It Could Happen Here - The Right Wing Palestine Grifters Part 2: From Anti-Imperialist to Anti-Trans

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

In part 2, Mia, Robert, and Garrison discuss how the injection of conspiracy culture and the structure of left media allowed leftist media figures to make hard right turns.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Wooha! All right, guys, I did my job that could happen here a podcast that i just opened by saying 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. 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 started my coffee for the morning son of a bitch I'm so sorry I apologize to everyone but unfortunately oh unfortunately this needs to be done yeah he's the human equivalent of soap scum yeah so okay I think the place to start with Max Blumenthal

is a thing that's pretty common among most of the kind of new crop of these Palestine grifters is that he used to be a pretty normal progressive. Now, for some of the people we're going to be talking about, pretty normal progressive was a thing they were in 2019. For Max Blumenthal, he was a pretty normal progressive in a thing they were in like 2019 uh for max blumenthal like he was a pretty normal progressive in like the 2000s and in 2009 he was a real journalist at some point right yeah yeah like like he wrote this book called uh republican gamora 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 gare do you know who sid blumenthal is? The name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing any specific bells for me. Major Clinton staffer, right? Yeah, he was Clinton's hatchet man.

This is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but later Hillary Clinton too. He's the guy who does the Clinton's political dirty work. He was a big guy in the nineties. He's the, 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 uh 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. Like he goes to Georgetown Days, he takes a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive circles. Because in 2012, 2013,

it was, and it still is to this day, but like it was very hard to take pro-Palestine positions. And he, like, he just ends up in this sort of spiral where like he loses most of his friends, 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. 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... I believe they're running again for the Green Party this year. Yeah, I don't know if they're going to be. This year's going to be theirs. I think they got it. I think they got it on lock now.

Jill Stein, 24. Wait, she beat Howie Hawkins? Is he not running again? I believe it's her. Last I heard, Jill Stein is making another run for it. God damn it. All right. Yeah, she is. Last I heard, Jill Stein is making another run for it. Goddamn. All right. Yeah.

Yeah. She is. 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. 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 it's a really interesting look into who he was before and the fact that he knows exactly what the playbook that he's going to be using is besides exploiting the palestinian cause the asad apologists have eagerly played

the al-qaeda card to stoke fears of an islamic takeover of syria back in 2003, 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. 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, 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 journalists in this outlet, the moment they start working for Greyzone, all of their positions on stuff like Syria just immediately flip. There's, okay, so there's a conspiracy version of this where, like, if you read liberal accounts of

Greyzone, they will argue that Max Blumenthal went to this meeting, got paid off by the Russian government, and that gray zone is like a Russian asset. I don't know. I don't think that's true. Well, the thing I can say was nobody knows where gray zone gets his money from. Right. They're very, 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 has taken a bunch of money from the Russian government to go on RT like all the fucking time. That's a part of it that I can say. I don't know. This is one of these things that's it's such a sort of like confluence of like all of these people were in the same place at the same time. It's one of these things that generates a trillion conspiracy theories. I'm going to 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 about before this in 2015. He starts talking about how anyone who opposes Assad is a, quote, head chopper. And he starts selling – one of these big things is selling this line that Assad is the defender of serious ethnic minorities, which is a thing that I think would be news to them. And he starts a podcast called Moderate Rebels, which is a joke about like, ah, the US is funding Moderate Rebels, but all those people are actually like Al-Qaeda supporters. And I don't know. I think it's interesting comparing his pre-2015 writing to his post-2015 writing because he very clearly understands what he's doing.

He wrote an analysis of the thing that he's going 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. You're going to see this in, this is one of the things that he does in Xinjiang 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 backed Wahhabi terrorist. You can find like some people who suck and go, oh, hey, like these guys are all jihadists. And, you know, in Syria, this is sort of bleakly funny because if you know your war on terror history, like Bashar al-Assad, like tortured people with the CIA and the US like held some 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 on to um and i'm gonna take an example of this because i think it's important because one of the the the ur 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 gonna going to read from, to take an example of 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, 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 al-qaeda training camps in bosnia like what the fuck like it's just it's complete nonsense and you know it relies on a lot of the other sort of like weird things that that leftists like believe and don't believe about

this um there's there's a very if you want to actually read about these sort of like transnational islamist networks um there's 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 i want 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 the sort of like left conspiracy solutions 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? Like, it's it's it's all stuff that's like this. And, you know, he also talks about how Milos like Milosovic would have like testified about the CIA institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo. And like, what? Milosevic is the guy who presided, he was one of the architects of de-collectivization in Yugoslavia. Before he was the butcher of Belgrade, he was the butcher of the Yugoslavian socialist state. And 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 like the leftist savior of yugoslavia and you know i think that the part about that 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 as 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.

I mean, you know, speaking of right wing dictators, yeah, there's a non zero chance. There's a non-zero chance there's an ad for someone who will be one in the future. Right now.

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Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we're back to this stuff. And Syria, and specifically the way people think about Syria, plays a huge role in the sort of development of the left. And one of the reasons that the sort of new gray zone line, which is that the entire opposition is composed of Islamists and that Assad is the only person who can stop them is that like you know part of the reason this works is that like yeah like they're and this is this is the gap that these people always sort of come in through is that like a lot of the western media was not covering syria very well they weren't covering the rise of like 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 this works. This works enormously well. This is the sort of breach through which Blumenthal enters the mainstream. And 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 the 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 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 tropo trap house which is like i guess if people who don't know it's massive like social democratic podcast um also like sort of came out of there like it was partially about like came out of like tur politics, but those were very, very similar circles like on Twitter at the time. And, you know,

and one of their big things is like Felix Biedermann's like the truth about Syria, which is a sort of slightly softer like version of supporting Assad that also supports like the revolution in Rojava. Like I came out of this because I was on the pro Rojava side because like I'm an anarchist and I have a bunch of Kurdish friends. So there's this giant fight about what the

Syrian civil war is and what the 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, nominallyinally 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 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, and then there's the second panel is who must go and Hillary Clinton's gone. And people still do this to this day. The other really common one, there's this little girl named Banna Al-Abed who is a Syrian girl who got bombed, and there's a video of her reacting in the way a small child would to being bombed. And there's a meme that's basically taking her words and twisting it into like, please, America, come and intervene in Syria. Basically, this girl is CIA propaganda trying to justify U.S. intervention in the war.

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, 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's 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 asabi means 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 stuff is like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is is something that's edgy and contrarian and like the like the 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 you know that was something that was heavily incentivized by the structure of how things like twitter work and how like retweets work and you know but this this is i mean it's bleak in and of itself but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only other people who support assad are like white supremacists and this leads to a bunch of very very very weird cross-pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of the most common sources about Syria for both sort of Marxist-Leninist 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'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. The last post that I saw from her was her responding to another guy who's just a straight-up hardline anti-Semite who posted this meme 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. with like stars of David on them, like including Max Blumenthal and partisan girls response to this is not to object to the fact that it's unbelievably anti-Semitic, but to be like, no, no,

no. Max Blumenthal is actually an anti-Zionist. So you shouldn't include him with all of the rest of the people who 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 that's a lot of the nexus of the kind of asshole left takes on syria revolve around is because if if Bashar al-Assad was dumping chemical weapons on civilian populations en masse, 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, right? 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 is a mannequin, or these are crisis actors. 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 syria and it really struck me as like i was kind of observing it from the outside because it like i don't know like i the period where this was happening is the period where occupy ice was starting so i was not super involved in this stuff but you could just sort of see like the kind of the level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing to the point where like all of the stuff that's like the the modern like conspiracy

canon is just getting embedded in there yeah it's where you see a lot of the stuff that has been the norm on the right for 20 years start to take hold in the left. 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, like the u.s doesn't like like everyone on twitter

would suddenly be like oh it's a it's a color revolution it's a cia op all the protesters are being paid by the cia and i could pick like a thousand examples of this from everywhere from like lebanon to hong kong like every time a mass protest would start these people would be like it's 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 slander of a leftist group, which is – so Ben Norton wrote a piece that was about Ecuador because there like we wouldn't even have time to cover this, but he's going to break with the gray zone people when they take their hard right pivot because they start doing like anti-vax shit. That's too much even for him, 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 is some of one of the few pieces of satisfaction we've gotten out of this. one of the few pieces of satisfaction we've gotten out of this. But Norton, so one of the people he's targeting is the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador.

And so we've talked about them on this show before. They are one of the most radical indigenous organizations on the planet. Like they, you know, they have been literally, in the case of Ben Norton, they have been overthrowing 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 one of their big things. And gray zone, like, like Norton calls these people, uh,

anarchist inspired ultra leftist back 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 an insult. It's like what?

Oh no, I've been ultra leftist. You, my politics are too good. You, my takes are too based. Like what? This is supposed to be an insult?

Like, it's baffling stuff. Yeah, but like in the span of two years, they went from like praising the, they went from praising the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador to calling them a CIA op. Like again, within two years. And a lot of this stuff is based on the work

of this guy named Williamiam engdahl i don't know how to pronounce his last name i think i think it's william engdahl so he's he's a larouche um we've talked about the larouche 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's like copying their stuff right like he's this is this is where a lot of his stuff about what color revolutions are comes from and angda is i'm gonna i'm gonna turn to some research by emmy bevancy who's an anti-fascist researcher so angda thinks that blm was a color revolution because he he is just a really, really hardline right-worker. This is actually a pretty common thing in these circles, is people who think that BLM was a color revolution, people who think that

Occupy is a color revolution, and that's sort of the far right of these sort of circles. And I guess, speaking of 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 wonderful. 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

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Yeah, so, okay. So we, the reason we're covering this in the first place is the sort of right wing pivot that this circle does but before we talk about that we need to talk about one more thing that is incredibly bleak which 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. In 2017, the DSA has its first elections after the giant surge of membership from both Trump winning and also Bernie. And they have its first elections to its governing body, and one of the people who's elected is this guy named R.L. Stevens. R.L. Stevens, he's a very popular 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. 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, can't help but be reminded of COINTELPRO by reading this thread. And even people who are normally Max Blumenthal supporters were like, what the fuck are you doing?

And like the full story of Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement in this is actually worse than I can talk about on air. So after the first thread where Ben Norton calls it a cointel for op, he deletes that one because it's just not, obviously not true and people are yelling at him. So he makes a second thread. 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. There were some other people who were further right than them, but they were the center right of the DSA. They were electoralists. The only thing they ever wanted to do was canvassing.

And R.L. Stevens was on the other side, opposing them. And I was on, politically, I was on the same side as R.L. Stevens here. I fucking hate the Momentum people. I think they destroyed the DSA. like politically i was in the in like on the same side as arnold stevens here right like i fucking hate the momentum people i think they destroyed the dsa um one one day i will do a whole thing about them um like these these people like the momentum people literally purged my friends from new york right and arnold stevens is one of their enemies and that is not what this shit was fucking about like arnold stevens is just a rapist but you know max blumenthal and ben norton came in and

were like oh 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 I have screenshots of it and I have way back machine things of 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 it is like there's that piece that goes around regularly about how like misogynists make the best informants. 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 going to 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 I found the exact exact 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 he starts doing anti-lockdown stuff and so he starts ranting about how like australian lawmakers are proposing fines for sharing information about anti-lockdown protests and like fans for fines for attending rallies and he just gets more and more into hardcore anti-lockdown stuff and then into stuff that's effectively just straight up anti-vax stuff. One of the things that he ends up doing

is, 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 that would give you like quote unquote herd immunity

and everyone would be safe and that's like 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 as 2021 goes on he starts pivoting into this anti-lockdown stuff um and so i first saw this stuff from this journalist named walter bragman back when he was on twitter is he starts like he 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 force everyone to go back to work and then people will get like infected with covid and that will get the immunity to covid which is a terrible idea because 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 barrington Declaration is so it's created by the American Institute for Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are. So they are a right wing libertarian think tank, which Blumenthal should hate. Right.

He's supposed to be a leftist. He should hate these people. They received $68,000 from the Koch brothers to do an economics conference, a thing that they are very mad about. Anytime someone tries to bring it up and talk about how they're Koch funded, they're like, well, we only took $68,000 one time to do one economics conference. You can't call us Koch funded. But then on their website, they admit that they quote, for the record, 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. But obviously, so 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 zero dollars for the coke brothers i could safely say that it's bullshit to say that we only took money for the coke 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 US 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 gray zone it's very deeply weird and this stuff just and as as like 2021 goes on this stuff gets like worse and worse and worse by 2021 the blumenthal is writing articles about an impending attempt to implement social credit alongside jeffrey lafredo so okay we need to take this in two parts 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 mean like garrison i know you know this i know you know you do know what rebel news is that's'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 relatively few Canadian far-right websites that also regularly goes viral in the U.S. 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 like 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, like okay the kinds of tweets 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 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 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, this 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 like alex jones is a huge pusher of this and basically what they're saying is that they're they're going to import this system from china that they say exists called social credit where like if you say something bad about the government you won't be able to like use your credit card to buy food and this is not how things work in china but it's very interesting because you know these right-wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming to the 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 conspiracy theory and like the all the sort of marxist leninism's like whole one of their whole pitches was that they are the like they they support china against american imperialism and then like within about a year like in like a one year span they've just pivoted to publishing like full-on right-wing social credit stuff um and you know and by by 2022 it's gone even further uh this 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 of them based in Alberta, and then a few other kind of conservative influencers tied to – some of whom were tied to Rebel News, kind of who were based more throughout Canada, organized this event where a whole bunch of truckers, but mostly just regular people, would drive to the Capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau would meet their demands or something like that. They were out there for a few weeks. It really started getting shut down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to block one of the big trade border crossings between the US and Canada. At that point, it became enough of a problem that everyone was like, okay, we're just going to make you guys leave. At that point, it became enough of a problem. The government was like, okay, we're just going to like 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 six. Not really. I mean, it, 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. But yeah, that is kind of the gist. I did a few episodes as this was ongoing, and then I did a larger kind of piece about the whole thing

that was more scripted towards the end of it. You can find those, I think, in like, if you go back to like February of 2022, you'll find some of those pieces. Yeah, and I think the other thing that's important to emphasize about this, these are right-wingers like i i have pictures of these guys waving yustashi flags where these are like the guys who did the holocaust in croatia like yeah there there there was a mix of like conservatives to like actual fascists with like nazi flags there like that it was it was pretty there was a pretty wide ideological spectrum that was present

now some conservatives weren't happy that they're 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. 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 um like she was supporting this by 2023 he's just posting straight up anti-vax stuff um like here's the thing that he wrote about uh peter holtz who was this guy he was like this guy who was i don't know he's like a science guy he was like he was a really big target of the right for a while because he wouldn't he kept like there's there's this whole thing where joe rogan was trying to debate him about whether vaccines

worked and it was it was this whole weird thing meeting of the minds yeah yeah so by full 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 uh desperate to avoid accountability so this is just straight up anti-vax shit right like and this this is like where we are like now. It's like he spent like a whole bunch of like the last two years just tweeting anti-vax stuff. And this got fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly. And this is something I think is really interesting because it's another demonstration that like. He knows what he's doing. So back in 2021, like right after the the atlanta um the atlanta spa shootings happened um he like max lumenthal's reaction to it was like oh yeah here's a like here's this 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 coven 19 in the lab rogan cited a u.s 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 atlantis 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 one year later

he has Jeffrey Sachs on the show to talk about how the US is covering up how the Pentagon and the National Institute of Health funded biological research that created COVID-19 a lab in Wuhan in one year he has gone from calling the lab leak

like a neocon a quote Trump disinfo dump that was created like a neocon a quote a quote trump disinfo dump that was created by a neocon to having jeffrey sacks 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 sacks is no not really oh boy okay so s sax is a columbia university economist um 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 that people will talk about a lot is how like all of the shock therapy stuff like caused the largest drop in life expectancy between World War Two and COVID.

Right. And like like Sacks is not a bit like sax was literally in the room he was in the room in the kremlin when the ussr was dissolved this is like this is one of the greatest anti communists in human history and here is max blumenthal a man who is supposed to like his entire thing is about like opposing the imperialist to overthrow communism like sitting down 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 theory the labley conspiracy theory that he was literally calling disinfo one year ago and i don't know i thought about this for a long time, trying to figure out what was happening here. And the conclusion that I came to is that this is the soul of a man who believes in nothing. And, you know, you can ask the question, why do this?

And the short answer people tend to give is just money. money. And that's 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? There are more leftists now than there've been for a very, very long time, But there's only so many leftists. And you can't pull from them all because leftists all hate each other.

So even if you try to corner the market of one faction to the left, another faction to the left is just going to hate you because this is just how infighting works. And so if you're producing something that's designed for the left and only the left, there is built in a hard cap on how big your audience can get. And if you're successful, you can hit that limit. But if you want to grow more after that, you have to expand your ideological base, like the ideological base of your audience. 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, for example, who's 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're talking about how ivermectin is actually a good COVID treatment together. Yeah, he used

to be like a left-wing YouTuber who has like a different talk show. He was who has 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 just 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's not, there's like, 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'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 palestine and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done because any like any time anytime someone posts posts like a pro-palestine thing people just

click on it right yeah and this this has been this has been like so maxwell mcdowell spent the last about two years just doing anti-vax stuff the moment like the moment palestine became something that people were focusing on again and you know 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-vaxx 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 is content in the culture war 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 u.s 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 uh okay her her tweet just trails off as bodily it says dot dot dot it just moves to another i don't know she's not a very good writer um 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 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 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 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 specific line, this is how 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 end points 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 get ready for that shit because it's about to get wildly anti-semitic oh great hooray Oh, great. Hooray! Woo!

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. 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 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

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