It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 111

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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 It Could Happen Here, a podcast about a world sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host, Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel and the Gaza Strip rages on, and the moral authority of Biden and 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 this show. They aren't Chris Ruffo,

they aren't Libs of TikTok, and although they will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they aren't cut from that pre-existing template. These are our monsters. These are monsters birthed by the left I grew up in, by the generation of new socialists 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 this story with a taste of where it's going to end. Max Blumenthal is a left-wing journalist with the outlet Greyzone. 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 the 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 released a tweet about it. Blumenthal 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. Blumenthal responded, quote, Nobel winning inventor of the PCR test, Cary Mullis on Anthony, quote, I am the science Fauci, quote, and this is from Mullis. Tony Fauci does not mind going on camera in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.

where he says lie instead of lying there is a direct quote that is him not me so to understand how absolutely absolutely absurd this is we need to talk about who carrie burris actually is so max blumenthal is correct that carrie mollis won the 1993 noble prize for the invention of the pcr test which is now one of the basic building blocks of biology. They let undergrads in 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 were 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, Kerry Mullis, unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But the last part, the part where Cary Mullis claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, we need to talk about a bit more because it is absolutely monstrous and it is going to give Mullis a body count even Kissinger would not in respect to. So, OK, we need to talk about what HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm just

going to 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 proper 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 HIV isn for it now you can get treatment and you can live a normal life on the other hand if 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. Kerry Mullis, the guy who Max Blumenthal is tweeting a video of to go after Anthony Fauci, doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is caused by malnutrition 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 Foo 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 um it's the you know it's berkeley right like so some stuff's gonna some stuff's gonna be racist um 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 thombo mbeki under the spell of aids denialist including mullis declared that aids was caused by poverty not hiv many south africans were denied access to treatment. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, 35,000 babies were born with HIV and 330,000 South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily. 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 Blumenthal 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 shills and right-wing fanatics that the ideology spawned and who we're now having to deal with. People who are on Infowars 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. And they're people

who I've now lost. And 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 Marxist-Leninism as an ideology, and you could trace it through the 20th century, and you could trace the ways in which it is and isn't the ideology that Lenin had originally been developing. But that really is the wrong place to start here. If you want to understand how this ideology came to be and why so many people came to 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'd been told about the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about Allende and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about American imperialism in Lebanon and Haiti and Guatemala and Honduras and Iran, about Patrice Lumumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharto and the killing fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Che Guevara, about the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a thousand crimes of the American empire. Crimes we could spend an entire episode just listing by name. They learned in a tremendously short amount of time that the American empire was born of genocide.

It was built by slavery and is 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 Engels. And it led to other Marxists and to the great international enemies of American imperialism from the last century. Ho Chi Minh, to Castro, to Lenin, to the struggles against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like Fanon and militants like Assata Shakur,

it led them to believe, to really believe in the struggle against capitalism and racism and imperialism. And that led them to Stalin and Mao. And eventually, it would lead them down a darker path. A path where anything and everything could be justified, if it meant defeating the American empire. A path that told them it was their duty to back every state in the world who could even conceivably check the advance of American power. It led them to modern geopolitics, to the belief that modern China and Vietnam were socialist states still resisting American imperialism. It would lead them eventually to backing the very Russian oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. And it would lead some of them into the very heart of darkness itself, to an alliance with anyone and everyone

who opposed liberal interventionism. It would lead them to seek an 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 a government they

supported of being CIA assets, spread like wildfire. There were contradictions from the beginning, of course. How do you square your opposition to capitalism with your support for China, a country with almost a thousand billionaires? The solution was to lie. Lies about China in particular abounded. Many Marxist-Leninists 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. It's unclear to me if it's ever been true, even through the – I mean, I guess you could argue it was sort of true during the socialist period. It has not been true for a very, very long time. China has a lot of homeless people, but these sort of lies persist because they are what you need to believe in order to

believe that China is a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common line is that China has a fully socialized healthcare system. This is unbelievably not true. China, in fact, used to have something like a universal medical system that they operated in extreme difficulty with groups of people called the barefoot doctors who would go to rural villages that had never really received proper medical care before and attempt to treat them. This was a thing that China used to have, and then they tore it up and privatized it. And now Chinese private health care is an absolute disaster. Calculations 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 economies of entire provinces would immediately go under as an enormous majority of the corporations immediately went underwater. What we're getting this sort of picture of is people begin to believe things that need to be true in order to square their anti-imperialism or their version of anti-imperialism, which is opposing at all costs the United States, with their anti-capitalism. When the two begin to conflict in terms of attempting to support a very obviously capitalist economy. And this leads to some very, very bizarre twists and turns. One very common thing is for socialist and socialist organizations in the US, or at least I say socialist, I mean Marxist-Leninist organizations, to advocate for a $15 or $20 minimum wage in China while simultaneously celebrating $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 hardline murderous anti-communists who 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 ire of liberals, who, stealing a term from anarchists, began to call the Marxist-Leninist tankies. This, I suspect, if you have heard of these people, is probably the word you've heard used to describe them. So we should talk about what

this word actually means. But first, unfortunately, some ads. And we're back. Unfortunately, some ads. And we're back. To explain what a tankie is, we have to go back to, bizarrely, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. 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 a fascist and killing them all. And they were fairly successfully able to convince a large number of communists that the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They were aided in this by the fact that the liberals also lied about what the Hungarian revolution really was, and this is a lie that they continue to spread to this day. The liberal version of the revolution is that it was a liberal revolution by people who wanted liberal democracy against 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 Hungarian workers' councils. So workers across their factories seized control of their factories, threw their bosses out, 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. 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 an 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 were people, people leave communist parties in droves. This is a big enough deal that it

spawns effectively like a crisis in China, where there is a series of mass strikes and people chanting like, hear another Hungary. And in particular, the British Communist Party had a guy on the ground in Hungary reporting on what was happening. And his report 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 and slaughtering the working class. The term was revived in the 2010s to describe the return of Marxist, 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.

And 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-Leninists, they're also just – yeah, they're called MLs too, Marxist-Leninists actually are. Now, Marxist-Leninists, they're also just – yeah, they're called MLs too, Marxist-Leninists. Absolutely hate being called tankies except under the circumstances where they adopted, ironically. And I'm of two minds. I have called these people 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-Leninists who supported the USSR and believed that state ownership of the means of production was the socialist transition to communism. These modern quote-unquote Marxist-Leninists don't even believe that. Both Stalin and Khrushchev, for all the differences, would have had these people shot 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 re-education 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-throated support for the suicide nets to fly under the roofs of the Foxconn 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 whose sins spawned their bastard children, patriotic socialism, and eventually MAGA communism. So how do we understand what these people are? I am going to give the final word to Karl Marx, the man whose ideology, in theory, spawned theirs. I'm going to read from one of Marx's most famous works, the 18th premier. 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 in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus, 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. This is precisely the trap that Marxist-Leninists have walked into. Faced with mass social upheaval, they knew nothing better than to don 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. from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout well that's when the real magic happens so if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change

if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. Wooha! All right, guys guys i did my job that could happen here a podcast that i just opened by saying woo-ha mia i'm gonna 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 i just woke up we're talking about max blumenthal and i i'm just barely starting my coffee for the morning. Son of a bitch. I'm so sorry. I apologize to everyone, but unfortunately, this needs to be done. Yeah, he's the human equivalent of soap scum.

scum yeah so okay i 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 of these palestine grifters is that he used to be a pretty normal progressive now for some of the people we're going to be talking about pretty normal progressive was a thing they were in like 2019 uh for max blumenthalhal he was a pretty normal progressive in the 2000s and in 2009 he was a real journalist at some point right? yeah yeah he wrote this book called Republican Gomorrah Inside the Movement

that Shattered the Party which is a pretty good book about the rise of the Christian right and how they seized 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 him, we need to talk about his family.

Garrett, do you know who Sid Blumenthal is? Oh, yeah. The name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing any specific bells for me. Major Clinton staffer, right? Yeah, yeah. He was like Clinton's hatchet man. This is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but later Hillary Clinton too. He's like the guy who does the Clinton's political dirty work.

And he was a big guy in the 90s. who does the Clinton's like political dirty work. And he was like, he was a big guy in the nineties. He's the, the most impactful thing that he did for modern politics is that he is the guy who invented birtherism is slightly too strong of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like Obama birtherism, like into the mainstream because like as an attempt,

basically to kill Obama's campaign so that Hillary could win the nomination. How well did, how well did that turn out well it gave us donald trump so you know things things going great and you know so this is max blumenthal'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 Adam 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, 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 it was very hard to take pro-Palestine positions. And he just ends up in this sort of spiral where he loses most of his friends. His girlfriend breaks up with him.

up in this sort of spiral where like he loses most of his friends his girlfriend breaks up with him like he's not getting work from the usual places he'd be getting work from because he's been sort of like kicked out and isolated for taking this stance and the product of this is that he goes he takes this meeting that is very very weird so in 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 normal person almost no one has ever heard of this thing yeah so this 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 like uh like senior officials um very famously mike flynn gets paid 45 000 to speak there uh jill stein who's the the green party candidate in 2016 this is where all the conspiracies

running again for the green party this year tech yeah i i don't know if they're gonna be this year's gonna be theirs i think they got it i think they got it on lock now jill stein 24 wait she beat howie hawkins is he not running again i believe i believe it's her um that's last last i heard jill stein is is making is making another run for it god damn all right yeah yeah she has uh one month ago she launched her 2024 presidential bid oh boy so yeah okay so so jill stein this is where if you've ever heard the conspiracy stuff that's like jill stein is like a russian agent it comes from the fact that she was at this meeting and then started running for president. Now, what's interesting about Max Blumenthal going here

is at this point, he's a pro-Syrian revolution guy. He writes a bunch of articles criticizing Western leftists for supporting Assad. I want to read from a little bit of them because it's a really interesting look into who he was before and the fact that he knows exactly what the playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause,

the Assad apologists have eagerly played the Al-Qaeda card to stoke fears of Islamic takeover of Syria. Back in 2003, Assad accused the U.S. 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 that 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 under Islamic control. In his address to the Syrian People's Assembly on June 3rd, the dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the terms terrorist or terrorism a whopping 43 times. That is a full 10 times more than George Bush did during his speech to Congress in the aftermath of 9-11. In joining the Assad regime's campaign, the Jihad legitimized 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 Sharon, and the neocon cabal after 9-11. So this is pre-2015, like 2015, like pre this meeting, Max Blumenthal. So he goes to this meeting and then after that founds Grayzone and all of his positions suddenly flip. And this is the thing you can actually, if you

want to, if you go back and trace, so Grayzone is this sort of media outlet thing that Max Blumenthal founded. And it's interesting because there's a lot of, like Aaron Maté too, like if you go through the journalist in this outlet the moment they start working for gray zone all of their positions on stuff like syria just immediately flip um there's okay so there's a conspiracy version of this where like if you read liberal accounts of gray zone they will argue that max lima thought went to this meeting got paid off by the Russian government. And that gray zone is like a Russian asset.

I, I don't know. I don't think that's true. I, well, the thing I can say was nobody knows where gray zone gets his money from. Right. They're very,

they're very sort of like, like there's Patreon stuff, but other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it. There's no evidence like directly that he's been like paid by the Russian government to do gray zone. The thing that I can say is that he's been like paid by the russian government to do gray zone 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 um 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 generates a trillion 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 the the position that he starts taking is is the exact same position that he was 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 these big things is selling this line that like Assad is the defender of serious ethnic minorities, which is like a thing that I think would be news to them. And, you know, and he, he, he starts a podcast called moderate rebels,

which is a joke about like, ah, like the, the U S is funding moderate rebels, but all those people are actually like the the u.s is funding moderate rebels but all those people are actually like al-qaeda supporters and i i don't know like i think i think it's interesting comparing his pre-2015 writing to his post-2015 writing because he very clearly understands what he's doing like he he wrote an analysis of the thing that he's going to be doing 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 blumenthal figures out is that there are there is a very large market in selling a palatable form of islamophobia to the left um you're gonna see this in this is one of the things that he does in xinjiang um where there's he's he's part of this whole sort of sphere of people who are like there's nothing happening in xinjiang everything's actually great and with 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 Wahhabi terrorists. You can find some people who suck and go, oh, hey, these guys are all jihadists. And in Syria, this is sort of bleakly funny because if you know your war on terror history, Bashar al-Assad tortured people with the CIA, and the US held some Uyghur 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 this is something that there's a very old sort of tradition of this on the left that a lot of people are able to sort of graft onto. And I'm going to take an example of this

because I think it's important. Because one of the er sort of moments of all of this politics is the collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left-wing defense of Milosevic. So I'm going to read from, to take an example of like what this shit looks like, I'm going to read from an article that Jeremy Scahill wrote, which is, I think, the worst article about Milosevic I've ever seen. This is a Huffington Post piece. This is, I think, the worst thing I've ever seen written about Milosevic in a mainstream outlet. Here is Jeremy Scahill. Hill, 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 in 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 in Yugoslavia know it 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 Mujahideen eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia where they went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and bin Laden were on the same team. To this day, there are reports of training camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation. It is also likely a training ground for future blowback. So that's like nonsense. Like there are not, there are not

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

no, no, it must have been the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex-Mujahideen 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 it's it's all stuff that's like this and you know he also talks about how melos like melosovic would have like testified about the cia institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo. And like what? Like Milosevic is the guy who presided like he was one of the architects of of decollectivization in Yugoslavia. Like he is like before before he was before he was the butcher of Belgrade. He was the butcher of the Yugoslavian socialist state.

But you can you know, and so and he was he was just a hardline right-wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting, 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 leftist savior of Yugoslavia and you know I think the part about this that's really sad is like you know there was you know the sort of last true believers of the old Yugoslavian working class right were these the Yugoslavian anti-war protesters and these guys you know they they're they're protesting to stop the war they see coming that the serbians are about to unleash and they just get murdered in the streets by milosevic

you know well because seven years later the u.s 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 is a hero and this is you know this is this is just this is their big sort of like political trick is using the threat of like terrifying muslim like terrorists to just legitimize right-wing dictators uh i mean you know speaking of right-wing dictators uh yeah there's a non-zero chance there's an ad for someone who will be one in the future uh right now and we're back so we're back to this stuff and and syria and specifically the way people think about syria plays a huge role in the sort of development of the left um and one of the reasons

that the sort of new gray zone line which is that the entire opposition is composed of Islamists and that Assad is the only person who can stop them is that like you know part of the reason this works is that like yeah and 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 Jabhat al not covering syria very well they weren't covering the rise of like jabal tanuzra very well and you know they they they use 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 know now like assad is actually an anti-imperialist and and this works this works enormously well this is the sort of breach through which blumenthal enters the

mainstream and this this discourse about syria like reshapes everything about the left um this is where this is where american marxist leninism like comes from right like a huge portion of it is from the people who backed ass sod 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 syrian civil war in some way or another like the whole gray zone versus bellingcat thing is a like is is a thing that was originally about the syrian civil war um tropical trap house which is like i guess if people who don know, it's this massive like social democratic podcast, also like sort of came out of there. Like it was partially about like came out of like Turkish politics, but those are very, very similar circles like on Twitter at the time.

And, you know, and one of their big things is like Felix Biedermann's like the truth about Syria, which is a sort of slightly softer version of supporting Assad that also supports the revolution in 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 gray 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 hardline marxist-leninists who are just sort of like like kind of edgy bernie like birdie supporters and thisgy 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 the 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 and Hillary Clinton's gone. And people still do this like to this day. The other really common one, there's this little girl named B al-abad who's a syrian girl who got

uh 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 uh intervene in syria like turn it basically like this this girl is cia propaganda trying to like justify u.s intervention in Syria, like turn it basically like this, this girl is CIA propaganda trying to like justify US intervention in the war. Like that's the, that's the bit you see it posted a lot. People repurposed it after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians. It's like, it's like pretty fundamentally cruel. Yeah. And that's, that's how a lot of this stuff worked because it was was it's stuff that fits

into the social values of that part of the left at that time which is that both the marxist-leninists and what was called the dirtbag left around trapo was completely irony poisoned and like i get it i i was around then like i did my time in the irony trenches like it's really hard not to react to the world with ironic detachment when it's so fucking terrible but you know the the other side of that was like the these people started like we're doing these asadmias because they were like because they were edgy and contrarian and because you know like the like this is like the stuff with the bond this is the one of the things with the bonus of is like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is is something that's edgy and contrarian and like the like the performance of that was this very sort of like powerful emotional pull that that serves to

legitimize a bunch of this stuff and you know originally and part of the other thing here too is like everyone everyone in all of these circles their big thing is trying to own the libs and this is something that like the libs cared about and doing this thing of like how much you don't care about it and how much you think it's like them falling for propaganda. That was something that was heavily incentivized by the structure of how things like Twitter work and how retweets work. And, you know, but 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 um one of the most common sources about syria for both sort of marxist leneninist and like social democratic Twitter users is this

person named partisan girl who's like I still to this day like a very big media figure so she is a Syrian Australian quote-unquote Syria expert we don't really have time to get into all of her stuff she's been on info wars she's been on yeah she's been on RT a bunch I think yeah yeah she I mean she's been on David Duke duke's podcast david duke podcast yeah the former grand wizard of the kkk she was on richard spencer's podcast like she is just a nazi um the the last post that i saw from her was her responding to another guy who's just 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 stars of David on them, like including Max Blumenthal. And Partisan Girl's 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 you've included on here because they're Jewish, even though some of them aren't. He's just accusing the rest of the people who you've included on here because they're jewish even though some of them aren't he's just accusing random people of being jewish who aren't but that's the thing like she's straight up an anti-semite just actually a fascist i i like i literally like 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 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 syria analysis and this is you know one of the things that happens in this this is i'm gonna

kind of defer to you on this, Robert, because this is something I know a lot less about, but one of the things that the gray zone people become really heavily involved about is the doing a bunch of weird denialism stuff around chemical weapons attacks and Duma. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's, that's a, Duma. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of the nexus of the kind of asshole left takes on Syria revolve around is because 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 or defend him. It doesn't matter how many of his enemies were quote unquote Islamists. He was pumping chemical weapons into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to be that that never happened, right? That that was the CIA faking it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and it got blamed on Assad. A lot of it comes down to there's this

group. These guys are civil defense people. There are civil defense units in any city being bombed, made up of civilians in the area. When I was in Mosul, I was embedded with a lot of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go in and they pull people out and bodies out of wreckage after bombings. They're usually locals. They provide some emergency medical care to the extent that that's possible. There's people doing this right now in Gaza. And in Syria, it was the White Helmets. And the White Helmets were in large part formed by a dude named James Messier, I believe is the way his name is pronounced. He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that long ago. But a big part of this chunk of 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 Hook, where they're taking pictures of dead bodies and going, oh, this like a mannequin or like these are crisis actors and it's it's it's it's insane because it's like this is all the stuff that like the israelis are doing now where like they're taking pictures of a dead baby and going like this is a doll but so many people were doing this with like with this shit in sy. And it really struck me as like, I was kind of observing it from the outside because like,

I don't know, like I, the period where this was happening is a period where occupy ice was starting. So I was not super involved in this stuff, but you could just sort of see like the kind of the level of conspiratism, just like skyrocketing to,

to the point where like all of the stuff that's like the the modern like conspiracy canon is just getting embedded in there yeah it's where you see a lot of the a lot of the stuff that has been the norm on the right for 20 years start to take hold in the left um 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 pretty widely prevalent. Yeah, and 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 the US doesn't like, everyone on Twitter would suddenly be like, oh, it's a color revolution. It's a CIA op. All the protesters are being paid by the CIA. And I could pick a thousand examples of this from everywhere from Lebanon to Hongon to hong kong like every time a mass protest would start these people would be like it's it's a color revolution um i'm gonna i'm gonna pick one that i think i genuinely think is the most egregious piece of slander they've ever fucking printed or at least like like slander of a leftist group which is so ben norton wrote a piece that was about ecuador because there's been there there been a bunch of like Ecuador has periodic mass protests they also had

elections and Ben Norton who's another Grey's own guy who eventually like we wouldn't even have time to cover this but he's gonna break with the Grey's own people when

they take their hard right pivot because they start doing like anti-vax shit that's too much even yeah which has been at least a little bit of fun to watch yeah yeah

watching watching them all fighting each other has been oh god this little bit of fun to watch yeah yeah watching watching them all fighting each other has been oh god this is some of 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 um 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

neoliberal government since before Ben Norton was born. Like their big thing is doing is they do these days where like 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 this is one of their big things and gray zone like like norton calls these people uh anarchists inspired ultra leftist backed by the u.s which is just you know you're in for a good political analysis when someone uses the term ultra left yeah i love it as it's all it's like what oh no i'm an ultra leftist you my politics You know you're in for a good political analysis when someone uses the term ultra-leftist. Yeah. I love it as an insult. It's like, what? Oh, no, I'm an ultra-leftist.

My politics are too good. My takes are too based. Like, what? This is supposed to be an insult? Like, what? It's baffling stuff. Yeah, but like in the span of two years, they went from like praising the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of ecuador to calling them a cia op like again within two years um and and a lot of a lot of this stuff is based on the work of this guy named william engdahl i i don't know how to pronounce his last name i think i think it's william engdahl so he's he's a larushite um we've talked about the

larushites on this podcast before they're famous for like beating up leftists on college campuses in the 70s they're also like the most feted up motherfuckers in the entire world like they are they are snitching on leftist groups to like federal agencies you've never heard of before like they claim to have worked with the cia the fbi the defense intelligence agency directly cooperated with reagan's national Security Council like they have they are like the biggest snitches in the entire world and you know Blumenthal is like copying their stuff right like he's

this is where a lot of his stuff about what color revolutions are comes from and Engdahl is I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to some research by Emmy Bevensey who's an anti-fascist researcher so engdahl thinks that blm was a color revolution because he is just a a really really hard line like right worker 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 occupy is a color revolution and that's sort of like the far right of these of these sort of circles and uh i guess speaking of the the far right of these circles uh do you know what is the by far the right choice for you to to to to purchase to use your consuming power of the of of the purchasing dollar that's right these these ads great job mia that was that was wonderful and we are unfortunately back um well my wallet is later and i've never felt happier hey yeah so okay so so the reason we're covering this in the first place is the sort of right-wing pivot that this circle does. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about one more thing that is incredibly bleak, which is the time he accused a sexual assault victim of being a COINTELPRO 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 um in 2017 the dsa

has its first has its first elections after the giant surge of membership uh from both like trump winning and also bernie and they they have his first elections to its governing body and one of the people who's elected is this guy named RL Stevens um RL Stevens he's a very popular leftist leftist at the time he does this whole podcast circuit he's very charismatic he gets the third most votes of anyone elected to the national political committee but it turns out he is also an abuser um a woman publishes an anonymous letter about steven sexually assaulting her it is fucking brutal um ben norton who's one of his co-workers that we've talked about before makes a giant thread

accusing the victim of being co-intel pro um max blumenthal quote tweets it and says quote can't help but be reminded of co-ELPRO by reading this thread. And even people who are normally Max Blumenthal supporters were like, what the fuck are you doing? Um, and like the full story of Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement in this is actually worse than I can talk about on air. involvement and this is actually worse than i can talk about on air so after the first thread where he where ben norton calls it a cointelpoop he deletes that one because it's just not obviously not true 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 but when like during the in this fight inside the DSA between 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's there were some other people who are further right than them but they were they were like the center right of the dsa they were electoralists the only thing they ever wanted to do was canvassing like i was on and arl stevens was on the other side like opposing them and i was on like politically i was in the in like on the same side as arl stevens here right like i fucking hate the momentum people i think they destroyed the DSA. One day I will do a whole thing about them.

Like, these people, like, the Momentum people literally purged my friends from the org, right? And R.L. Stevens is one of their enemies. And that is not what this shit was fucking about. Like, R.L. Stevens is just a rapist. But, you know, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton came in and were like, shit this rl stevens guy is

like an anti-imperialist so we're going to accuse the survivor of being a co-intel pro-op oh my god it's fucking it's so fucking bleak um 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 with it because I was there when this was happening. And none of these people ever suffered any professional repercussions for this. They were just fucking allowed to do this shit and nothing ever happened to them. I don't know. It makes me just incredibly deeply angry. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it is like, there's that piece that goes around regularly about how like 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 you know and this is this is this i mean this is the thing that like like to this day there were like really shitty left-wing groups who still do this stuff you know okay so we're gonna move on from that to some very okay so this is you know all of the stuff that max blumenthal had been doing until that point that was all inside of the bounds of what was considered acceptable on the left and that sucks right like that's not good but by about 2021 he is and i i found the, I'm pretty sure I found the exact month where this happened, where in 2021, like Blumenthal just loses it. Like 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. then into stuff that's effectively just straight up anti-vax stuff. One of the

things that he ends up doing is, he writes an article about, if people back remember in COVID, there was the whole thing about flattening the curve and trying to get less people to die. And there was this whole debate over whether you should just not have lockdowns and let everyone get COVID and that would give you

quote-unquote herd immunity and everyone would be safe. And Sweden tried that and it fucking killed a number of people it was a terrible idea but like the whole sort of gray zone crew like starts well except for Ben Norton who leaves starts like rallying around this

stuff and it's really weird because like in 2020 when China was doing the 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 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 uh no not really yeah so so this this was this giant anti-lockdown like declaration that a bunch of right-wingers were pushing around that was it's

this giant anti-lockdown screed that's basically saying like the way to stop covid is you have to like open all the all the businesses again for safe when 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 burying decorations is so it's created by the economic, the American Institute for Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are. So they are a right wing libertarian think tank, which Blumenthal should hate. Right.

He's supposed to be a leftist. He should hate these people. They received sixty eight thousand dollars from the Koch brothers to do an economics conference, a thing that they are very mad about anytime so anytime someone tries to bring it up and talk about how they're coke funded they're like well we only took 68 000 one time to do one economics conference you can't call us coke funded but then like on their website they admit that they like quote for the record uh aier received 68 000 in Koch funding over the last 10 years and that sum was used entirely to offset

the conference of a single economics conference in 2017 with no links to the Great Barrington Declaration. Obviously, the reason the Kochs fund this thing is because these guys have the same economics like politics as they do. And as someone who has taken $0 from the Koch brothers,

I could safely say that it's bullshit to say that we only 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 American Institute 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 U S they said that that was a mistake. And they were advocating ending lockdowns,

reopening businesses. And this was an overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of people killed. Like that's what these people were trying to do. But Max Blumenthal suddenly is like pushing this stuff, like in pieces that he's writing for Grayzone. It's very deeply weird. And this stuff just as 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 Lofredo. So, OK, we need to take this in two parts uh 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 i i i mean like garrison i know you know this i know you know you do know what rebel news is the canadian yeah basically yeah yeah canadian bright part yeah it's like a bright part info wars type thing I know you two know what Rebel News is. It's the Canadian, basically. Yeah, yeah. Canadian Breitbart. Yeah, it's like a Breitbart InfoWars type thing. They have like podcasts and online sites.

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 branch in Australia.

They played a significant role in, if you remember, the basically caravan that drove. Yeah, we're going to get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting to that. Yeah, so Blumenthal is writing an article with Jeremy Lefrido, who is a guy who wrote a million articles for Rebel News.

In fact, as best I can tell, he was still working for Rebel News when Blumenthal starts directly linking to Rebel News articles about this stuff. Now, it turns out he was actually fired from Rebel News after a bunch of tweets surfaced, which, like, okay, the kinds of tweets- Do you know how hard it is to get fired from rebel news I track down these tweets um it is I'm not even gonna read any of them there are 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 um there's a bunch of him saying the n-word there's a bunch of like incredibly racist like anti-chinese stuff which is very funny 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 the big pro-china guy and here he is like writing articles with this deranged

anti-chinese racist and again like this this got him fired like from rebel news and the max blumenthal article with him is still up. Now, so that's insane enough, right? But the part I wanted to talk, the reason, that was a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was looking at this article. The reason I 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 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 a this is a very big right-wing conspiracy theory thing. Alex Jones is a 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 if you say something bad about the government, you won't be able to 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 U S like this never happened. It was never going to happen. But what's interesting about it is that gray zone is specifically writing about this, which is insane because again, this is, this whole thing is an anti-China is an anti-China conspiracy theory. And like the,

all of the sort of Marxist-Leninism's whole – one of their whole pitches was that they support China against American imperialism. And then within about a year, in a one-year span, they've just pivoted to publishing full-on right-wing social credit stuff. And by 2022, it's gone even further. This is where we get the truckers convoy so garrison covered this extensively on the show yes um yeah do you want to do like the really short version of what that was uh this a few kind of q anon influencers most of them based in uh alberta and then a few other kind of conservative influencers tied to, and some of whom were tied to Rebel News, kind of who were based more throughout Canada, organized this event where a whole bunch of truckers, but mostly just regular people,

would drive to the Capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau would meet their 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 going to make you guys leave.

And that was that so it caused kind of chaos in ottawa for a few days it was compared a little bit to like it's like canada's january 6th not really i mean it had a very large mobilization of people which was unique for canada and we've started to see some of like the the tactics and stylings of this of this trucker convoy get adopted both in Canada and the States. We've had versions of this tried to get started in the States. They never really took off.

People have tried to organize it again in Canada. It hasn't really taken off the same way. That is kind of the gist. I did a few episodes as this was ongoing and then I did a larger piece about the whole thing that was 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 right-wingers. Like, I have pictures of these guys waving Ustashi flags.

Ustashi are the guys who did the Holocaust in Croatia. There was a mix of conservatives to actual fascists with Nazi flags there. There was a pretty wide ideological spectrum that was present. Now, some conservatives weren't happy that Nazis were there and tried to get them to leave. Others are 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 strike looks on with silent satisfaction as the imperial trudeau regime imposes the emergency act to freeze bank accounts they wanted this so he's just fully like fully

spends his whole time fully on board with the truckers thing he's trying to convince people it's a trucker strike which is it's not it's like objectively it's not it's it's almost all these people are like anti-union who are participating yeah and they're also they're also like the actual people who are truckers are the people who own trucking companies they're not like they're not the people who are leasing trucks out they are like the owners of these trucks so he's really doing this sort of like. Like he's really doing this, this sort of like pivot, right? Like she was putting this up by 2023. He's just posting straight up anti-vax stuff. Like here's the thing that he wrote about Peter Holtz, who is this guy.

He was like this guy who was I 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 her like there's there's this whole thing where joe rogan was trying to debate him about whether vaccines worked and it was it was this whole weird thing meeting of the minds yeah yeah so by full of dollars like bill gates made hundreds of millions of dollars off his investment in biotech thanks to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear campaigns in history he called mrna a miracle vax a miracle now he admits the vaccines were semi-worthless big pharma junk and then uh but after contributing so much social damage with his unrelenting

sanatorium demand for hard lockdowns and the mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including to small children, Hote seems desperate to avoid accountability. So this is just straight up anti-vax shit. Right? Like, this is like where we are like now. It's like he spent like a whole bunch of like the last two years just tweeting anti-vax stuff, and this got fused with the lab leak stuff really quickly. This is something I think is really interesting, because it's another

demonstration that he knows what he's doing. So back in 2021, right after the Atlanta spa shootings happened, Max Lumenthal's reaction to it was like, oh, yeah, here's a – in light of recent racist attacks, here's a reminder of Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump, the Washington Post blaming China for cooking up COVID-19 in the lab. Rogan cited a US-funded dissident as a fake scientist to legitimate 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, if you want to hear me talk about the full explanation of that for a very long time so that's what he's saying in 2021 right is he has correctly identified that the lab leak stuff is uh like deocon like trump like anti-china stuff uh one year later, he has Jeffrey Sachs on the show to talk about how the U.S. 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, 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, just as an ideological shift. Right. But we need to talk about do you guys know who Jeffrey Sachs is? No, not really. Oh, boy. OK, 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 like 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 caused the largest drop in life expectancy between world war ii and covid right and like likes is not a bit, like, Sachs 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-communists in human history.

And here is Max Blumenthal, a man who is supposed to, like, his entire thing is about, like, opposing the imperialists to overthrow communism. Like, sitting down, having like a very, like, a very sort of, like, having like a very like a very sort of like having like a very palling around interview about uh that is that is sax pushing a conspiracy the ladley 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 you can ask the question why do this and the short answer people tend to give is just is money and that's like true but it doesn't go anywhere near far enough because I think the real answer of 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 the Young Turks taking this anti-trans, anti-homeless pivot. 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 have been for a very, very long time, but there's only so many leftists. And you can't pull from them all because leftists all hate each other so even if even if you try to corner like the market of one faction of the left another faction to left is just going to hate you because this is just how this is just how infighting works and so if you're producing something that's designed for the left and only the left there is built in a 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 liberals to listen to your show or you can try to get conservatives. But, you know, for people like Max Blumenthal or like Jimmy Dore dore for example is another person who did this big like anti-vax pivot around the same time max blumenthal was doing it they have a whole thing where they they're they're talking about how ivermectin is actually a good covid treatment together yeah he he used to be like a like a left-wing youtuber or as like yeah he was he was a he was a young guy from the young

turks um and he went off did his own thing is now like just completely only does anti-vax shit but but you know the problem is if you're if you're a jimmy door like you're you're gray zone right recruiting liberals is really really hard because your entire brand is based on how much you hate liberals and this means that the people who 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's not there there's like us 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 ministers 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 pandered to if you just like pump out like bottom barrel anti-vax shit like

they will flock to you and you know whenever you need to get leftist sort of back on your side right you can just start tweeting about palest, and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done because anytime someone posts a pro-Palestine thing, people just click on it, right? Yeah. This has been – so Max Wittmuth also spent the last about two years just doing anti-vax stuff. The moment Palestine became something that people were focusing on again and you know there are no reasons for that right like but the moment he did that he just pivoted back into doing palestine stuff and everyone just completely ignored what he'd been doing this whole time and if you do this and you could you pander to you pander to the anti-vaxxers and making

anti-vax content and then also you could just go back and regain your leftist credentials and get 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 lose all meaning, and the only thing that's left the left and the right and we lose all meaning and the only thing that's left is content in the culture war um and i want to close this episode by talking by reading something from another gray zone contributor anya parampil who is she's another gray zone journalist and she's max blumenthal's wife and she she is the gray 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, leftist white men now pander to other white men by telling women of color they're bigots for saying boys shouldn't be able to piss in the girls room. These same punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily... I don't know. Okay. Her tweet just trails off as bodily and says dot dot dot and just moves to another... I don't know. She's not a very good writer. Gender ideology has created a dynamic in which a bunch of men

can come into organizing circles, play victim and assert control over what is acceptable for others, especially women, to say and think. Most people know it's just misogyny, tied up in a frilly bow, but are too afraid to... Just dot dot dots off again. 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 same these are the same people who do not even believe biological women exist total incoherence so this is just a

collection of this is just a collection of like very basic right-wing talking points like this is just a collection of this is just a collection of like very basic right-wing talking points like this is yeah the the the the like um the false correlation between like uh reproductive health care and like uh vaccines for public health and the stuff about gender gender ideology all of it is just very very basic basic, like talking points used, 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 this stuff ends because this, this, this specific line, this is how you fucking make money. And, you know, there's, you fucking make money. And we could talk about a million more iterations of how these stuff fuse together.

I mean, Max Blumenthal goes to an anti-vax rally that has a bunch of three percenters and a bunch of just straight up right wing fascists. But this is at least one of the endpoints of where this stuff goes. But, you know, this is at least one of the endpoints of where this stuff goes. But tomorrow we are going to look at a group of people who took this even further. Yeah. So get ready for that shit because it's about to get wildly anti-Semitic. Oh, great. Hooray. Hooray.

Woo. hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

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Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy

Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. It's an introduction to the podcast. I'm your host, Theo Wong, with me is Garrison. Hello. Hello. Welcome to part three of this nightmare. Yeah, so, okay, all the way back in episode one, I said that Marxist-Leninism was based on a series of arguments about the state, the nature of socialism, and the left's relation to 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 nationalist socialism, one that's focused on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and from Zionists. They call it Baga communism, but you might almost call it a kind of national socialism. almost call it a kind of national socialism. So how do we get from Marxist-Leninism in ideology whose defining thing is pure and total

opposition to the American empire to MAGA communism, a thing about how great the US is and how much they like Trump? Patriotic communism. These are two distinct, patriotic socialism and MAGA these are two distinct patriotic socialism and and uh maga communism are two technically distinct things we'll be getting into that it's a it's a long

dark road ahead but there's no light at the end of it either it just it just keeps being long and dark so i think i think the place to start if you want to understand how this sort of like Ouroboros of shit emerged from the left, is by talking about the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things that Marxist-Leninism did, and this is one of its key political achievements on the left, was to rehabilitate nationalism and talk about it in a way that was very, very different to what was happening in the left before this. Because the left around 2011, around Occupy, but after that, tended to be very skeptical of nationalism because they had come out you know had had had had firsthand experience with

like what american nationalism really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks now and the marches londonists are attempting to bring this bring nationalism back into the left and they're doing this through arguments that aren't necessarily wrong um their argument is effectively that anti-colonial nationalism and anti-colonial nationalisms because there's a bunch of them and particularly like non-white anti-colonial nationalism like aren't the same thing as american nationalism and that these anti-colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary and this is true in a lot of cases right like palestinian nationalism is like a completely different thing from australian nationalism nationalism yeah and you know i i'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle but i'm not gonna like tell some kurdish kid that they need to like abandon their desire to speak curmudgeon because

it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever right like but this is where we kind of start running into problems because you know okay so what about like bathism for example bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement right and they are opposed at least nominally to american imperialism but they are one hardline anti-communists and two hardcore arab nationalists which may have been vaguely tolerable if you were arab but like god help you if you were like kurdish or syria or 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 your 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 illegal to give your kid like a kurdish name in both in both sort of Bathys Syria and Bathys Iraq and you know if you try to resist this they'll kill you um and I'm using Bathysm like as an example for this because like there are people now who are genuinely Bathys but it's like it's really hard to find people who support the bath party but yes for for reference i have never heard of this despite oh you never heard of the bath party oh this is saddam this is saddam hussein's party in in okay well in terms of the its revelancy to the modern kind of workings of of of uh the sort of political spheres I operate in. 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 Bolsheviks.

The big bastion of kind of like, it's not even really Bathism anymore, but like Bashar al-Assad technically is like a Bathist. really bath ism anymore but like like Bashar al-assad technically is like a bath okay okay um although his they're not really bath ists anymore they just kind of have this party apparatus still around but like you know most people are like okay this sucks right but you know

I'm using bath ism because it's the easy no but like this is this is a question you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements and it's it's the easy example but like this is this is a question you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements and it's one people don't like asking which is whose nation is being liberated and you know what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these nationalist movements produce and these aren't abstract questions right one of the big examples of this is west papua which, which is a place that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia. But Sukarno, who's this great sort of – Sukarno is this great anti-imperialist hero. He's the guy who did the Bandung Conference, which is the giant assembly of all of the sort of Asian and African states to join together to resist imperialism. But one of the things that this left-wing Indonesian nationalism is about is their right to colonize Papua. This is this is where this place where you have to ask, like, whose nation is being liberated?

The answer is not the West Papuans. Right. They're just getting absolutely screwed because the nation that's being liberated is this new nation of Indonesia and not them. And, you know, I mean, I've talked about this on the show before. Like, I'm personally skeptical of left wing nationalist movements because I'm from China. Like, like my family is from China and we had two left-wing national liberation movements traded back by the ussr uh the first one which is the chinese nationalist party made it about seven years before they turned on the chinese working class and butchered them in the streets with machine guns and then spent the next 70 years as like a fascist death squad party

and then the other one the chinese communist party yeah, maybe like 40 years. I mean, they 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 mosques in Xinjiang, which is a thing that they continue to do to this day as part of what is. shit you not the 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 huh right and this and this is a product of chinese nationalism right like this is 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's genuinely is sure. One of these things that's, you know, like there,

there are, there are, there's lots of nuances to it. And, you know, I, 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 tell a Palestinian kid that their nationalism is bad. Right. Like, you know, I should, I realized that I've never explained this the whole time i was doing this uh so ml is an abbreviation for marxist leninist that people say

because saying marxist leninist over and over again like i've been doing for these past two episodes is is annoying wearying yeah so the ml decided to take the other extreme which is just mainlining every single non-western nationalism they can get 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 okay i guess i should explain this a little bit so part of it is people being nationalists for countries that they're not from which is deeply weird part of it also this is this is part of the reason this stuff spread is you know you get like chinese people becoming chinese nationalists like in response to like covid and anti-asian violence or just sort of

in general as like a pipeline but you know you get people trying to have both being both like chinese nationalists and vietnamese nationalists at the same time. And that doesn't make any sense. I mean, like the whole apparatus that all of these sort of revolutionary anti imperialist nationalisms would work together was shot, like should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is just to pretend that it never happened. You know,

and, but like, like Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists and nationalism like don't like each other like on the vietnamese side in like modern vietnam so they have like a basically their own it's not actually their own version of like it's not actually like a q anon branded thing but they have a conspiracy theory that's like their version of the like sovereign citizen like q thing and their version of it is that it basically says that the Vietnamese government sold the country to China in 1990

and they're embarking on a 40-year plan to fully sell the country to China. 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 started i was hearing like leftists talking about how ukraine wasn't a real nationality and how it had been invented by nazis and that ukrainians are inherently fascist and i was like what like why is some random kid from new jersey suddenly screaming about how ukraine is like a fake nationality and you know it turns out yeah like it's because these people were like really getting into russian nationalism and 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 this has real sort of ideological consequences for what Marxist-Leninism becomes because it begins to pivot around a collection of nationalism to the point where it's not based on communism anymore. It's just pure economic nationalism. alluded justifications 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 while also nominally being anti-capitalist uh i'm not going to go into these arguments because they're just pseudo-marxist gibberish just it's just weird intellectual posturing i think it's more useful to look at where it ends up which is have 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 could i don't think so brick bricks is a thing that stands for brazil russia india china and south africa oh god it was

originally a asset class developed by the chairman of asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how you know it's really anti-imperialist, right? Like it's a golden 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 a lot of these people become convinced that like BRICS is like – it's like a real alliance and these people are like going to like create the multipolar world where the US is no longer the only power. This is anti-imperialism. And like –

Uh-huh. Yeah. This is like on a fundamental level. If you're pushing BRICS 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 of gujarat is it vladimir quote we will show ukraine true decommunization putin is it the african national congress of selling your comrades out to bank of america or is it quote we must combat welfarism xi jinping like none of

these states are even remotely socialist but you know people are people are holding them up as like anti-imperialist powers because you know their their sort of faux anti-imperialism has completely devoured whatever their anti-capitalism used to be and you know you shouldn't look too closely at like india's relations with the u.s either uh pay no attention to the fact that indian and uh and chinese troops periodically beat each other the death in the mountains uh 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 garrison i bet you have heard of his name is benito mussolini oh yes i'm slightly i'm slightly familiar with his 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 class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie right so the the capitalists and working class are fighting it out and that's the the you know the the logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting it out and And Mussolini goes, no, no. Proletarians and bourgeoisie have been replaced by the struggle between 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 from here but first do you know who else opposes a national socialism is it it's the products and services okay for this podcast yeah i'm sure i'm sure advertising hates yeah yeah hates the nationalism part in national socialism and one of the other parts about this nationalism is that it's the vector by which a bunch of right-wing social values start creeping into these marxist leninist spaces because there are still a lot of like old school Marxist-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 they're just boomers, right?

But they're boomers who the thing they're a boomer for is Marxist-Leninism. boomers who the thing they're a boomer for is Marxist-Leninism. The ML's strategy for dealing with this was to just ignore it, effectively. They do a really good job at ignoring this is happening. The fact that Russia

has passed a series of laws that ban all gender-affirming surgery and changing... They banned all gender-affirming surgery. They banned all they banned all gender affirming surgery. They banned like anything that 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 org and 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 invasion of ukraine they just don't care and because they don't care because they've been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know one of the things that they do too is like they've been trying to they try to make the argument that like no no no these places are actually good for queer people i see this with china a lot where they're like no no China has one trans person who was a talk show host so conditions for trans people

there are really good meanwhile like actually being a trans person in China fucking sucks ass there's really only like a tiny number of gender clinics like you have to like there's like this whole thing where you

have to like get approval from a bunch of people to get surgery you have to like prove you're not a criminal or something you 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 great it's it's completely nuts the whole system is just nuts right 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 leave leave room in these Marxist-Leninist spaces for people who are not really leftist at all, but are just like hardline, homophobic, like transphobic, anti-American nationalists. I started seeing this because one of the problems that Marxist-Leninism has is that it's not an ideology that exists outside of the US, Britain, Australia, a bit of Europe. It doesn't exist in china the closest equivalent to this stuff in china like people who are pro like very hardline pro-chinese government and are also like pro-chinese nationalism the only people in china who believe this stuff are

hardline right-wingers like people who are people who in the u.s would be classified as fascists and you started to see these people like into Marxist-Leninist spaces because nobody gave a shit that they were incredibly homophobic and transphobic. 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 um we don't know but there are two break points that really like kicked the sort of birth of the the of like maga communism and patriotic social like the sort of right trajectory of this stuff like into focus

um 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 the giant outcry over the book in defense of looting uh slightly yeah i i know that liberals were mad about the title of the book that's yeah and and and conservatives obviously oh yeah yeah so yeah so so in the middle of the uprising i kind of i guess kind of towards the tail end of the uprising completely by coincidence my friend vicky austin while i've been writing a book called indefensive 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 Tucker Carlson to sitting members of the U.S. Senate were going on record denouncing it. I think the Democratic Party officially denounced it. denouncing like i think i think the democratic party like officially denounced it like it was i i have never seen this kind of like cross-partisan every like hate mongering about a book and like the entire time i've been on the left and you know and this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and conservatives and fascists who are freaking out about this this extended to a bunch of the left there was there's a lot of like like the editors of the new republic right are like writing articles denouncing this

stuff like it is it's and it spreads across the social democratic left because the social democrats are mad that people are looting small businesses and the other group that really really comes out against this is like are the marxisteninists, like as people like the gray zone people really come out against this. And, you know, okay, so like, why am I talking about people not liking a book? The reason I want to talk about this is that what emerges from this specific thing. So Vicky, the author of this book is both trans and Jewish. And what emerges here is this very specific combination of transphobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, both explicitly anti-Black racism, and in the form of crime panics. And if you look at all of those elements together,

that has been the entire right-wing strategy for putting all of the uppity minorities back in their place after the uprising. That was their entire strategy, the defense of small businesses, and then turning that into a crime panic to rebuild support for the police. This was that, anti-Semitism, transphobia. That is their entire strategy for post-2020.

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

of these things that really sort of cleaves like it really it cleaves the left in between 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 if people how much people remember the initial reactions to it i think the reactions to january 6th on 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 on the left can be divided into roughly three different reactions, although people have mixes of them.

Reaction one, this is funny. Reaction two, oh my god, the fascists tried to do a coup and installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three, January 6th was the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians now okay objectively we can say that january 6th was not the white working class having its revenge on the politicians

if if you are one of the first two opinions that's's fine. That's normal. That makes sense. If you're the last one, you should stop listening to this podcast. Yeah. And, you know, I want to actually. So I spent a bunch of time after this and some other people did this to 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 and 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 the world was just like hey this is what fascism looks like i mean it is well i think this is 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. to be ex-president speak um like they they they have enough capital and sports to be able to to do this which is very different than a whole bunch of like broke punks riding on trains to go

protest like halfway across the country like these are these are two very different social factions um but yeah it is it is 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 yeah we can just we're breaking into congress yeah well i 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 yeah and that's and that's what's happening here but but there's a bunch of the left who like absolutely insist that this was really the working class because they

are chronically incapable of distinguishing between a large group of white people and the working class and these are the people okay it's not good they keep doing this like they were they were doing this with like a bunch of like like french anti-vaxxers yes there's like a bunch of people who were convinced like and this is this is one of the things we talked about this last episode like these people support the canadian truckers convoy even though they're just right wingers um the other big example of this is the the belgian farmers protests there's these huge farm protests in belgium that are like a very big cars 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 they're small business owners on farms yeah ooh woo small bean blah blah blah yeah 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 uh all of the wonderful little snippets of of important messages that is 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 um i i was too late i'm just gonna admit i was too lazy to go back and find the first time someone used the term. Patriotic socialist, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure those two words have been combined many times. Yeah. I mean, like in the modern context.

Yeah. It's like it's a thing from like the very, very like like 2020 basically is when it. Yes. The specific ideological strain that we'll be talking about emerges around 2020 i think that's fair yeah and it so patriotic 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 nationalisms so instead of being like hardline

anti-americans uh you're now like a hardline pro-american nationalist whose thing is that instead of being an anti-imperialist who ignores the war crimes of china and syria and blah blah blah and yeah obviously russia. Instead, now America is the best. Yeah. And like, you know, I mean, their line, basically, they've adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line

that the American Communist Party took in like the 30s, which was like, ah, the way we get a revolution in America is through American nationalism. So we're going to like 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 an attempt to pull in people from the left, right?

But everyone who looked at this was like, this is lame and sucks. Like, why would I want to get, why would I want to, like, these people suck i i don't like that they're weird american nationalists why would anyone be interested in this and so what they were in so that didn't work very well um the thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core of like laroucheites and these like very weird third positionist people but there's just not that many of them. I mean,

like they, they definitely, the people that were, they were pushing this as like an, it's almost like a memetic ideology in 2020. There was, there was some of them who were more kind of typical, like Marxist-Leninists, people who kind of orbited around the writers at gray zone.

Like we mentioned in the last episode, we had this one youtuber named peter coffin um he was like a like a marxist youtuber yeah the guy guy is most famous for kicking himself in the balls on live tv yeah well i think he he was really one of the the guys to kind of uh uh popularize patriotic socialism as as a term even before people like kinkle came onto the scene which i assume we'll be getting to yeah. Yeah, we'll get to that. But yeah, it kind of circled around this Caleb Maupin, Peter Coffin

circle of these sorts of content creators and writers who were really into classical Marxist theory. Yeah, but from a very statist American imperial perspective

this is the thing, they suck as theorists and this is like a one of the trends of these people and this is why it doesn't take off because one of the other guys, who's going to become a Maga Communism guy later, is this guy named Haas or Infrared who, he's like the big

theory guy, and his stuff is unreadable yeah, he's like a Twitch streamer, and his stuff is unreadable. Yeah, he's like a Twitch streamer, I think. His 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. It's all a way just to boost your personal brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal brand. your personal brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal brand like that all the guys who are pushing this really hard none of them were serious about any kind of political theory tied to this emotion they were all plugging their twitch stream plugging their youtube

their their their new book that's coming out like all of it was just to sell content like that yeah but that's my read on a lot of the guys that at least initially started pushing this thing as a as like a meme yeah but i i think the thing that's important about this too though is the original guys were fucking losers like this is why this didn't work sure often like coffin starts doing this because his his original previous 17 grifts have all fallen apart yeah he was he's been through he's taken every conceivable leftist position and tried to make a brand around it and it was just failing right he just turns to this it doesn't work and like him and moppin and like the other people in the space like are so unbelievably uncharismatic and so it just doesn't work the thing about this too right is like the reason

it doesn't work partially is because these people aren't charismatic and partially it's because they really are obsessed with writing theory bullshit like like yeah like the theory behind it is completely incoherent but they're like reading their theory on streams and shit and like nobody likes that they need to produce some theory to make themselves feel legitimate yeah but like haas spends all this time ranting 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 haas 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 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's just small. Who lost a city council race in 2010. He was a joke. But in 2020, he starts to crack the formula, which is he figures out the same thing the 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 manga communism

which is like kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideology it's like mostly a troll ideology it's memetic like it's's, yeah, it is, 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, but what Hinkle does, and this is the thing he does that's very smart is that he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less smart than Haas, 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, 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. Most of which he has made in the past two months. Yeah, yeah.

And he was on, you know, and he's now he's now taken like he's done one of these right-wing media tours like he's been on carlson he's been on fucking info wars he's been on oans the one american network um and part of the reason this works is because right-wingers love to find like a nominal leftist who agrees with them and hinkle you know he gets into arguments people sometimes like when he was on alex jones there alex jones is like what do you mean you're a communist like what the fuck and hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why america like communism is when no globalists it's just doing like in effect they are doing a form of national socialism, which relies on anti-Semitism. 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 just a form of Nazi theory. Like that is what he fundamentally operates on. And he he's interesting because his he is he has gone you know as 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 own share of transphobia as well oh yeah well we're gonna

okay okay hinkle is way further right than anyone who's ever come out of the left to like do this kind of thing has ever gone yeah he is like so there's a video of him arguing with a guy named sneeko and who i probably just cover just a twitch is just as it's a twitch streamer who aligns himself with a whole bunch of kind of yeah influencers young, usually white men. Like he's close to Andrew Tate. He's a fucking Twitch influencer who courts misogynist young men. That's the basic of it.

I mean, he's kind of, he's gotten 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 Sniko is like a Muslim fascist in the same, well, he's like a far right-wing Muslim in the same vein as like educators. I don't think Sniko is really politically driven, like consciously so. really politically driven like consciously so he's just an asshole who figured out that hey if you say certain things you can get a whole bunch of 12 year old boys to watch

your stuff all the time like that's really I think the core of his politics. Yeah I hate him he sucks so much but like so Hinko goes on his show, and he spends the entire show trying to convince Sneko that Hitler was gay,

and that the reason, and Sneko's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Research, and Sneko's like, well, that was a good thing. And Hinkle's response is, no, no, no, all of the Nazis were gay and trans, so they had to destroy the Institute of sexual research to

cover up the fact like to hide the evidence that they were all gay 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 i just can't take anything hinkle says as like a literal thing he believes i think no he doesn't believe he believes everything is memetic 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 that's all he is he's just a brand but what he's discovered the way he's he's decided to build his brand is by basically out trying to he's doing okay there was there was a weird market communism thing he does that less now because it's outlived its usefulness in a lot of ways. Now it's easier to

be a Palestine quote unquote anti-Zionist influencer. In reality he just is extremely anti-Semitic like that is his actual politics.

It's genuinely unclear to me whether he personally is really anti-semitic like i don't know he might be i mean there he is like it doesn't matter like that's the thing like he's the way that he talks about it the way he talks about how how how zionists like rule the world it's it's it's you can just like control yeah so we're gonna talk about that until protocols of the elders yeah like so but so this is the thing like like hinkle hinkle is not really at this point like they're like there there is no person behind it right he's just purely a right wing mill that regurgitates stuff and the stuff that and the way that he figured out you could

do this is by trying to outflank the traditional hard right on antisemitism. So let's take a look at exactly the kind of antisemitic shit that he's on, because he is just straight up an antisemite, right? This is not a thing I'm saying because it's palisade stuff. So last week, the trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 came out. Yeah. And there's a bunch of women twerking in it and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff and there's like this in enormous like really weird incredibly pathetic right wing like thing about it saying

that it's like anti-christian and it's like spreading porn to children and teaching people to do crimes and that like shooting cops is bad that no one should ever play it and because this is like the current right-wing media panic hinkle starts tweeting about it and his tweet is so it starts with an israeli flag and it starts with like that like siren thing that people post when they're about to do an alert quote why are the zionists all capitalized at rockstar Games releasing this all-cap sexualized video game for children in America? Get hashtag BAN GTA 6. This is also in all caps.

Trending right now. So this is straight-up neo-Nazi shit, right? This is straight-up neo-Nazi shit about the Jews having a conspiracy to degenerate. Yeah. This is straight-up neo-Nazi shit. And he's been trying to use the fact that he is more anti-semitic than openly anti-semitic even then so even then someone like elon musk right sure and he's been trying to use this as a way to basically steal their bases um so like two days ago when this

goes up three uh really recently there was this giant like call like ago when this goes up three, really recently, there was this giant like call. Like there's this giant like Twitter space thing that had Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Trey and Vivek Ramaswamy in it. And Hinkle just like keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's going to turn on the star link, like internet stuff or Palestine.

And these people basically tell him to shut up and like kick them off. But then he does that. He starts doing this like giant, like I've been censored like media thing about it and what he's doing here him off but then he does that he starts doing this like giant like i've been censored like 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 who wants more open anti-semitism right like these people are anti-semitic he's trying to flank them you can say quote unquote from the right but like at this point the right left spectrum kind of dissolves into meaningless

mumbo jumbo. Yeah he's trying to he's just a fascist right he's trying to flank them from the anti-Semite flank from the anti-Semitic flank yes yeah and you know but he's figured out and this is the thing that actually pushed him really into the mainstream

is he figured out a way to do cover for 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 we're gonna talk about that in a second people who don't understand who he actually is or maybe if they do they just don't really care because it doesn't affect them it doesn't affect them. Yeah. Because he is currently possibly the most influential person talking about this conflict right now. Like,

like at least on the internet, like his, his, his impressions is larger than anyone else. His tweets get read, read aloud in newsrooms across the, across the country. Like he is,

get read aloud in newsrooms across the country. He has succeeded in grifting off of this conflict to promote his personal brand in an almost unparalleled way. There's never been someone who's done this as successfully as Hinkle does for any other conflict. It is quite surprising that this one guy sitting on his phone in america has has been this successful by essentially just tweeting non-stop um yeah like to put this in perspective so like yes alex jones got banned and that kind of like

limited his coverage but he has more followers on twitter than alex jones alex jones has just been unbanned from twitter like he has more followers than a than Alex Jones. Alex Jones has just been unbanned from Twitter. He has more followers than Alex Jones. That's how big he's gotten. It's not even just followers, too. It's how much his posts are seen and circulated. He was for almost, I think, most of the month of October, he was the person with the highest digital impressions on the platform. His stuff was being seen by more people than

anyone else like he yeah so let's let's talk about what that stuff actually is it's large it's a combination of him just retweeting other people stealing other people's like videos of like press conferences from like kamas most of it is dead babies like it's a bunch it's a bunch of dead babies it's a bunch of dead palestinians just over and over and over and over again and then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire like how could the zionist do this well also one of the things about misinformation uh yeah characterizing attacks events like a lot of others basic stuff like it's yeah and one of one of his tricks and this is this has been a thing for these kind of like these marxist lenders people for a long time is spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the syrian civil war yes exactly pictures

from palestine 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 yeah 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 Arabic Instagram, on Arabic Twitter. They're spent fucking everywhere. And those people either don't know who he is, right? Because they're only seeing his Palestine stuff, right? They're not seeing his raving about how GTA 6 is anti-Christian.

They're only seeing that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is one of the really grim parts about this, which is that 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 brands. And he's able to do this because,

you know, Hinkle is incredibly safe, just fucking living it up in the U S while the people who's suffering, he's exploiting are getting fucking murdered in the streets. And he's making tons of money doing this. Enormous amounts of money. Yeah. And I don't know.

I don't, I don't really have, I don't have a fucking solution to this. Like he's, he is effectively just figured out how to completely game this system in a way that hasn't been done before. I think part of this is 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, draw more people to his platform. He's, he's, he's just like figured out a specific thing. Like he's, he's been trying to do this for a few years with very, with various types of like,

you know, conflicts or like little, little like bits that he like tries to, tries to do this media strategy thing on. And this, this one just happened to work. There, there was,

there was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to get platformed by many many unwitting people and at this point deplatforming is not even an option. You can't

deplatform someone with 3 million followers really. That just isn't He's also on YouTube followers, really. That just isn't... Yeah. At that point, that's strategy. He's also on YouTube and shit, too. Yeah. That strategy just doesn't even follow anymore. Yeah.

I guess one last thing I want to say about this is, like, he's been incredibly successful at leveraging the fact that he posts not even good pro-Palestine content, right? The actual stuff he's doing 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, he's using Palestinians as a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to build a brand. Well, as a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to build a brand well but also complaining about the degeneracy of seeing a whole bunch of non-white people having a beach party in gta5 right like it's like it's it's not like he actually cares about the lives of palestinians being killed because he's complaining about black people in gta5 like

it's not like come on like it's it's he is he's just an anti-semitic fascist this is yeah this is very very clear i i think i think the thing that can be done is we like we need to like these people can't be allowed to fucking get their start here like we can't be having a bunch of fucking transphobes and anti-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 if there had actually been you know a kind of sustained effort to get these people fucking out before before they pulled all of this shit we wouldn't be here right now but that wasn't done people were 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 right like these types of people aren't super popular among most like social Democrats, at least recently. There's been kind of a harder divide, at least from my observation, between like SOC Dems, between like socialists, libertarian socialists, and the people who are like hard-lined, I am a Marxist-Leninist. I am affiliated with these Marxist-Leninist organizations. And those are the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind of almost like prey on to like gain followers and gain support. And I would say this, like those groups, like the PSL, for example.

PSL is one example, sure. And like they also have, there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them chasing down abusers. bunch of horror stories about them chasing down abusers like i i know people who they liked a tweet that was talking about how the psl had had fucked up a uh a sexual assault investigation and they were dragged because they had liked to tweet about this they were dragged in front of the psl central committee where gloria rivera their fucking like eternal presidential candidate 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 um you know but these groups were like on they were on the edge of collab like basically becoming a non-relevant because they've been supporting russia during the war in ukraine for this whole

time but then palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like is the one issue that their stance is like you know tolerable to the general populace on. And so they've all, all of these people have been using Palestine. Even all these people who've been fucking pivoting harder and harder, right. For years and years and years now have been, have like, have been exploiting the exploiting the fucking genocide in Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftist cliques back and it's utterly grotesque yeah that's that's that's what i've got about this um it is certain it is certainly upsetting yeah free palestine fuck the grifters Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire,

join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. Check out betteroffline.com. calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, my episode is going to be a bit more philosophical. I love me some philosophy. I don't always understand it, but I do like it. And I read something recently that really stuck with me, especially in the context of what is currently going on right now in Palestine and the genocide 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 grievability. It was coined

by Judith Butler in this blog post from 2015 when Butler is asking the question, when is life grievable? 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, 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 lives lost, and we're given these numbers and stories, 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 precariousness as the following. To say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is 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, a 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 substitution ability and anonymity and that dying and death is just as socially facilitated as humans persisting and flourishing. So Butler is saying it's 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 presupposition for the life that matters. Butler gives us this example, so let's think about this. An infant comes into the world, is sustained in and sustained by that world as an infant and through to adulthood and old age, and finally, eventually, it dies. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life.

But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, that this future possibility is installed as the condition of its life. Life is celebrated because it can be lost. In ordinary language, Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the value of life comes from the reality and certainty that 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 a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know it sounds heady, and I really had to read this multiple times to even try to comprehend it, but essentially without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there is no life, or rather there is something living, 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 grievability precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and apprehension of precarious life. And so, grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to 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

lives 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 the 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-U.S. 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

grievable and who will not? Because it means something to state and to show the name of someone who has died, to put together some remnants of a life and to publicly display and draw attention to the loss. So Butler is asking, in this context, what would happen 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 U.S. has killed, of whom we will never have the image, the name, 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 belonging. When the photos of Abu Ghraib were first released in the U.S., 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 U.S. has committed. We were not supposed to know that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 did the vast majority of people in power, but the American public should have a right to know about the activities of its military, and it should have the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on the basis of full evidence is, or at least it should be, part of the democratic tradition of 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 effect, of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq, as indeed 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 there is selective outrage because it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images that only show reality. It really feels like people are only outraged when they consider a life grievable, 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 Talal 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 ought to feel the same moral outrage in relation to say that these forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even to say that we ought to feel the same moral outrage in relation to both. But 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, then 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 indifference 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 callous. 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 grievable and ungrievable lives. And now we are going to differentiate between the populations on whom your life and existence depend on, and those populations who represent a direct threat to your life and existence. 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 and seen by our media, whether it's implicit or explicit, as barbaric or pre-modern, as not having yet conformed to the norms that make the human recognizable to the West, to the American. So those who Americans kill by following this line of thought are not quite human. They are not quite alive, which 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 maybe 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 of 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 Nekba happened in order to move on from it. Things like that is what I'm thinking about when I read about this stuff. But anyways, that is what I am thinking about when I read about this stuff. But anyways, Talal Asad is wondering why modes of death dealing are apprehended differently, why we object to the deaths that are caused by suicide bombing more forcefully and with greater moral outrage than 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. 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, I want to insist on this interdependency precisely because when nations such as the U.S. 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, or 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, you know how it goes. Free Palestine. hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to

help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast,

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents.

Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hello. Hello, Mia. Hello, you lot. Hello, podcast fans. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how the world is falling apart and some people who are trying to pull it back together.

Today, we are not talking about people who are pulling it back together. We are talking about a guy who is constantly struggling to hold it together. And that, my friends, is Joseph Robinette Biden, old guy, United States president and border fascist. And what's happening? Why are we talking about Joseph Robinette Biden today? Well, because you'll remember that Biden made some promises when he was campaigning in 2020, and it will shock you to hear that he is throwing migrants under the bus again

in an attempt to get Republicans in the 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 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 uh the yazidi mother i saw carrying her children to try and come to a safer place uh they are the afghan grandmother 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. I made a whole 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'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 votes for that, given that people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants. But this isn't a well-flashed-out proposal, but what it very clearly shows is the intent to throw some of the most desperate people on earth under the bus. And that is disgusting. It's abhorrent, 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 secondarily to, I'm just going to call it effectively perform ethnic cleansings by continually removing populations from the u.s they could just do this yeah that's all they used executive for yes it is yeah yeah they have never once waived that executive power in defense of the little guy or people who desperately needed help it would seem certainly not in the last couple of administrations uh shout out to the former obama administration uh staffers by the way for showing their whole

ass by just screaming racist shit at muslim people in the last few weeks uh but for people who hadn't already kind of worked out 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 um 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 like this person right under this proposed democratic uh like 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 has 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've done all around the world that has 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 and we're placing it in the hands of a of a random border patrol agent who may very well not speak the language or understand anything they're saying to bounce them back that's not how we should do things i think it probably goes without saying they also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal um this allows immigration officials to deport people without court hearings if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail their initial asylum

interview again like this treating of people seeking asylum like they don't have rights or they have to, they're guilty until proven innocent almost in this system, right? And to get these court hearings, to do well in these court hearings, they need money, they need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost anywhere from $6,000 to $12,000 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? $10,000, $12,000 in the United States is a lot of money if you're coming from large parts be in desperate need of help uh would have for instance yesterday i was speaking to a yuzidi family yuzidi however you want to say it um who people will be familiar with the way their community was treated by uh isis right there some of the worst genocidal and and misogynist violence that we've seen this century was enacted upon that community. They're coming to the United States to be safe. And I don't think those people would have had the money to get together for a hearing, right? They speak Kurdish. I've never encountered a border patrol agent who speaks Kurdish, right?

So they would have to make their claim on arrival. They could be immediately rejected. 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, a translator, all those things. And the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do, and I think this is the most bizarre one, is that they have decided that they want to do. And I think this is the most bizarre one, is that they have decided that they want to mandate the detention of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated.

This one, it seems like, obviously, like a massive concession to this sort of insane Republican right-wing sort of demand that we criminalize all asylum seekers. And I think... And I want to something like for a second about this too because like yeah you know one of the ways that that all this whole anti-migrant thing is has ramped up like when i was a kid like because there was you know i was like growing up when this this first sort of like anti-immigration hysteria was like ramping up and back then the hysteria was illegal immigration it's like this

stuff is all legal like you have the legal like these are literally people doing legal immigration yeah and we're just here now it's like no like like you try you if you attempt to come into the u.s 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 and like the fact that biden is fucking just like just going like oh yeah yeah we should this is this is fine like we're gonna do like this is this is stuff that would have been unimaginable for a

republican president in the 2000s yeah like the thing about this too is that none of this would have been possible without democratic complicity this is this is this way the system has worked this entire time right there's a reason they called obama 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 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 CBP1, right?

CBP1 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 CBP-1. 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 dumpster dive from a Susan G Komen event, right? Or maybe if they're really lucky, a yurt that me and 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 CBP1. Most of them who I have spoken to are carrying visa rejection letters, right? They've been to embassies all around the world and just been summarily dismissed. They don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right? And they've exhausted all their options.

No one wants to spend their life savings and walk across 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 immediately 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 most languages. And it's entirely understandable that people are taking this route.

We have caught the bottle of migration and then shaken it up, right, 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 expelling migrants who are protecting us, it didn't have any provisions for vaccination. It didn't have any COVID testing. It was just a cynical attempt to use the pandemic. And as we've seen through public records requests, it's something they'd planned long in advance to evict people from this country without giving them a chance at an asylum hearing um and now biden is doing this without even the

pretense of an excuse right at least trump made up some bullshit uh it was transparent but biden isn't even bothering to do that uh 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 die in his bed.

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. We did this neocolonial thing where we stole everything we thought was of value. We imposed dictators upon them when they chose socialist or more progressive regimes. And then we just put 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 aren't marketed on the show? Yeah, yes. The products and services that we so greatly loathe oh hang on i 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 it's a little fucking children who have died because they can't afford insulin. And the reason they have died is because these fucking ghouls

want to extract every penny out of those of us who have diabetes. So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you won't ever again. But here's some other adverts. We are back without hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me, Amir,

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 you remember this, that Biden was cancelling private prison contracts when he first came into office. Do you remember his executive order on this? Vaguely, yeah. Yeah, I think it got a lot of attention. That may have specifically applied to people

who are in federal criminal incarceration. It certainly never applied to people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained by third-party contractors like CoreCivic, right? And they continue to be so under the Biden administration because again, right, it is seemingly the implicit policy contractors like core civic right and they continue to be so under 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 uh than u.s citizens or than people seeking permanent

residence in this country through other means you know one of the things i i was i was doing this for other reasons for not this story but i was going back through and i was reading the the democratic party platform from 2020 and if you go back and read the democratic party platform from 2020 the the opening thing is them talking about the like how they're they're when they're in power they're going to do what's needed to dismantle structural racism in this country. Fuck me! And it's like...

My ass. And this is one of these really sort of grim things about this, right? It's like the Democrats really really cynically capitalized off of people's revulsion at the fucking horrible stuff trump was doing at the border and then they got into power they did all 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 diffuse 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 cages thing yeah i will say this i i was always kind of cynical about that because i fucking remember occupy ice and i remember all those fucking liberals who told me they'd be marching in the streets just fucking abandoning

us and leaving us to like deal with the fucking cops on our own so like i think i think it is like there's been a sort of mythologization to some extent of how willing people were to actually do shit under trump but they sure as fuck not here under biden so then yeah there ain't no one in the street saying no more kids in cages now right like they're not 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 i want to this is kind of off topic too but like so this is a story like at some point i'm going to do an actual episode about this um there's been i've been i've been trying to get to talk to people about this for a

bit but so there's been a whole bunch of shit with a lot of so one of the subsequent things that was happening with all these people is that like government in Texas has been shipping them to random cities. Yes. So a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago and there 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 had been a toxic waste dump and only just didn't do i 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 doing? You can't have this stuff be on a 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 Brandon Johnson, like nominally is one of the most left-wing mayors in the U S and this is

what is fucking happening. Even in this, from the sort of progressive wing, the democratic party, like the, the concern, like the, the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even worse on 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 seek asylum at least it wouldn't this is like the immigration system is like a ratchet and it only moves to the right and under democratic government it wouldn't move to the right it does now and this means 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. it also impels us to like, look, look at someone who believes that there is not a ballot box option that is going to deliver us a system with dignity and democracy and justice. Anyway, uh, I think like this is where we have to step up and do the stuff that we always talk about.

Like it, this happened a little bit in 2020 and it happened a little bit under Trump, but like now more than ever, the need to do mutual aid especially for migrants but also for in-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 listening have as well.

But if you haven't found the place or the 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 on 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 it's a big burden to shoulder right when the state has enough money to

send thousand pound bombs to israel and that means that we have to pay for beans for hungry children yeah well and i mean the thing the thing that this too right is like it if you if you spent the amount of money that the u.s was spending on trying to keep a lot of the country on just like giving like you just gave that money to the same those same people we wouldn't be having this problem right now like it isn't like putting people in a prison is like the least cost efficient way to do possibly do anything and it doesn't matter because the the whole point of this like and this is one of these things with this sort of ratchet right is eventually you're going

to get to fucking like you know i mean like the 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 both slow boatloads of people go down in the mediterranean like go down the mediterranean several hundred people die their their popularity goes up. Because, you know, and this is the thing you're going to, we're not that far away from in the fucking US is the Republican demand in like maybe,

like eight, maybe 10 years is going to be just shooting, like literally just machine guns at the border. Like this is where this is fucking going, right? Oh, you haven't seen the replies to my uh to my post yeah when i when i say democrats i mean i mean like like the this is gonna be the demand of the fucking house like republican caucus right like yeah this is this is 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 going to shoot some of the people

at the border people are going to call this progress right yeah and the only way that this can be and this this cannot be stopped by voting for the democrats this is like you know and like people people thought this about obama and people also thought this about biden was that we're going to vote for these people because they're going to be good on immigration and like this is the reason why we're fucking are where we are now. So there is no solution to this that doesn't revolve around 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 of being back here, we need to do a 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 adverts 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 that they didn't do the hard parts, right? So the places in Hukumba 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'll very often see people saying, oh, you couldn't climb this wall. It doesn't matter. You just walk along until you find a gap and get through. You also can climb the wall. We've seen people climb the wall. We've seen people cut it with angle grinders, right?

But what happens with Title 42? What happens right now under what's called Title VIII 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 asylum. And then they end up in these open air detention sites in Cumbria, etc. What happens under 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 gaps in the wall one would assume so you go to the furthest places and the hardest places and the highest places and the most rugged places right and you try and walk through those routes instead you try and walk through for instance valley of the moon which is just to the east of akumba where just last week some of my

friends were involved in a search and 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 fucking no one else would have done if they hadn't been there right yeah the result of this is that people will die in greater numbers crossing our border and that's what we saw under 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 the Republicans.

They will keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much of the world is not going to stop. It will keep happening. Transphobia, a thing that we have exported culturally, that's on Britain too. Definitely an island of turfs. It's been a collaborative effort between the US and the British. Yeah, that's what the special relationship is about.

It's JK Rowling and Tim Pool. The French are also complicit in this too. They're not getting fucking off the hook for this shit. No, yeah. This is not a podcast. It's France off the hook for anything. But yeah yeah this is not a podcast that's france off the hook for anything but but you know like and i mean this is something i think you're getting at too but like we in large part like the us and the uk are responsible for why transphobia is as bad as it is in in mexico right now which is it is so much more like as 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 uh even if you're not fucking killed there's you know like this is actually like the the one of the episodes next or what week will that be the week after next like yeah i'm gonna we're gonna replay the episode like the interviews that i did with mexican trans organizers talking about the turfs there because they are armed and they will fucking like actually they will attack people um yeah yeah it's look they united nations says yeah it's bleak the The UN says that life expectancy for trans people in Central America is 35 or less, right?

I am 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 where they want to get it. 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 take risks and hop on trains. They get extorted. They get robbed. They get assaulted.

Young women often get sexually assaulted. It's a terrible and dangerous journey. young women often get sexually assaulted. 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'll 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 sleep at night and feeling safe and yeah that that's i guess what we all voted for when we chose the anti-fascist guy in 2020 like it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of uh 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 it is a functional definitional totalitarian regime

and it will never be fucking described as that by the academics who fucking use this language but you know how how how else do you describe living in a condition where you can at any point be removed and are spending literally all of your time attempting to flee a police state like yeah the u.s the u.s is and has always been an unbelievably authoritarian state and it's getting more so fucking every day and you know and this is also one of these things where it's like i mean we we literally saw this in 2020 the the people who got sent in to put down the uprising in portland it was fucking bortak right it was it was it was the the it was it in to put down the uprising in Portland, it was fucking Bortak, right? It was,

it was, it was the, the, it was, it was, it was the, 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 Bort tech didn't win really in 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 they're getting more money to give more money yeah so you know either

either we stop 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 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 you're hanging out with people who don't often hang out with, even if you don't care about, you know, the mother bringing her baby from Shingal in Iraq to here, who I met last night, even if that doesn't bother you and you're so somehow heartless that you don't care, I will say that every single time we put more money into border security, it ends up with all of us being surveilled more. If you attended a protest in 2020, you might have been surveilled by border patrol, right? If you walk around in the desert where I live, you're probably being surveilled by border patrol. If you use your

cell phone without encryption, you might be being surveilled at the border, right? The companies, many of them 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 ass in the ass this will come back to bite you in the ass even if you don't care about migrants because the moment you are not in lockstep with the government, you become a potential victim of that surveillance. And a big thing with undocumented immigration is it essentially makes you illegible and therefore untaxable to the government.

What the government state at its very core wants people to be is legible and taxable and countable. If you think that isn't going to bounce back on trans folks, right, and making them specifically non-binary folks too, right, like the idea that you don't have a box to tick on a form and that makes you harder to be legible and statistically quantifiable by the government, all of 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. There's no one you can fucking vote for to change that yeah yeah you can feel free to write your legislators uh 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 uh so instead i go to the border and i build 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 out there and start doing mutual aid. You don't even have to go on x.com or Reddit to do it. Just fucking go out and 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 meaningfully 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 mutual aid gang of wonderful people, you can go to gofundme.com slash Hacumba hyphen migrant hyphen camps. Hacumba 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. 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 is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.