now. So what are you doing being stateless? The amount that that mirrors the sort of evangelical or just the Christian language of Jews, we have our Messiah now. What are you doing still being Jews? It's almost like it's just, it comes from the same place of this anti-Semitism where

It's the imperfect Jew who has the opportunity to not die is allowing themselves to die. And I just find that an interesting parallel because, you know, there is that resentment of Jews in the diaspora that a lot of Israelis have is, you know, like, what are you doing, not living in the Jewish state? By not living in the Jewish state, you are putting yourself in danger and you're putting all of us in danger. You are abandoning your God and you're abandoning your people. And it's the same kind of, you know, I mean, it's a similar resentment you see, you know, throughout Christendom with regards to Jews as being these like stubborn people who turn their back on the Messiah Christ. So it's almost as if the Messiah in Zionism is the state. But, you know, Palestinians become the doppelganger of the Nazi, right? And this is what we're seeing.

I think that, you know, one of the things that I've, you know, it's become clear to me that this, I just did this deep dive into October 7 memory culture, right? And I put that in quotes because there's something kind of extraordinary that's happened in this past year where it usually takes a couple decades for an event to be sort of metabolized into culture, right? I know. December 11th is an exception to that. I was immediately kind of turned into gallery art and turned into disaster films.

But I don't think we've ever seen anything on the scale of the sort of October 7th recreation. No, it's more like a laboratory culture where you put organisms in a broth and you let them grow and whatever. Oh, culture. Yeah, you know, like the Nova Festival retramatization or prosthetic drama exhibit is an opportunity for you, the viewer, to go in and create, your own, it's total recall. You get to go in as if you were there. And I remember when the festival, I'm dancing, I'm camping, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Whoa, it's, it's, it's so intense. We've invented so many things, guys. And there's VR, you know, there's VR goggles, to the houses. Did you go, Naomi? One of our previous guests did. No, oh, because I think you saw had Maya Rosen on. That was such a great.

We had brace. Brace Belden from Trunon gave his report from the Nova Festival exhibit, yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Maya Rosen wrote an incredible piece in Jewish currents about so-called dark tourism. Yeah. But, you know, there's the tours of the site of the Nova Festival and the kibbutz. In Israel, yes. In Israel.

But then you can also have a VR experience of it where you have goggles and you've guided tour. It's kind of like... The fact that this kind of stuff is. is normalized is insane. I mean, we were talking earlier. It's riding on the backs of a lot of this Holocaust. Yes. Immersive education. They use the word immersive all the time. Like you're going to have an immersive experience, right? And, and so I think that this, this absolute conflation of Palestinians and Nazis, October 7th Holocaust. Yes. It's a kind of, I mean, what's happening is, the moment that we're in is, I mean, the foundational crime of the state of Israel is the

Nakhba, the ongoing Nakhba, that's what can't be looked at, that your happy ending is absolutely entangled with another people's ethnic cleansing, dispossession, exile. It's impossible to look at that. So that is the ultimate dismembering. It's dismembering Israel from history, geography, you know, imposing this kind of other story onto that land. And that is, and so if you can, after the fact, finally prove Palestinians are Nazis, that's what's going on with all of this October 7th conflation, right? Because there's always been this discourse, oh, you know, the Mufti of Jerusalem and all that, but it's never been like this, where you now have this whole cultural apparatus that is specifically designed to blur the lines between October 7th and the Holocaust. I mean, the Shoah Foundation now has added a chapter where after you listen to, the testimonials of Holocaust survivors.

You listen to testimonies from survivors of October 7th, okay? So this is collapsing, space and time. You know, the same thing is happening with March of the Living. Now they're hearing from people who survived October 7th. You know, everything is being collapsed, and it's being collapsed for a reason because this then allows people to really nail this. false claim, this false equation of Palestinians with Nazis. And if that's true, then as to quote Jared Kushner, finish the job. Okay. And so like we're on a knife edge. We have to understand

the psychology at work and how dangerous these stories are. Because it's not ending, right? It's not ending at all. No. Because the ultimate fantasy for Jews, I think, and this is, I don't know, This is maybe getting deeply psychosexual on some level. And Israel is a very psychosexual entity. But to get to play both sides in the Holocaust role play is that we get to be the forever recipients and victims. And at the same time, we get to be the perpetrators. And so in real life, we get to be the perpetrators.

And then we dress the Palestinians up as the perpetrators and say, you're looking, they're doing it to us. where the victims i uh yeah it's sickening yeah we spend our whole lives trying to understand it or we could try to we could stop it i would i would rather have no holocaust education at all than to have a holocaust education that's doing what you just said yeah i would rather just say we're never going to talk about it again than to talk like and my great grandparents died in auschwitz it's honestly it would honor their memories more yeah it's a terrible it would honor violence to their memories.

It would honor their memories more to say we don't speak about it than to say we're going to get addicted to the rush of fake aliveness we get from identifying as the people to whom this will never stop happening. And thus, whatever we do to others either isn't happening. And when it is happening, wink, wink, wink. Let's celebrate on national television like you see on Israel, you know, Israel's Channel 12 and 14. when they go blow up pagers and whatever i mean yeah where you just see abject cruelty and the celebration of you know children being killed and and it all leads back to this you know uh annoying

topic of uh of antisemitism that i i find myself you know uh inextricably linked to because i i I have to try to explain that the nation that talks about being the number one, you know, defensive organism against anti-Semitism is the one exporting the most anti-Semitism in my lifetime. And trying to, you know, you talk about in the book the way in which right wing, the right-wing kind of co-ops left-wing language, right? or even left-wing causes that have been dropped by like liberal democratic establishment. It's almost like with regards to Israel because, you know, they are saying we are against anti-Semitism the loudest and, you know, first almost for most people, that it's hard to convince other people, no, no, guys, this is an anti-Semitic project.

This is a project that puts every single person on this podcast in danger. right now uh the you know zionism prays on us zionism is uh is not protecting us from anything and so it's uh you know it's it's it's tough to uh to do that when you see so many people who at this point are are going i don't even believe you know if someone says anti-semitism i just tune it out, which is a dangerous thing. Like that makes me uncomfortable. And it's one of those things where I understand it. I understand the phrase being watered down. You know, people saying anti-Semitism for anything that's a criticism of Israel makes people believe that, oh, you're just doing propaganda. But anti-Semitism does exist. And Israel is its, it's the number one exporter of it.

And so I, you know, I live with the fear of where this is, you know, all going. And I, that's me centering obviously myself and not, you know, the current present victims of Israel's genocide, which I also feel shame about. So, you know, it's a nice little psychological soup that I live in at all times. Right. And that's the other piece of it is that while we're having this inside Jewish baseball conversation, which is very important and very relevant to people outside of being. Jewish. Yeah. There's a whole cosmos of grief and shock and rage and fear

and terror as every day more and more bombs rain down with impunity and impunity in an entire region is is taunted and beckoned and goaded into a conflagration that no one except this fucking lunatic state actually wants

and how are they supposed to feel? And at what point are they, at one point would we blame them for saying you know what i don't give a fuck i know actually about your concerns about future anti-semitism future anti-semitism or how how the jews look right now yeah or how the how is is victimizing you like it's and i agree i can't blame people for for rolling their eyes or for saying you know um tough shit um but that's not or for or for only leaving us a four-star review right exactly Yeah, four-star review took away one star because they talk about anti-Semitism too much.

Yeah, so. There's a great quote. I wish I had it. It's my friend Molly Crab Apples writing this book about the Bund. It's finished. Well, it's in draft. I've read the draft. It's so fucking good.

Oh, good. It's just going to be so good for when it's out in the world. I can't wait for it to be out in the world. She has this great quote from a bundist, anti-Zionist. in the 40s where he said, you know, we're neither exceptional in our chosenness or in our victimhood. Love that. You know, and, yeah, there was an early essay that had a big impact on me, and I think we should try to keep in mind as we enter into the retramatization hyperdrive

of hitting the one-year mark. And by the way, it's worth people knowing that the families, and the kibbutz that were hit hardest are boycotting Netanyahu's ceremony so much so that they had to cancel the live audience because they were afraid of being disrupted, but they're going to put on a show and it'll be broadcast to the world.

No live audience. They had to cancel it. But there's a really great Australian anthropologist of Lebanese descent, Gassan Hajj, who wrote an essay in November talking about how hard it was to sort of comply with the demands for, you know, condemnation and so on. And it wasn't because he didn't condemn the actions, but he said that what was being demanded of him was a supremacist mourning, supremacist mourning.

And he said, unlike Palestinians who are murdered all the time, the murdered Israelis were special. They were superior dead people who needed to be revenged in a way that reminds everyone, but particularly the killers of how superior they were. And I still think that's one of the most powerful essays that's been written this year. And he's one of the people who got blacklisted in Germany. Wow. Great guy.

And yeah, that's what we're going to be seeing, some supremacist mourning, which doesn't mean, you know, I think people have a right to grieve, but that's different than what's going to be going on. and the message it's going to be sending to the world. Well, but I love that you said that because, you know, we talk about the intention of healing versus the intention of staying broken. Grief, I call it, and this is mine.

My dad didn't make this one out. This is my own. I call grief the great conveyor belt. It takes us from the land of how could this be? This shouldn't have been. It should have been some other way. And this is whether you're mourning a loved one who died or you're mourning the loss of a relationship or you know you're in one reality something happens that is a shock to your to the

worldview of permanence that we all you know labor inside of which the buddists know is the root of all suffering believing that anything is permanent but there are certain shocks in life that are more shocking than others and someone is gone and our system can't compute and grief is actually a physical nervous system process that takes us on this conveyor belt faster than it would if we had to just get used to it, to shake off that old paradigm and get used to a new one and feel all the things and let our nervous system process at all, right? So grief is actually supposed to be healing. Just like memory and memorialization and collective mourning is like what a museum, a good museum would do, is supposed to be healing, just like good education is supposed to be healing. So

if we were actually let ourselves feel the full grief about October 7th, that was, would be one thing, but that would also require that you wouldn't be able to put up an apartheid wall around that grief. You'd have to feel all the grief connected to it of cause and consequence, and you'd have to feel the grief that something, and you might, your system through its own innate, God-given intelligence might make some connections to other people's sufferings and to, you know, carmic dynamics that, that, that, you know, you know, you know, resulted in that day and the implications of that. And so what we're going to see on October 7th is not grief. It's not mourning. It's pageantry. It's a kind of emotional pornography. And pornography

only has, it's always driving towards the same money shot so that it can just re-op itself over and over again. And it's about getting that feeling, never getting through it, never getting to those and never reclaiming our fullness, our wholeness, our truth, our full selves, and thus we can never be fully in the world, we can never belong, which is the perfect condition for Zionism to keep festering because Zionism is a perpetual unbelonging machine. Well, I got caught up on all of the porn jokes I wasn't going to make. Make them. No, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it because, you know what?

Shoot your shot, Matt. That's a good sermon. That's a good sermon. I think that was great. This has been a great show. Daniel, I know you had the thing you wanted to read. Yeah. So I got an incredible text the other day, and I thought this would be a great place to end,

especially this came from since this came from a fellow Canadian Jew, Naomi. Someone, I do these mental chiropractic. walks with people. This is a side business of mine where I help people get unstuck through conversation while walking. And a fellow Canadian Jew wanted to walk with me to talk about her, um, I'm never learning that down. Her grief, her, her, her difficulty in her relationship with her father. Now, this is a person in a, I won't even name the city, but a mainstream Canadian Jewish community. Talmudora kind of tier. Canadian Jews, you know the type. And this person had had an awakening, an inconvenient,

unexpected, unasked for awakening since October 7th. Probably it was percolating for years, getting a sense of what this Israel thing really is and what it's doing to us. And when she took this walk with me, she was wondering, how do I keep having a relationship with my father while pretending to him that I still agree with him about Zionism? Because she had a strong sense, And he had almost intimated it, almost in as many words, that if he was to find out that one of his children was anti-Zionists, like some of these newfangled JVP protesters, he would disown them. He would no longer have any contact with the grandkids. I mean, it was that kind of breaking point.

Talk about severing. You're willing to give up your own kids? 100%. Yeah. And I took a walk with this person. This is in early January. And I basically said, you can keep up the charade as long as you feel you can. but don't think this is going to get any easier, you know?

And she took it under advisement, but she wasn't quite ready. Well, a few months later, the damn broke. And there's just been a series of conversations since then. I was just, she just can't keep it in anymore. And of course, his insecurities have been bubbling over and he feels the distance from her emotionally. Sure. And so he inquires. Anyway, so this is the latest.

I just got this today. Have we got that? Yeah. So this is the text. And I'm sharing this with her permission. She said, I've been wanting to give you a small update out of interest and as a window. There was a breaking point with my dad in June. Circumstances led to having a genuine conversation, but it only lasted a short while until he snapped.

He said horrible things and attempted to disown me. He told me to find a new dad and worse. This woman's in her mid-30s. Her father's probably in his 70s. We didn't talk for a week. my mom brokered a short but formal apology and since then we have an operating relationship including elements of love. I am thankful the coercive mind control conditions have been somewhat lifted, but obviously I struggle to find a way to have genuine love for him and with him every day.

His reaction was so profoundly telling in our only follow-up conversation to his apology text. He'd said my conclusions, quote, contradict his whole life, his life's work, his DNA. he's got power poison pain and joy inside his DNA right as Kendrick Lamar said he said that this is the worst thing they could imagine as parents I know you know this about the Zionist psyche it doesn't make it I think she means less not more scary to encounter the depths of it in real time yet I somehow don't want you to give up on trying to reason with them and I think she also means that for herself she doesn't want to give up on trying to reason with him I know they are truly deranged and so completely indoctrinated, yet my dad's reaction also has the hope of showing

how fragile his worldview is. Yes, because he constructs identity with one as one with Israel, his sense of reality is clearly no more stable than that belligerent state itself. I love that sentence. There has to be a breaking point of his own, or at least some of them. And then skipping down to a next paragraph, it's interesting the thing that broke him in the conversation. We were managing to stay in it respectfully for a while. And this is the doppelganger point here, Naomi, when we remained in the abstract. I even got him to admit the basic contradiction between democracy and a Jewish state. He was forced to call it a special kind of democracy, L.O.L. Democracy plus. Yeah. Theory was a bit safer. An exceptional democracy. We wouldn't

have it any other way. We're special people, a chosen democracy. What made him C. Red, as he called it, was when I dared suggest that the hostages were more afraid of the IDF than their captors. seems so simple and obvious, and yet it struck the heart that holds everything together. The audacity to suggest we are anything like the savages or the unthinkable that we could be worse, just one threat to the distinction between us and them and everything crumbled. The conversation collapsed. It's incredible to witness how desperately this entity clings to righteousness by making the line separating us from them impenetrable. Without that line, the entire illusion falls apart.

I guess it was interesting because of all the things we were able to respectfully discussed. It was mere humanity that shattered everything. Again, I know we understand this. It's basic dehumanization and surface of depopulation,

but it's still wild to watch it manifest in real time. Just one reference to equivalence. I mean, I know the fury was building, but it was still so basic and so mortal. And then just as a little epigraph, she sent me this as a PS. Also, months ago, I realized that somehow a copy of the shock doctor

and found its way onto the bookshelf in my dad's office. I always think of that book with a smile, knowing there's truth, a dissenter in the room with him at all times, hiding in plain sight. He didn't get to the last chapter. But he got most of the way there. Maybe he'll read Double Ganger

and just stop right at the third act of the book. Thanks for sharing that. And please thank your friend for sharing it with us. I will, yeah. Anything jump out of you from that? Honestly, nothing that's hopeful because I think that, you know, I've, I think I've, I have changed older generations' minds.

I'm not going to name any names. You know, I've had like lifetimes of conversations that eventually lead to a breakthrough. Um, not with my own parents, but, um, with other folks. And people can change, you know, but the thing that I'm worried about, I mean, I feel really grateful that's the people who I'm thinking of changed before this genocide. Because if you're, if you're part of the machinery of rationalizing it, right? It becomes you're so, you become so much more invested in the story. Yes. Now, now, now, now you said it was okay to bomb. hospitals. Now you're a doctor who said it was okay to bomb, you know, a neonatal ICU.

How are you going to live with that? And I'm scared of how much harder it's gotten because of that. And because, you know, because the people we need to be, you know, learning to tell a story that is not a story of severings, but is a story of connection with. are not going to want to talk to us in the same way, certainly not Israelis. And I feel all we can do is just put one foot in front of the other and try to work where we can and build community and, you know, build another way to be Jews, which I know we've all been doing. But it's not going to be a fast fix. No. Yeah. Well, what I acknowledged this person for was her stand in the matter, was that because really

it did look to her like it was like she was going to lose her father entirely. Yeah. And that she couldn't, not just that she was going to lose his love, but you can hear it. She's still struggling to love him, but she's struggling. She's wrestling, which is what Israel, that's what the name means, wrestling with God, right? Because Jacob, was it Jacob, who was it Isaac? was Jacob one of those biblical guys wrestled with God got renamed Israel

and she's wrestling with that question and she hasn't thrown him under the bus or throwing him off the cliff she's still he's still there she may not talk to him much she may but she's being real with him and she's standing her ground calmly and

openly but firmly and letting him be uncomfortable and you can see him he's just thrashing and writhing on the hook because it's so painful and he's but she's not causing him that pain it's the pain of the contradictions he's trying to rationalize and she's saying i will not perform filial loyalty to you she's being cordelia right now you know like i'm not going to perform family loyalty by pretending to you like it's the loving thing

to hold on to your illusions. Your illusions are dying and that's what's killing you. And I love you and I'm watching it happen. And I can't help you except to be available to you when you're ready. I just really admire that. I don't have anyone in my family who disagrees with me on this. So I don't have, I haven't people, so many people are like, oh, your family is so courageous for speaking out.

Kind of not, we're not. We're loud mouths and we're talented at being loudmouths and we're willing to use our voices, which takes a certain degree of courage. But there are Jews who have a lot to... And you have each other. And we have each other. You know, I mean, this is the thing is like this is why, you know,

I often as a sort of a movement elder, you know, like I'm often just in the position of just trying to tell people to be nicer to each other because I really do feel that, you know, people are, if somebody said to me, they described it as severing limb after limb of their family tree, you know? So like we, we like all like like for a lot of folks, all they have is this movement. So if the movement treats them like shit, it's really, really hard, you know. And it's very, very hard to organize in the middle of a genocide.

But like we we do have to try to hold each other. Yes. Yeah. It's a it was really a great letter. And it makes me feel like kind of a cow. Because I just I just blocked my cousins on Twitter. that's that that's how i've dealt with it as because you know you can only have so many uh text conversations uh in which they you know tell you that traders will be dealt with at the end of the war

before you're just like i'll just i'll just block this person it is uh it was really daniel that was that was amazing and uh i thank you for sharing that on the podcast uh and naomi i thank you for for coming on the podcast and talking to us. This is, you know, of all of the shows that I've seen you on, this is probably the silliest one that you've been on. So I appreciate you for coming on and talking to us. I think you guys are amazing. Really appreciate you. Well, I think you are amazing and I thank you. Where can the audience find your work? Well, this big piece about October 7th is coming out in the Guardian with any with with with with with any luck uh on Saturday and um and uh yeah where I don't know you still are you still on Twitter yeah you're

still on Twitter yeah I'll do a lot of stuff with many is that yes that's right you're at Zeteo me and mehiti have a monthly thing yeah so check that out we're going to be putting links in the show notes once again Naomi Klein. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks Naomi. Bye. And thanks to all of you out there who listen to this podcast and all

of you who subscribe on Patreon Patreon.com slash Bad Hasbara. Thanks for listening to the funny, silly, wacky, whimsical episodes. Thanks for tuning into the, you know, the slightly more sober, serious episodes where Matt and I

pretend to have depth. Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I'm pretending. I think deep down, underneath all the puns that you do, I think you might actually have depth, which is kind of intimidating because it's like, you know, I'm over here just kind of pretending to feel feelings. Yeah, I take irony pills to try and cover it up, but I think they're wearing off. I think I need to increase my dosage. Yeah. Let me be clear. I feel feelings. But I just, I don't know how to express them. You know, it's because, like, deep down, I'm a deeply stupid person, but very emotionally intelligent. I don't know what I'm doing.

I think, self-hating for no reason. No, we're sensitive guys, and it comes out in all kinds of different ways. But we appreciate all of you, no matter what attracts you to this cock and Mamie podcast. Yeah, even if it's a telegram group that told you to go on and give us one star. And hey, if you tuned in to get, if you're Israeli, look, come here, Habibi, if you, if you tuned in to leave us one star and you learned anything at all today, you enjoyed it at all, you laughed at one joke, you got a little slightly tumessent looking at one of our versions of Jewish facial hair. Yeah. Why don't you go leave us two stars? Yeah, yeah.

Or even three. Why don't you just go leave like a three and a half star just like just neutralize the algorithm for us? help bring in the new year by giving us how about three stars you know that's that's a way of you know repenting that's a way of doing some penance come on man be nice about it uh but if you're not one of those people from the telegram group once again go to spotify give us five stars all right bad is borrowed gmail.com and thanks everyone so much for listening until next time from the river to the sea don't do trauma prosthetically um jumping jacks was us push-ups was us godmaga us all karate us taking molly us michael jackson us

yamaha keyboards us jarja vinks on us and or was us heath ledger joker us endless friend success Meals was us, McDonald's was us, being happy us, Bikram yoga us, eating food, us, breathing air, us, drinking water us. We invented all that shit. Thank you. Thank you.