Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 111

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

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On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. A Muslim leader and former Black Power activist was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical, for free on theHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional Networks the book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise. I like the fact that people who say, I'm not as tough on musk as I should be, are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliffe, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, News Anchors Amy Robach and TJ Holmes explore everything from current events to pop culture in a way that's informative, entertaining and authentically groundbreaking. Join them as they share their voices for the first time since making their own headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool, so media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here,

and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Ike Adapten here, a podcast, how to world, sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host, Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel and the Gaza Strip reaches on, and the moral

authority of biting in his liberal cohort crumbles day by day, a new generation of right-wing media grifters have seized on Palestine as a way to boost their own reactionary brand. But these are not the standard kind of right-wing grifter that we've become accustomed to on the show. They aren't Chris Rufo, they aren't Libs of TikTok, and although they will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they aren't cut from that preexisting template. These are our monsters. These are monsters birthed by the left I grew up in, by the generation of new socialist radicalized

by Bernie Sanders, the Syrian Civil War, and the election of Donald Trump. This is largely going to be a setup episode to understand the background of the kinds of people who are going to come later. But I wanted to start the story with a taste of where it's going to end. Max Blumenthal is a left-wing journalist with the Outlet Grey Zone. He was, for a very long time,

well regarded in anti-imperialist circles. In many ways, he is the ideological predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left. In 2021, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's Chief Health official, went on face to nation to face allegations and calls by Senator Rand Paul and Ted Cruz for him to step down and quote, be prosecuted over the course of COVID-19. Yeah, after this interview happened, face the nation release a tweet about it. Blumonfall responded with an incredibly disturbing video. I'm going to read the tweet. I'm

not going to play the video because this guy listening to him is a painful experience. Blumonthal responded, quote, Nobel winning inventor of the PCR test, carry molis on Anthony, quote, I am the science Fauci, quote, and this is from molis. Tony Fauci does not mind going on camera in front of the people who pay a salary and lie directly into the camera. By the way, the the part where he says lie instead of lying there is a direct quote that is him, not me. This is lie, instead of lying there as a direct quote, that is him, not me. So to understand how absolutely absurd this is, we need to talk about who Kerry Burris actually is. So Max Blumenthal is correct that Kerry Mollis won the 1993 Nobel Prize for the invention

of the PCR test, which is now one of the basic building blocks of biology, like they let undergrad and college do this stuff. But he is also an enormous crank. Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote a profile of him when he died in 2019. They described him like this, quote, he'd become a vociferous critic of widely accepted scientific theories,

ridiculing the notion that CFCs caused the ozone hole, that humans caused climate change, and that HIV caused AIDS. Now, okay, climate change denialism, I think, is something we all understand. The ozone layer stuff is extremely funny, this interview is from the 90s. So in the 90s, we're using these things called CFCs, which is a class of chemical that we used in like hairspray and refrigerators. And using them tore a hole in the ozone layer. So the world for maybe the last time actually performed a collective action, stopped using them and the hole fixed itself. So, okay, obviously, carry molest, unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong.

But the last part, the part where carry molest claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, we need to talk about it a bit more because it is absolutely monstrous and it is going to give molest a body cow even Kissinger would not in respect to. So okay, we need to talk about what HIV AIDS actually is. So, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go to the CDC for this one. HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is a virus that attacks the body's immune system.

If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. There is no effective cure. Once people get HIV, they have it for life. But with problem medical care, HIV can be controlled. People with HIV who get effective HIV treatment can live long, healthy lives, and protect their partners. And this is something that queer people fought and died for. If you have HIV, there are simple and easy tests for it now, you can get treatment and you can live a normal life. On the other hand, if the HIV isn't treated, you can get acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, AIDS, and that can and will kill you.

It is what killed so so many almost an entire generation of queer people. It killed them for decades and decades and decades and it's still killing them now. Keri Mollis, the guy who makes Blue Mythol's tweeting a video of to go after Anthony Fauci, doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is caused by malnutrition and poverty. And he is going to spend the rest of his life telling anyone and everyone he can, getting mainstream press coverage, telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He is the Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS denialism. Lots of people believe him, including, for

example, the food fighters Dave Grohl. They believe him because he is apparently a reputable source. The man has a Nobel Prize. But unfortunately, as we've already seen from his climate denial and his CFC denial, he is spreading unbelievably dangerous lies. And this specific lie that HIV doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people. Here's from that Berkeley article again. I don't like the way they're phrasing it. It's the, you know, it's Berkeley, right? Like some stuff's going to, some stuff's going to be racist.

His views on AIDS don't just look bad. They may have had deadly consequences. By the late 1990s, South Africa was in the midst of a catastrophic AIDS epidemic. President Thumbna Beke, under the spell of AIDS denialist, including Mollis, declared that AIDS was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many South Africans were denied access to treatment. A 2008 study published the Journal of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome estimated that as a result, 35,000 babies were born with HIV and 330,000 South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily. This is monstrous. And here is Max Blumenthal, who was up until very recently, at the very least nominally

a left-wing journalist, tweeting a video of this fucking guy to attack Anthony Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right-wing anti-lockdown ghouls. Now I especially want to do this because if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it is very, very easy to do from the left. You can attack him for his response to the original HIV AIDS pandemic. And you know, lots of queer people have done this. Instead, Max Blumethal is tweeting a guy is tweeting a video from an unbelievable right wing crank who was responsible for the deaths of 330,000 people. So the question we're going to be answering

for the next three episodes is, how did we get here? And what is happening now? And to do this, we need to talk about the rise of American Marxist-Leninism. I'm going to try to present the ideology as sympathetically as possible, because it's important to understand

how people came to believe in these things. Because part of the horror and tragedy here is that not all of these people are the grifters and chills and right wing fanatics that the ideology spawned and who we're now having to deal with, people who are on info wars agreeing with Alex Jones. Most of them were people like us, people who saw the horrors of this world and wanted to make it better. A lot of the writing about this is clinical and antiseptic, largely coming from either academic journals or very, very angry liberals. And I can't be clinical about this, I can't cover this neutrally. And I can't do that because some of these people were my friends They were people I loved and respected and cared about their people who I've now lost

So I owe it to them to be fair about this So what is the modern generation of Marxist-Leninism? You could start with the history of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's consolidation of power and the development of Varsus Leninism as an ideology and you could trace it to the 20th century and you could trace the ways in which it isn't the ideology that led in it had originally been developing. But that really is the wrong place to start here. If you want to understand how this ideology came to be and why so many people came to follow it, the right place to start is America. It's with a generation of young people who grew up in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse

and the ruthless suppression of Occupy by the Obama administration. It's a generation of people who grew up on the internet who began to learn about the lies we've been fed our entire lives about the world and America's role in it. They learned the lies we've been told about the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about A Yende and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about American imperialism and Lebanon and Haiti and Guatemala and Honduras and Iran, about Patrice Lemumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharto in the killing fields, about Thomas Sunkara, about Che Guevara, about the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a thousand crimes of the American

Empire. Crime as we could spend an entire episode just listing by name. They learned in a tremendously short amount of time that the American Empire was born of genocide, was built by slavery and a sustained by replicating those genocides across the world and at home. At the government, they were taught from birth to love and respect slaughtered children in the streets with hellfire missiles and then had the unmitigated gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders of the free world and the upholder of the rules-based international order. And so, they started learning about how our capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx, and then they started reading angles, and it led to other Marxists,

and to the great international enemies of American imperialism from the last century. Ho Chi Minh, the Castro, to Lenin, to the struggles against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals, like Phanon, and militants like Assad-Ishakir, it led them to believe, to really believe in the struggling as capitalism, racism and imperialism. And that led them to stowling in Mao. And eventually, it would lead them down a darker path. A path where anything and everything could be justified. If it meant defeating the American

Empire, a path that told them it was the duty to back every state in the world who could even conceivably check the advance of American power. It led them to modern geopolitics, to the belief that modern China and Vietnam were socialist states still resisting American imperialism, we would lead them eventually to backing the very Russian oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. And it would lead some of them into the very heart of darkness itself, true in alliance with anyone and everyone who opposed liberal interventionism. It would lead them to seeking alliance with the arch-right-wing anti-communist Donald

Trump. But it didn't start that way. The co-option of the ideology is a process that took almost a decade, and comprised a series of debates inside the left about what capitalism, socialism, and imperialism really are, and how the left should relate to nationalism in the state. We'll talk more about how these debates led to a right-wing turn in episode 3. But the core beliefs, anti-imperialism, objection to capitalism, a rejection of liberal interventionism, and some of the darker and more conspiratorial

tendencies like accusing any protest movement against the government they supported of being CIA assets spread like wildfire. The Recontradiction is from the beginning, of course. How do you square your opposition to capitalism with your support for China, a country with almost 1,000 billionaires? The solution was to lie. Lies about China, in particular, are bounded. Many Marxists let it as believe for reasons that are deeply unclear to me,

that China has public housing, that it automatically guarantees every citizen a home. This is not true, this unclear to to me if it's ever been true, even through this. I guess you could argue it was sort of true during the socialist period. It has not been true for a very, very long time. China has a lot of homeless people,

but these sort of lies persist because they are what you need to believe in order to believe that China is a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common line is that China is a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common line is that China has a fully socialized healthcare system. This is unbelievably not true. China, in fact, used to have something like a universal

medical system that they operated an extreme difficulty with groups of people called the barefoot doctors who would go to rural villages that had never really received proper medical care before to attempt to treat them. This was a thing that China used to have, and then they tore it up and privatized it. And now, Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster. Coculations by the Chinese journal,

Chuang, estimate that almost the entire Chinese economy is based on corporations not paying their required contributions to healthcare plans and that if corporations actually paid into the healthcare plans of migrant workers, the entire economy of entire provinces would immediately go under as an enormous majority of the corporations immediately went underwater. And so what we're getting a sort of picture of is people begin to believe things That need to be true in order for their ant to square their anti imperialism or their version of anti imperialism

Which is posing at all costs the United States with the ranche capitalism When the two began to conflict in terms of you know attempting to support a very obviously capitalist economy and this leads to some very very bizarre twist in turns one very common thing is for socialist socialist organizations in the US or at least I say socialist I made Marxist loneliness organizations to advocate for a 15 or 20 dollar minimum wage in China will simultaneously celebrate $0.32 an hour as the end of poverty in China. This has never actually penetrated the minds of the New Marxist-Leninists, with their endless parades of flags and new countries added every day from the genocidal austerity mongers

in Ethiopia to the hard-line murderous anti-communist to rule Myanmar by baton and bullet. New Marxist-Leninists were able to effectively insulate themselves from reality. This left them as prey for a new generation of right-wing grifters who would cynically exploit them for wealth and status. They also garnered the hatred of the more internationalist factions of the left. And then, as their numbers expanded, the increasing eye of liberals, who, stealing a term from anarchists, began to call the Marxist-Leninist tankies. This, I suspect, if you have heard of these people,

is probably the word you've heard used to describe them. So we should talk about what this word actually means. But first, unfortunately, some ads. And we're back. To explain what a tanky is, we have to go back to bizarrely the 1956 Hungarian revolution. So, alright, in 1956, there was a massive uprising in Hungary. The Hungarians effectively forced their government to break with the Soviets. The Soviets respond to this by rolling a bunch of tanks across the border, claiming everyone in the revolution is the fascists and killing them all. And they were fairly successfully able to convince a large number of communists that the Hungarian

revolutions really were fascists. They were aided in this by the fact that the Liberals also lied about what the Hungarian revolution really was. And this is a lie that the liberals also lied about what the Hungarian Revolution really was. And this is a lie that they continue to spread to this day. The liberal version of the revolution, it was a liberal revolution by people who wanted liberal democracy against like Soviet totalitarianism, etc., etc., etc. And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising and what most of it was was a rebellion by the hunkarian workers councils.

So workers across their factories, seize control of their factories through their bosses out and begin to manage them democratically. The different workers councils like foreign regional federations it is. It is very stunningly, very, very similar to the original Soviets of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which in theory, the USSR is supposed to be named after. But when they reappeared again, the Soviets just absolutely smashed them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned one party state. And what this actually meant was tanks rolling up to the gates of factories blasting apart the very workers' councils who are supposed to be the basis of communism. This was an attempt in some sense, yes, to implement democracy, but it was an attempt to implement

democracy in the factory, and it was attempt by the working class to seize control of the means of production and manage them themselves. Now, the smashing of the Hungarian Revolution led to a split in enormous numbers of communist parties all across the world. There are people leave communist parties and droves. This is a big enough deal that it spawns effectively like a crisis in China, where there is a series of best strikes

and people chanting like here with another Hungary. And in particular, the British Communist Party had a guy on the ground in Hungary reporting on what was happening. And his reports split the party between the people who supported the Hungarians and the people who supported the Soviets. The latter faction became known as tankies for their support of rolling tanks across the border, you know, slaughtering the working class. The term was revived in the 2010s to describe the return of Marxist Leninist, so though much of his usage was about Russia and Syria rather than the original

Hungarian uprising. Now it is true that all of these people do actually support, or they do actually believe the Soviets were crushing like the return of fascism, but that actual belief, like the belief in that the Soviets were right to crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively irrelevant now except as a sort of marker of loyalty because the USSR is gone and the Hungarian Revolution is gone too. So what's left is a term that on the one hand does correctly, it does correctly describe a part of their political tradition, but it has a tendency to sort of anchor these arguments in the past instead of the present with the substantive disagreements with the Marxist

Leninists actually are. Now, Marxist-Leninist, they're also just, yeah, they're called M.L.s, too, as Marxist-Leninists. Absolutely hate being called tankies, except under, you know, the circumstances where they adopted ironically. And I'm of two minds. I have called these people's tankies a lot. But the biggest problem with calling these people tankies is that the original tankies, the people who supported the Soviets butchering the Hungarian working class were actually communists They were Marxist-Slananists who supported the USSR and believe that state ownership of the means of production was the socialist transition to communism These modern quote-unquote Marxist-Slananists don't even believe that

Both Stalin and Kyrgyzstan for all the differences would have had these people shop for supporting capitalists in their imperialist market economies. If you tried to explain to Mao that Deng Xiaoping with his people's billionaires and a trillion dollars of American treasury bonds sitting in his coffers was doing communism, he would have branded you a capitalist rotor and sent you to a reeducation camp. At the end of the day, whatever else, the original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR were communists. Their modern-day equivalents don't even have that to hide behind. They have been reduced to capitalists with a hammer and sickle fetish. So who are these people really? What they've become is suicide net socialists,

because the suicide nets are the actual content of their politics. This is the actual content of backing states like the people's Republic of China. It is full-throwed support for the suicide nets to fly under the roofs of the Fox Con factories in Shenzhen. The reality of their suicide net socialism is that the Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than live under it. And it was these suicide net socialists who sinned, spawned their bastard children, patriotic socialism, and eventually boggakombinism. So how do we understand what these people are? I'm going to give the final word to Karl Marx, the man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going to read from one of Marx's most famous works, the 18th of May, I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on the show before.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before. Precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history and time-honored disguise in borrowed language. Thus, Luther, which is Martin Luther, put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the French

Revolution of 1789 to 1914 draped itself alternatingly in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1948 knew nothing better to do than to parody. Now, 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793, 1795. 1989, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793, 1795. This is precisely the trap that Marxist-Leninos have walked into. Face with mass social upheaval, they knew nothing better than the dawn the mask of Stalin and Mao. And it was a terrible mistake. Here is Marx again.

The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutionaries required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the 19th century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There, the phrase went beyond the content. Here, the content goes beyond the phrase. But we never buried our dead. The memories of dead generations still weigh like a nightmare in the minds of the living.

And in the next episode, we will walk face-first into that nightmare and behold the abyss within. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. Jamil Alamin, a Muslim leader in former Black Power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. He said to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something or paying you something like that. I said no, what you talking about? But I had no idea. Who, you know, who he had become. That's how he approached you. You know, he meant what he said that. Yeah,

I'm thinking, murder, any minute, you know. I think that's what he was thinking. Yeah. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking

on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's illiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional networks. When I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground, just choose them up left, right, and

center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done and excused being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Roboc and TJ Holmes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits. This was a scandal that wasn't. Yeah.

And this was not what you've been sold. The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, and homes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright guys, I did my job. It's that could happen here. A podcast that I just opened by saying, Luha. Yeah, I'm going to throw to you now. What are we talking about today? Oh boy. So yesterday we did, I guess the sort of intro leg work to the kind of stuff that you need to know to understand the sort of new crop of right wing Palestine grifters. And today we're actually going to get into who these people are and how their politics developed and how the sort of trajectory of this has shaped a lot of the left. And to do this, unfortunately,

we need to introduce one of the main characters of this for better or for worse, probably for worse. Max Blumenthal. Damn it. I just woke up. We're talking about Max Blumenthal and I'm just barely started my coffee for the morning. Son of a bitch. I'm so sorry. I apologize to everyone, but unfortunately, unfortunately, this needs to be done.

Yeah, he's the human equivalent of soap scum. Yeah. So okay, I think the place to start with Max Blumenthal is a thing that's pretty common among most of the kind of new crop of these Palestine grifters is that he used to be a pretty normal progressive. Now, for some of the people were going to be talking about pretty normal progressive was a thing they were in like 2019. For Max Blumenthal, like, he was a pretty normal progressive in a thing they were in like 2019. For Max Blumenthal, like he was a pretty normal progressive in like the 2000s. And in 2009.

He was a real journalist at some point, right? Yeah, yeah. Like he wrote this book called, I Republican Gamora inside the movement that shattered the party, which is a pretty good book about the rise of the Christian right in how they see as the Republican party.

And this is very funny, because the place he is going to end up at the end of this story is going on Tucker Carlson and being aligned with like the exact forces he was talking about like a decade and a half ago. So before we really sort of get into it, we need to talk about his family. Gare, do you know who Sid Blumenthal is? Oh yeah. The name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing any specific bells for me. Yeah, so I think you're Clinton staffer, right? Yeah, yeah.

He was like Clinton's hatchet man. Basically, like this is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but like later Hillary Clinton too. He's like the guy who does the Clinton's like political dirty work. Um, and he was like, he's a big guy in the 90s. He's the most impactful thing that he did for modern politics is that he is the guy who invented birth rhythm is slightly too strong of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like Obama birth rhythm like into the mainstream because like as an attempt basically to kill Obama's campaign so they Hillary could win the nomination. How well did that turn out?

Well, it gave us Donald Trump. So you know, things going great. And you know, so this is Max Blumethal's dad, right? Like Max, and this is I think I think that's kind of important about him is that he grows up very sort of proximal to power Like he goes to Georgetown Day School, which is a $40,000 a year prep school that has like multiple supreme court Justices like I've sent their kids there Now, but he's so he's like kind of a normal progressive journalist for a long time

But in the early 2010s, he takes a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive circles. Because in 2012, 2013, it was, and it still is to this day, but like it was, it was very hard to take pro-Palestine positions. And he, like, he just ends up in this sort of spiral where, like, he loses most of his friends, let's go for him breaks up with him. He's not getting work from the usual places

he'd been getting work from because he's been sort of kicked out and isolated for taking the stance. And the product of this is that he takes this meeting that is very, very weird. So in 2015, Russia today has this like week-long gala thing. That's for its 10th anniversary. If you're like a Mueller investigation fan, this is very famous. If you're a no-well person, almost no one has ever heard of this thing. Yeah. So this gala thing is just in 2015, it has a bunch of very, very important,

like Russian officials, Gorbachev is there, like there's a bunch of like senior officials. Very famously, Mike Flynn gets paid $45,000 to speak there. Jill Stein, who is the Green Party candidate in 2016. This is where all of the conspiracy is running again for the green party this year. Tech. Yeah, I don't know if we're going to be this year's going to be theirs. I think they got it. I think they got it on lock now.

Jill, Jill's tied 24. Which she beat. How are we Hawkins? Is he not running again? I believe I believe it's her. That's last last I heard Jill's time is making is making another run for it. God damn. All right. Yeah. Yeah. She has One month ago she launched her 2024 presidential bid. Oh boy. So yeah, okay. So so Jill Stein this is where if you ever heard the conspiracy stuff That's like Jill Stein is like a Russian agent. It comes from the fact that she was at this meeting and then started running for president. Now, what's interesting about Max Blumenthaw going here is at this point, he's a pro-Syrian revolution guy

and he writes a bunch of articles like criticizing Western leftist for supporting Assad. I wanna read from a little bit of them because it's a really interesting look into who he was before and the fact that he knows exactly what the playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Asad apologists have eagerly played the al-Qaeda card to stoke fears of an Islamic takeover of Syria. Back in 2003, Asad accused the US of deliberately overstating the strength of al-Qaeda in order

to justify its so-called war on terror. But now, in a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world, Assad insists the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost entirely by al-Qaeda like jihadists, who have come from abroad to place the country under Islamic control. It is addressed to the Syrian people's assembly on June 3rd. The dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the term terrorist or terrorism or whopping 43 times. That is a full 10 times more than George Bush did and he speech to Congress in the aftermath

of 9-11. In joining the Assad regime's campaign, the G-Legitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational jihadis, ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hezbollah's core Islamist values. Assad's apologists have unwittingly underwritten the war on terror, lexicon introduced by George Bush, Ariel Shorone, and the Neocon Cabal after 9-11. So this is pre-2015, like pre-this meeting, Max Blumenthal. So she goes to this meeting and then after that, founds Greyzone and all of this position

suddenly flipped. And this is a thing you can actually, if you go back and trace a Greyzone is this sort of media outlet thing, that Max Blumenthal found it. And it's interesting because there's a lot of like Aaron Mottetshi, like if you go through the journalist in this outlet, the moment they start working for Greyzone, all of their positions, also like Syria just immediately flip. There's, okay, so there's a conspiracy version of this where like if you read Liberal Accounts with Greyzone, they will argue that Max Limitthal went to this

meeting, got paid off by the Russian government and that Greyzone is like a Russian asset. I don't know. I don't think that's true. I think I can say, but nobody knows where Greyzone gets his money from, right? They're very sort of like, there's Patreon stuff, but other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it. There's no evidence, like directly, that he he's been, like, paid by the Russian government to do Greyzone.

The thing that I can say is that he has taken a bunch of money from the Russian government to go on RT, like, all the fucking time. That's a part of it that I can say, I don't know, this is one of these things that's, it's such a sort of, like, confluence of, like, all of these people were in the same place at the same time. It's one of these things that generation should show in conspiracy theories. I'm gonna say that I don't think that this is like a giant Russian conspiracy,

but he does flip all of his positions almost immediately after going to this meeting. And the thing that the position that he starts taking is the exact same position that he was writing about like before this in 2015. He starts talking about how like anyone who opposes Assad is a quote, head chopper and he starts, he starts selling like one of the big things is selling this line that like a Assad is the defender of serious ethnic minorities, which is like a thing that I think would

be used to them. And you know, and he, he, he, he starts a podcast called moderate rebels, which is a joke about like, uh, like the, the US is on moderate rebels, which is a joke about like, I'd like the US's funding moderate rebels, but all those people are actually like Okita supporters. And I don't know, like I think it's interesting comparing his pre-2015 writing to his post-2015 writing because he very clearly understands what he is doing.

Like he wrote an analysis of the thing that he's going to be doing. Yeah, there's no plausible deniability with him. Yeah. And a big part of this whole deal is, like, and this is one of the things that Max Lundolf figures out is that there are, there is a very large market

in selling a palatable form of Islamophobia to the left. You're going to see this in, this is one of the things that he doesn't shing-john where there's, he's part of this whole sort of sphere of people who are like, there's nothing happening in shing-john, everything's actually great. And with both that and Syria, there's exactly the same playbook, which is to go all like, you know, all of the resistance to this government is CIA back, well, hobby terrorists, you can find like some people who suck and go, oh, hey, like these guys are all jihadists. And you know, in Syria, this is sort of bleakly funny because if you know your war on terror history, like Bashar al-Assad, like tortured people with

the CIA and the US like held some weaker guys for the CCP in Gitmo for allegedly being part of a separatist group. But this is an important part of how people sort of launder these right wing dictators. And there's a very old sort of tradition of this on the left that a lot of people are able to sort of graft on to. And I'm going to take an example of this because I think it's important. Because one of the the er sort of moments of all of this politics is the collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left wing defense of Bolosovic. So I'm gonna read from, take an example of what this shit looks like. I'm gonna read from an article

that Jeremy Scayhill wrote, which is, I think the worst article about Bolosovic I've ever seen, this is a Huffington Post piece, it's I think the worst thing I've ever seen written about Bolosovic in a mainstream outlet. Here is Jeremy Scayhill, quote, little attention, therefore, has been paid to Milosevic's long-term efforts, which predate 9-11, the 1999 NATO bombing, and his own trial, to expose the presence of al-Qaeda and the

Balkans from Bosnia to Kosovo. With 9-11, Milosevic's talk of al-Qaeda was easily dismissed as laughable pathetic opportunism. But those who follow Milosevic's career, and importantly, the events of the 1990s at Yugoslavia and Doa was none of these. Those allegations were based on true events the US does not want discussed in an international court. Following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan

in the 80s, many Muzhidhadin eventually turned their sights at Yugoslavia where they went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and Pinlai were on the same team. To this day, there are reports of trading camps in Bosnia which remains under occupation. It is also likely a trading ground for future blowback. So that's nonsense. Like there are not, there are not,

Al Qaeda training camps in Bosnia. Like what the fuck? Like it's just, it's complete nonsense. And you know, it relies on a lot of the other sort of like weird things that leftists like believe and don't believe about this. There's a very, if you want to actually read about these sort of like transnational Islamist networks, there's a very good book by the anthropologist Darul Lee called the Universal Enemies

Jihad and Jihad Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity. But like, okay, I want to ask the audience a question, right? Why would members of the Mujahideen be in Bosnia in the 1990s? And I want to suggest that it might have something to do with the fact that Milosevic was trying to kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He almost did it. He was pretty close to actually doing it. You know, but the sort of left conspiracy solutions like no, no, it must have been the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex-Muzahadin guys would have gone to a country where someone

was trying to kill the entire Muslim population. Like, what the fuck do you like? It's all stuff that's like this. And you know, he also talks about how Milose like, like, Milose of Equative like, testified about the CIA institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo. And what? Milosevic is the guy who presided.

He was one of the architects of de-collectivization in Yugoslavia. Before he was the butcher of Belgrade, he was the butcher of Yugoslavia and socialist state. But he was just a hard-line right-wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting, by doing this thing where you're like, oh, well, actually, all of these people were, they were all al-Qaeda.

You can use this to sell the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as the left to save for Yugoslavia. I think the part about that's that really sad is there was the last true believers of the old Yugoslavia working class, right, were the Yugoslavia and anti-war protesters. These guys, they're protesting to stop the war they see coming that the Syrians are about to unleash. And they just get murdered in the streets by Milosevic. You know, well, because seven years later, the US decided that they didn't like him, like he's become this, like, hero of a bunch of these, like a bunch of Marxist-Leninists, like see this guy as a hero.

And this is, you know, this is just, this is their big sort of like political trick, is using the threat of like terrifying Muslim terrorists to just legitimize right-wing dictators. I mean, you know, speaking of right-wing dictators, there, there's a non-zero chance. There's an ad for someone who will be one in the future right now. And we're back. So we're back to this stuff. And Syria, and specifically, the way people think about Syria plays a huge role in this or development

of the left. And one of the reasons that the sort of new Grey Zone line, which is that the entire opposition is composed of Islamists and that a sought as the only person who can stop them, is that like, part of the reason this works is that like, yeah, like this is the gap that these people always sort of come in through is that like a lot of the Western media was not covering Syria very well. They weren't covering the rise of like Jabal Taneu's for a very well. And you know, they used this gap to sort of like come through and rehabilitate Assad by going like the media is lying to you Assad who again I need to mention like 10 years earlier this guy was torturing people for the CIA. But you like Assad is actually Nancy and Piri-List,

and this works enormously well. This is the sort of breach through which Blumatal enters the mainstream. And this discourse about Syria like reshapes everything about the left. This is where American Marxist-Leninism comes from, right? Like a huge portion of it is from the people who backed the sod. Um, um, and this is, it's actually really weird.

Like almost every big sort of like leftist like podcast or media thing, like came out of the Serious Civil War in some way or another. Like the whole Grey's Oversist Belingat thing is a, like, is a thing that was originally about the Serious Civil War. Um, Tropical Trapp House, which is like, I guess if people don't know, it's just massive, like social democratic podcast. Also, like, sort of came out of there,

like it was partially about, like, came out of like Turkish politics, but those were very, very similar circles, like on Twitter at the time. And, you know, and one of their big things is like Felix Baderman's, like the truth about Syria, which is a sort of slightly a slightly softer version of supporting Assad that also supports the Revolution of Rojava. I came out of this because I was on the pro-Rojava side because I'm an anarchist and I have a bunch of Kurdish friends.

So there's this giant fight about what the Syrian civil war is and what the sides are and what it means. And this is one of the things that comes to define what the left is. And the Grey Zone people sort of win. And the result of this is that this pro-Assad, like nominally anti-imperialist position, becomes the default position of a bunch of sort of, like people who aren't like hard line marks slanders, who are just sort of like kind of sort of like people who aren't like hard line marks slenders who are just sort of like like kind of edgy Bernie like Bernie supporters And this is something that like you can see the effect of this like to this day if you look at left

If you look at like leftist meme culture like you can see people who are otherwise mostly normal making line of Damascus jokes about how like Assad is like the line of Damascus People still make jokes about barrel bombs, which is, you know, this thing that Assad would do. There's the whole, like, the one that I see them most, it's like still very, very common is there is this whole meme of like Hillary Clinton says Assad must go, and then there's like the second panel is like, who must go, Hillary Clinton's gone,

and people still do this, like two days' date. The other really common one, there's this little girl named Bona Alabez, who is a Syrian girl who got bombed and there's like a video of her, you know, reacting in the way a small child would to being bombed and like there's a meme that's basically taking her words and twisting it into like, please America, you know, come and intervene in Syria. Like turn it basically like this girl is CIA propaganda trying to like justify US intervention in the war. Like that's the that's the bit.

You see it posted a lot. People repurposed it after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians. It's like it's like pretty fundamentally cruel. Yeah, and that's how a lot of this stuff worked because it was, it's stuff that fits into the social values of that part of the left at that time, which is that both the Marxist-Leninists and what was called the Derbeg left around Choppo was completely irony-poisoned. And like I get it, I was around then, like I did my time in the Irony trenches.

Like it's really hard not to react to the world's with ironic detachment when it's so fucking terrible. But the other side of that was, these people started, we're doing these assobbinges because they were edgying contrarian and because this is the stuff with the bond, this is one of the things with the bond, is deliberately demonstrating that you don't have

any empathy is something that's edgy and contrarian. And like the performance of that was this very sort of like powerful, emotional pull that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff. that that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff. And, you know, originally, and a, and part of the everything here too, is like everyone, everyone in all of these circles, their big thing is trying to own the lips. And this is something that like the lips cared

about. And doing this thing of like how much you don't care about it and how much you think it's like, if I'm falling for propaganda, that was, you know, that was something that was heavily incentivized by the structure of how things like Twitter work and how like retweets work. And, you know, but this, this is, I mean, it's bleak in and of itself, but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only other people who support Assad are like white supremacists. And this leads to a bunch of very, very weird cross pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of the most common sources about Syria for both sort of

barcass loneliness and like social democratic, what do you use this is this person named partisan girl, who's like, I still do this day, like a very big media figure. So she is a Syrian Australian quote-unquote Syria expert. We don't really have time to get into all of her stuff. She's been on NFOs. She's been on RTI of Monch, I think. Yeah. She's been on David Duke's podcast. David Duke's, he's been on NFOs. She's been on RT of Monch, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. She's been on David Duke's podcast. David Duke's, she has been on this podcast. Yeah, the former grand wizard of the KKK. She was on Richard Spencer's podcast. Like she is just a Nazi. The last post that I saw from her was her responding to another guy who's just a straight up hardline anti-Semite

who posted this beam that was like Maybe this is why all conservatives support Israel and has a bunch of faces of conservatives with like us Stars of David on them like including Max Blumenthal and Partisan girls response to this is not to object to the fact that it's unbelievably anti-Semitic But to be like no-no-no Max Blumenthal is actually an anti-Zionist So you shouldn't include him with all of the rest of the people who've even included on here because they're Jewish. Even though some of them aren't,

he's just accusing random people of being Jewish who aren't. But that's the thing, like, she's straight up an anti-Semite, just actually a fascist. I literally, we could sit here for 10 minutes listing the names of all of the fascist podcasts she's been on. And this is one of these things that people knew, like people knew that she was a fascist.

And I had arguments with people where I would be like, hey, this person is a Nazi, like, she's been on David Duke's podcast. And people would be like, well, yeah, she's a fascist, but I like her seriode analysis. And this is, you know, one of the things that happens in this is I'm going to kind of defer to you on this rubber because this is something I know a lot less about. But one of the things that the Grazian people become really heavily involved about is doing a bunch of weird denialism stuff around chemical weapons attacks and duma. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's a, that's a lot of the nexus of the kind of asshole left takes on Syria revolve around is because if, if Bashar al-Assad was dumping chemical weapons on civilian populations in mass, which we know he was, then there's absolutely no way you can justify it, if it doesn't matter how many of his enemies were quote unquote Islamists, he was pumping chemical weapons into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to be that that never happened, right? That that was the CIA faking it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and it got blamed on Assad. A lot of it comes down to there's this group. These guys are civil defense people.

This is their civil defense units in any city being bombed, made up of civilians in the area. When I was in Mosul, I was embedded with a lot of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go in and they pull people out and bodies out of of wreckage after bombings, right? They're usually locals. They provide some emergency medical care to the extent that's possible. There's people doing this right now in Gaza. And in Syria, it was the White Helmets. And you know, the White Helmets were in large part formed by a dude named James Messier, I believe it's the way his name is pronounced. He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that long ago, but a big part of the this chunk of the left's line on Syria is that because these guys are the first responders and they're getting

in after these chemical attacks and providing a lot of the initial evidence in the wake of them, it's that these guys, the white helmets are a CIA front, and they're the ones who are kind of planting all of the evidence of these attacks. Yeah, and this stuff gets really, really out of control very quickly. I mean, this is one of the, you suddenly see all of these people doing the stuff that the Alex Jones supporters are doing

about Sandy Huck, where they're like taking pictures of like dead bodies and going, oh, this is like a mannequin or these are crisis actors. And it's insane, because this is all the stuff that these rallies are doing now, where they're taking pictures of a dead baby and going, this is a doll. But so many people were doing this with this shit in Syria,

and it really struck me as like I was kind of observing it from the outside because it, like I don't know, like I, the period where this was happening is the period where I was starting. So I was not super involved in this stuff. But you could just sort of see like the kind of the level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing. To the point where like all of the stuff that's like the modern like conspiracy can it is just getting embedded in there. Yeah, it's where you see a lot of the stuff that has been the norm on the right for 20 years start to take hold in the left. on the right for 20 years start to take hold in the left default reality kind of fragmenting

conspiratorial angles on verifiable things that are happening, right, where you have what's obviously occurring based on the evidence and the completely errant reality fragment that is how you have to perceive events in order to stay ideologically consistent. That's when a lot of that starts to infect the left in a way that is now, you know, a pretty widely prevalent. Yeah, and one of the things that, you know, one of the things that he's able to do with this that becomes one of the staples of a lot of the left is this line about color revolutions where every single time a protest starts in a country that he doesn't like, or like the US doesn't like, like everyone

on Twitter would suddenly be like, oh, it's a color revolution, it's a CAA op, all the protesters are being paid by the CAA. And I could pick like a thousand examples of this from everywhere from like Lebanon to Hong Kong. Like every time a mass protest would start, these people would be like, it's a color revolution. I'm going to pick one that I think I genuinely think is the most egregious piece of slander they ever fucking printed, or at least like slander of a leftist group, which is, so Ben

Norton wrote a piece that was about Ecuador, because there've been a bunch of, like Ecuador has periodic mass protests. They also had elections. And Ben Norton, who's another Grey Zone guy, who eventually like, we wouldn't even have time to cover this, but he's gonna break with the Grey Zone people when they take their hard right pivot

because they start doing like anti-vax shit. That's too much even to him. Which has been at least a little bit of fun to watch. Yeah, yeah, watching them all fighting each other has been, oh god. So this is one of the few pieces of satisfaction we've gotten out of this. But Norton, so he, one of the, one of the people he's targeting is the confederation of indigenous nationalities of Ecuador. And so we've talked about them on this show before. They are one of the most radical indigenous organizations on the planet.

Like they, you know, they have been literally in the case of Ben Norton. They have been overthrowing near liberal government since before Ben Norton was born. Like their big thing is doing is they do these days where they call an uprising, and an uprising happens. Hundreds of thousands of people go into the streets and try to bring down the government. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But, you know, this is one of their big things. And Greyzone, like, like, Norton calls these people anarchists inspired ultra-leftist back by the US,

which is just, you know, you're in for good political analysis when someone uses the term ultra-leftist. Yeah, it's not. I love it as it insults. Like what, oh no, I've been ultra-leftist. You might politics are too good. You might take the two-based, like what, this is supposed to be an insult?

Like, it's baffling stuff. Yeah, but like in the span of two years, they went from like praising, they went from praising the confederation of religious nationalities of Ecuador to calling them a CIA op like again within two years. And a lot of a lot of this stuff is based on the work of this guy named William Engdahl. I don't know, I'm not a pronounceist lesson.

I think it's William Engdahl. So he's a LaRoucheites. We've talked about the La russians on this podcast before they're famous for beating up leftists on college campuses in the 70s. They're also the most fettin' up motherfuckers in the entire world. They are snitching on leftist groups

to federal agencies you've never heard of before. They claim to have worked with the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, directly cooperated with Bra Reagan's National Security Council. They have, they are the biggest dishes in the entire world and, you know, I'm blooming with all, like, copying their stuff, right? Like, this is where a lot of his stuff about what color revolutions are it comes from. And Engda is, I'm going to turn to some research by Emmy Bevin,

CEO of the anti-fascist researcher. So Engda thinks that BLM was a color revolution because he is just a really, really hard line. Like, right, we're going to this is actually like a pretty common thing in these circles as people who think that BLM was color revolution, people who think that like occupies a color revolution and that's sort of like the far right of these sort of circles. And I guess speaking of the far right of these circles, do you know what is the by far the right choice for you to use your consuming power of the purchasing dollar. That's right. These ads. Great job. That was wonderful.

And we are unfortunately back. Well, my wallet is later and I've never felt happier. Yeah. So, okay. So we, the reason we're covering this in the first place is the, the sort of right wing pivot that this circle does. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about one more thing that is incredibly bleak, which is the time he accused a sexual assault victim of being a co-entelpro-op. is the time he accused a sexual assault victim of being a co-entell pro op. So this is a story I don't think most people know. I only know about it because I was there in the DSA at the time this was happening. In 2017, the DSA has its first elections after the giant surge of membership has his first elections after the giant surge of membership from both like Trump winning and also Bernie and

They they they have his first elections to its governing body and one of the people who's elected is this guy named Arles Stevens Arles Stevens is a very popular leftist leftist at the time. He does this whole podcast circuit He's very charismatic He gets the third most votes if anyone electates a national political committee very charismatic, he gets the third most votes of anyone elected to the National Political Committee. But it turns out he is also an abuser. A woman publishes an anonymous letter about Steven sexually assaulting her. It is fucking brutal.

Ben Norton, who's one of his co-workers that we've talked about before, makes a giant threat accusing the victim of being co-intelpro. Max Blumenthal, quote tweets it and says, quote, can't help but be reminded of co-intelpro. Max Blumenthal, quote tweets it and says, quote, can't help but be reminded of co-intelpro by reading this thread. And even people who are normally Max Blumenthal supporters were like, what the fuck are you doing? And like the full story of Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement in this is actually worse than I can talk

about on air. So after the first thread where he where Ben Norton calls it a co-entell for up, he deletes that one because it's just not obviously not sure if people are yelling at him. So he makes a second thread that that thread is still up to this fucking day. You can find the thread of Ben Norton talking about how a DSA faction called momentum had like manufactured the sexual assault thing to like destroy its opposition. And I want to make something very clear because I was there when when like during the in this fight inside the DSA, which in momentum and everyone else in the fucking org.

And I was on the anti momentum side, right? momentum was basically the right wing of the DSA. Not exactly the right wing, like there were some other people who were further right than them, but they were like the center right of the DSA. They were like, Toralists. The only thing they ever wanted to do was canvassing. I was on, and Arles Stevens was on the other side, like opposing them. And I was on, like, politically, I was in the, like, the same side as Arnold Stevens here, right? Like I fucking hate to have mentioned people. I think they destroyed the DSA.

One one day I will do a whole thing about them. Like these these people like the momentum people literally purged my friends from the York, right? And R.O. Stevens is one of their enemies and that is not what this shit was fucking about. Like R.O. Stevens is just a rapist. But, you know, Max Blumenthal and Ben

Norton came in and were like, oh shit, this Arles Stevens guy is like an anti-imperialist, so we're going to accuse the survivor of being a co-entell pro op. Oh, my God. It's fucking, it's so fucking bleak. Max has deleted his tweet, but you can find it if you, you know, I have screenshots of it and I have way back machine things, but because I was there, what this was happening. And none of these people ever suffered any professional repercussions for this. They were just fucking allowed to do this shit and nothing ever happened to them. I don't know. It makes

me just incredibly deeply angry. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it is like, there's that piece that goes around regularly about how like misogynists make the best informants. And it remains a pretty durable fact about organizing, like if you run into people who are immediately attacking the victim of sexual assault as some sort of an informant, because the person who committed it is on the quote unquote right ideological side. That might tell you something about the people who are doing that.

Yeah, and this is the thing that like to this day, there were like really shitty left wing groups just still do this stuff. You know, okay, so we're gonna move on from that to some very, okay, so this is, you know, all of the stuff that Max Lumenthal had been doing until that point, that was all inside of the bounds of what was considered acceptable on the left. And that sucks, right?

Like, that's not good. But by about 2021, he is, and I found the exact, I'm pretty sure I found the exact both with this happened, where in 2021, like Blue Muthal just loses it. Like it is, it's specifically August 2021.

He very specifically starts, like tacking right really fast. And what he starts doing is he starts doing anti lockdown stuff. And so he starts ranting about how like Australian lawmakers are proposing fines for sharing information about anti lockdown protests and like fans for fines for attending rallies. And he just gets more and more into hardcore anti lockdown stuff. And then into stuff that's effectively just straight up anti-vax stuff. One of the things that he ends up doing is you write an article about like, if people back remember in COVID, there was a whole thing about flattening the curve and trying

to get less people to die. And there was this whole debate over whether you should just like not have lockdowns and let everyone get COVID and that would give you like quote unquote herd immunity. And everyone would be safe. And that's like sweet and try that and it fucking killed a number of some people. It was a terrible idea. But like the whole sort of gray zone crew like starts to block stuff for Ben Norton who leaves

starts like rallying around this stuff. And it's really weird because like in 2020 when China was doing lockdowns, Ben Norton was really, really pro lockdowns. But as 2021 goes on, he starts pivoting into this anti-lockdown stuff. And so I first saw this stuff from this journalist named Walter Bragman, and back when he was on Twitter, is he starts, like he writes an article that has a bunch of claims from this thing called the Great Barrington Declaration. Do you remember that?

No, not really. Yeah, so this was this giant anti-lockdown like declaration that a bunch of right wingers were pushing around, that was, it's this giant anti-lockdowns greed that's basically saying like the way to stop COVID is you have to like open all the all the businesses again force I've wanted to go back to work and then people will get like infected with COVID and that will give them immunity to COVID

which is a terrible idea because if you get infected with COVID, there's you know the chance that you die right it's yeah Yeah, and but the interesting thing about the Great Bergerian Declaration is it's created by the American Institute for Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are. So they are a right-wing libertarian think tank which Blumenthal should hate. Right. He's supposed to be a leftist. He should hate these people.

They received $68,000 from the Koch brothers to do an economics conference, a thing that they are very mad about anytime. So every time someone tries to bring it up and talk about how their Koch funded, they're like, well, we only took $68,000 one time to do one economics conference. You can't call us Koch funded. But then like all their website, they admit that they quote for the record, bit that they quote for the record, AIER received $68,000 in Coke funding over the last 10 years. That's some with use entirely to offset the conference of a single economics conference in 2017 with no links to the great barringing decoration. But obviously, the reason the Coke's fun, this thing is because these guys have the same economics like politics as they do. Someone you know, as someone who has taken

zero dollars from the Koch brothers, I could safely say that it's bullshit to say that we only took money for the Koch brothers once. So what happens basically is the the Americans, too, for economic research has a like conference for a bunch of weirdo hacks who are also technically scientists to put out this report saying the lockdowns that happened immediately, like after like the disease, like COVID really started spreading in the US, they said that that was a mistake and they were advocating ending lockdowns, reopening businesses. This was in overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of people killed.

Like, that's what these people were trying to do. Um, but Max Lumeuthhal suddenly is like pushing this stuff like in pieces that he's writing for Greyzone. It's very deeply weird. And this stuff just, and as like 2021 goes on, this stuff gets like worse and worse and worse. By 2021, Blumenthal is writing articles about an impending attempt to implement social credit

alongside Jeffrey LaFredo. So, okay, we need to take this in two parts. We'll get to the social credit stuff in a second. First, we need to talk about who Jeffrey LaFredo is because this guy, so this guy used to work at Rebel News, which is this like, I mean, like Garrison, I know you know, you know, you do know what Rebel News is. That's the Canadian, yeah, basicallyersen, I know, you know, you know, you do know what rebel news is.

It's a Canadian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Canadian bright. Yeah. It's like a bright part in Phil Wars type thing. They have like podcasts and online sites.

Yeah. They're like a Canadian far right news source, essentially. They also engage in a lot of like activism. It's one of the few relatively few Canadian far right websites that also regularly goes viral in the US. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also quite popular in Australia or they have a, they have a very, very interesting, in Australia.

They play the significant role in, if you remember, the, the basically caravan that drove, we're going to get to that. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to that. Yeah. So, so Blumenthal is writing a, like, an article with Terminal Freedom. Frito who is a guy who like wrote like a million articles for Rebel News. In fact, as best I can tell, he was still working for Rebel News when Blumenthal starts like directly linking to Rebel News articles

about this stuff. Um, now it turns out he was actually fired from Rebel News after a bunch of tweets surfaced, which like, okay, the kind of tweets. How hard it is to get fired from Rebel Dews. I track down these tweets. It is, I'm not even going to read any of them. There are seven different tweets where he talks about how he wants to rate people. There's one where he's confessing that's just about him being a pedophile.

There's a bunch of him saying the N word. There's a bunch of like incredibly racist, like Chinese anti-chinese stuff, which is very funny because Max Blumenthal presents himself as like the big pro-China guy in here he is, like writing articles with this deranged anti-Chinese racist. And again, like this, this got him fired from Rebel News. And the Max Blumet, the article with him is still up. Now, so that's insane enough, right? But at the moment, I wanted to talk to reason,

that was a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was looking at this article. The reason I wanted to talk about this article in the first place is because he's writing about social credit. Now, for people who don't recognize the social credit stuff, here's the title of this article,

quote, the title, is it the subtitle, the Titans of Global Capitalism are exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to institute social credit style digital ID systems across the West. So what is this social credit thing? This is like, this is a very big right wing conspiracy theory thing, like Alex Jones, the huge pusher of this.

And basically what they're saying is that they're going to import this system from China that they say exists, called social credit, where like if you say something bad about the government, you won't be able to like use your credit card to buy food. And this is not how things work in China. But it's very interesting because, you know, these right wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming to the US. Like this never happened, it was never gonna happen.

But what's interesting about it is that Greyzone is specifically writing about this, which is insane. Because again, this whole thing is an anti-China conspiracy theory. And like all of the sort of Marxist led inisms like, what are their whole pitches? Was that they are the, like, they support China against American imperialism. And then like within about a year, like in like a one year span, they've just pivoted to publishing like full on right wing social credit stuff. And you know, and by 2022, it's gone even further.

This is where we get to the truckers convoy. So Garrison covered this extensively on the show. Yes. Yeah, do you want to do like the really short version of what that was? This, a few kind of Q and on influencers, most of them based in Alberta, and then a few other kind of conservative influencers tied to some of whom were tied to rebel news,

kind of, who were based more throughout Canada, organized this event, where a whole bunch of truckers, but mostly just regular people, would drive to the Capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau would meet their demands or something like that. They were out there for a few weeks. It really started getting shut down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to block one of the big trade border crossings between the US and Canada.

At that point, it became enough of a problem. The government was like, okay, we're just gonna make you guys leave. And that was that. So it caused chaos in Ottawa for a few days. It was compared a little bit to Canada's January 6th. It had a very large mobilization of people, which was unique for Canada. And we've started to see some of the tactics and styling of this trucker convoy get adopted both in Canada and the States. We've had versions of this tried to

get started in the States. Never. They never really took off. Oh my God. There's been people who have tried to organize it again in Canada. Has it really taken off the same way. But yeah, that is kind of the gist. I did a few episodes as this was ongoing, and then I did a larger kind of piece about the whole thing that was more scripted towards the end of it. You can find those, I think, in like, if you go back to like February of 2022,

you'll find some of those pieces. Yeah, and I think the other thing that's important to emphasize about this, these guys are bright wingers. Like I have pictures of these guys waving you stoshy flags, where these stoshier, like the guys who did the Holocaust and Croatia, like, yeah. Like there was a mix of like conservatives

to like actual fascists with like not just like there. Like that, that it was, it was pretty, there was a pretty wide ideological spectrum that was present, you know, some conservatives weren't happy that they're trying to get them to leave. You know, there's more ambivalent, but yes, there was a large variety of ideological representation at the trucker convoy. Yeah, so here's Max Blumenthal's response to it. The lockdown left spent the last week spouting academic theory to undercut support for a trucker confoli. Yeah, so here's Max Blumenthal's response to it. The lock down left spent the last week's spedig academic theory to undercut support for

a trucker strike. Looks on with silent satisfaction as the imperial true door regime imposes the emergency act to freeze bank accounts. They wanted this. So he's just fully, like fully spends his whole time fully on board with a trucker sting. He's trying to convince people it's a trucker strike, which is,'s not it's not it's not it's not it's it's almost All these people are like anti-union who are participating. Yeah, and they're also they're also like the actual people who are truckers are the people who own Trucking companies. They're not like they're not the people who are leasing trucks out. They are like the owners of these trucks.

So he's really doing this sort of like, like he's really doing this sort of like pivot right. Like she was supporting this stuff. By 2023, he's just posting straight up anti-vax stuff. Like here's the thing that he wrote about, Peter Holtz, who was this guy, he was like this guy, who was, I don't know, he's like a science guy. He was like, he was a really big target of the right

for a while because he wouldn't, he kept, like, there's, there's this whole thing where Joe Rogan was trying to debate him about whether vaccines worked and it was, it was this whole weird thing. Meeting up the mind. Yeah. Yeah, it's a Bible with all this like Bill Gates made hundreds of millions of dollars off his investment, biotech.

Thanks to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear campaigns in history. He called mRNA, a miracle, a, social damage with this unrelenting, sanatorium demand for hard lockdowns and the mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including the small children, Houghton seems desperate to avoid accountability. So this is just straight up anti-vax shit. Right? Like, this is like where we are. Like, now, he's like, he spent like a whole bunch of like

the last two years just tweeting anti-vax stuff. And this got fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly. And this is something I think is really interesting because it's another demonstration that like, he knows what he's doing. So back in 2021, like right after the Atlanta, the Atlanta spot shooting happens. He like Max Liemontal's reaction to it was like, oh yeah, here's your, like,

what here's this in light of recent racist attacks, user reminder of Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump, the Washington Post blaming China for cooking up COVID-19 in the lab. Rogan cited a US-funded dissident as a fake scientist to legitimize his propaganda. Now, this is actually, the stuff about the lab leak is actually true, which is sort of wild. I mean, it's not quite,

like the lab leak stuff I think has directly contributed to people getting attacked. The Atlanta shooting, I don't know, I did a bunch, I did two episodes about it at the, like, a bit later. Yeah a bunch, I did two episodes about it at the like a bit later Yeah, if you want to hear me talk about the full Accumulation of that for a very long time. So in that's what he's saying in 2021, right? Is he is correctly identified that the lab leak stuff is I

Like the Ocon like Trump like anti-China stuff One year later like Trump, like anti-China stuff. One year later, he has Jeffrey Sachs on the show to talk about how the US is covering up how the Pentagon and the National Institute of Health funded biological research that created COVID-19 a lab in Wuhan. In one year, he has gone from calling the lab leak, like a neocon, a quote, Trump disinfo dump

that was created by a neocon to having Jeffrey Sachs on his show to talk about how the lab leak is real. And like, this is bad enough, this is not ideological shift, right? But we need to talk about, do you guys know who Jeffrey Sachs is? No, not really. Oh boy. Okay, so Sachs is a Columbia University economist.

He is also the guy who did shock therapy, both in Russia and in Poland. Like this is the guy who privatized the Russian economy and handed it over to a combination of like American investors, Russian mobsters, and the guys who would become Russia's oligarchy. Like he is the guy who, like if you are one of these people, he should be enemy number one. Right. He is, he is the guy who like destroyed, if you believe this, if he's the guy who destroyed Russian communism, right. He is, he is responsible. And this is, this is one of the things these people will talk about a lot is how like all of the shock therapy stuff like cause the largest drop in life expectancy between World War II and COVID, right?

And like, like, SACS is not a bit, like SACS was literally in the room. He was in the room in the Kremlin when the USSR was dissolved. This is like, this is one of the greatest anti-communist and human history. And here is Max Blumenthal, a man who is supposed, like his entire thing is about opposing the imperialist you over through communism,

like sitting down having a very sort of, like having a very pallying around interview about, that is sacks pushing the conspiracy theory that he was literally calling disinfo one year ago. And I don't know, I thought about this for a long time trying to figure out what was happening here. And the conclusion that I came to is that this is the soul of a man who believes in nothing. And you know, you can ask the question, why do this? And the short answer people tend to give is money.

And that's like true, but it doesn't go anywhere near far enough, because I think the real answer why these people did these right-wing pivots is much, much worse. The actual reason people in left media suddenly start taking right-wing turns, and this is something we've seen from like the young Turks, like taking this like anti-trans, anti-homeless pivots, there have been several other outlets that have done a right-wing turn. And this is a structural problem in left media, which is that if you're in left media, you have a massive, and you're trying to expand, you have a massive problem. And the problem is that the left in the US just isn't that big, right?

Like there are more leftists now than there've been for a very, very long time, but there's only so many leftists. And you can't pull from only so many leftists. You can't pull from them all because leftists all hate each other. So even if you try to quarter like the market of one faction or the left, another faction to leftists is going to hate you because this is just how it's just how it's how it works. And so if you're producing something that's designed for the left and only the left,

there is built in a hard cap on how big your audience can get. And if you're successful, you can hit that limit. But if you want to grow more after that, you have to expand your ideological base, like the ideological base of your audience. But the problem is there's only two directions you can go, right? You can either try to get liberal-solicing to your show, or you could try to get conservatives. But you know, for people like Max Lumeuthal or like Jimmy Doer, for example, is another person who did this big like anti-vax pivot around the same time Max Lumeuthal was doing it. They have a whole thing where they're they're they're talking about how I from Max Dyn is actually a good COVID treatment together. Yeah, he used to be like a like a left-wing YouTuber or as like.

Yeah, he was a guy from the young Turks and he went off to his own thing as now, like, just complete, this only does anti-vax shit. But the problem is if you're a Jimmy Doer, like you're your gray zone, right? Recruiting liberals is really, really hard because your entire brand is based on how much you hate liberals. And this means that the people who naturally agree with them are conservatives. And the other important thing here is that leftists don't have that much money. Right? Like, there, there, there's not, there's like, there's like,

there's like, there are, there are leftists who are like college students who have rich families who have some money. There's like a small number of like leftist businesses, but like they don't have, on average, leftists don't have that much money. On the other hand, conservatives have an enormous amount of money, and they are very, very easily panned or two. If you just like pump out like bottom barrel anti-vac shit, like they will flock to you.

And you know, whenever you need to get leftist sort of back on your side, right, you can just start tweeting about Palestine and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done because any, like at any time, anytime someone posts, like a pro Palestine thing, people just click on it, right? Yeah. And this has been, this has been, like, so Max, we went to the last about two years just doing anti-vac stuff. The moment Palestine became something that people were focusing on again, and there are good reasons for that, right? But the moment he did that, he just pivoted back into doing Palestine stuff, and everyone just completely ignored what he'd been doing this whole time.

If you do this, you pander to the anti-factors and making anti-vax content, and then also you could just go back and regain your leftist credentials and get like views and support from leftists by doing Palestine stuff, you can make a lot of money. But there's a price. Every time you sell out to these people, you betray another part of yourself until one day, you believe in nothing. The left and the right and lose all meaning. And the only thing that's left is content and the culture war. And I want to close this episode by talking, by reading

something from another Greyzone contributor, Anya Parampel, who is, she's another Greyzone journalist and she's Max Blumenthal's wife. And she, she is the Grey Zone person who's reached the end of this cycle. I'm just going to read what this looks like. Quote, the labels of left and right are outdated in the US case in point left as white men now pander to other white men by telling women of color their bigots for saying boy shouldn't be able to piss in the girls room. These same punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily, I don't know, yeah, I'd, okay.

Her tweet just trails off as a bodily. It says dot, dot, dot, it just boosts her to the, I don't know, she's not a very good writer. Gender ideology is created into Titanic, in which a bunch of men can come into organizing circles, play victim in a certain control over what is acceptable for others, especially women, to say and think. Most people know it's just misogyny,

tied up at a frilly bow, but are too afraid to, just dot, dot, dots off again. I deeply weird. Now that participants in the Depression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti-war rally because it didn't fit their tunnel vision for the movement, gloves are off. Good luck winning over the people with your message.

The same people who believed workers should not be mandated to take an experimental injection that did not, quote, stop the spread, cried, my body, my choice, and row was overturned. Yet these seem, these are the same people who do not even believe biological women exist, total incoherence. So this is the question of, this is just a collection of like very basic right wing

talking points, like this is the the the the the the fall like the false correlation between like reproductive health care and like vaccines for public health and the stuff of gender ideology. All of it is just very, very basic, like talking points used, used by the right that conflate various issues. Yeah, it's just like this is indistinguishable from the ravings of any other right-winger. And this is just, this is just where the stuff ends, because this specific line, this is how you fucking make money. And we could talk about a million more iterations of how these stuff fused together.

I mean, Max Liemontal goes to an anti-vax rally that has a bunch of like three percenters and like a bunch of just straight up right-wing fascists. But this is at least one of the end points of where this stuff goes. But tomorrow we're going to look at a group of people who took this even further. Yeah, get ready for that shit because it's about to get wildly anti-semitic. Oh great, hooray! On March 16th 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta.

Jameel Alamine, a Muslim leader in former Black Power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. He said to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something or paying you something? I said, no, what you talking about? But I had no idea who you had become. That's how he approached you. You know he meant what he said that.

Yeah, I'm thinking, murdered, in a minute, you know. I think that's what he was thinking. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical for free on the I Heart Podcasts. Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking

on a world-changing figure. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also soared chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars,

done excuse being a total ****. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robock and TJ Holmes,

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And this was not what you've been sold. The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts. It's an introduction to the podcast. I'm your host, Biel Håg, with these garrison. Hello. Hello. Welcome to part three of this nightmare. Yeah. So, okay, all the way back in episode one, I said that Marcus Lennonism was based on a series

of arguments about the state, the nature of socialism, and the that Marxist-Leninism was based on a series of arguments about the state, the nature of socialism and the left-relation of nationalism. And today we're going to go through some of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise of a new kind of nationalism, one that's focused on taking back your country from debbueless global elites and from Zionists. They call it bogecommonism, but you might almost call it a kind of national socialism. So how do we get from Marxist-Lendonism in ideology who's defining thing is pure total opposition

to the American Empire to mogeocominism and think about how great the US is and how much they like Trump. Patriotic communismutism. Oh, that's patty pat. These are two just patriotic socialism and Manga Commutism are two technically distinct things will begin into that. It's a it's a long dark road ahead, but there's no light at the end of it either. It just it just keeps being long and dark.

So I think I think the place to start, if you wanna understand how this sort of like, or a Boris of shit emerged from the left is by talking about the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things that Marxist-Linanism did, and this is one of its key political achievements on the left, was to rehabilitate nationalism and talk about it in a way that was very, very different to what was happening in the left before this. And, you know, because the left around 2011, like around Occupy, but after that time, to be very skeptical of nationalism, because

they had come out of the Bush era, and had first had first had experience with what American nationalism really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks. Now, the Marxist Leninists are attempting to bring nationalism back into the left. They're doing this to the arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. The argument is effectively that anti-colonial nationalism and anti-colonial nationalism, because there's a bunch of them. And particularly like non-white anti-colonial nationalism,

like are the same thing as American nationalism and that these anti-colonial nationalism are revolutionary. And this is true in a lot of cases, right? Like Palestinian nationalism is like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah. And you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle, but I'm not going to like tell some Kurdish kids that they need to like abandon their desire to speak kramanji because it's like insufficiently revolutionary, whatever, right? Like, desire to speak Kermungi because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever, right?

But this is where we kind of start running into problems because, you know, you, okay, so what about like, bathism, for example. Bathism originally is a leftist, like nationalist movement, right? And they are opposed at least non-religious American imperialism, but they are one hard-line anti-communists and two hardcore Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable if you were Arab, but like God help you, if you were like Kurdish or a seriative Yazidi, or like any other national minority, under bath party rule where, you know, they're gonna ban your flags,

they're gonna ban your language, they're going to like keep you from like naming your kids, like your names. This is literally a thing, like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah, like it was legal, like your names. This is literally a thing. Like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah, like it was legal to give your kid like a Kurdish name in both sort of Bathast Syria and Bathast Iraq. And you know, if you try to resist this, they'll kill you.

And I'm using Bathism like as an example for this because like there are people now who are genuinely bathists, but it's like it's really hard to find people who support the bath party. But for reference, I have never heard of this despite my— You never heard of the bath party? It's just a dom— It's just a dom with S this party. And okay, well, in terms of its relevancy to the modern kind of working of

the sort of political spheres I operated, this is not something that has come up in my conversations. I've ran into a few neo-bathists, who are either like Saddam's or Walsers, the big bastion of kind of like, it's not even really bathism anymore, but like Bashar al-Saud technically is like a bathist. Okay.

Although his, they're not really bathists anymore. They just kind of have this party app where I still around. But like, you know, most people are like, okay, this sucks, right? But you know, I'm using bathism because it's the easy example. But this is a question you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements,

and it's one people don't like asking, which is whose nation is being liberated, and what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these nationalist movements produce. And these aren't abstract questions. One of the big examples of this is West Popuo, which is a place that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia. But Sukarno, who is this great sort of, like, Sukarno is this great anti-imperialist hero. He's the guy who did the Ben Dung Conference, which is the giant assembly of all of the sort of like Asian and African states to like join together

to resist imperialism. And but like one of the things that that this left wing Indonesian nationalism is about is their right to colonize Papua. So the West Papua and just get absolutely screwed over by by the Indonesians. And this is this is this is one of this place for you have to ask like whose nation is being liberated. And the answer is not to West Poppowents, right? They're just getting absolutely screwed because the nation is being liberated is this new nation of Indonesia and not them. And you know, I mean, I've talked about this on the show before like I'm personally skeptical of left wingwing nationalists' movements

because I'm from China or like, like, my family is from China. And we had two left-wing national liberation movements traded back by the USSR. And the first one, which is the Chinese nationalist party, made it about seven years before they turned on the Chinese working class and pushed or dimmed its treats with machine guns. And then it's been the next 70 years.

It's like a fascist desk-wide party. And then it's been the next 70 years is like a fascist desk wide party. And the other one, the Chinese Communist Party lasted, yeah, maybe like 40 years. I mean, they, they, the lasted like how many years in power, like 17 years in power before they got to the cultural revolution where they were also shooting workers in the streets and bulldozing moss and shing-john, which is a thing that they continue to do to this day as part of what is, and I shit you not, the name for the quote unquote counterterrorism operation that China runs in Xinjiang is the people's war on terror.

I wish I was making this up. I'm not. Right. And this is a product of Chinese nationalism, right? Like it's Chinese Islamophobia and Chinese nationalism that sort of do this stuff. I'm very skeptical of nationalism as like a liberatory framework, but like it's complicated, right? It genuinely is. Sure. One of these things that's, you know, like there are, there are, there are lots of nuances to it. And, you know, I think you have to take a kind of middle ground of like, you have to keep it kind of under control, but also like I'm not going to go

telepalestadian kid that their nationalism is bad, right? Like it's, you know, I should, I realized that I've never explained this the whole time I was doing this. So ML is an abbreviation from Berkshire's Leninist that people say because saying Marxhire's Leninist over and over again, like I've been doing for these past two episodes is that annoying? Wearing. Yeah. So thes decided to take the other extreme, which is just mainlining every single non-Western nationalism that he gets their hands on because they're trying to hold nationalist positions that are contradictory at the same time. So for example, like they're trying to be both, I guess I should explain this a little

bit. So part of it is people being nationalist for country that they're not from, which is deeply weird. Part of it also, and this is part of the reason this stuff spread, is you get Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists, like in response to COVID and anti-Asian violence or just sort of in general as a pipeline. But you know, you get people trying to have both being both like Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese national at the same time. And that doesn't make any sense. I mean, like the whole apparatus that all of these sort of revolutionary

anti-Napoleus nationalisms would work together was sh- like should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is just to pretend that it never happened. trying to invade a Vietnam. Their solution to this is just to pretend that it never happened. But like Chinese Vietnamese, Nationalists don't like each other. On the Vietnamese side, modern Vietnam. So they have basically their own,

it's not actually their own version, like it's not actually a Q and on branded thing, but they have a conspiracy theory. That's their version of the like, sovereign citizen, like Q thing. And their version of it is that it basically says that the Vietnamese government sold the country to China in 1990, and they're like embarking on like a 40 year plan to like fully sell the country

to China. And like Western MLs just completely ignore this stuff because it's not convenient for them and they just pretend that all these people get along. But this stuff gets, you know, it gets incredibly bizarre and like just weird really quickly. Like one of the things I remember from back in 2016, 2017, I was started, I was hearing like leftist talking about how Ukraine wasn't a real nationality and how they'd been invented by Nazis and that Ukrainians are inherently fascists and I was like, what? Like why is some random kid from New Jersey suddenly screaming about how Ukraine is like a fake nationality? And you

know, it turns out, yeah, Like it's because these people were like, really getting into Russian nationalism. In like, in like 2016, it was just deeply weird. And then you get to like 2022 and all these people are just straight up supporting like Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that like Ukraine isn't a real place and also is only Nazis and stuff like that.

And this has real sort of ideological consequences for what Marxist-Leninism becomes because it begins to pivot around a collection of nationalism. So the point where it's not even based on communism anymore, it's just pure economic nationalism. And this is a product of these incredibly convoluted gestifications they have to put together for supporting China, which is objectively a market economy. And like very obviously a market economy. Well, you know, so they have to support China will also normally be anti-capitalist. And I'm not going to go into these arguments because they're just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just weird

intellectual posturing. I think it's more useful to look at where it ends up, which is, have you ran into the people advocating bricks? It's like the great anti-American thing. Do you know what bricks is? No. Oh, God, okay. So I don't know, I don't think so. Bricks is a thing that stands for Brazil,

Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Oh, my God. It was originally a asset class developed by the chairman of asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how you know which really anti-aperealist, right? Like, it's a, it's a golden Sachs carrier of the Red flag. Yeah, like it's an investment, it's an outline of an investment strategy, right?

But a lot of these people become convinced that like bricks is like a real alliance. And these people are like gonna like create the multi-polder world where the US is no longer the only power. And this is anti-imperialism. And like, uh huh, yeah. This is like on a fundamental level.

If you're pushing bricks as an anti imperialist formation, like what are we even doing here? Like who is doing the socialism in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, right? Like is it the guy who invaded Haiti? Is it the butcher or Gujarat? Is it Vladimir? Quote, we will show you crane true decombinization Putin. Is it the African National Congress of selling your comrades out to Bank of America?

Or is it quote, we must combat welferism, Xi Jinping? Like none of these states are even remotely socialist. But people are holding them up as like anti-imperialist powers because you know, they're sort of faux anti-imperialism has completely devoured whatever the Ranticapitalism used to be. And you know, you shouldn't look too closely at like India's relations with the US either, pay no attention to the fact that India and Chinese truth periodically beat each other, the death and the mountains. You know, it's a disaster, but this is what happens when you mix nationalism with your socialism. And because of where this is going, we should talk about the history, a little bit about the history of displacing class struggle with the struggle between states, because one of

the people who does this is a man that a guy I said, I've got you, have heard of his name is Benito Mussolini. Uh-oh, yes, I'm slightly familiar with his work. Yeah, and Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in the beginning is that, you know, okay, so like the Marxist line is that there's a class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, right?

So the capitalist and the working class are fighting it out and that's the, you that's the logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting it out. And Mussolini goes, no, no. Proletarians of bourgeoisie have been replaced by the struggle between like, proletarian nations and capitalist nations. So this is, you know, you can start to see the outlines

of how we're going to get to a national socialism from here. But first, do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is it the products that they have? Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure advertising hates. Yeah, yeah, hates the Ted and national socialism We're back. Okay, so we have the nationalism parts in national socialism and One of the other parts about this nationalism is that It's the vector by which a bunch of right wing social values start creeping into these

breakfasts, Leninist spaces. Because there are still a lot of like old school marches, Leninist parties left over from like the 60s. But a lot of them are just basically right wingers now, like they're unbelievably homophobic, they're transphobic, they like scream about cancel culture all the time, like they're just boomers, right? But they're boomers who the thing they're boomer for

is Marxist-Leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing with this was to just ignore it effectively. And they do a really good job at ignoring this is happening, right? Like the fact that Russia has passed a series of laws that ban all gender affirming surgery and changing like, they ban all gender affirming surgery, they banned like anything that allowed would have allowed you to change your gender on like any, any, like any state identification documents, they've banned

same sex marriage in the constitution. They banned anyone, like the recent ones, they banned anyone from saying that same sex relationships are quote, normal or good. And those are their words, not mine. Yeah, I have seen this. Yeah, and you know, they've also declared the quote, global LGBTQ movement as an extremist organ immediately started doing raids on like queer bars and nightclubs.

And this has changed the minds of zero of the MLs who've been supporting, who've been supporting like the Russian invasion if you crane, they just don't care. And because they don't care, because they've been doing, they've been spending an incredibly little, you know, one of the things that they do too

is like they've been trying to, they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no, these places are actually good for group people. I see this with China a lot. Like, no, no, China has one trans person who is a talk show host. So conditions for trans people, they are really good. Meanwhile, like, actually being a trans person

and trying to fucking sucks ass, there's really only like a tiny number of gender clinics. You have to like, there's like this whole thing where you have to like get approval from a bunch of people to get surgery. You have to like prove you're not a criminal or something. You have to have like a grave, it's completely nuts. The whole system is just nuts, right? But they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or just completely ignore it. But, you know, they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave a space, like a leave room in these martial-slimatic spaces for people who are not really leftist at all, but are just like hard-lied homophobic,

like transphobic anti-American nationalists. And I started seeing this with, because so one of the problems that martial-slimaticism has is that it's not an ideology that exists outside of like the US-bwritten Australia, a bit of Europe, right? Like it doesn't exist in China. The closest equivalent to this stuff in China, like people who are very hard-line pro-Chinese government and are also pro-Chinese nationalists. The only people in China who believe this stuff are hardline right wingers, like people who are people who in the US

would be classified as fascists. And you started to see these people like moving into like Marxist-Leninist spaces, because nobody gave a shit that they were like, incredibly homophobic and transphobic. And they were just, I mean, again, just objectively right wingers, right? And they just start to sort of creep into these spaces. Now, this may or

may not have ever turned into a real thing. We don't know, but there are two break points that really like kicked the sort of birth of the like, like, Maga Commitism and Patriarchs also like the sort of right trajectory of this stuff like into focus. There was some stuff that happened in the middle of the 2020 uprisings and then surprise surprise January 6th. So do you remember, you probably, yeah, you were probably busy while this was going on. Do you remember the giant outcry over the book, Indefensive Looting? Uh, slightly. Yeah, I know that liberals were mad about the title

of the book, that's yeah. And, and, and conservative, obviously. Oh yeah, yeah, so, yeah. So, so in the middle of the uprising, I'm like, kind of, I guess, kind of towards a tail under the uprising, completely by coincidence, my friend and Vicki Austin while I've been writing a book

called In Defensive Looting, which people should actually go read because it's really interesting. And she got an interview with NPR about it and people lost their fucking minds about this book. Like everyone from, like everyone from Tucker Carlson to like sitting members of the US Senate were going

on record to announce, I think the Democratic Party like officially denounced it. Like it was, I have never seen this kind of like crosspartisan every like hate-mongering on a book and like the entire time I've been on the left. And you know, and this didn't just, it wasn't just liberals and conservatives and fascists who are freaking out about this. This extended to a bunch of the left. There was, there's a lot of like, like, I mean, editors of the New Republic, right, are like deriding articles announcing this stuff. Like, it is, it's, and it spreads across a social dynamic, credit left because the social democrats are mad that people are looting small businesses.

And the other group that really, really comes out against this is like Arthur Marxist-Leninist, like as people like the Grey Zone people really come out against this. And you know, okay, so like, why am I talking about people not liking a book? The reason I wanna talk about this is that what emerges from this specific thing.

So Vicki, the author of this book is both trans and Jewish. And what emerges here is this very specific combination of transphobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black racism, both explicitly anti-black racism, and in the form of crime panics. And if you look at all of those elements together, that has been the entire right wing strategy for putting all of the like up to the minorities back in their place after the uprising. Right, that was their entire strategy, the defense and small businesses, you know, and then turning that into a crime panic to rebuild support for the police. This was, you know, that anti-Semitism, transphobia, that is their entire strategy

for post 2020. And this is like, this is the place where it was first, all of it was put together in one spot. And again, like a lot of people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist-Leninists, like joining on this, because even though the point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property. Well, that is ostensibly the point. Yeah, but in reality, the market's letting us, they don't actually oppose capitalism. They just think it should be run by someone else. So everyone falls in line and joins this sort of, George, you know, joins the sort of ritual to downciation of this book.

And this is one of these things that really sort of cleaves, like it really, it cleaves the left in between the people who like actually fully support the uprising. And the people who are like, oh no, the small businesses, oh no, the horror. And the second thing that really reshapes the environment, like the whole sort of ecosystem, like of the left is January 6th.

And so I don't know how much people remember the initial reactions to it. I think the reactions to January 6th and the left can be divided into roughly three different reactions, although people have mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny. Reaction two, oh my God, the fascist tried to do a coup and installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three, January 6th was the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians.

Now, okay, objectively, we can say the January 6th was not the white working class having its revenge on the politicians. The January 6th was not the white working class. I think it's your beds with the politicians. If you are one of the first two opinions, that's fine, that's normal, that makes sense. If you're the last one, you should stop listening to this podcast. Yeah, and I want to actually, so I spent a bunch of time after this,

and some other people did this to you, like trying to figure out the actual, like who, from who was arrested and who we know was there, what their actual class backgrounds are. And it turns out the three most common kinds of people who were there are troops, cops, the small business owners, which is, yeah, it is as pure of an expression of the social base of fascism as you can possibly get, right? Like it is, the world was just like, hey, this is what fascism looks like. I mean, it is, well, I think, I, I think there's a lot of participants in that crowd

who I maybe wouldn't even consider fascists, but they are a crop of conservatives that are, that have the financial and social resources to be able to go across the country to this, to this big event to watch the soon-to-be-ex-president speak. Like, they have enough capital and support to be able to do this, which is very different than a whole bunch of like broke punks riding on trains to go to protest, halfway across the country. Like, these are two very different social factions. But yeah, it is a grouping of conservatives who are able to financially support going across the country to hear President Trump speak. And then in the moment, you realize, oh, wow. We're breaking into Congress.

Yeah. I think the thing I would say about that too is like, like, part of the process of what fascism is, is turning those people from regular conservatives into, like, into ground troops. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And that's what's happening here. But, but there's a bunch of the left who like absolutely insist that this was really the working class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing between a large

group of white people and the working class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing between a large group of white people and the working class. And these are the people. Okay. It's not good. They keep doing this. Like they were doing this with like a bunch of like French anti-vaxxers. Yes. There's like a bunch of people who were convinced like and this is this is one of the everything

we talked about this last episode. Like these people support the Canadian truckers convoy even though they're just right wiggers. The other big example of this is the Belgian farmers protests. This is huge farm protests in Belgium that are like a very big car cause the left on the right and literally the thing they are protesting about is that they're incredibly pissed off that there's environmental regulation to try to get them to not like dump fertilizer in the fucking rivers. It's like, that's the kind of thing that they're mad about. Like they're mad about environmental regulation, they're mad about like, like not being allowed

to completely destroy the environment completely, but because it's like a large mass of people, there's all these people who are like, ah, it's the revolution. It's like, no, these guys are like their small business owners on farms. Yeah. Ooh, a small bean. One of the products of this is this thing that becomes known as patriotic socialism. But first, do you know what else is a product? All of the wonderful little snippets of important messages that it was about to flow right into your brain as you listen to these ads.

We're back with patriotic socialism. So patriotic socialism is this thing that emerges in like, I think like late, I think it's like early 2020. it's like early 2020. I was too late. I'm just going to bid. I was too lazy to go back and find the first time someone used the term. It was, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm sure those two words have been combined many times. Yeah. I mean, like, it's in the modern context. Yeah. It's like, it's a thing from like, very, very, like, like, 2020, basically is when it, like, in the modern context, yeah, it's like, it's a thing from like the very, like, like, 2020 basically is when it, like, yes, the specific ideological strain that we'll be talking about emerges around 2020, I think that's fair. Yeah, and it, so Pitcharch socialism, it combines all of the elements that we've talked about

already, right? It takes the nationalism, the homophobia, the support for capitalist economies. But then it makes one crucial move, which is it flips the direction of the support for capitalist economies. But then it makes one crucial move, which is it flips the direction of the nationalisms. So instead of being like hardline anti-Americans, you're now like a hardline pro-American nationalist, who's the thing is that instead of being an anti-imperialist to ignore the war crimes of China and Syria North of war crimes of China and Syria and blah, blah, blah, blah. And obviously Russia, instead, now America is the best.

Yeah. And like, you know, I mean, they're lying basically. They adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line. The American Communist Party took on like the 30s, which was like, ah, the way we get an American revolution in America is through American nationalism. So we're going to post pictures of us next to Abe Lincoln, and this is going to make people not hate us. And you can tell how well this worked by tracking the number of people in the Communist

Party as they adopt this strategy in the late 30s and seeing how it plummets. So you know, winning ideas, great, great, great moves here. But, okay. So, the thing about patriotic socialism is that it never did that well because it sucks, because you can't, it was originally in the attempt to pull in people from the left, right? But everyone who looked at this was like, this is lame and sucks. Like, why would I want to get, why would I want to, like, do these people suck? I don't like that they're weird American nationalist. Why would anyone be interested in this?

And so what they were in, so that didn't work very well. The thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core of like Lurusheites and these like very weird third positionist people, but there's just not that many of them. I mean, they definitely, the people that were there pushing this as like an, as almost like a memetic ideology in 2020, there was, there was some of them who were more kind of typical like Marxist-Lanonists, people who kind of orbited around the writers at Grey Zone, like we mentioned in the last episode. We had this one, YouTuber named Peter Coffin, who was like, like a Marxist YouTuber. Yeah, the guy is most famous for kicking

yourself in the balls on live TV. Yeah, I think he was really one of the guys to kind of popularize patriotic socialism as a term even before people like Kinkl came onto the scene, which I assume will be getting too sure I will get to that. But yeah, it kind of circled around this like Caleb Mopin, Peter Cothin, circle of these sorts of like content creators and writers who were really into like classical Marxist theory.

But like not, but I, yeah, it's because, but they were, from, from, from very like statist, yeah, American imperial perspective, right? No, no, no, no, no. Like they suck as theorists, right? Like, and this is, this is like a, one of the trends of these people is that they're, and this is why it doesn't take off because like, and one of the other guys, he's going to become like a magma-communism guy later, this guy named Haws or Infrared. Who, he's like the big theory guy.

And stuff is unreasonable. He's just an unreasonable. Yeah, he's like a twist-streamer. He's stuff is completely unreadable. Like it's nonsense. Like to the point where even when this politics gets big and Hinkle tries to get people to read it, no one will fucking read it.

His own followers won't read it because it's awful. I think there's a difference between like, I don't think that this, at least in my observations of this political subculture, the point is not to convert people to your politics because there really isn't any core political essence of this thing. It's mostly a visual meme to get eyes on you because all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators. Like, it's all the way just to boost your personal brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal brand. All the guys who are pushing this really hard, none of them were serious about any kind

of political theory that tied to this emotion. They were all plugging their Twitch stream, plugging their YouTube. Their new book that's coming out. All of it was just to sell content. That's my read on a lot of the guys that at least initially started pushing this thing as a meme. Yeah, but I think the thing that's important

about this too though is the original guys were fucking losers. This is why this didn't work. Sure. Often, like, often starts doing this because his, his, his previous 17 griffs have all fallen apart. Like, he was, he, he's been through, he's taken every conceivable leftist position

to try to make a brand around it. And it was just failing, right? He told his attorneys that this doesn't work. And like, him and Mopin and like, the other people in the space, like, are so unbelievably uncharismatic. And so it just doesn't work. The thing about this too, right? It's like, the reason it doesn't work partially is because these people aren, right, is like, the reason it doesn't work, partially it's because these people aren't charismatic and partially it's because they really are obsessed with writing theory bullshit.

Like, yeah, the theory behind it is completely inculcated but they're like reading their theory on streams and shit and like nobody likes that, right? They need to produce some theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but like, Cuspin's all the time, they're dancing about haggle. It's like does anyone want to list like, do some theory to make themselves feel legitimate? Yeah, but like, Coss spends all this time dancing about Hegel. It's like, does anyone want to list like, no?

Like, I mean, I, I do like hearing about Hegel, but not from Coss. Yeah, but, but you know, like, like, he's like, he's also yelling about how like, there isn't a real left anymore because unlike the far right, people won't align with Putin. But, uh-huh.

Into this gap comes Jackson Hinkle. So Hinkle was just like a nobody. He was some random left Twitter person with like 10k followers. Yeah, he just lost a city council race in 2019. Like he was like, he was a joke. But in 2020, he starts to crack the formula, which is he, he figures out the same thing

that Greyzone people do, which is that you can't pull from the left, right? If you want to actually build a large scale brand, you have to pull from the right. And so he's one of the people who first gets really big into this thing called Maga Commitism, which is like kind of a,

it's like kind of a troll ideology, it's like mostly a troll ideology. It's been meant to be like, it's, yeah, it's, yeah. It is meme based. Yeah, basically what they've done is like, they've pulled together, it's an attempt to build an ideology based on pure authoritarianism.

Like it's based on like liking both Trump and Xi Jinping and Putin at the same time because all of them are powerful leaders who like want to restore their nation or whatever. And you know, but like the actual content of it is kind of nothing, but what Hinkel does and this is the thing he does that's very smart is that he's not in insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less smart than haus, but because he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less smart than ha's, but because he's not smart, he kind of half stumbles and half figures out into how you make

content for the right, which is just incredibly simple propaganda, right? You retweet right wing social media people. You make posts with very, very simple slogans and like sentences with like words that don't go above two syllables. And you get in every single time a right wing grievance thing happens, you just get in and you just keep cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day. He does this on his YouTube channel, he does this on his Twitter. He now has 2.3 million Twitter followers. But the other thing which he has made in the past two months. Yeah, yeah. And he was on, you know, and he's now taken like he's done one of these right wing media tours, like he's been on Carl Saini's been on fucking Info Wars,

he's been on OIN's The One American Network. And part of the reason this works is because right wingers love to find like, alum a nominal leftist who agrees with them. And Hinkle, you know, she gets into arguments people sometimes, like when he was on Alex Jones, they're Alex Jones, like, what do you mean you're a communist? Like what the fuck? And Hinkle's putting out some bullshit

about why a mere like communism is when no globalists who just do you know. He's like, in effect, they are doing a form of national socialism, which relies on anti-Semitism. Yeah, yeah. Which relies on anti-Semitism. And this notion of casting globalists

as Jewish Zionists who are secretly controlling all of industry. And we're going to give the real power back to the average regular working man, which is, he can frame it as communism, but like it is, it is, it is just a form of Nazi theory. Like that is what he fundamentally operates on. And he's, he's interesting because his, he is, he has gone, you know, as bad as the

like, transphobia stuff from last episode is, right? Like that, that is like an average, like, COVID-grifter thing. He has, he has, he has his own, has his own share of transphobia as well. Oh, yeah. We're the guests. Okay. Okay. He's way further right than anyone who's ever come out of the left to like do this kind

of thing has ever gone. Yeah. Yeah. He is like. So there's a video of him arguing with a guy named Sneakow and who who probably was just covered. He's just a twitch is just is a twitch streamer who aligns himself with a guy named Sneeko, who probably just covered his own point. He's just a twitch streamer who aligns himself with a whole bunch of influencers for young, usually white men.

Like he's like, close to like, Andrew Tate. He's just a fucking twitch influencer who courts unbelievably growing misogynist young man. Like that's the basic of it. You know, I mean, he's kind of, he's gone to the point where he's not quite in the same circles as Nick Fuentes, but that's largely because Fuentes is like a hardline Christian fascist and sneakers like a Muslim fascist in the same wall, like fat, he's like a foreign for a right wing Muslim

in the same vein as like I don't think he's really, I don't think Sneakho is really, I'd be politically driven like like, like consciously so. Yeah. He's just, he's just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you say certain things, you can get a full bunch of, yeah, 12 year old boys to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's, that's, it's really, it's really the thing. I think the core of, of his, of, I hate politics. He sucks so much. Um, but like, so Hiko goes on his show and he spends the entire show trying to convince Sneko that Hitler was gay and that

the reason and, and Sneko's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the, the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Research in Sneko's like, well, that was a good thing. And Hinkle's response is, no, no, no. All the Nazis were gay and trans. So they had to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover up the fact, like, the hide the evidence that they were all gay and trans. Like, this is a level of, like, homophobia

and like, transphobia that is like so far beyond the like normal shit that like, and you know, and this, and like even Sneko is like, what the fuck are you talking about? See, but I just can't take anything, Hinkel says as like a literal thing he believes. I think, no, he doesn't believe, he believes that everything is the matter.

She like, it's, yeah. He is the pure distillation of a man who believes in nothing. Yeah, like, he is, he's not even a person, he's not even a human being. He is just a content mill. Yeah, that's all he is. He's just a brand. But what he's discovered, the way he's decided to build his brand is by basically outfrying to, he's doing, okay, there is the weird manga communism and he does that less now because it's outlived a usefulness in a lot of ways.

No, it's now it's easier to be a Palestine. Yeah. And quote unquote, anti-zionist influencer in reality, he just is extremely anti-Semitic like this. Yeah, so that is his actual politicsSemitic like this is the status of actual politics. Yeah, let's talk about it. Okay, he's like, it's genuinely unclear to be whether he personally is really anti-Semitic. Like I don't know, he might be. I mean, there's, it doesn't matter.

But that's the thing, like he's like, the way that he talks about it, the way that he talks about how Zionists like rule the world. It's, you can just like control. Yeah, so we're gonna talk about that until the protocols of the elders sign on. Yeah, so this is the thing, like, Hinkle is not really at this point. Like, there is no person behind it, right?

He's just purely a right-wing male that regurgitate stuff. And the way to heat it, you could do this, is by trying to outflank the traditional hard right on anti-semitism. So let's look, let's look at, like, exactly the kind of anti-semitic shit that he's on because he is just straight up in anti-semitite, right?

This is not a, like, thing I'm saying because of the parasite stuff. So, Grant, the, like, last week, the trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 came out. Yeah. And there's like a bunch of women twerking in it and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff. And there's like, this enormous, like really weird, incredibly pathetic right wing, like, thing about it saying that it's like anti-Christian and it's spreading porn

to children and teaching people to do crimes and that shooting cops is bad and no one should ever play it. And because this is the current right wing media panic, Hankle starts tweeting about it. And his tweet is, so this starts with a really flag and it starts with that siren thing that people post when they're about to do an alert.

Quote, why are the Zionists all capitalized at rockstar games releasing this all caps, sexualized video game for children in America, get hashtag ban GTA 6, this is also an all caps, trending right now. So this is straight up neo-Nazi shit, right? This is a neo-nazi shit about the Jews that are promoting conspiracy.

De-generous. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is just a neo-nazi shit. And he's been trying to use the fact that he is more anti-symmatic than openly anti-symmatic, even then someone like Elon Musk, right?

Sure. And he's been trying to use this as a way to basically steal their bases so like Two days ago when this goes up three Really recently there is this giant like call like there's this giant like Twitter space thing that had Alex Jones Elon Musk Antutre and VVick Ramaswami in it and He go just like keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's gonna turn on the starlink internet stuff or Palestine. And these people basically tell him to shut up and kick him off.

But then he starts doing this giant, I've been censored media thing about it. And what he's doing here, this is something he does constantly. He's trying to take the bases of from people like Alex Jones, people like Elon Musk, people from Manchu Tate, who wants more open anti-semitism, right? Like, these people are anti-semitism. He's trying to flank them, you can say quote unquote,

from the right, but like at this point, the right less spectrum kind of dissolves into meaningless mumbo jumbo, but. Yeah, he's trying to, he's, well, I mean, he's just a fascist, right? He's trying to, he's trying to flank them. He's flanking them. He's flanking them.

From the anti-semitic wing. Yes, yeah. And, you know, but he's figured out, this is the thing that actually pushed him really into the mainstream is he figured out a way to do cover for this that also lets him get a bunch of like attention and clicks and stuff from the left, which is, and also like a lot of support

from Palestinians. And a lot of support from that in a second. People who don't understand who he actually is, or maybe they do, they just don't really care because it doesn't affect them. Because he is currently, possibly the most influential person talking about this conflict right now, like, like, yeah, at least on the internet, like his, his, his impressions is larger than anyone else. His tweets get read allowed in newsrooms across the country. Like he is succeeded in grifting off of this conflict to promote his personal brand in almost an almost unparalleled way. Like there's

never been someone who's done this as successfully as Hinkledo's for any other conflict. It is it is it is quite Quite Quite surprising that this is this one guy sitting and sitting in on his phone in America has has been this successful by essentially just tweeting non-stop Yeah, like to put this in perspective. So like yes Alex Jones got banned and that kind of like limited is coverage, but he has more followers on Twitter of now. It's Jones. Alex Jones has been on band for Twitter. Like he has more followers in Alex Jones. Like that's that's how and it's not even just followers too. It's how much his posts are seen and circulated. Like he was he was for almost I think the most of the month of October. He was person with the highest digital impressions on the platform.

Like he, he, his stuff was being seen by more people than anyone else. Like he. Yeah. So let's, let's talk about what it, that stuff actually is. It's, it's a, it's a combination of him just retweeting other people, stealing other people's like videos of like press conferences from like, come off. Most of it is dead babies. Like it's a bond, it's a videos of like press conferences from like Kamos. Most of it is dead babies.

Like it's a bunch of dead babies. It's a bunch of dead Palestinians just over and over and over and over again. And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire like how could the Zionists do this? One of the things about misinformation, mischaracterizing attacks events, like a lot of other basic stuff like it's yeah. And one of one of one of this tricks And this is this has been a thing for the use kind of like these marks on this people for a long time is Spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the Syrian Civil War. Yes, I like some palestines Which they do constantly and This you know and like one of the things that we haven't sort of touched on yet is like yet he

So one of the things that's happened with him is because he's the biggest person tweeting about Palestine. His, like, a lot of his tweets about Palestine are translated into Arabic and they're posted all over, like, Arabic Instagram, all of Arabic Twitter, like, they're, like, they're spent fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either, like, don't know who he is, right? Because they're only seeing, yeah. Palestine stuff, right, because they're only seeing Palestine stuff, right? They're not seeing his like raving about how GTA 6 is anti-Christian, right? They're only seeing that stuff.

And this has made his work enormously more popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. Yeah. And this is one of the really grim parts about this, which is that, you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting fucking killed all the time. Like every single day, another Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed. Like more and more Palestinian intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill the void

left by the fact that the Israelis have been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own fucking grifting brand. And he's able to do this because, you know, Hinkle is incredibly safe, just fucking living it up in the US. Well, the people who's suffering, he's exploiting, are getting fucking murdered in the streets. And he's making tons of money doing this. A enormous amount of money. Yeah.

And I don't know. I don't really have, I don't have a fucking solution to this. Like he's, he's effectively just figured out how to completely gain this system in a way that hasn't been done before. I think part of this is like with the way Twitter's content moderation is working now, Gore can be spread around in ways that it didn't used to, which is a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people. So he's able to do a whole bunch of quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images which draw more people to his platform.

He's just figured out a specific thing. He's been trying to do this for a few years with various types of conflicts or little bits that he tries tries to, tries to do this media strategy thing on. And this, this one just happened to work there with, there was, there was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to, to get, get, platformed by many, many, many unwitting people. And at, at this point, de platforming is not even an option. Like, it's like, you can't, you can't Like you can't deplatform someone with 3 million followers,

that just isn't, at that point, you just... He's also on YouTube with shit too, like, yeah. That's right, he just doesn't even follow anymore. Yeah, I guess one last thing I want to say about this is like, and he's been incredibly successful at leveraging, um, like a leveraging the fact that he posts, not, not even good pro Palestine content, right? It's because they actually got fucking sucks ass, right? It's, but he's been incredibly successful at leveraging that to use his defense against

any claims of anti-Semitism. And this sucks because he's, you know, he's, he's effectively using Palestinian as a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to build a brand. Well, that also complaining about the degeneracy of seeing a whole bunch of non-white people having a beach party in GTA V, right? Like it's not like he actually cares about

the lives of Palestinians being killed because he's complaining about black people in GTA 5. Like, come on. Like, he is, he's just an antisemitic fascist. This is very, very clear. I think the thing that can be done is we need to, like, these people can't be allowed to fucking get their start here.

Like, we can't be having a bunch of fucking transphobes in anti-Semites. We can't be having all of these fucking homophobic right wing nationalists like in leftist spaces. They just, like, they can't be here. Because if they had actually been, you know, a kind of sustained effort to get these people fucking out before they pulled all of this shit. We wouldn't be here right now. But that wasn't done. People were just completely okay with having all of these right wingers just being there because they supported the same states that they do. And because of that, we're here.

I mean, yeah, I really only see that on like the heavily communist and statist contingent of the left. These types of people aren't super popular among most social Democrats. At least recently, there's been a harder divide, at least from my observation, between like Sochdem's, between like socialists, libertarian socialists, and the people who are like hard-lined,

I am a Marxist-lenonist. I am affiliated with these Marxist-lenonist organizations, and those are the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind of almost like prey on to like gain followers and gains of work. And I would say this, like those groups, like the PSL for example, so I'm gonna be like,

PSL is one example. And like they also have a whole bunch of horror stories about them chasing down abusers. Like I know people who they liked a tweet that was talking about how the PSL had fucked up a sexual assault investigation. And they were dragged because they have liked a tweet about this. They were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee

where Gloria Rivera, their fucking, like eternal presidential candidates, started doing a bunch of fucking transphobia shit, and then covering it with the exact same gray zone, like I'm a woman of color thing. But these groups were like, they were on the edge of like basically becoming an on-relevant because they've been supporting Russia

during the war on Ukraine for this whole time. But then Palestine is the one issue, they're actually like, is the one issue that their stance is like, you know, tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all, all of these people have been using Palestine. Even these people who've been fucking pivoting hard,

and harder and harder right for years and years and years now have been like, have been exploiting the fucking genocide in Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftists clicked back. And it's utterly grotesque. Yeah, that's what I've got about this. It is certainly upsetting. Yeah, free Palestine, fuck the grifters. Go, go, go, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. He said to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something or paying you

something like that? I said, no, what you talking about? Right here, no idea. Who, had no idea who he had become. That's how he approached you. You know, he meant what he said that. Yeah, I'm thinking, murder, enemy, you know. I think that's what he was thinking too. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts,

Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical for free on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk He believed he was taking on a world-changing figure that night He was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also soared chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big

axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it getting the bars done, excuse being a total ****. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is on Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robock and TJ Holmes, a renowned broadcasting team, with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide, are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard

before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits. This was a scandal that wasn't. And this was not what you've been sold. The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic.

It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the code happening here. Today, my episode is going to be a bit more philosophical. I love me some philosophy.

I don't always understand it, but I do like it. And I read something recently that really stuck with me, especially in the context of what is currently going on right now in Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. I read something and I couldn't stop thinking about it so I thought, let's just make an episode. So today I wanted to talk about this word I learned called grieveability. It was coined by Judith Butler

in this blog post from 2015, when Butler is asking the question, when is life grieveable? In 2016, Butler wrote a book called Frames of War, When is Life Grievable, and this is a quote from this book. One way of posing the question of who we are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived. That is,

it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities and to defend them against the lives of others, even if it means taking those latter lives. So that quote kind of encompasses the idea of grievability. I really just thought it was poignant to talk about and relevant because we are being inundated with all these numbers every day of casualties and death counts and collateral damage and people accept these things because it's part of being human. It's just the way war is, but I really don't

think we should accept that as the reality. I think that makes us callous. And I think accepting human death no matter in what context is a little bit inhuman. And so I think maybe that's why this concept fascinated me because tying grief to the concept of being alive. It truly is indicative of if that life is worth something to you or to the world. And so we're reading and hearing about all these live lost and we're giving these numbers and stories and these numbers are repeated every day and they increase every day and this repetition seems endless and impossible to change. And Butler is saying that we don't often consider the precarious character of the

lives lost in war. And Butler defines precarious character of the lives lost in war, and Butler defines precariousness as the following. To say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness being aspect of what is apprehended and what is living. Normatively construed, I am arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status. Butler goes on to explain that although this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot be properly recognized.

Butler says it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition, just as it can be refused by such norms. But the main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared condition of human life, so precariousness being a condition that links human life and humans to non-human animals. So for instance, to say that a life is injurable, that it can be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death, is to underscore not only the finitude of a life and that death is certain, but also

the precariousness of life that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means that one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know, and dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know, not at all. This existential reality that everything ends and everything is temporary,

this encapsulates our relation to death and to life. Precariousness underscores what Butler calls our quote radical substitutionability and anonymity, and that dying and death is just as socially facilitated as humans persisting and flourishing. So Butler is saying it's not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is intrinsic with birth itself, and birth is, by definition, precarious. It means that it matters whether a newly born infant survives, and its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care

for that being so it may live. I put the following sentence in bold because I think it's kind of underlying what I'm trying to say even though it sounds really simple, but only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. And again, maybe it sounds simple, but I don't think we actually absorb the meaning of what that means to value a life and to mourn a life. And this is how we come to the idea of grievability. The idea that grievability is a pre-supposition for the life that matters. Butler gives us this example, so let's think about this. An infant comes into the world, is sustained and sustained by that world as an infant and through to adulthood

an old age, and finally, eventually, it does. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grieveable, but it would be grieved if it were lost, that this future possibility is installed as the condition of its life. Life is celebrated because it can be lost. An ordinary language butler says grief attends the life that has already been lived, and presupposes that life as having ended. So the value of life comes from the reality and certainty that it will end.

And if we think about this idea of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that happens when death happens, grievability is a condition of a life's emergence and sustenance. This future concept that a life has been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived. In other words Butler says, this will be a life that will have been lived is the presupposition of agreeable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know it sounds heady and I really had to read this multiple times to even try to comprehend it, but essentially without grieve ability, without the impulse to mourn a life,

there is no life. Or rather, there is something living that is other than life. This other than life thing is a life that will never have been lived in the first place because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it is lost. The unease and anxiety and apprehension of griefability precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and apprehension of precarious life. And so, grieveability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living exposed to non-life from the start. To put it in maybe a simpler way for me to understand even is that a life is worth grieving because we already know it will die and that life is worth celebrating because it has already been exposed to death or the implication of certain death from the start. It is pretty heady, but

maybe I'll just leave you to marinate with that during a break and we can get more heady when we get back. Okay, we're back. Let's go back to the idea of war. One way of posing the question of who we are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.

War is essentially the division of populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived. That is, it has never counted as life at all. And we see this division of the entire world into grievable and ungrievable lives when we look at the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend their certain communities. This is kind of reiterating the quote that I'd started with at the top from 2016, but essentially to defend these certain communities against the life of others,

it usually implies the taking of those other lives. Butler here makes a reference to 9-11, explaining that after the attacks of 9-11, the media showed us graphic pictures of those who died, along with their names, their stories, and their reactions of their families. Public grieving was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation, which meant that, of course, there was considerably less public grieving for, let's say, non-US nationals,

and none at all for illegal workers. Butler says the differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance. And Butler asks, why is it that governments so often seek to regulate and control who will be publicly grieveable and who will not. Because it means something to state and to show the name of someone who has died, to put together some remnants of a life and to publicly display and draw attention to the loss. So Butler is asking in this context, what would happen if those killed in war were to be grieved in such an open way? Why is it that we are not given the names of all the war dead,

including those the US has killed, of whom we will never have the image, the name, the story, never have a testimonial shard of their life, nothing to see, to touch, to know. Open grieving is bound up with outrage. Outrage in the face of injustice or of unbearable loss has enormous political potential. Butler draws a similarity here to Plato. Apparently, one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban the poets from the Republic is that he thought that

if citizens went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw, and that such open and public mourning in disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul would disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well. And I didn't know this, but to put it in that context is really fascinating to me because it's essentially saying that if we expose human beings to the reality of tragedy in life, they might care too much and start to fuck up our politics essentially. So whether we are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking about effective or emotional responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power, and sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The blog post I'm referring to that Judith Butler wrote was written in 2015, so Butler

uses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of what they're trying to say. For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we saw how emotion was regulated to support both the war effort and, more specifically, nationalist-fulonging. When the photos of Abu Ghraib were first released in the US, conservative television pundits argued that it would be un-American to show them. Because we were not supposed to have graphic evidence of the acts of torture the US has committed. We were not supposed to know that the US had violated internationally recognized human rights. It was un-American to show these photos and un-American to glean information from them as to how the

war was being conducted. Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create a negative image of the US and that we had an obligation to defend a positive image of the country. Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, suggesting it was anti-American to display the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider and neither do the vast majority of people in power, but the American public should have a right to know about the activities of its military, and it should have the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on the basis of full evidence is, or at least it should have the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on the basis of full evidence is, or at least it should be, part of the democratic tradition of participation and deliberation.

So what was this really saying Butler is asking? They say, it seems to me that those who sought to limit the power of the image in this instance also sought to limit the power of the image in this instance also sought to limit the power of effect of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq as it did. I feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to what we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting horrific images of what is happening to them because of the state of Israel and how they're selective outrage because it is almost in polite

to show or proliferate these images that only show reality. It really feels like people are only outraged when they consider a life grieveable, which takes us to this whole topic. It brings us back to the question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable, and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that should be honored. This ties in directly to the idea of how effect or emotion is regulated and what we mean by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references the anthropologist Tallah Asad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing. In this book, the first question he poses is, why do we feel horror and

moral repulsion in the face of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the same way in the face of state-sponsored violence. He asks this question not in order to say that these forms of violence are the same, or equatable, or even to say that we have to feel the same moral outrage in relation to both. But Assad finds it curious, as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first take form as effect, are tacitly regulated by certain kinds of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel more horror and moral revulsion in the face of lives lost under certain conditions than under certain others. Assad explains that, for instance, if someone kills or is killed in war, and the war is

state-sponsored, and we invest the state with legitimacy, then we consider the death lamentable, sad, unfortunate, but ultimately not radically unjust. And yet, if the violence is perpetrated by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, that our emotion invariably changes, or so Assad assumes. Assad is saying something here that is really important about how the politics of moral responsiveness really feed into public perception, that what we feel is in part conditioned by how we interpret the world around us, that how we interpret what we feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself. If we can accept our emotion, could be affected

and structured by things we do not fully understand, can this help us understand why it is that we might feel horror in the face of certain losses, but in difference or even righteousness in the light of others. Conditions of war bring something really interesting here, this feeling of heightened nationalism. In this feeling of heightened nationalism, it's as though our existence is bound with others, with whom we find some kind of national affinity for, who are recognizable to us, and who can conform to certain culturally specific notions about what the culturally recognizable human is. And sure, maybe some of you are like, well, this is really obvious. Of course, some people care more about people who look like them

or about things that directly affect them. But what I'm arguing is that I can't accept that as reality. I don't think we should accept humans as by default callus. There's no way change happens that way. I think we have to question why we unconsciously are more outraged by certain losses than others or why the public is this way even if you are not. That's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of information. Let's take our second break. We can just marinate with all of that and we'll be right back to wrap this up. Okay, we're back. So we discussed the differentiation of the population of the world into grieveable and ungrieveable lives.

And now we are going to differentiate between the populations on whom your life and existence depend on, and those populations who represent a direct threat to your life and existence depend on, and those populations represent a direct threat to your life and existence. This is a concept that really struck me as something we don't even give a second thought to, that when a population appears as a direct threat to your life, they do not appear as lives, but as a threat to life. Butler asks us to consider how this is shown with how the world views and interprets Islam. Islam is portrayed in scene by our media, whether it's implicit or explicit,

as barbaric or pre-modern, as not having yet conformed to the norms that make the human recognizable to the West, to the American. So those who Americans kill by following this line of thought are not quite human. They are not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over their loss of life as we do the loss of life that bear national or religious similarity to our own. And again, this isn't a novel concept, in simple terms, it can

be whittled down to the reality that most people only care about things that directly affect them, or things that happen to those who look like them. And again, maybe that seems like an obvious realization to make about our society, but what I'm asking you to do is not just accept this as part of the human condition, and to question why it is like that in the first place. True, deep understanding of ourselves and of our humanity is dependent on us excavating ugly truths about ourselves and humanity that we are not even aware of. I think this is something that bothers me about how Israel's narrative or the Zionist narrative

of the conception of Israel almost makes them seem sinless. They had done nothing wrong. The Arabs were barbarians that didn't leave them alone. The same can be said about how American history books talked about Columbus and the Native American people here. Usually history is written by those who want to appear in a better light and By default, I feel like this makes them sinless and pure and can do no wrong but again Better understanding if humanity means accepting that sometimes it is grotesque and I think that is something we need to

Accept and understand I think Israelis need to accept that the Necba happened in order to move on from it. Things like that is what I'm thinking about when I read about this stuff. But anyways, Talal Assad is wondering why modes of death dealing are apprehended differently, why we object to the deaths that are caused by suicide bombing more forcefully and with greater moral outrage than we do those deaths that are caused by aerial bombings. And then Butler takes this back to how we differentiate populations. How some are considered from the start very much alive and others more questionably

alive, or as living figures of the threat to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as, quote, socially dead, which is the term that Jamaican-American historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of the slave. War relies on and perpetuates a way of dividing lives into those who are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when they are lost, and those that are not quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it should come as no surprise that the death of Ungrievable Lives would cause deep outrage on the part of those who understand and are seeing that their lives are not considered to be lives in any meaningful sense of the word in this world.

Butler explains that although the logic of self-defense portrays such populations as threats to life as we know it, they are themselves living populations with whom our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us. What does that mean? Well, it's about how interdependency is interpreted and executed and how it has concrete implications for who survives, who thrives, who barely makes it, and who is eliminated or left to die.

Butler writes, when nations such as the US or Israel argue that their survival is served by war, a systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason I am not free to destroy another, and indeed, why nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences, that is doubtless true. But what may be finally more true is that the subject I am is bound to the subject I am not that we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed and that we are bound to one another in this power and in this precariousness.

In this sense, we are all precarious lives. That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article as a whole or this blog post as a whole, kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're all the same and our divisions are truly man-made. Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives or just this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining. I think it's worth examining how now in real time we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This is across the board. I'm not just talking about one

group of people. Grievable lives, I think, are this concept for me. And tying grief intrinsically to life is essential to understanding why it is life is valuable at all. It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it. And I think this also can go back to how we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right now describe Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims. This all leads to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem inhuman and in a way unalive.

So with all of that, I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah, until next time time you know how it goes. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. Jamil Alamin, a Muslim leader in former Black Power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. He said to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something to pay you something.

Like I said, no, what you talking about? But I had no idea who he had become. That's how he approached you. You know, he meant what he said that. Yeah, I'm thinking, murder, enemy, you know. I think that's what he was thinking to me. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now.

Listen to the new podcast Radical for free on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional networks. When I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint, and they're just putting big axes on machines, and it's almost like kids playing on the playground,

just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done an excuse being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series

as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Roboc and TJ Holmes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide are sharing their voices and perspectives

in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture and everything in between. Nothing is off limits. This was a scandal that wasn't. And this was not what you've been sold. The Aimean TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic.

It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. Hello Mia. Get your podcasts. We are not talking about people who are pulling it back together. We are talking about a guy who is constantly struggling to hold it together, and that my friend is Joseph Robinette Biden, old guy, United States president,

and a border fascist. And what's happening? Why are we talking about Joseph Robinette Biden today? Well, because you will remember that Biden made some promises. It went when he was campaigning in 2020. And it will shock you to hear that he is throwing migrants under the bus again, and in attempt to get Republicans in a Senate to stop stamping their feet and wailing and having a tantrum. Specifically, the Senate failed to pass an emergency spending bill which would fund military aid.

Among other things, it would fund military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. And the reason they did that is because these Republicans are having a little tantrum about quote unquote border security. Border security probably doesn't mean what you think it means. In practical terms, what border security means is killing more innocent people, more people who are fleeing the worst things that are happening in this world at our southern border. It is making America a more deadly place for the most desperate people on earth.

That is what border security means. That is what I want you to think of when you hear people saying we should secure our border because the people you're securing it against, the Aziti mother, I saw carrying her children to try and come to a safer place. They, the Afghan grand mother, who I saw walking through the mountains last weekend. Those are the people who we're securing our border against, and this is sorry, this just pisses me off to an unfathomable degree for many of you. But the reason we're talking about this today is because whatever happens at the border, right, whatever policy we have at the border, migration won't change, because what people are leaving is worse than that.

And so they will still come here because they believe the lies in America tells the world and it tells its citizens about itself too, that this is a safe place. And for some people it has been a safe place. And that's a good thing. But what will change is how people are treated when they get here because what Biden has proposed is a return to Title 42, a meta-host series on Title 42 that you can listen to. But what he's proposing this time is a very similar policy by which the Border Patrol agent who meets people after they cross the border in between ports of entry can send

them directly back to Mexico without them having a chance for an asylum hearing. Right. This is illegal under international law and parts of US law. It doesn't, it's not clear what Biden's proposing or what the administration is proposing to do about it. Maybe they could change the immigration law. They could probably get enough vote for that, given that people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants. But this isn't a well-fledged out proposal, but what it very clearly shows, right,

is the intent to throw some of the most desperate people on Earth at a birth. And that is, it's disgusting. It's a horror and it shouldn't be unexpected either. The executive is a branch in democratic control that is utterly incapable of helping a single person, but has the immense terrible and powerful authority to kill any person on earth and then secondary relate

to, uh, if I'm just going to call it effectively before ethnic cleansings by continually removing populations from the US, they could just do this. Yeah. And like I used executive for, yes, it is. Yeah, yeah, they have never once waved that executive power in defense of the little guy or people who desperately needed help. It would seem certainly not in the last couple of administrations. Shout out to the former Obama administration,

StarFords, by the way, for showing their whole ass by discreming racist shit at Muslim people in the last few weeks. But for people who had already ready kind of way to how terrible the Obama administration's policy was. So I want to talk a little bit about the things that they're trying to do. So the first and foremost would be allowing Border Patrol to summarily expel migrants. Let me explain to you exactly how fucking stupid this thing is. I was present with a Border Patrol agent last week who was trying to discern who was a child or not, who was hampered in this by not being able to count in Spanish. Border Patrol agents do take a Spanish class in their academy, right? But how

the fuck are we expecting this guy to discern the veracity of someone's asylum claim, when he can't count to 18, this person, under this proposed democratic proposal, would have the effectively life or death choice of whether someone can make an asylum claim or they get immediately bounced back to Mexico, right? This person would, for instance, have the choice to send a trans woman who would not be safe, quote unquote, remaining in Mexico while she applied for asylum here back to Mexico, to apply for asylum here, right? This person would be able to send someone who had very credible fears of violence in Mexico, back to Mexico, where they often have no network. They have no resources. And it once again, be putting the strain of our foreign policy and the fucked up shit we've done all around the world, that is destabilized regimes specifically across South America, but also all around the world.

As a consequence of that, people aren't safe there. They're coming here to find safety and we're placing in the hands of a random board of patrol agent who may very well not speak the language and understand anything they're saying to bounce them back. That's not how we should do think I think it probably goes without saying. They also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal. This allows immigration officials to report people without court hearings if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail their initial asylum interview. Again, this treating of people seeking asylum, like they don't have rights or right,

like they have to, they get their guilty until proven, almost in this system, right? And to be proven, right, to get these court hearings, to do well in these court hearings, any money, they need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost anywhere from six to 12,000 dollars from what I've heard, but these people aren't allowed to work in the United States. So we're creating a de facto system that privileges wealthier migrants, right? You know, 10, 12,000 United States dollars is a lot of money if you're coming from large parts of the world. We're way too much lower, right?

So having that kind of money isn't something that people who may be in desperate need of help would have. For instance, yesterday I was speaking to a Yuzidi family. Is Yidi, how have you want to say it? People will be familiar with the way their community was treated by ISIS right there, some of the worst genocidal and misogynist violence that we've seen this century was an ice depot in that community. They're coming to the United States to be safe and I don't think those people would have had the money to get together for

a hearing, right? They speak Kurdish. I've never encountered a border patrol agent who speaks Kurdish, right? So they would have to make their claim on arrival. They could be immediately rejected. They could if they fail their asylum interview, they could be placed in this expedited removal process by which they wouldn't have a right to a court hearing, a lawyer or translator or all those things. And the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do, I think this is the most bizarre one, is that they have decided that they want to mandate the detention of certain migrants to mandate the detention of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated. This one, it seems like an obviously a massive concession to this sort of insane Republican

right wing sort of demand that we criminalize all asylum seekers. And I want to say something like for a second about this too, because like, yeah, one of the ways that this whole anti-migrant thing has ramped up, like when I was too, because like, yeah. One of the ways that this whole anti-bigoting has ramped up, like when I was a kid, like as there was, I was growing up when this first sort of like anti-immigration hysteria was ramping up. And back then, the hysteria was illegal immigration.

It's like, this stuff is all legal. Like, you have the legal, like these are literally people doing legal immigration. Yeah, and we're just here now where it's like, no, like you try, you, if you attempt to come into the US legally, we are going to fucking put you in a camp. Like it's fucking insane. It's like, like this is shit that like even like 15 years ago, people would have been like, what the fuck are you talking about? But the way that the way that this has been accelerated, and this is something that's, and you know, like the fact that Biden is fucking been like, what the fuck are you talking about? But the way that the way that this has been accelerated, and this is something that's, and you know, and like the fact that Biden is fucking just like, just going like,

oh, yeah, yeah, we should, this is fine. Like we're going to do like this is, this is stuff that would have been unimaginable for a Republican president in the 2000s. Yeah. It is like the thing about this too is that none of this would have been possible without Democratic complicity. This is this is this is the way this system has worked this entire time, right? It's the reason they called a bomb of the deporter in chief because he was the guy who could

could have actually turned the tide against this stuff and just didn't and was just like fuck you. We're going to deport millions of people. And that's how we're fucking here with this shit over again. People who are literally coming to the country legally, which is what all these people said, spent all this fucking time saying you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, I mean, I think the claim of the Biden administration is I don't fucking know. Like they want people to use CBP one, right? CBP one is the biggest fucking disaster in applications. I can't think of any, I don't know. It's like as bad as fucking Tesla's autopilot if Tesla's autopilot got to decide your

whole future, right? Every single person I have met at the Southern border has tried CBP1. People aren't like, no one wants to pay someone to drive them off road across the desert to a shitty hole in the wall in the middle of the freezing mountain range, 80 miles east of here, and then to sit with their children while it rains, snows, freezes, and wait for one, two, three nights in this shitty conditions with maybe a tent that we dumps to dive from a Susan G. Coleman event, right? Or maybe if they're really lucky, like a to that mean my friends built from pallets. Right? No one in their right mind would want to do that. These people don't want to do that.

They've tried fucking CBP one. Most of them, who I have spoken to, are carrying visa rejection letters. Right? They've been to embassies all around the world, or just been summarily dismissed. They don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right? They've exhausted all their options. No one wants to spend their life savings and walk across a desert. It's dangerous, right? But that is the only way they can do it. And as you say, it is perfectly legal to enter the country between ports of entry and a medley surrender to the first law enforcement agent you see to claim asylum.

That is how one claims asylum when one is fleeing persecution and when we have shut the door through this stupid app that only recognizes white faces and crashes all the time and isn't in those languages. And it's entirely understandable that people are taking this route. We have caught the botlum migration and then shaken it up for three years with Title 42, which is this Trump era policy that co-opted the COVID pandemic, which they allowed to rip through large

segments of the United States community and pretended that by expanding migrants who are protecting us, it didn't have any provisions for us, it didn't have any provisions for vaccination, it didn't have any COVID testing, it was just a cynical attempt to use the pandemic. And it's we've seen through public records of questions, something they'd planned long in advance to evict people from this country without giving them a chance of an asylum hearing. And now Biden is doing this without even the pretence of an excuse, right? At least Trump made up some bullshit. It was transparent, but Biden isn't even bothering to do that.

And he's just going to boot these people back into a place where they're going to be vulnerable. I've spoken to migrants who have been abused, who have been robbed in Mexico. It's not a safe place for vulnerable people and the more vulnerable people you put into it, the less safe it's going to get. And nor is it Mexico's fucking problem, right? Like Henry Kissinger didn't fucking run Mexican policy and then get to live to 100 and Diane is dead, right? It's a lot of these countries people are coming from. They're coming from because we fucked up their policy as a country. We fucked up their future, right? We did this neocolonial thing where we stole everything we thought was a value. We imposed dictators upon them when they chose socialist or more

progressive regimes. And then we'd split our hands up in the air and said, no, you can't come here. It's no space, sorry. And it's fucking inexcusable and it's abhorrent. Mia, do you know what else is inexcusable and abhorrent? Is it the products and services that are to market on the show? Yeah, yes, the products and services that we so greatly love. Oh, hang on, I've got something to say about the fucking products and services.

We're doing this now, because we've got time. There was an advert for Novo Nordisk in our podcast the other day, and I just want to take this opportunity to say an extra special fuck you to them because I have held in my hand as a little fucking children who have died because they kind of fought insulin. And the reason they have died is because these fucking ghouls want to extract every penny out of those of us who have diabetes. So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you won't ever again be here some other adverts. We are back without hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me, Mia, and we're talking about

Joe Brandon and his terrible immigration policy. And so the final part of this, and perhaps the most bizarre one, is that the White House mandating the detention of these migrants pending their claims. The US has never had enough detention space to do this, and we don't now. It remains extremely fucking unclear how this will be done. I will say that there was a big fuss made me and maybe remember this that Biden was canceling private prison contracts when he first came into office. Do you remember his like executive order on this? Fagally. Yeah. Yeah. I think it got a lot of attention. That may have specifically applied to people who are in federal criminal incarceration. It's certainly never applied to people who are in federal criminal incarceration.

It's certainly never applied to people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained by third party contractors like Core Civic, right? And they continue to be so into the Biden administration because again, right, it is seemingly the implicit policy of the Democratic Party that these people are of less value and have fewer rights than US citizens or then people seeking permanent restricting in this country through other means. You know, one of the things, I was doing this for other reasons for not this story, but I was going back through it. I was reading the Democratic Party platform from 2020. And if you go back and read the Democratic Party platform from 2028,

the opening thing is them talking about the, like, how they're, they're when they were in power, they're going to do what's needed to dismantle, structure racism in this country. Fuck me. And it's like my ass. Like, and this is one of these, these really, the really sort of grim things about this, right? It's like the Democrats really, really cynically capitalized off of like, like people's revulsion at the fucking horrible stuff, from the student at the border. And then they got into power. They did all

of the same shit. And nobody fucking cares now because that's that's literally what the Democrats are there for, right? They're there to defuse people's ability, capacity, desire to resist doing the exact same fucking things Republicans are doing. And it's really effective. And the consequence of this is that now we're fucking here with like trying to bring fucking the same shit Trump was doing back. Yeah. And you're right. Like so many people poured so much rage and passion into like, I'm sure you can remember the whole no more kids in case you think. Yeah, I will say this. I was always kind of cynical about that because I fucking remember

occupied ice now, remember all those fucking liberals who told me they'd be marching in the streets just fucking abandoning us and leaving us to like deal with the fucking cops on a round. So like I think I think it is like there's been a sort of myth-logization to some extent of how willing people were to actually do shinder Trump. But they sure as fuck not here under Biden. So yeah, there ain't no one in the street saying no more kids and cages now, right? Like, then here for the little children, I've met, you know, day in, day out for the last six months who are going to be detained, who might be separated for their families. Yeah, and I wanna, this is kind of off topic too,

but like, wait, so this is a story. Like at some point, I'm gonna do an actual episode about this. There's been, I've been trying to get to talk to people about this for a bit, but so there's been a whole bunch of shit with a lot of so one of the the most important things that was happening with all these people is that like the government in Texas has been like shipping them to random cities. Yes, so a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago and it turned and they're eventually were protests here, but like our fucking progressive mayor tried to have a basically a concentration camp company set up like a camp for these people on land that it turned out. It had been a toxic waste dump. And only just didn't do. I don't even think he ever backed up the story here is kind of I think what happened if I'm remembering correctly is that the governor was like like Pritzker was like what the fuck are you doing you can't have this stuff be out of toxic waste site.

But so that's like temporarily been stopped like that's that's the kind of shit that's happening like in you know like like been stopped. Like that's the kind of shit that's happening. Like in, you know, like Brandon Johnson, like nominally is one of the most left wing mayors in the US. And this is what is fucking happening even in this one of the sort of progressive wing that Democratic Party, like the, the concern, like the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even worse in this stuff. Yeah, and like the entire democratic party in so much as it has, and there was a time

when it genuinely did show up for people trying to come to this country to see a silent at least, it wouldn't, this is like the immigration system is like a ratchet and it only moves to the right. And the democratic government, it wouldn't move to the right. It does now. And this means that there is not an electoral option for you, right? You cannot just vote. If you give a single fuck about innocent people living outside of this country wanting to come here and be safe, there is nothing on the ballot box for you to tick, that represents a serious option. And that's sad, yeah, it's a pretty fucked reflection of our electoral politics,

but I think it also impels us to, like look at someone who believes that there is not a ballot box option that is gonna deliver us a system with dignity and democracy and justice anyway. I think this is where we have to step up a system with dignity and democracy and justice anyway. I think this is where we have to step up and do the stuff that we always talk about. This happened a little bit in 2020,

and it happened a little bit under Trump, but now more than ever, the need to do mutual aid, especially for migrants, but also for a house people within your community, for all the fucking human detritus of Joe Biden's dog shit governance. It's right now. And like, it is, as I've seen personally, within the power of a very small group of people to impact the lives of a very large group of people through organizing.

Look, I've participated in Mutual Aid for a while. I'm sure many of the people are listening have as well. But if you haven't found the play so other way to do so, it's a great time to start organizing something. The options in the next electoral cycle are that things get worse, or that things get much worse. I don't think we have an option, which is dismantling the structural racism that is within the United States, or even just not punching down some of the most

vulnerable people in the world, it would appear. And so to protect those people, it falls upon our communities. And that's a big burden to shoulder, right? When the state has enough money to send 1,000 pound bombs to Israel. That means that we have to pay for beans for hungry children. Yeah, well, I mean, the thing that this too, right, is like, if you if you spent the amount of money that the US was spending on trying to keep a lot of the country on just like giving, like, if you just gave that money to the same, those same people, we wouldn't be having this problem right now. It is in like putting people in a prison is like the least cost-efficient way to do possibly

do anything. And it doesn't matter because the whole point of this, and this is one of these things with this sort of ratchet, right? It's eventually you're going to get to fucking like, you know, I mean, like the situation we have now right now in Greece where you have effectively a fascist government who's up like pot like when like when when when when when when when both slow boat loads of people go down in the Mediterranean, like go down the Mediterranean, several hundred people died their popularity goes up because, you know, and this is the thing you're going to be we're not that far away from in the fucking US is there a public in demand in like maybe

like eight maybe ten years is going to be just shooting like literally just machine guns at the border like this This is where this is fucking going. Oh, are you have seen the replies to my to my post Yeah, I don't know what I would I say different. I mean like like the like this is gonna be the demand of the fucking house like a Republican caucus, right? Like yeah, this, this is where this is fucking going. And the Democrats, like, you know, and the Democrats will take power fucking 12 years later and be like,

well, we're only gonna shoot some of the people at the border, people are gonna call this progress, right? Yeah, he's right. And the only way that this can be, and this cannot be stopped by voting for the Democrats. This is like, you know, and the, like, people, people thought this about Obama and people also thought this about Biden, was that we're gonna to vote for these people could be going to be good on immigration.

And like this is the reason why we're fucking our where we are now. So like there, there, there, there is no solution to this that doesn't revolve around like fundamental systemic change to what the US is because otherwise we're just going to every single fucking year. We're going to be back here. Yeah. Talking about being back here, we need to second advertising pivot, I think. Right? There are two mid-rolls in these. Yeah.

Yeah. So we are back here. Once again, lamenting the fact that we have to introduce these advert for you. Here you are. All right. And we have returned to lament the decline of the United States. I wanted to talk briefly about what Title 42 does to migration flow, right? As many of you will be aware, Donald Trump has built a big beautiful wall along the Southern

border of the United States. The caveat to that being only some of it, and they didn't do the hard parts, right? So the places in Hukumbu where people are entering are gaps in the wall, right? There are camps at three of these gaps spread over about a 15 mile area. There are gaps all up and down the wall, right? You're very often see people saying,

oh, you couldn't climb this wall, it doesn't matter, you just walk along it until you find a gap and get through it. You're so can climb the wall,, you couldn't climb this wall, it doesn't matter, you just walk along until you find a gap and get through. You're so can climb the wall, we've seen people climb the wall, we've seen people cut it with angle grinders. But what happened to a title 42, what happens right now under what's called title eight of the United States Immigration Law,

people enter the country through a gap in the wall and they wait and they surrender to a border patrol agent and say I'm here to claim a silent, right? And then they end up in these open air detention sites in a cummer, etc. What happens on a title 42 is that if you think you're going to be bounced directly back to Mexico and you believe that you aren't safe there, you attempt to avoid border patrol, right? And so you go to the places where they're going to be watching these cats in the war one with issue. So you go to the furthest places and the highest places and the highest places and the most rugged places. And you try

to walk through those routes instead. You try and walk through for instance Valley of the Moon, which is just an east of a cumberware. Just last week, some of my friends were involved in a search rescue operation for a four-year-old child who'd become separated from their family coming from Afghanistan and then they found that child fortunately. But if I can no one else would have done it, they hadn't been there, right? The result of this is that people will die, it greater numbers crossing our border, and that's what we saw around a title 42 under Trump, and that's what we saw around a title 42 under Trump. And it's what we saw in title 42 under Biden. Because there was like, I have attended

that you've heard about on this podcast. And the ones that I haven't and that you haven't heard about on this podcast are not going to stop because Joe Biden offered a concession to Republicans. They will keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much of the world is not going to stop. It will keep happening. Transphobia, a thing that we have exported culturally. Is that to un-brayton to? Right, Liga. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, Ireland of terms. So it's a collab- it's been a collaborative effort between you and the other countries.

Yeah, that's what a special relationship is about it's JK Rowling and Tim pull If the French are also complicit in this too, they're not getting fucking off the other shit But yeah, this is not a podcast. It's frowned stuff to hook. Yeah, but you know I like and this is something I think you're getting at too, but like We think you're getting at two, but like we in large part, like the US and the UK are responsible for why transphobia is as bad as it is in Mexico right now, which is it is so much more like

as bad as it is to be trans in the fucking US, it is so much worse in Mexico. Um, like the odds of you being killed are indescribable Even if you're not fucking killed. There's you know, I'm like this is actually like the the one of the episodes next third What week will that be the week after next like what I'm gonna we're gonna replay The episode like the interviews that I did with Maxine trans organizers talking about the turf's there because they are armed and they will fucking like actually will attack people. Yeah, it's like the United Nations says, yeah, it's bleak. The UN says that life expectancy for trans people in Central America is 35 or less.

Right? That's a dime older than that. That is abhorrent, right? That you are extremely likely to die young if you are trans. In places not so far from here, right? And I think that's what I want to get at. And it's the fundamental conceit of this whole thing is that border policy doesn't change migration. Migration happens because people aren't safe where they are. And that's why they leave.

They don't take this journey because it seems easy because even right now, it's incredibly hard. People walk thousands of miles, they walk across mountains, they run, they take risks and hop on trains, they get extorted, they get robbed, they get assaulted, young women often get sexually assaulted. Like it's a terrible and dangerous journey. And people won't stop taking that journey because Joe Biden decided to do something different.

The things that are driving them to leave their homes will still keep happening. And they will now have to take a more dangerous journey. And all that this does is make it more likely that those people will die on the way here, or that when they get here, they have to live their whole lives, always wondering if they're going to get sent back, right? Never really feeling safe. It robs people of what some of us can take for granted, right? Which is being able to go to sleep at night and feeling safe. And yeah, that's, I guess what we all voted for when we chose the anti-fascist guy in 2020 make it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of politics in this country and the impact it has for people who don't get a choice to vote in this country. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it is a, it is a functional,

definitional totalitarian regime and it will never be fucking described as that by the academics. You fucking use this language, but you know, how, how, how else do you describe living in a condition where you can at any point be removed and are spending literally all of your time attempting to flee police state? Like, yeah, yeah, the US, the US is and has always been an unbeliefably authoritarian state. And it's getting more so fucking every day. And you know, and this is also one of these things where it's like, I mean, we literally saw this in 2020, the people who got sent in to put down the uprising in Portland. It was fucking Bortak, right? It was, it was the, it was, it was, it was the border patrols, like special forces units, right? Like that's, that's the inevitable logic of this state is that

you any person who wants to resist the state eventually one day, these people will fucking come for you too. And the question is whether, you know, it's whether you start because poor tech didn't win really. And like the stuff that they were trying to do in 2020, like they, they basically kind of got beaten. But you know, they're still there. They're still getting fucking money. Like the money is sending to give more money. Yeah. So, you know, either we stopped them now before they fucking have another trillion dollars to spend on this shit. Or, you know, we fight them again in like five years when there's more of them and they're better funded. Yeah. And like, the final thing I'll say with regard to that funding is maybe you're meeting your family over the holidays, right?

Maybe hanging out with people he didn't often hang out with. Even if you don't care about, you know, the mother bringing her baby from Shin-Gaul in Iraq to here, who I met last night, right? Even if that doesn't bother you and you're so somehow heartless that you don't care. I will say that like every single time we put more money to board security to end up with all of us being surveilled more. If you attended a protest in 2020, you might have been surveilled by board patrol, right? If you walk around in the desert where I live, you're probably being surveilled by board patrol. If you use your cell phone without encryption, you might be

being surveilled at the border, right? The companies, many of them, uh, based in the US, some of them based in Israel that are surveilling Palestinians are the same ones that are surveilling us at our border. And this will come back to bite you at the arse, in the arse. This will come back to bite you in the arse, even if you don't care about migrants, because the moment you are not in lockstep with the government, you become a potential victim of that surveillance, right?

And a big thing with undocumented immigration is it essentially makes you a legible and therefore untaxable to the government, right? What would the government state? It is very core, one people to be if legible and taxable and countable. If you think that isn't going to bounce back on trans folks, right? And it's making them, or specifically, non-binary folks too, right?

Like the idea that you don't have a box to take on a form and that makes you harder to be legible and statistically quantifiable by the government. All of this will come back and hurt you, even if you're just a super right-wing libertarian who doesn't want to pay their taxes. Like this border security is a thing that will eventually be used against you. And I don't think it's in any of our interests to just keep handing these tools to the state that end up being used against the most desperate people in the world. And so hopefully, I know, like this, there's no one you can fucking vote for to change that. Yeah, yeah, you can feel free to write your legislators. I have been on the phone to my legislators about individual cases of people who I care about

very deeply, who are in a very grave amount of danger and they haven't done shit. So instead I go to the border and a bill shelters out of pallets and tops for people because it's the only thing that makes me feel like I'm not completely fucking powerless. And so if you want to take that power dynamic back, you know, cook some beans, make some rice, buy some tops with your holiday money and go right there and start doing mutual aid.

You don't even have to go on x.com or read it to do it. Just fucking go out, start helping people. You'll find other people who want to help. And you can organize. And it's about the only way I can see that you can make things meaningful, it better right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good message to end on. Yeah, it is. If you want to give your money to my little meat to late gang of wonderful people, you can go to gofundme.com slash her Cumba hyphen migrant hyphen camps. Her Cumba is J-A-C-U-M-B-A. But you can also keep it. And I would love it if you started something yourself and told us what you were doing. That would make things less shitty for us.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemeeta.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta.

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