It Could Happen Here - The Right Wing Palestine Grifters Part 3: A Kind of National Socialism

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

In part 3, Mia and Gare discuss the rise of increasingly fascist media figures who exploit the suffering of Palestinians to build careers off their media brandsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's an introduction to the podcast i'm your host be along with me with me's garrison hello hello welcome to part three of this nightmare yeah so okay all the way back in episode one i said 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. That's focused on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and from Zionists. They call it MAGA communism, but you might 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. Oh,

these are two distinct, patriotic socialism and 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 or a boris of shit emerged from the left is by talking about the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things that Marxist-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 of the Bush era and had firsthand experience with what American nationalism really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks. Now, the Marxist-Leninists are attempting to bring nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this through arguments that aren't necessarily wrong.

Their argument is effectively that anti-colonial nationalism – and anti-colonial nationalisms because there's a bunch of them – and particularly non-white anti-colonial nationalism aren't the same thing as American nationalism and that these anti-colonial nationalisms are revolutionary. And this is true in a lot of cases, right palestinian nationalism is like a completely different thing from australian 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 bath ism, for example, bath ism 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 Assyrian or Yazidi or like any other national minority under bath party rule where, you know, they're going to ban your flags. They're going to 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. It sounds absolutely nuts, but yeah, it was illegal to give your kid a Kurdish name in both Bathurst, Syria and Bathurst, Iraq. says they'll kill you um and i'm using bathism like as an example for this because like there are people now who are genuinely bathists but it's like it's really hard to find people who support the bath party 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. Okay, well, in terms of its relevancy to the modern kind of workings of the sort of political spheres I operate in, this is not something that has come up in my conversations. ran into them there i've ran into a few neo-bathists who are either like saddam's also the the big bastion of kind of like it's not even really bathism anymore but like like bashar assad technically is like a bath okay um although his they're not really bathists anymore they just kind of have this party apparatus still around but But most people are like, okay, this sucks, right? But I'm using baptism because it's the easiest.

But this is a question you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements. And it's one people don't like asking, which is whose nation is being liberated? And what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these nationalist movements produce? And these aren't abstract questions, right? One of the big examples of this is West Papua, 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. So the West Papuans just get absolutely screwed over by, by the Indonesians. And this is, this is where this place where you have to ask like whose nation is being

liberated. And 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 or like, like my family is from China and we had two left-wing national liberation movements

traded back by the USSR. And the first one, which is the Chinese Nationalist Party, made it about seven years before they turned on the Chinese working class and 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 lasted, 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, and I shit you not, the name for the quote-unquote counterterrorism operation that China runs in Xinjiang is the People's War on Terror. I wish I was making this up. I'm not. And this is a product of Chinese nationalism. It's Chinese Islamophobia and Chinese nationalism that sort of do this stuff. I'm very skeptical of nationalism as a liberatory framework, but it's complicated, right? It genuinely is one of these things that's – there's lots of nuances to it.

And, you know, I think you have to take a kind of middle ground of like you have to keep it kind of under control. But also like I'm not going to go tell a Palestinian kid that their nationalism is bad. Right. Like, you know, I should I realize that I've never explained this the whole time I was doing this. 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. 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 could 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 should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is just to pretend that it never happened uh you know and and but but like like chinese and vietnamese nationalists and 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 the vietnamese government sold the country to china in 1990 and they're like embarking on like a 40 year plan to like

fully sell the country to china and like like western mls just completely ignore this stuff because it's not convenient for them and they just pretend that all these people get along but this stuff gets you know it gets incredibly bizarre and like just weird really quickly like one of the things i remember from back in 2016 2017 i 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 even it's not based on communism

anymore it's just pure economic nationalism. And this is a product of these incredibly convoluted justifications they have to put together for supporting China, which is objectively a market economy and very obviously a market economy. So they have to support China while also nominally being anti-capitalist. I'm not going to go into these arguments because they're just pseudo-Marxist gibberish. It's just weird intellectual posturing. I think it's more useful to look at where it ends up, which is, have you ran into the people advocating BRICS? It's like the great anti-American thing. Do you know what BRICS is?

No. Oh, God. Okay. I don't know. I don't think so. BRICS is a thing that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Oh, God. OK, so I don't know. I don't think so. Bricks is a thing that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Oh, 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 carrier of the red flag yeah like it's 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 bricks is like it's like a real alliance and these people are like gonna like create the multi-polar world where the u.s is no longer the only power and this is anti-imperialism and like uh-huh yeah this is like on a fundamental level if you're pushing bricks as an anti-imperialist formation, like what are we even doing here? Like who is doing the socialism in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa? Right. Like, is it the guy who invaded Haiti? Is it the butcher 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 holding them up as like anti-imperialist powers because, you know, 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 US either. Pay no attention to the fact that Indian and Chinese troops periodically beat each other to death in the mountains. You know, it's a disaster, but this is what happens when you mix nationalism with your socialism and because of where this is going we should talk about the history a little bit about the

history of displacing class struggle with the struggle between states because one of the people who does this is a man that I bet you have heard of. His name is Benito Mussolini. Oh, yes. I'm slightly familiar with his work. Yeah. And Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in the beginning is that, you know, okay. So like the Marxist line is that there's class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, right?

So the capitalists and the working class are fighting it out, and that's the – the logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting it out. And Mussolini goes, no, no, proletarians and bourgeoisie have been replaced by the struggle between proletarian nations and capitalist nations. capitalist nations so this is you know you can you can start to see the outlines of how we're going to get to a national socialism from here but first do you know who else opposes a national socialism is it it's the products and services okay all right support this podcast yeah i'm sure i'm sure advertising hates yeah yeah hates the tenets of national socialism 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. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturno, 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. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. 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. 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. We're back. Okay, so we have 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.

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. And the ML's strategy for dealing with this was to just ignore it, effectively. You know, and they do a really good job at ignoring this is happening,

right? Like, the fact that Russia has passed a series of laws that ban all gender-affirming surgery and changing, like, they banned all gender-affirming surgery, they banned, like, anything that would have allowed you to change your gender on like any any

state identification documents they've banned same-sex marriage in the constitution they banned anyone like the recent one is 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 uh who've been supporting like the russian 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 little you know one of the things that they do too is like they've been trying to they try to make the argument that like no no no these places are actually good for queer people i see this with china a lot where you'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 i'd like actually being a trans person in china fucking

sucks ass there's a really only like a tiny number of of uh of gender clinics like you have to 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 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 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 room in these martial law spaces for people who are not really leftist at all but are just like hardline homophobic like transphobic anti-american nationalists and i started seeing this with because so one of the problems that marxist leninism has is that it's not a it's not an ideology that exists outside of like the u.s britain australia a bit of europe right like it doesn't exist in China. The closest equivalent to this stuff in China, like people who are 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 US would be classified as fascists. And you started to see these people like moving into like Marxxist line into spaces because you know nobody gave a shit that they were like incredibly homophobic and transphobic and they

were just i mean again just objectively right-wingers right and they just start this sort of creep into into these spaces now this may or may not have ever turned into a real thing. We don't know, but there are two breakpoints that really, like, kicked the sort of birth of the of like MAGA communism and patriarchy. So it's like the sort of right trajectory of this stuff, like into focus. There was some stuff that happened in the middle of the 2020 uprisings and then surprise surprise january 6th so do you remember you probably yeah you were probably busy while this was going on do you remember the 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 conservatives, obviously. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So in the middle of the uprising, I guess kind of towards the tail end of the uprising, completely by coincidence, my friend Vicky Osterweil had been writing a book called In Defensive Looting, which people should actually go read because it's really interesting. which people should actually go read because it's really interesting um and she got an interview with npr about it and people lost their fucking minds about this book like everyone from like everyone from tucker carlson to like sitting members of the u.s senate were going on record denouncing like 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 are writing articles denouncing this stuff. It is – 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 Marxist-Leninists. Like is 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 a 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 you know putting all of the like 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 nominallyists, like a lot of Marxist-Leninists like joining on this, because even though the point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property. Well, that is ostensibly the point.

Yeah. But in reality, 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 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 can be divided into roughly three different reactions although people have mixes of them um reaction one this is funny uh reaction two oh my god the

fascist tried to do a coup and installed trump as dictator and reaction three january 6th was the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians now okay objectively we can say 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 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 too 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 there's 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. 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 to protests like halfway across the country. Like these are two very different social factions. But yeah, it is a grouping of conservatives who are able to financially support going across the country to hear president trump speak and then in

the moment you realize oh wow 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 reasons 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 car cause to 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. One of the products of this is this thing that becomes known as patriotic socialism. But first, do you know what else is a product? All of the wonderful little snippets of important messages that is about to flow right into your brain as you listen to these ads. to your brain as you listen to these ads. 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 i, 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. I know you. 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.

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 podcast or wherever you get your podcast we're back with patriotic socialism so patriotic socialism is this thing that emerges in like i think like late i think it's's like early 2020. I was too late. I'm just going to 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 a thing from, like, very, very, like, 2020, basically,

is when it, like, appears. 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 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 um and blah blah blah and yeah obviously russia um instead now america is the best yeah and like you know and 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 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, there 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 larushites 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 uh the writers at gray zone like we mentioned in the last episode uh we had

uh this one youtuber named peter coffin um who 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 of popularize patriotic socialism as a term even before people like Kinkel came onto the scene, which I assume we'll be getting to shortly. Yeah, we'll get to that. But yeah, it kind of circled around this like Caleb Maupin, Peter Coffin circle of these sorts of like content creators and writers who were really into like classical Marxist theory. like content creators and writers who were really into like classical marxist theory um yeah but like not but i i yeah but they were from very like statist yeah american imperial perspective right no this is the thing is like they suck as theorists right like and this is this is like a one of the trends of these people is that they're and this is why it doesn't take off because like

one of the other guys who's going to become like 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. His stuff is completely unreadable. It's nonsense. 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 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.

a visual meme to get eyes on you because all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators like it's yeah it's it's all a way just to boost 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 that 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 tooth though is the original guys were fucking losers like this is why this didn't work sure

coffin like coffin starts doing this because his his original previous 17 grifts have all fallen apart like 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 and 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 like lost a city council race in 2010 like he was like he was a joke um but 2020, he starts to crack the formula, which is he figures out the same thing

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

it's like kind of a troll ideology it's like mostly a troll ideology it's like it's yeah 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 um 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 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 um 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 with people sometimes. Like when he was on Alex Jones, Alex Jones was like, what do you mean you're a communist? Like, what the fuck? And Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why communism is when no globalists. is when no globalists... He's just doing... 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 it's it's he can frame it as communism but like it is it is it is just a form of nazi theory like that is what he fundamentally operates on and he's he's interesting because his he is he has gone you know as 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 cast 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 who's just a twitch is just as it's a twitch streamer who aligns himself with a whole bunch of kind of yeah influencers for young usually white men um like he's like he's like close to like andrew tate it's it's just yeah he's a fucking twitch influencer who who courts unbelievably right wing misogynist young man. 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 Sneeko is like a Muslim fascist in the same... He's like a far right-wing Muslim in the same vein as like... I don't even think i don't think sneaker is really i politically driven like like like consciously so he's he's he's just a 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 that's it's really it's really i think the core of of of his of yeah i hate politics he sucks so much um 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 and sneko's like well but hitler destroyed the the magnus hirschfeld institute for sexual research and sneko's like, 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, to hide the evidence that they were all gay and trans. of like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so far beyond the like normal shit that like and you know and 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 just 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 now it's easier to be a uh a palestine uh yeah like and quote unquote anti-zionist uh influencer in reality he just is extremely anti-semitic like this is yeah so that is his actual politics yeah let's talk about it well okay here's the thing i it's genuinely unclear to me whether he personally is really anti-semitic like i don't know he might be i mean there's

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 is how how zionists like rule the world it's it's it's you can just like control so we're going to 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 way that he figured out you could do this is by trying to outflank the traditional hard right on anti-Semitism. So let's take a look at exactly the kind of anti-Semitic shit that he's on because he is just straight up an anti-Semite, right? This is not a thing I'm saying because it's Palisade stuff.

straight up an anti-Semite right this is not a like thing I'm saying because it's palisade stuff um so grant the like last week the trailer for grand theft auto 6 came out yeah and there's like a bunch of women twerking in it and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff and there's like this 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 caps sexualized video game for children in america get hashtag ban gta6 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 are promoting conspiracy degeneracy that's like right like that's yeah yeah like this is just 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. So, like, two days ago when this

goes up, really recently, there was this giant call, there's this giant Twitter space thing that had Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Trey, and Vivek Ramaswamy in it, and Hinkle just keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's going to turn on the Starlink internet stuff for Palestine, and these people basically tell him to shut up and like kick him

off but then he does 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 from people like alex jones people like elon musk people from angie tate who wants more open anti-Semitism. These people are anti-Semitic. He's trying to flank them, you can say quote-unquote, from the right, but at this point the right-left spectrum kind of dissolves into

meaningless mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, 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 he's figured out this is the thing that actually pushed him really into the mainstream is he figured out a

way to do cover for this that also lets him get a bunch of like attention and clicks and stuff from the left which is and also like a lot of support from palestinians and're going to 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. Because he is currently possibly the most influential person talking about this conflict right now. At least on the internet. His impressions is larger than anyone else his tweets get read of read aloud in newsrooms across across the country like he is

he has succeeded in grifting off of off of this conflict to promote his personal brand in a almost an almost unparalleled way like there's never been someone who's done this as successfully as hinkle does for any other conflict it is it is it is quite uh quite quite surprising that there's just this one guy sitting in sitting in 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 alex jones like that's that's

how and it's not even just followers too it's it's how much his posts are seen and circulated like he yeah he was he was for almost i think the most of the month of october he was person with the highest uh digital impressions on the platform like he he yeah 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 zionists do this well um also one of the things about misinformation uh mischaracterizing attacks events like a lot of other 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-leninist 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 like arabic

instagram of arabic twitter like it's like they're spent fucking everywhere and those people you know either like don't know who he is right because they're only seeing his Palestine stuff right they're not seeing his like raving about how GTA 6 is anti-christian right they're only seeing that stuff and this has made his work enormously more

popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals 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's 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 like with the way twitter's content moderation is working now gore can be spread around in ways that it didn't used to, which is a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people. So he's able to do a whole bunch of quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images, which draw more people to his platform. He's just like figured out a specific thing.

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

isn't yeah at that point he's also on youtube and shit too like yeah it just it just it that's right he just doesn't even follow anymore um yeah i guess i guess one last thing i want to say about this is like and he's he's been incredibly successful at leveraging, like at leveraging the fact that he posts not, not even good pro-Palestine content, right? He's 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 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. 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 in leftist spaces. They just – they can't be here because if there had actually been 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, between like sock dems between like socialists libertarian socialists um and the people who are like hard-lined i am a marxist leninist um 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 yeah well and i would say this like this is like those groups like like the psl for example psl is one those groups, like like the PSL, for example, PSL is one example. Sure. Right. And like they also have there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them chasing down abusers. Like I know people who they liked a tweet that was talking about how the PSL had had fucked up 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 uk Ukraine for this whole time but then Palestine is the one issue they're actually is the one issue that their stance is like you know tolerable to the general populace on it so they've all of these people have been using Palestine even these people who've been

fucking pivoting harder and harder right for years and years and years now have been like have been exploiting the fucking genocide in Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftist cliques back and it's utterly

grotesque yeah that's what I've got about this it is certainly upsetting free Palestine fuck the grifters 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.

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