Rev Left Radio - Anti-Imperialism: Palestine, Venezuela, & the DPRK with Abby Martin

Episode Date: August 13, 2017

Abby Martin is an American journalist and presenter of The Empire Files, an investigative news program on the socialist state-funded satellite network teleSUR English and YouTube. She was formerly the host of Breaking the Set on the Russian network RT America, working from the Washington, D.C. bureau. Abby sits down with Brett to talk about US imperialism and the Israel Apartheid State.   Topics Include: Charlottesville's "Unite The Right Rally" and the antifascist resistance, the nuclear standoff between the Trump Regime and the DPRK, the Israeli Aparthied State and Palestinian resistance, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the failures of the US corporate media, and much more!    Follow Abby on Twitter: @AbbyMartin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JournalistAbbyMartin/ Visit her websites: http://theempirefiles.tv & https://abbymartin.org  --- Please donate to our Patreon:  http://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter: @RevLeftRadio Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/revleftradio Don't forget to rate/review us on iTunes to help our overall reach! This Podcast is Officially Affiliated with the Omaha GDC and The Nebraska Left Coalition Random Song From Our Friends: Vampires by Mic Crenshaw (available on iTunes)   We cannot thank you enough for all of your support and feedback!

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from, like, people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. when the main function of a protect and serve supposedly group is actually revenue generation

they don't protect and serve simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house that can result in us not having clean drinking water why should those be in anybody else's hands they should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions people engaged in to overcome oppression

to fight back and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today I come to you with a heavy heart. I'm sure many of you are aware of what happened yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia. A big fascist rally.

People died from a Nazi terrorist attack. Many more injured. I have Abby Martin here I'm super excited about this we've been planning to have Abby on for a very long time about a month now I had a lot of questions

about the Democratic Party and the media industrial complex and all of that but given what happened yesterday I think we're really going to kind of hone in on Charlottesville instead of that and then we'll touch on her experiences in Israel and Venezuela as well

all right Abby why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background sure so I'm a media analyst independent journalist for about 10 years now started my website Media Roots, which is just a grassroots kind of citizen journalism project. From there got on RT, Russia Today, and was doing Breaking the Set for three years, which was just a daily media critique show.

And then from there, went on to Telesaur, which is a Latin America conglomerate of different states that fund this media entity. And it's amazing. It's a grassroots progressive project started by Fidel Kempark. Castro and Hugo Chavez actually to kind of combat the corporate media oligarchy. And so I've been doing a show called The Empire Files on Telesaur for about two years now with my partner, Mike Prysner. And it's just an investigative weekly series that's either an interview or documentary that just really tries to tell, retell history from the eyes of the marginalized and oppressed. Of course, the winner's right history.

So it's time to retell these stories in the context of how we've been fucked over. Yeah, absolutely. And I was watching the Empire Files, the pieces you've done on Venezuela, and they were extremely powerful. The way you, you know, expose the opposition and the threats that you were under, we'll get into that later, but the Empire Files is really, really good work. Thank you. But before we begin, this is something I've kind of been personally curious about for a while. How do you identify politically? I know you're anti-capitalist, anti-imperalist. Do you identify with a certain tendency, or what are your political influences? you know it's it's interesting it's at first i was really confused i was really i started off being vehemently anti-war um it took me a really long time brett to to understand ideologically how that was an offshoot of capitalism um it's easy to hate the government it's easy to blame everything on the government um but it's a lot harder to understand that the market is an

offshoot simply of capitalism and how these things grow together so i would say it took me years to kind come to that that true awakening of understanding that capitalism is the root of the problems that we face. And yeah, I mean, I definitely would call myself an unabashed leftist for sure. But, you know, I haven't joined a political party because I don't want to put myself in the trapping. I want to kind of simply be a vehicle for the message and not turn people off of labels. Yeah, absolutely. I think everybody's had their own political development based on their life experiences when they came to really, you know, mature political consciousness. a lot of us start out as liberals because the only options we have is this false

dichotomy of liberalism versus conservatism and so we start there and then through life experiences through understanding history through living through wars and recessions a lot of us kind of develop politically along those lines and I think we're all continuously developing and we're all constantly learning so I agree with this like just kind of keep it in motion and keep thinking and keep growing as a leftist intellectual and thinker and activist so but yeah let's go ahead and let's try this getting out of the liberalism. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's go ahead, speaking of liberalism, because this is going to come up in this

conversation. Let's go ahead and I'll just give some background about what happened yesterday. So, yeah, please. Yeah, yesterday there was a huge Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Thousands of Nazis, white supremacist, alt-right neo-Nazis, clansmen all came together, descended on this little, you know, college town basically in Virginia. And they were met with huge counter-protesters. um black lives matter antifa the iwww gdc democratic socialist of america a bunch of left wing groups came out and stood up to them obviously clashes occurred fist fights in the streets truly brutal stuff

um the whole town was basically in a state of chaos a state of emergency was actually declared by the governor i think in that state and then towards the middle of the afternoon what happened was a Nazi who has been identified as James Field. He got in his car, a gray Dodge Charger, I believe, and ran through a left-wing segment of the protest. So a bunch of leftists were in the streets, and he just drove his car through. Killing one, her name was Heather Hire, let's not forget that, and injuring dozens of others. So that's what's happened. We're still living in the wake of this. We're all still trying to figure it out. People all over the country. leftist organizations are throwing vigils and solidarity rallies.

So this is a really interesting turning point. This is really so far, I think, the culmination of what Trump's candidacy and his primary things have fed the flames of fascism, and all that's finally coming home to Roos. So what are your kind of takeaways from what happened? What do you think about the rise of fascism? Just your general thoughts on what occurred yesterday. It's just sickening, Brett. I'm just, you know, looking at how the president, the sitting president of the U.S. Empire, you know, of course, this whole time he's been completely off-fuscating this rise of fascism.

Under him, his permeation, basically, of, you know, all these fascists and white supremacists are essentially surrounding him. And, you know, he takes to Twitter and says both sides. Both sides are responsible for the violence. What the fuck are you talking about, dude? Are you kidding me? There's one side inciting fascist violence. The other side saying, give us free health care. I mean, this is unbelievable, this fake dichotomy and rhetoric.

So that aside, I was just absolutely disgusted. I mean, I'm disgusted every day by this reality star con artist that's running the country. But, yeah, I mean, this is honestly the culmination of this rhetoric. This is the culmination of a Donald Trump presidency. And I think what's different now, Brett, is before during Bush, during Obama, we saw this rise of militia movements and these kind of like white supremacist's offshoots. And of course, that exponentially arose, right? During Obama, I think, like 800% with the rise of these militia movements now under Trump,

they've turned into a brown-shirt army. And this is the biggest danger of Hitler, right? You have a loyalist kind of brown-shirt army that acts in accordance with the police, acts in accordance with ICE to carry out fascism. And that's what we're seeing now. It was extremely scary to see all these militia people open carrying these massive armaments basically in defense loyalists of a sitting president. I mean, this is disgraceful.

This is disgusting and it's terrifying. Chris Hedges has documented the rise of Christian fascism for a long time, and it seems like Trump has basically been the face to allow the Christian theocracy in. These Christian fascists have used Trump as kind of a smokescreen to get in and to basically put their policy in place. And what this is done is on the federal level, we've seen what it's done, right? They want to install basically like the handmaidens tale in America, like an ISIS-style bureaucratic Christian nation.

But on the other hand, you have these people who have been emboldened, the alt-right. They're empowered. We saw immediately when Trump won. I saw police officers. I saw people running around Manhattan, actually, yelling racist tirades, screaming Trump, Trump as if it's some sort of slur now to be basically like, fuck you, I'm just going to scream Trump and that means like, you know, you're a piece of shit. So you saw the shift and you saw the kind of sea change happen. And this is what's going to happen, Brett. We're going to see it

more and more. All of this talk from false, like, independent journalists, right? Oh, Antifa's just as bad as neo-Nazis or neo-Nazis don't exist. Look, if you're going to continue with that rhetoric, then we know what side you're on clear as day. There's no distinguishing any more who these people are. They are murderers. You cannot compare Antifa who anti-fascist by their name alone. And plus, you know, as I was saying before on Joe Rogan, because a lot of these all-right comedians have been tricked and by the alt-right and by this hysteria online and think that and think that Antifa is somehow this threat, right? An army of like anti-fascists who are really fascists.

It's a complete fucking misrepresentation of who they are, what they're doing. They show up to combat people who are fascists, who are Nazis, right? Exactly. And so to conflate those is just absolutely absurd. But it also is absurd to even pretend remotely like the left is somehow a threat or as violent as fascists. I mean, like I said before, just look at the rhetoric. And, you know, this whole debate them, we just saw Politicon, and I'm going off on a huge tangent here, I'll wrap up right now, but Politicon was just this giant convention, right? This political convention, money-making convention, where you had two, here's the other people on the side of the debate.

It was Jank Ugar versus Ben Shapiro, and then Ann Coulter versus Anna Gasparian, and it kind of takes us back to this whole debate Nazis, Nazism, and these kind of like Uber capitalists apologists who are fascists. They're not worthy of debating because these people have a genocidal ideology and they want to eliminate my friends and people of color from this planet. So how the fuck are we going to debate these people and put their ideas in a marketplace? There is no marketplace to stand on. So I don't understand this whole debate them. And this is what we see when we give them credence. When we give these idea credence and when we put them up on a pedestal and think they're normalized. Then see what happened yesterday, Brett.

Yep. And that's exactly what the liberal approach does. It treats it, it treats fascism as just another, you know, team in the realm of ideas battling it out. And if you look in history, we see it time and time again. Liberals don't know how to handle fascism. They're so committed to this abstract idealism and that's going to solve fascism and it's never worked. Hitler himself came to power within a liberal democratic, you know, capitalist framework. So we see that again and again. And when you have this, when you see this, when you see, see people like Joe Rogan who lately I've just been wanting to pull my hair out he has on Gavin McGinnis one of the co-founders of the proud boys which is a brown shirt fascist organization I mean I don't understand this normalization of this neo-fascism you know and here we are what five years after Occupy Wall Street and we're actually giving credit to people who are like banks are altruistic I mean Ben Shapiro's a little fucking pissant how was anyone taking this guy seriously or like liking what he has to say I mean it's just shocking And, you know, going back to Hitler, the whole conspiracy theory mean, like, culture that's now being fostered and proliferated by the all right, I find really interesting because it does take me back to Nazi Germany.

I mean, this hysteria about Jews and how Jews control the world, I mean, I feel like there's an inkling of similarity here when this hysterical mantra about fake news, right? And everything's fake news that basically isn't worshipping Trump. and this whole conspiracy about like the deep state is somehow working and like against Trump when really Trump has surrounded himself with the most generals since World War II fucking Raytheon like VP I mean do we do you really need me to explain to you that Raytheon is part of the deep state like the military industrial complex is the deep state so it's just it's just a bizarre disconnect from his from his followers and these loyalist brown shirts and it is dangerous because it because again that that's how Hitler was able to

within so much power. He had this loyalist army, and then on top of that, he had this conspiracy theory culture. He was able to just garner people in his own reality, and nothing else existed outside of that. Yeah, and it's worth, exactly,

and it's worth pointing out yesterday when Trump gave his fucking clown car of a speech after the violence in Charlottesville, where he rambled on about unemployment numbers and free trade and talked about he wants the world safe for kids to go outside and play. And then when a reporter asked him, do you accept support from white supremacist,

He refused to answer. He has white nationalists. And I mean, look at, look at Bannon. This guy is an open white nationalist. He, I mean, really, we did a whole expose on Steve Bannon that people should check out. But I mean, these people, these people are totally unashamed. That one guy was wearing, I forget his name, Garca, I want to say. He was wearing an actual, like, neo-Nazi medal and, like, refused to take it off.

I mean, these are the people who are colluding with Trump. This is why he didn't want to go out and can. condemn the attack, of course. This is why on a Holocaust, remember, and state he talked about how he didn't want to condemn the threats on synagogues. I mean, this is all I feel like very precise. And he's, yeah, and since he's one of the most, if not the most unpopular president of all time, his base is dwindling just down to these fascists. That's all he has. So he literally can't disavow them because his shrinking base consists almost more and more entirely of them. So this is who he's leading and this is who support him. And you can go on these daily

stormer websites and see what they're saying in lieu of what happened yesterday. And they support Trump. They support what he said. They love, you know, him not answering that question about white supremacy. They fully embrace that as him giving a wink and a nod to them. I'm not going to disavow you. You are my people. It's that sort of, it's that sort of thing that's happening. But let me ask you this. Do you think with the slaughter of innocent, of an innocent person yesterday and the injury to so many more, do you think this is going to hurt the alt-right? Is this going to hurt the movement, or is it going to emboldened them? Or is the American mainstream population going to start looking at this as the violent, disgusting

movement it is? Or what's your take on that? No, I mean, all I'd the way to do is look at the guy who slaughtered almost three people with a fucking machete in Portland, Oregon. I mean, I wish the answer could be yes. I wish that people could really understand the threat here. and who these people are, but I think that that was a pretty, you know, it exemplifies what the reaction will be, which is not enough.

You know, there was an open Trump supporter who once again ran into the courtroom or whatever when he was caught saying death to Antifa. I mean, this is a guy who slit the throat of two grown men and almost killed another. I think that we're going to see much more attacks like this, because this is what this climate will do. I mean, it's fostering this kind of hatred and bigotry and honestly, like, fomenting a civil war. So I don't think, given what the media has done already, no, I don't think that they're going to react accordingly. And of course, the Trump administration is not going to react accordingly. You know, again, the media is not treating this at all like it should.

The media is basically hysterically fear-mongering about Russia, day in and day out. And that's why I think Trump's actually going to win again, right? Because, because as the media is just obsessing about Russia Gates still, we have, you know, 200 people facing, what, 70 years in prison for a broken window at the inauguration. We have all of these things that are happening that the media cannot lock in on because they're liberal and they don't want to give credit to anything that will break their whole liberal base. Trump, on the other hand, is going in campaign. He's basically the, I think, I don't think anyone's gone as early as him in their presidency to start a re-election campaign already. So while the media is obsessing about

Russiagate, while leftists are being, are under attack from literally every corner and angle, including the media, including liberals, including the alt-right, including Trump, Trump is campaigning and Trump is garnering that base, honing in on that base, and keeping that base strong. And that's all he needs to win reelection. And that's what's scary to me. The whole could be burning. All of the Democrats are going to be focusing on Russia and we're going to be left out. Yeah. And when you talk about the world burning, that's not even too absurd because let's get into this next topic, the threats of nuclear war with the DPRK. What role do you think that plays in sort of Trump trying to consolidate power or trying to distract people from

his utter incompetence and his administration's utter incompetence, how do you think this whole nuclear tit for tat thing is going to play out? So what people don't realize is that every year it seems like whenever North Korea tests their intercontinental ballistic missile system, the U.S. has a fucking freak out and field day and all of a sudden takes that as a threat to the planet, right? And we need to respond to it because we're the world's arbitrator on who can have weapons and who can test them and who can't, right? So we have to remember that this is literally a response

to North Korea testing its own weapons in its own land. This is literally response to North Korea an independent sovereign state having the ability to have a weapon system. So if you're just taking it at that phase, you have to look at what happened to Saddam, what happened to Assad, and what happened to Gaddafi when they decided to work with the U.S. establishment

to eradicate their weapons programs. Well, we immediately invaded, right, or tried to be a regime change. And two countries we succeeded that are now complete failed states with ISIS taking over. So I think that North Korea has been smart. I don't think that, you know, you're looking at North Korea, and the media likes to paint King Jong-un is some, like, crazy, just crazy dude, right? Just completely insane, belligerent. When really, it's the U.S. that's completely insane in belligerent.

We're the only country who's ever dropped nuclear weapons and for some reason we're given the arbitration of telling other people who can have them, right? When we're the only country belligerent enough to ever actually perform that technological holocaust. But look, North Korea knows very well what will happen if they give up those. So then you're looking at the rhetoric, okay, this fire and fury, this biblical insanity that Trump is audacious enough to go out and say. So the media likes to paint, oh, this is so crazy, how could Trump say this? But then they look at someone like General Mattis, Mad Dog Mattis, another psychotic war criminal who says basically the same thing. He says that, you know, North Korea needs to watch out if they don't want the destruction of their people. To me, that's another genocidal threat.

I mean, what the fuck is the difference, fire and fury or the destruction of the people? I mean, to me, it just seems like all of this is genocidal rhetoric, and it's all coming from the U.S. And when you tell people like, look, here's the bigger context. People are like, oh, well, should we just allow threats from DPRK and not respond to them? It's like, no, we're the ones who are threatening them. We're constantly surrounding this country with war games all around Korea. We have how many bases in South Korea, right? Aside from that, just the constant threats whenever they just shoot a missile.

And we've already disproven the fact that these missiles can reach the continental U.S. And also this whole threat against Guam. It was based on a report that I don't believe, first of all. And also, why the fuck do we have troops in Guam? Why is Guam still a goddamn colony? Like, all of these things are never discussed. It's all just completely normalized, never mentioned. And again, this whole firing theory, look, to Americans, we're so fucking naive.

We've never really had a large-scale war. We don't really understand. We don't absorb the externalities of our foreign policy ever, right? But North Korea has certainly remembered what happened when the Korean war happened just sheer decades ago. They remember a bomb dropped for nearly every civilian in the country. They remember the hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm. Almost 5 million people were slaughtered. I mean, can you imagine if that happened here?

So when we say fire and fury like the world has never seen, they take it very, very seriously, because they remember that fire and fury that rained down on them when their ancestors were alive, and probably some have still survived the Korean War that are thinking, yeah, we remember that time and we don't want that time again. So I think that people need to understand that this rhetoric comes with a very, very heavy

memory for the civilians living in North Korea, and the demonization of these people is just absolutely insulting. I mean, first of all, when they talk about bombing this region, they just talk about the loss of South Korean lives, right? Oh, well, we can't put millions of South Koreans at risk. Well, what about North Koreans? These people aren't robots. These are human beings, and the media's depiction of North Korea is almost as absurd as Venezuela.

I mean, actually, much more absurd. Korea is definitely the most absurd in terms of the media painting it, because you can say anything. Nothing's corroborated. It's such a closed-off society that you can just literally make up any store you want. And when photos come out, of course, inside the DPRK, it's totally contrary to what we think. I mean, there's people having picnics, ice skating, weed is legal there. I mean, so it's just really comical the things that I read about this country, and people just believe it, take it, and at face value without questioning that. Yeah, and I think it's super important to realize that the depiction that you touched on,

the depiction from the media of the North Korean people and the North Korean leader is deeply racist and deeply orientalist. They paint these people as they're, like you said, robots are just brainwashed automaton who can't think for themselves and don't have their own interest and don't know what's good for them. And that provides cover for U.S. imperialism to go in there and quote unquote liberate them because that's always how our imperial war machine justifies itself. It's always under the context of liberating the Libyan people, liberating the Iraqi people. The U.S. Empire doesn't give a fuck about anybody except the U.S. Empire and its interests,

and its corporate interest and its geopolitical interests. So whenever the media talks about the DPRK, I just want to vomit, and I think you and I share that. Yes, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. All right, well, let's go ahead and get into your experiences in Palestine. and this is one topic that I haven't been able to touch on this show yet, and it's extremely important, and you're one of the few Western journalists that actually goes to these places, gets on the ground,

does first-person investigative journalism? I mean, you are one of the very few that does that, and so I think it's an extremely important, you know, service that you provide to not only this country, but the entire world by opening up these places and really going in there. So can you please talk about your experiences as an embedded investigative journalists in Israel?

Like, why did you go? Where did you go? What were your experiences, et cetera? Yeah, absolutely, Brett. And that's why I went, you know, because I'm sick of being told that I don't know. I need to go and find out, you know, and we're told our whole lives.

Like, first of all, I didn't even know what Palestine was until I was 18. So I think I've pretty much gotten the other side my whole life. You know, that's all we hear is Zionism being propagated throughout every sort of establishment source, media, my college years, you know, that was the first time I learned about Palestine, and I was like, well, why didn't I know about this other side of the story?

So, of course, talking about this issue, and Zionism has such a strong propaganda apparatus, of course, Israel employs, I think, thousands of people just to correct Wikipedia entries and correct forums online and cater message boards. And they're even given like a hot air balloon ride through Tel Aviv for whoever can edit the most entries within a year or something like that. So they are very invested in shaping the narrative. But luckily, with the proliferation of social media, they can't keep a lockdown on the narrative much longer. So you can only skew these photos that come out of Gaza so much and claim that they're all Hamas targets until people really understand the situation for themselves. So I think

that's why we're seeing the opinion shifting in terms of even liberals care more about Palestine and they did simply 10 years ago. So I wanted to go on the ground to see for myself what was going on. And I'll tell you, Brett, it was actually much worse than I thought. No matter how many videos you watch and how many articles you read, nothing can prepare you for how brutal the occupation is and how just fucked up it is for so many different reasons. So I was primarily in the West Bank only because I couldn't get into Gaza

because even though our tax dollars pay for one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, I wasn't allowed in. Neither are Israeli citizens, which I found really interesting. So they basically have tried to keep this entire area off limits for journalists. It's very hard to get in. So for people who don't really understand, Palestine was split into kind of three territories once it was taken over. Israel is a settler colonial state that was simply built on top of Palestine. So it's not like there's two different countries next to each other.

This is a country built on top of another one. And when Palestine was divvied up in partition, it was partitioned into three areas, one of which was Gaza. At the time, it wasn't a closed-off open-air prison. It was simply a surplus of where they would house all the refugees from the Nakhba and the initial ethnic cleansing, where tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes and merely moved miles away into this giant area called Gaza, where they were living as refugees mere miles away from where they were ethnically cleansed from settlers in their own homes.

And that's where you still hear people saying, oh, the two-state solution, the two-state solution, and I'll get into that in a second. But that is where the future Palestinian state was supposed to be, which is the West Bank. Now, when you see the West Bank, because they've never actually made settlements illegal and because the UN has never fucking done anything about them, And there's so many illegal settlements being built year after year, and you even have some numbers here that are really crazy. Yeah, I mean, just this month, a hundred's more. But because that has been happening nonstop, all of the West Bank has been taken over by settlement. So the territory that was supposed to be the future Palestinian state is merely just dotted specks of land overcome by illegal settlements, totally taken over. You look at a picture of area B, A, and C in the West Bank, and it's just littered with settlements.

Like, that's why I say that there's, you know, there's really no ability to create a future Palestinian state out of an area that's already been taken over. So, and then you look at Jerusalem, which was just supposed to be an international zone. And so that aside, so kind of giving you a sense of what the map looks like now. I think people have probably seen the four partition areas of like here was Palestine, you know, and when it was initially when Israel was created, and here it is now. And you can see the land has just been completely eviscerated even even since then. So when we got there knowing, you know, I didn't really, it didn't really hit me until you're in the West Bank, seeing how militarized and taken over and occupied this area is. And what people may not understand is that the West Bank is under complete martial law. So it is 100% occupied.

People like to think of Palestine. They're like, oh, there's Palestine and there's Israel. Like they don't understand that there is no Palestine really. It's either Gaza, which now is completely an open-air prison torn. controlled by Israel where they actually control the caloric intake of people who are eating there, where 90% of the water is actually unpotable, and where people can't even fucking leave. I can't even think of another place in the entire world where if you're a refugee, you can't fucking leave. You can't even try to leave on a boat, otherwise you will get

executed by Israeli forces. So you are literally a prisoner there. In terms of the West Bank, you can't leave in or out. The occupation is so brutal. These soldiers, Not only are there multiple dehumanizing checkpoints, you can't go a mile down the road without getting stopped and harassed, willy-nilly arbitrarily for hours on end, guns pointed in your fucking face with someone's finger on the trigger. But aside from that, it's just little things that I was absolutely floored about and devastated about that Palestinians can and can't do. For example, 90% of Palestinians can never go to Jerusalem.

This is the site where the Alaksa mosque, the dome of the rock, I mean, these are extremely holy sites in Islam. The dome of the rock is one of the holiest sites in all of Islam. And you cannot go there. If you're a Palestinian, you just can look at it from afar. I spoke to one 15-year-old girl, and I was just like, you know, what are your dreams? She was like, my dream is to go to the beach. They live by the beach.

They live like five miles from the beach, but these are the restrictions for Palestinians that they can never go to the beach. They can never go pray at their holy sites. They may be, if they're lucky, we'll get a permit once in their life where they can go into Jerusalem. And a lot of these people, you know, it's all the signs are in Hebrew,

and it's confusing. You don't know how to even get through the checkpoints if you're lucky enough to go in and pray at the site, and a lot of them get executed trying to go into these checkpoints because they don't know the proper way to go in and out. We actually saw a guy almost get executed right next to our car

who was walking a little too, a little too close to the guards. And they shot at his legs. The bolts were ricocheting everywhere. I mean, it was just unreal. There is no way to fight the occupation because, of course, guns are illegal. But it's not just guns.

It's that you can't protest. A group of five or more people in Palestine is illegal. You can't even raise a Palestinian flag. That's illegal. We went to some other place called Sebastian. And the day that we were there, we were told a story that two Palestinians, had erected a flag on top of a hill and they were shot.

They were shot for doing so. And the next day, that Palestinian flag was back up on that hill. And that really shows you the resilience of Palestinians that they will risk life and limb for solidarity to show that they are alive and well. And their resistance is existence. And that's where that phrase comes from. It's like simply to exist is resistance.

And it's incredible. I mean, when you look at the juxtaposition, of settlers, and I know we're going to get into this next, what the settlers can do versus what the Palestinians can do is astounding. Yeah, so Israeli settlements, and it's been reported this week, you know, they've tripled in the first half of 2017 alone, what are these settlements, what is the intentions behind them, and what are the consequences for the Palestinians? There were two types of settlements, some that were illegal within Israeli law and some that

were legal within Israeli law. All the settlements are illegal under international law. So after the knockba, after the initial giant massacres that happened that expelled tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, when you look at the world, I think, next to Syria, I mean, there's the most refugees from Palestine because of all of this ethnic cleansing that has happened. That's why, ever since this happened, Palestinians hold up that key. That's a really big symbol for Palestinians say, you know, we have the right to return. That's a really powerful thing for them.

But that's also why this is so fucked up that international human rights bodies have just allowed Israel to continue to have all these settlements being built year after year. And even Israeli law, again, had to even pretend like, you know, they were legal even under Israeli law, even though they were still happening and being codified and helped and abated and abetted by the government. But until this year, that was kind of like the face that they were putting out to the public, no, these are still legal, they're not happening. But then they just went and retroactively legalized all of them. So the Knesset, which is the Israeli Supreme Court, just finally did that. So, you know, just wipe their hands clean and they're like, okay, all the settlements here are now legal. So what was happening was there, anyone from all over the world can go to Israel, I'm sorry, can go to Palestine, set up a tractor trailer literally anywhere on top of an Arab village, and that's what they usually do. even though there's dozens of, hundreds of miles of empty land within the borders of Israel or whatever,

these people, these crazy-ass settlers, come and build their home on top of an Arab village. So it's also like the architecture of oppression where you have to dominate that person. What sick fuck would want to travel around the world and move on top of an Arab village? I don't know. You'd have to be pretty fucking sick because what these people do is unbelievable. And I'll get into that in a second. But you can go and you can set up a tractor trailer on any sort of makeshift little house. And immediately, Brett, the government will supply you with water lines, electricity, and a little military base, a little military outpost to protect you.

Because that's their whole job. It's like, okay, settlers here. We need to immediately go and make sure that these people are safe and that they can live fine, you know? And so these were like the so-called illegal settlements that Israel retroactively codified. But Israel was allowing, of course, legal settlements within their law forever. But all the settlements are illegal. Every single one is a legal under international law. And when you're there, we went to this village called Duma.

And this was a village where there was a horrific arson attack. Because the settlers are extremely brutal. They clearly have dehumanized Arabs to the point where they feel like they can move on top of an Arab village and just constantly commit acts of terrorism against them. Like I said before, it's illegal to have any sort of weapons. You can't really fight back against what's going on, but settlers can be totally armed. And they run around with giant rifles and machine guns, and they're just, they shoot arbitrarily. They burn down giant olive harvests, and olive oil means a lot to Palestinians.

This is like one of their only sources of sustenance and income. So to burn down these olive oil trees is really, really horrifying. But on top of that, there's extreme terrorism going on against the Palestinians who simply live there. For example, this village Duma where I went and visited a family where settlers who lived there just went and burned this family alive. They pulled out the mother and father. They poured gasoline into their mouths and they burned their bodies. And including the little baby, little tiny baby boy who was done. burned alive by these people.

Jesus. And there was one little boy, Ahmed, who hid. And that's why he survived. And his grandfather now has to hide him, because they can't afford to move. If you leave your home, then you're fucked. Then settlers will just take it over. And you can see videos of this online. Like, settlers will come in the dozens and literally forcibly remove Palestinians from

their home, and then it's theirs. And Palestinians can't do anything about it. And then they'll demolish it and whatever. But this little boy named Ahmed was able to survive because he hid from the settler terrorists. And now he has to stay in a different room every night. They had to board up their windows. They're afraid of Maltau cockles being thrown in and burning him again. And this is what the grandfather told me. He said that still, when Ahmed was in the hospital getting skin graft surgery, that the settlers would come and protest at the hospital. And they've come back to

Duma, the village, and protest there. And what do they do? They hold up three fingers saying, we got three. There's one more to go. Wow. There's videos of inside of a wedding where you can see these Israeli settlers holding up a little replica of a baby, symbolizing that infant baby that was burned alive, and stabbing it, dancing. It's a deranged and extremely disturbing ideology. And what bothers me a lot is this whole mantra that Israel is this democratic place, when really it's a theocratic, fascist state. And when you have people like Sam Harris saying, I don't criticize Israel, well, too bad, because if you want to talk about religion, then, wow, this is a really fascinating place when you have a Jewish supremacist country that is doing it openly colonizing and ethnically cleansing people to this day. And it's been going on for decades. And it's just completely absolved from any sort of accountability in the entire Western world.

It's quite astounding. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that a discrepancy between his inability to critique Israel, but his fervent, you know, supportive of U.S. imperialist bullshit about Islam is never ending from him. But the moment it comes like, hey, look at this seriously far-right pseudo-fascist or full-on fascist, theocratic state in the Middle East, silence. But that's what we expect from these white, liberal, rich males that don't give a fuck about other people. And to be honest, they're Western chauvinists. That's what they are. Absolutely.

So you mentioned the government. It's very right-wing in nature. And racism, as it does in America, plays a huge role in Israel. So how ubiquitous is racism in Israel? What are the similarities and differences to the racism here in the U.S.? In terms of Israeli society. So Israelis, I feel like the main problem is obviously to have a state, like this, in order for it to exist, it has to be built on racism, right? Because you, because the sheer

fact that you're occupying an Arab country in order to exist, like you have to have some sort of supremacist ideology that you are better than these people. Otherwise, you would not be able to live in an apartheid state, right? Like, Jim Crow couldn't have existed if we were already in an equal footing. Like, this is a subjugation, and it's based on immunization of a people. So So that alone, I mean, the indoctrination of Israelis from youth is astounding. I mean, you read some of these stories of the apartheid system going on in school where, you know, Palestinians and Israelis are just simply in separate schools, and they never interact.

And when we were driving into the West Bank, there was a giant red sign that says this is a legal for Israelis to even go into the West Bank. Like, you can't even go in there. there's very few anti-Zionist Israelis for obvious reasons. I mean, it's basically you're rejecting your entire national identity. So it's one thing to say the occupation's inhumane. We shouldn't have the occupation. It's another thing to say Israel shouldn't exist.

Like, I'm an anti-Zionist. And that's understandable. That's a long road to get to as someone who grew up in Israel and you're an Israeli. I totally understand that it's very difficult to come to terms with the fact that, like, this is wrong. But we do know several anti-Zionists Israelis who have shed a lot of light on, like, how the indoctrination works from early on and how fucked up it really is. And I think another big problem is not only the education system, not only just the notion of what Israel is and how it's built, but also the military, the militarization of a society, when every single person has to go into the IDF. I mean, the IDF is a horrific institution. Can you imagine how much worse these fucking empire babies in America would be if everyone served in the military?

Right, exactly. I can't even imagine how much more like bloodlust and psychotic this country would be if we all had to be militarized in that way. But I think that that's a huge problem, and I think it's obviously by design, not only to indoctrinate everyone with the belief that, you know, Arabs want to kill you at a moment's nose. notice and this is all like about dominating these people who want you dead. But the militarization really, really helps, helps that cement that belief. When we were in Palestine and when we're in the borders of Israel, two different very, I guess, I guess, senses that we got from people when we were talking to people. When we were in Palestine, we could have easily been mistaken as Israeli settlers,

were white Americans and we were in yellow plates which also means that you're in a settler car again they have if people want to say oh this is not apartheid they have literally different license plates if you're Arab and Jewish

like it was on your driver's license like it's very real the apartheid's palpable but when we were driving to these some of these villages people would come up and go hi all the little kids I mean I was expecting them to be throwing shit at us

and screaming at us like why wouldn't day. And even when they found out that I was American, I was like, you should hate me. I fund your subjugation. I fund this occupation with my tax dollars. So it was very interesting to see, like, the difference in how we were treated from, from Arabs and Palestinians, and they were all extremely friendly, welcome, come into our home, eat these meals, like, we love you, we love you. And then we went into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to do about 50 different man on the streets with dozens of people from all walks of life, right? And the dichotovies.

and their responses and attitudes was completely different and very disturbing. I mean, first of all, right when we, the first thing that we were told was, I do Arab from like Israelis when we were walking in Jerusalem. They were very hostile. They thought that we looked Arab, which was really weird. I was like, wow. And then as soon as we started talking to these people, we realized that 95% of all people we talked to had openly genocidal rhetoric

and were very comfortable with, with expounding that rhetoric, which I found very shocking. About 5% of those people called themselves leftists and liberals, but still kind of like still the best thing that they could say was that the occupation's inhumane and that they feel like Palestinians aren't given as much as they should be. So what you realize as you're there, and then, of course, you look at people like Dan Cohen and Ronnie Barkin,

who are Ronnie Barkin's an Israeli leftist, an anti-Zionist, and Dan Cohen is a Jewish anti-Zionist who lived in the, West Bank for a long time. And they snuck into some of these giant rallies, these fascist rallies, and they've recorded kind of this dissent into total fascism and how it's really an inevitable, an inevitability for this kind of society. But leftism is a slur. There's a phrase within Israeli society that says, leftists are the AIDS and Arabs are the common cold, where you can't get rid of the common cold unless you get rid of AIDS. Wow.

Because they can't go to the final solution, which, of course, is getting rid of all Palestinians unless leftists are removed from society, because they're really the last kind of vestige of blocking the final solution. Are these people who are like, no, we need to incorporate Palestinians, we need to include Arabs, we need to have a more human occupation? No, a lot of these people just want to carpet bomb them and get it over with. And sadly, it's true. And it's exemplified as much as Israeli authorities and the government,

like to pretend like all these fascist settlers who are terrorists and stuff are outliers. It's totally codified and normalized in society. And this is exemplified with the case of Alarazaria. Yeah, and what role do you think does the U.S. play in upholding this apartheid state? And furthermore, what role does the U.S. media play in providing cover for both U.S. imperialism and the Israeli apartheid state? So I could speculate. I still don't understand what the U.S. gets out of this staunch, like, alliance.

I really don't, because, first of all, we're seeing the tide turn in the U.S. where I think that the majority of liberals now sympathize or empathize with Palestine, which is a huge shock wave, right, to the establishment considering the amount of propaganda that they've levied to try to consolidate this narrative. I think that it's a couple things. I think it's the military industrial complex where you saw that recent 10 billion dollar aid package, where Obama, you know, did with Netanyahu. And a lot of people are like, holy shit, this is just proof that, like, Israel controls the U.S.

No, it's not. Israel, we use Israel as a dog in the fight where we can own this kind of, I mean, look who's around it. Like, obviously, it behooves us to totally control this nation there as a battering ram, you know? So, and look what we did in all of these different wars in the past. we use Israel as kind of like a launch pad for different invasions, etc. But I think that with that $10 billion aid package was really was actually pulling Israel back in the fold into our military industrial complex. Because if you look at Israel's power and industry over the last 10 years, they've actually had their own little mini military industrial complex thing going on where they just sold one of the largest military aid deals to India.

they've been testing a lot of military equipment, you know, in terms of drone warfare, Elbit systems was involved, and, you know, we know that they basically use Gaza as a giant testing ground for new weapons. So I think what the U.S. was doing was putting them back into our industry and saying, you need to buy from our corporations or whatnot if you want to get this aid deal. So that's one thing. It's bizarre. It's one of those third rail issues. It really is one of those third rail issues. Israel, you know, and when I started talking about Israel and criticizing it, I remember people immediately just jumped down my throat with all those tired notions that I was an anti-Semite because I was suddenly talking about people being

slaughtered in Gaza. So I think that the risk and the self-censorship, journalists do not touch it because it's not worth it for them. There are so many Zionist entities that are involved in politics, as we know, like every single senator just signed on to condemn BDS. I mean, what does that tell you? The U.S. Empire is the biggest, strongest force in the world, and they clearly control Israel. Like, Israel would not exist without our subsidization. So, like, that's very obvious.

So, but as far as the media towing this line, I mean, I mean, it's just one of those things. It's like you look at Syria and you look at Venezuela. It's like you could ask the same question, why is the media towing this narrative? What are they getting out of it? And I think it's obvious. I mean, first of all, it would completely eliminate the whole, like, terrorism narrative, the whole freedom fighter narrative where ever since the 9-11 happened, I mean,

Palestine was the first country that was blamed, if you remember. We had the Israeli generals all over TV that morning talking about how we're going to have to install a war on terror just like them. There was the Kagan family entertaining and fading Palestine the morning of 9-11. And, of course, we saw that footage of Palestinians dancing in the street. And I still hear to this day people use that as justification to obliterate Gaza. Every time Israel wants to go on another bombing rampage, they say, well, they celebrated 9-11. So these are the propaganda things that are littered throughout the years that stay. It works.

I mean, this propaganda works. They wouldn't spend billions of dollars on it if it didn't. Yeah. Yeah, and it's worth noting as well that the, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, U.S. imperialist war machine commits 9-11s every decade to other countries. Our 9-11 pales in comparison to things that we've done in all these other countries. And I shouldn't say we because I'm very, you know, strong-headed in this notion that we should not use the word we when talking about the U.S. government because they are utterly detached from the interest of common people

and they have their own motives and their own motivations separate and aside from us. But you did mention Venezuela. We're coming up on an hour. Would you like to more or less quickly go through your experiences on the ground in Venezuela, what's happening there, and most importantly, who the opposition is, because that is really obscured here in the U.S. media? Of course. I mean, do you want me to get in from kind of like who Chavez was and that whole thing, too? Yeah, if you have the time, go ahead. Of course, yeah.

So a lot of people, you know, who are totally new to this issue may be hearing a lot from the media, right? that Venezuela has deteriorated into a totalitarian dictatorship where Maduro is, you know, mowing down protesters in the streets who are peaceful to try to maintain power. So to lay this out, first of all, before I get into the story, I do have to say for transparency sake that I work for Telesore, and what that means is, like I said at the beginning of the broadcast, it's a Latin American conglomerate of state media forces.

So, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Ecuador, different state entities who have made this news network. Now, I don't really have a boss. We sell our footage to Telesaur, to broadcast. We're a production company, and we create these broadcasts to, and then they air them. So just for transparency's sake, so for people who want to negate my entire experience and opinions, simply because I am affiliated with Telesaur, you know, so be it. but you're really missing out on the truth here because it's pretty intense because you realize that the corporate media has, you know, there's a reason why all this narrative has been skewed in this way, and I'll get into that in a second.

But so Chavez has always been a huge threat to the establishment. Of course, you probably remember back when the Bush administration, Venezuela was on the extended axis of evil. I mean, Venezuela was declared one of the biggest security threats in the Western. hemisphere by the Obama administration, oddly enough. So this has been an ongoing thing for the last decade plus, where Venezuela has always been a thorn in the side of the empire, let's say, where Chavez has always been very outspoken, and then his successor, Maduro, as well. Back in 1999, Chavez won a sweeping victory of the country, and this was coming off, of course, centuries prior of colonialism, of an oil economy, and it still is an oil economy, but just,

just to let you know, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, far surpassing Saudi Arabia even. So in 1999, Chavez won this sweeping victory on the heels of a giant IMF economy. So back in the 90s, it was kind of finance guy after finance guy, just like you see in all these countries in Latin and South America before the pink tide. It was just people who were kind of IMF puppets who installed this World Bank austerity measures, you know. Back in the 90s, there was an IMF in position where basically you look at the same kind of inflation rates and economic distress. And it's kind of similar than it to what it is today, where the IMF came in, swept up all the shit. Oil prices skyrocketed. Everyone was facing skyrocketing inflation.

And so there was mass protests in the street. And 3,000 people were gunned down, murdered. This was a huge massacre in the streets right after this IMF bill happened. Chavez was looking at this happening as a military guy. He was already, like, publishing a lot of progressive thought. He was kind of known as this kind of radical thinker within the military, as odd as that is. But it was really turning into a fascist dictatorship on the outskirts. So Chavez, after this huge massacre, wanted to do a military coup.

He got a lot of people together in the military and tried to perform a coup to oust the city and government after this horrific massacre happened. But he got arrested. But after he was in jail for just a couple of years, he was so popular because of course the people were like, holy fuck. They're like, we all know what happened. This guy who we like tried to outst this government and didn't work, but now he's in jail. and we agree with him. We agree that we want his leadership, not your leadership. And so basically, as he was in jail,

there was so much pressure for every leader thereafter to promise that they would give Shaba's amnesty that they could not even run unless one of their platforms was giving Shava's amnesty from jail and releasing him. So whoever, you know, so they had to basically let him out of prison. And after he got out of prison,

he won in a sweeping victory and became like the kind of this unabashed socialist. He didn't necessarily run on a socialist platform initially, but he embraced kind of this popular socialism after he realized that that's what the people wanted. So he was really, really reflective of the people's will at that time. So he started off as kind of this anti-imperialist and then became a staunch anti-capitalist, pro-socialist. But I think that was the biggest problem is a lot of people from the left critique Venezuela as not overtaking all the enterprises and, you know, controlling the entire economy and even

letting private businesses in, because I think that's a lot of the problem that we see today is that it's a mixed economy and not completely run by the state. So at that time, I think that was the reason why he didn't completely nationalize everything is because he didn't, it happened over time slightly. But let's fast forward where, you know, during his reign, for the past 17, 18 years, he installed several missions and these are over two dozen of these missions which were huge state programs widespread social programs and for public improvement like mission sucre which provided free higher education mission bario adentro which provided free health care even mission musica and mission like

different art programs that supplied artists with the ability to make murals employ artists for the first time in venezuela history and mission viviendas which is a huge housing program, which has provided 1.6 million houses for the poor over the last 16 years. So all of these amazing advances that are completely undeniable that happened under Chavez. And you don't see this talked about in the media now. You don't see people talking about the advances in how poverty fell 43 percent to 26 percent. Extreme poverty, 17 percent to 7 percent. The amount of people attending school quadrupled, illiteracy was eradicated.

So all these things kind of similarly to Cuba. We only hear the bat, right, for a very specific reason. So here we are today where Maduro, you know, Chavez tragically died, and Maduro was his successor. A lot of these people don't realize that Maduro also won the popular vote in a free and fair election. They have elections there. Chavez won multiple elections. Maduro won a popular election. In fact, the Jimmy Carter Center, which, you know, Jimmy Carter, obviously, former U.S. president, and has a center that measures the fairness of elections,

the democracy of elections all over the world. In 2004, he declared Venezuela's elections the freest in the entire world. And astoundingly, unlike the U.S., Venezuela does have extremely transparent elections where they have the ability to audit their elections, and which they have. They did after Maduro won because he won with a hairpin. And so they, of course, they audited the vote, and they found that absolutely was transparent and free.

And every time that a person votes, they have a paper receipt, and they put a thumbprint in machine. So, you know, the U.S. decries Venezuela as this totalitarian state when actually their elections are much more transparent than ours. So, I mean, that's what's going on. And they just had another election. They have another one next year, a presidential one in 2018, and they just had a massive constituent assembly election that the opposition boycotted.

So that aside, I want to get into the opposition next because that's really what's at stake here because the left media has been really bad on this. Left media is promoting this kind of ambiguity where they're promoting this third position that doesn't exist, this gray area, where it's like, okay, we're going to criticize the fuck out of Maduro, call him corrupt, call them authoritarian, but also the opposition's bad. But it's like, so what are you advocating here? Because really what's at stake is something very serious. It's either you support the Bolivarian revolution and the trajectory and all of these missions that I just mentioned. or you support kind of a Pinochet-style takeover

of potentially a totalitarian dictatorship, which we will see massive amounts of casualties in the streets, Brett. Because when you look at what the opposition is, that's where it gets really scary. These are people who lost power. These are kind of the old oligarch class, the millionaires who lost power, kind of the same like the Batista generation in Cuba.

And rich, power-hungry oligarchs, don't let up power that easily. They don't give it up that easily. And that's why we saw a coup, coup attempts after coup attempts, right, starting in 2002, where the opposition, backed by the U.S., of course,

and a side note, the U.S. has given the opposition over $50 million since Chavez won. So how much money, you know, how much can that really turn around in the black market and what has that really done to emboldened the opposition since then? But in 2002, they kidnapped Chavez for 48 hours. and what did they do when they kidnap Chavez

and tried to take over the country? They eliminated the Constitution. They abolished the Supreme Court. So that shows you how much the opposition cares about democracy. So don't tell me that the opposition, oh, and that's why they're fighting because they just really want to restore democracy. No, we saw what you guys will do. We saw that you will immediately privatize all the housing units, right?

So when you look at what's going on today, and you saw this happen again in 2014, In 2012, I think there was another coup attempt. This is what the opposition wants, and this is what's really at stake, is a complete eradication and elimination of all of these social gains and a complete takeover the country where they want to rule without Chavismo, which is this grassroots organic force, which if you're going to try to rule without taking these people into account, that's fascism. And that's a fascist vision that they're trying to employ. And I have to point out what they're doing to do this, Brad, because going back to the whole deaths on the streets, the media wants to point out that protesters are trying to mobilize en masse peacefully, and Maduro's forces are gunning them down. Well, it couldn't be farther from the truth. This is actually a claim that's made up out of thin air.

Yes, Venezuela's horrifically crime-ridden, yes, there's all these paramilitary forces from Colombia, and there's forces of collectivos who are battling the streets. It's a very dangerous country, right? But when it comes to these protests, I was there. I went there, and a lot of other people haven't gone to the protest. So, you know, it's easy to see edited videos of, quote, unquote, repression from the state. It's another thing to be there and be a part of what's going on and see the truth. And the truth is that everyone has the right to protest there. There's massive amounts of protests with tens of thousands of people mobilizing peacefully, untouched, right?

But then you have these things called Guadimbas, and that's the ongoing. blockades that are done day after day from a small contingent of protesters who are semi-armed and violent. These people are armed with guns, with rocket launchers, and with torches, Maltaf cocktails. And what we've seen from these kind of fascist Guadimba protesters is that they are responsible for the vast majority of the deaths. When you look at the breakdown of the deaths, it's either through blockades where cars are trying to get out of the way and running off the road or outright political assassinations

where on the eve of the constituent assembly, one of the grassroots leaders was executed in his home several times over the last couple months. Chavistas were executed. Orlando Figueroa, a black Chavista, burned alive on the streets told by the opposition protesters, hey, black guy, are you a Chavista before they let him on fire and burned him alive with a Maltov cocktail. I haven't seen this in any sort of political movement other than the KKK. So don't tell me that this is some, you know, people have defended these types of actions and said, what are they supposed to do? They're starving. Fuck you. You don't burn people life. That's fascist violence. This is racism, classism, and fascism. This is not a normal, people don't do

this to gain political advocacy. Like, this is not the weather underground. I actually had some asshole tried to argue with me like, oh, well, the weather, whether, whether, underground used violence too. I was like, are you actually comparing like fascist Guadima protesters and finest weather to the weather underground? Like, holy shit. It's just like this complete, just absence of what these people are doing. And it's not only that. And of course, there are food shortages and shit. We can get into like what that is. There's an economic war, of course. But these protesters use the poor cynically when they actually aren't poor. The protesters are more upper middle class. They're all white. It's a huge class war going on. And really, you just have to look at the targets of these protesters. They're burning down food distribution warehouses. 50 tons of food are being burned. Maternity clinics are targeted.

Socialist organization offices. This is terrorism. This is terrorism. And this is not, I mean, it's just shocking. And then you have the media just glorifying the fuck out of these people. It's stunning. Yet again, 200 people in America are facing 70 years behind bars for a broken window, yet the protesters in Venezuela burning down the Supreme Court are heroic.

It's absolutely sickening. And I also think it speaks volumes as to the connection between fascism and capitalism. Capitalism has been, or, you know, fascism has been called capitalism in decay. Fascism is what happens when capitalism or the capitalist class feels they are losing power or entering a moment of crises. It's fascism is capitalism with its claws out. And what we see in Venezuela is class war laid bare. There's no more ideology, smoothing the edges of what's actually happening in reality. It's just full on the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat and the fascist forces have, as they always do, align themselves with the bourgeoisie. And that's what we're seeing actually here in America. You have the same sort of violent fascist lashing out to

maintain the racial and class hierarchies of capitalism. And we're going to see that more and more as capitalism spirals the drain, as neoliberalism fails to deliver on its promises over and over and over again, all over the planet, we're going to keep seeing these rises of fascist movements. And I know we're way over time. I want to thank you, Abby, for coming on the show. And I want to thank you for being a fucking hero. You put your life on the line. You go into these places that no other Western media outlet dares. And you lay it all on the line to give us real information. You're a fucking hero. I really appreciate you coming on the show. You have a home here. Anytime you want a platform to say anything, you have it here. Dude, thank you so much, Brett. I really, really appreciate the time to lay all this out. And thank you so much for your work. I mean, we all need to be the media and be creating content creators because we need to combat this propaganda and combat the empire. I mean, we are all we have. We need to build this super strong. So, Brett, thank you for doing your part and for kicking ass. Absolutely. And before

before we end can you go ahead and tell my listeners where they can find your work and find more of your stuff yeah absolutely you can go on the empire files dot tv and all of our episodes are on there and check out media roots radio that i do with my brother robby on sound cloud or iTunes and you can go to media roots dot org to check out thanks so much and all of our venezuela stuff and our palestine there's so much more that i obviously couldn't get into but it's all there if anyone wants to check it out yeah absolutely i highly recommend that as well thanks again Abby. Thanks so much, Brett. Good cast. See you later.

way to our grade. The process is a practice of what we call fascist stand for something. Stop running. Acting like you're active. But who am I to judge? We got a lot in common. Politics and economics, you know, them human type of problems. I'm follow my heart before I follow sheep to slaughter. See, I'm a do my job and try to be a better father. I've been working so hard someone's always working harder. What we're going to do if they put hands on the side of? Play my role as an artist. I'm not trying to be a martyr, but I gotta talk about it. Not enough of us will bother. Hey, oh, the vampires have got to go.

Hey, hey, oh, oh, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, oh, oh, the vampires have got to go. Kick, clack, hi-hack, kick, kid clap. I remember one time someone hit me with a bat. It hit and knocked me out, but I know he wish he had. See, that's a metaphor for where we are at. They shut up water in Detroit, they either slaughter or exploit.

Preparation for the confrontation that you can't avoid. We painfully endure, being gainfully employed. A robot took a job, we're on the corner with our boys. Now, for no good reason, it's open season. Black folks breathing provokes policing. I'm consistently scoping out things overseas, and freedom is a verb. I am not afraid of leaving the gentle genocide. It's a city gentrify.

You get pushed aside. Oh, this is a franchise. This is the player guys that the mayor has devised and the assassins to attack you in the back you can't hide. Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, oh, oh, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, ho, oh, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go up Why would I pay a human being a fee

To do for me what I can get a machine to do for free You might find it offensive, but it's not in my interest To wind up in a lawsuit where I'm the defendant After I pay your pension, your medical and dental The technology is cheap, it's not coincidental I'm international and intercontinental Ownership, by ownership, you pay for the rental Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go.

Hey, hey, oh, oh, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go. Hey, hey, ho, the vampires have got to go. Got to go, got to go, got to go, got to go, got to go. Thank you.