It Could Happen Here - The Right Wing Palestine Grifters Part 1: The Left Creates a Monster

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In the first of three episodes about the right wing grifters exploiting Israel's crimes in Palestine we look at the conditions on the left that made their rise possibleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 the 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 be prosecuted over the course of COVID-19. 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. By the way, the part where he says lie instead of lying there is a direct quote. That is him, not me. So to understand

how absolutely, absolutely absurd this is, we need to talk about who Cary Burris actually is. So Max Blumenthal is correct that Cary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel 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. 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 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, 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, Cary 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, okay, 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'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 Thumbo Mbeki, under the spell of AIDS denialists 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 Syndrome estimated that as a result, 35,000 babies were born with HIV and 330,000 South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily. This is monstrous. And here is Max Blumenthal, who was, up until very recently, at the very least nominally a left-wing journalist, tweeting a video of this fucking guy to attack Anthony Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right-wing anti-lockdown

ghouls. Now, I especially want to do this because if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it is very, very easy to do from the left. You can attack him for his response to the original HIV AIDS pandemic. And, you know, lots of queer people have done this. Instead, Max 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 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. 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 light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iheart radio app apple

podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 in Haiti, in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Iran, about Patrice Lumumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharto in 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.

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. This is 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 lie 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. Chinese private healthcare is an absolute disaster. Calculations by the Chinese journal Chuang estimate that almost the entire Chinese economy is based on corporations not paying the 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. would immediately go under as an enormous majority of the corporations immediately went underwater. And so what we're getting a sort of picture of is people begin to believe things that need to be true in order 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 began 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 socialists and socialist organizations in the US, or at least, I say socialists,

I mean Marxist-Leninist organizations, to advocate for a $15 or $20 mid-room 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, 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. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works

while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. To explain what a tankie is,

we have to go back to, bizarrely, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. So, all right, in 1956, there was a massive uprising in Hungary. The Hungarians effectively forced their government to break with the Soviets. The Soviets respond to this by rolling a bunch of tanks across the border, claiming everyone in the revolution is 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising and what most of it was, was a rebellion by the hungarian workers councils so workers across their factories seized control of their factories threw their bosses out and began to manage them democratically the different workers councils like foreign regional federations it is very stunningly very very similar to the original soviets of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which in theory, the USSR is supposed to be named after. But when they reappeared again, the Soviets just absolutely smashed them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned one party state. And what this actually meant was tanks rolling up to the gates of factories,

blasting apart the very workers councils who are supposed to be the basis of communism. This was an attempt in some sense, yes, to implement democracy, but it was an attempt to implement democracy in the factory. And it was 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 are people people leave communist parties in droves uh this is this is a big enough deal that it spawns effectively like a crisis in china where there is a series of strikes and people chanting like here 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-Leninists, although much of its usage was about Russia and Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising. Now, it is true that all of these people do actually support or they do actually believe the Soviets were crushing the return of fascism, but that actual belief, the belief 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. that on the one hand does correctly you know it does correctly describe a part of their political tradition but it it it has it has a tendency to sort of anchor these arguments in the past instead of the present with 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. Absolutely hate being called tankies, except under, you know, the circumstances where they adopted, ironically. And I'm of two minds. I have called these people's tankies a lot. But the biggest problem with calling these people tankies

is that the original tankies, the people who supported the Soviets butchering the Hungarian working class, were actually communists. They were Marxist-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 their 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 1789-1914 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.

It Could Happen Here is a production into that nightmare and behold the abyss within. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 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, 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.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal 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.