Rev Left Radio - Students Revolt: Campus Uprisings for Palestine

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Alyson and Breht discuss the student-led protests for Palestine sweeping across American universities, the reaction to them by the ruling class elite and their attack dogs (the cops), lessons learned from previous movements over the past decade or so, parallels to 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War protests, the current negotiations between the Palestinian resistance and Israel, and what it all means for the broader crisis (geopolitical and internal) racking the U.S. --------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left Radio Follow Rev Left on IG 

Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. Okay, on today's episode, we are obviously going to be talking about the number one story in the country at the moment, which is the campus uprisings from coast to coast, um, in solid. solidarity with Palestinians. This is a, this is broken out over, obviously, anybody listening to this is almost certainly aware of what's happening, broken out over the last couple of weeks, starting in Colombia, spreading very quickly. Not only has it spread through campuses throughout the country, it has resonance and has spread in some sense to, you know, place universities in Europe, to West Asia. There are signs from, you know, Yemeni masses holding up signs in solidarity with the students. the gaza and refugees in southern gaza have put in english you know letters of encouragement

and appreciation across the sides of their tents and so it is you know a real signal and a real sign of solidarity showing the absolute best of this godforsaken country and is a stark contrast to the elites of this country who are some of the most corrupt venal disgusting criminal people on the planet and draw a firm line in the sand saying we are not them. The American people, regular-ass people are not the elite. We do not agree with them. They do not represent us in any capacity. And these students are being incredibly brave in the process.

Allison, now that I've given the real birds I view, do you kind of want to flesh out some of the details, catch people up on what's happening, and we can go from there? Yeah, we can go ahead and talk kind of about the broader thing that is going to on right now. So obviously, for the last, you know, seven months now, we have seen a very intense level of violence and genocide being committed in Gaza that has escalated continually with Israeli troops continuing to move further and further into the south. As we talk about this, a potential invasion of Rafa is being discussed now. Netanyahu said today that even if they got the hostages back, they would still invade Rafa, which we all know. That isn't surprising to

anyone, but there is just a really high level of intensity going on with that. And in the United States domestically, we have seen, you know, people take to the streets to push back against this. We saw max mobilizations throughout the last seven months. We saw millions people in the street. We saw disruptions on April 15th where the Golden Gate Bridge was shut down. And there really has been kind of a massive shift within the United States, especially among young people who are refusing this genocide. And, you know, I've noted this. elsewhere, but I really do think that one thing that I've seen over the last seven months is people saying, okay, we're in the streets, we have these mass protests happening, disruption is happening,

where does it go? How does that turn into ending the genocide? And I think that's, you know, just an extremely fair question to be asking. And I would suggest that we are now seeing the answer to that question, which is that the protests in the streets have turned into encampments on college campuses, which are a particularly strategic place for them to go because colleges are heavily invested in mutual funds and bond packages that profit from genocide and are invested in companies that are both in Israeli settlements and which sell military equipment to Israel. And so divestment has kind of come out as this very concrete demand that could be used in order to push back against the economic financing of the genocide occurring right now.

This has echoes of divestment battles that we saw over South Africa, which we've talked previously about with our guerrilla history comrades. And we have seen this really spark up first in a couple of universities. But the one where everything really exploded was at Columbia, where students' encampment faced some serious repression from the police and from admin. And in response, the encampment only grew. Everywhere we have seen this kind of repression take place, there have been significantly larger encampments that have taken their space. We saw this in Columbia. We saw this at USC where the encampment was cleared within hours of it being set up when it looked like there were only 50 or so people there. And by that night, there was a new encampment with hundreds of people. We have seen this at the University of Texas Austin. All over the country, students are building these encampments. They are disrupting and they are demanding divestment now. I think it's a really interesting moment to watch the level militancy that we're seeing from students at UT Austin yesterday. We saw students drive lines of police off campus chanting in unison. We're not scared of you.

and off our campus, which is an incredible site to see. And we are seeing students that are organized, that are making clear, actionable concrete demands on universities that can be used to help isolate Israel on the international stage. And we are seeing really just a push here that is incredible. The more that these universities and the state apparatus pushed it back and try to crush the encampments, the bigger they have gotten. And we have seen some incredibly militant actions from some universities like Humboldt, where students ended up really occupying much of the campus and refusing terrible compromises and bargains that the university offered to them. Many of them were rated last night. I would recommend going to Twitter to find the bail funds

for those students. They definitely need the support right now. But yeah, the kind of big developments within the last 24 hours is that Columbia gave students a deadline to leave. Those students refused to leave, even though they were offered partial amnesty. In response, professors and faculty came out in support. Those students took what was previously called Hamilton Hall, which is a that was seized in the uprisings in 1968, renamed Hins Hall after a six-year-old Palestinian girl whose family was killed by the IDF and who was left in a car to die alone because no one could get to her to rescue her. They've renamed the hall after her at this exact moment as we are recording this. Columbia Police are saying that they are going to raid again,

and I just right before starting this with watching videos of people running through parks in New York City to get to the campus to be able to offer defense. We are, right in the middle of this. Everything is getting very intense. I just got a text on my phone right now that UCLA issued a statement to the students that they have to baitate as well or that there will be reprisal. Things are picking up, students aren't backing down, and that's where we're at. The last thing that I'll say on it, a big picture thing is, you know, Brett, you mentioned that, you know, the people of Gaza have made statements about this. We've seen signs thanking the students. I think the most mind-blowing thing that I've seen in the last few weeks is a statement

from the PFLP praising American students and saying that Arab students in the Arab countries should take after the lesson of the Americans, which is the kind of thing I never thought I would see in my life, right? It's really been a wild thing to see what's happening here. And there will be a lot of discussion about where this is going, what the strengths and weaknesses of this moment are. But, you know, that's kind of the general summary. I'm so unbelievably proud of all of these students. They have nothing but are absolute support. there is an incredible movement taking place right now and it has teeth absolutely unwavering uncritical support love solidarity from both allison and i hands down you know you're representing the best of us we can't say that enough um and i just have to point out in the columbia situation when they

took over the hall and they renamed it after that little girl who was killed obviously it's devastating to hear stuff like that it happens every day um during this these last few months where children are being obliterated by this disgusting death machine, aided and abetted by the U.S. elite, underfunded, undergirded by our tax dollars to slaughter people like this. And as little kids are being killed and murdered in Palestine, the elites in this disgusting country are hand-wringing over the supposed rabid anti-Semitism and quote-unquote violence of these incredibly peaceful student uprisings for humanity. So a little girl having her entire family killed and Israel killing her as the rescuers are trying to get to the car.

I mean, the details are a little fuzzy, but just straight up murder. You know, people are, the elites don't even mention that. Don't cover it in the news to any extent, but we'll do 24-hour across-your-screen coverage of these campus protests, doing everything they can to label them violent, anti-Semitic, even as Jewish. people are among the largest constituency involved in these movements. It is absolutely disgusting and it shows their priorities. One thing I want to say up top, before we get to your experience at your local university and some other deals that have been struck is that I think what makes moments like this politically interesting and politically essential is that they represent the precise

moment when the state crosses over into violence and political repression. It's it really, really signals the threshold past which the façade of democracy and constitutional rights and the right to free speech and assembly completely fall away. And the system reveals its true nature, which is fascist. And we've long argued on this show that Trump and the Republican party are not the singular fount from which fascism shall flow as the Democrats want us to believe, but that this fascism is already emerging. In some ways, it's always been here, especially for black and indigenous peoples and other peoples around the world in the global south. But fascism emerges in its more overt universal form, it is a bipartisan effort. And that is one of

the lessons we absolutely have to internalize in this moment and to see this moment as really telling because, again, it is this threshold point by which the complete facade falls away. And you are young students and their teens and early 20s and middle age and elderly faculty members are being met with the brutal violence of the state in the form of these fucking pigs in body armors with batons, brutalizing and terrorizing people who are ostensibly, who are literally exercising their constitutionally protected rights. And so all talk from either party about democracy, about freedom, about how much they love the Constitution, about how amazing it is that we are the freest country because we have

these amendments and this constitutional protections for. for individuals. It's all bullshit. And if you say the wrong things, you take the wrong positions, you move outside the acceptable Overton window, the facade completely falls away. We have to learn that lesson. But back to you, Allison, you went to your local university. I said on a Patreon episode, I'll say it here as well. I live in Nebraska. It's a red state. We don't at the moment have a campus encampment of any sort locally. If that happens, I'll be the first to bring that to your attention and I will go down there and support it with every fiber of my fucking being. But you live in a city that does have this situation going off. And you went down and visited

and participated and contributed to the movement. Hats off to you, of course. But can you talk a little bit about your experience down? I believe it was at UCLA. What you saw, the vibe of the people there, the goals, the aims. One of the things really quick before I handed off to you is, and we'll get into this a little bit more when we talk about all these lessons learned. But there are In contradiction or in contrast to some earlier movements, it's really nice to see a concrete set of demands. And these students are advancing very concrete, very sober-minded demands, and they're strategically leveraging these points where the universities are directly invested financially in Israeli apartheid, settler, colonial, and genocide. and they are doing things in an incredibly a way that we haven't seen

and the lack of that is something that we've Allison and I have criticized in spontaneous movements in the past where you don't have any discipline you don't have any real demands right occupies a perfect example of this and everything kind of falls apart but it seems that lessons have been learned

and we'll get into that more for sure but Allison your experience at your local campus and some of the deals around the country that have been struck thus far yeah yeah I can talk a little bit about what's going on at UCLA broadly in Southern California, we have many encampments now. It's kind of overwhelming how many there are and how many needs there are across all of them. There's an encampment at USC, UCLA, Occidental College, and Cal State, L.A.

within Los Angeles itself, outside of Los Angeles and in the area, Irvine and Riverside have kicked off encampments. There is a wave of encampments that are popping up across Southern California. This weekend, I was lucky enough to get to spend some time at the UCLA encampment for various reasons. service that I normally intend on Friday night didn't happen, and they were hosting a Kabbalat Shabbat service at the UCLA encampment, so me and my partner and some friends decided to go down and participate in the service and pray, because that's normally what we do on Friday night, and the normal one didn't happen. Getting down there on Friday night, the vibe was very, very, very chill, honestly. Things were very relaxed and calm. There were counter-protesters outside,

largely teenagers. They had bullhorns. They were yelling absurd, but honestly anti-Semitic things like raise your hand if you got paid by George Soros. So a good example of who the anti-Semites are. But yeah, we had the opportunity to be there and to participate in Koppelot Shabbat prayers and pray the Mariv service and come together and direct our prayers towards solidarity in that moment. It was really beautiful. During our prayers, the Zionists off campus were trying to drown us chanting things off on their megaphones. Again, the same kind of anti-Semitic bullshit. But there was a beautiful sense of community, a beautiful sense of Jewish people coming together and using religion to oppose this genocide that is happening right now, an incredible sense of

unity. Then we stayed in the camp for a little bit longer, while the Muslim students participated in their prayers, just kind of standing by, making sure everything was okay before leaving Friday night. Things were not particularly violent outside the camp. You know, it was all all very calm, and it was a beautiful display, honestly, of Jews and Muslims standing in solidarity together, mobilizing their religions alongside each other to fight this genocide. Really one of the most profound experiences that I've had in a long time. So left the encampment after that. It ended up coming back on Sunday because on Saturday night, it was discovered that a GoFundMe had raised $70,000 to fund a counter protest that was going to come to campus on Sunday. and a request for people to come to the encampment and defend it went out.

That ended up being a little hectic there. There was the students in the encampment and a protest moving in outside of the encampment to defend it. I spent most of my Sunday inside of the encampment. Once a friend and I got in, they gave us some jobs to do. They had us distributing water to the protest team or to the security teams that were on the barricades, distributing food and snacks to people. And then just kind of hanging out and watching as things went outside of the encampment, there was definitely a lot of violence. You can look at LA's People's City Council, Twitter, if you want to see a lot of that video. Zionists spitting on people, calling people the N-word, engaging in just the worst kind of sexualized insults to, chanting that they hope that we get raped, just really the most horrific things. One of the jokes that the Zionists at UCLA seem to have latched onto is that in the encampment, there are a lot of signs saying bananas are prohibited because a student has a deathly banana allergy. And the Zionists have been showing.

up with bananas, um, to try to taunt that student and to try to make fun of the encampment for pretending, uh, for defending their life, right from an allergy that could kill them. Discussed people. Discussed people. Just really vile behavior. Yeah, yeah, honestly, there's no other way to put it. Uh, they had a big stage outside the encampment. Fucking piece of shit, Jonathan Greenblatt showed up to speak, talked about how us on the other side were terrorists, supporters, all of these things, you know, it's just exactly what you'd think. But the students inside the encampment were incredibly, incredibly, incredibly disciplined and organized. I cannot emphasize this enough. They made sure that people in the encampment weren't getting pulled into fights with

people outside of it, that there could be no pretense for sweeping it. And when the counter-protester event was ending and they were getting ready to leave, a call went out. If you're willing to get arrested, get to the barricade. If they try to come, we're going to defend it. And thankfully, they didn't come. GEL support information was taken down. It was incredibly organized. And I'm very thankful that, you know, an attack on the encampment didn't happen. So that's a little bit of what I saw this weekend. Really incredible levels of coordination, really clear demands, really strong levels of discipline within the encampment and people just very, very, very clearly understanding that the goal is

divestment. The goal is not flashy optics. The goal's not provoking a fight for no reason. Everything has to be towards that demand of divestment. And as someone who was around for Occupy, let me tell you, that kind of attitude of having clear demands that everything is in service of is incredibly unbelievably refreshing to see. And things have gotten intense at the UCLA encampment since then. Zionist teenagers have been showing up every night trying to jump the fence, trying to get in, trying to cause fights. Last night, a student walking by yelled free Palestine at them, and they followed her across campus for several minutes, calling her a whore and a whole bunch of other terrible things. Just a lot of trying to start a fight. It honestly, to me, has very kind of

of like fry corpse vibes. The police are not intervening in this. And when the police do come in in response to the Zionist provoking things, the Zionists applaud them and cheer for them and say, yeah, okay, now it's their job. We saw similar things at ASU, actually, where the police cleared the encampment and then allowed frat boys to tear down the tents inside of it. So some self-deputization of young reactionaries in the United States definitely is at play, both at ASU and UCLA. And in Israel itself, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, right. It's central to have settled its function. And we are seeing that violence here.

So like I said, the message just went out in the telegram for UCLA that the admin, you know, put out a statement saying that it's unlawful. They need to disband. So we'll see where things go tonight. But that's what I saw this weekend. I saw discipline. I saw beautiful solidarity across ethnic and religious lines. And I saw people who are ready to do what they need to do to stop their universities funding of this genocide. Fascinating stuff.

And that absolutely comports with my, you know, from from a distance, observing. the situation incredibly closely, you do see that there is a difference here from these previous spontaneous uprisings. It is in some sense spontaneous, right? It's sort of, it comes out of a natural organic reaction to watching, you know, human beings be mass murdered. And of course, you know, from Jonathan Greenblatt in the ADL's perspective, the mass murder of human beings is not terrorism. It's the protesting of it that is terrorism, disgusting, despicable people, and really just tells the lie to the entire Anti-Defamation League what they really stand for. for you've completely been discredited and I hope everybody understands that.

But one of the things that showed me that there's a different level of organization is that there seems to be real media discipline because in any of these events, there are always these fucking freaks and want to be influencers and Twitter personality reactionaries who want to go into these events and they want to agitate, they want to come and they pretend they're a journalist just because you have a fucking iPhone and you can push record. It doesn't make you a journalist. But what you see in this movement and you have. seen in some other movements is that there's a spokesperson sort of discipline where the regular

people won't talk to you and that's huge because what these fucking assholes rely on is going in there getting a bunch of randos to start talking right you maybe get a 19 year old kid who's never talked in front of a camera before um maybe has really good opinions and really good values but can't quite articulate them on the spot then you have this shameless person like pushing them and prodding them and trying to get them off their, you know, off their footing. And that leads to just a clip that could then be, you know, edited and then thrown out viral on Twitter. Like, look at these kids don't know shit. You know, that's what they're trying to do.

And so to see that that be met with complete silence with an absolutely not, you know, with the fuck off. And then what is that? I saw that one video of this girl that try to do exactly that. And then she immediately starts playing the victim and starts having these crocodile tears, weeping how she's scared because of these people are lined up and silently just not answering her questions. And it's like, that's the perfect, perfect condescension of, of Zionism. That's a microcosm of Zionism. You are the aggressor as you try to pretend to be the victim, which is, incidentally, a hallmark of fascism.

All fascists will aggress while they, while they advance the idea that they are actually the true victims. And so I think that's very telling. But, yeah, the concrete goals being advanced, the discipline, the designated people for media or not having people speak to them at all, the ability to cooperate and coordinate to address threats, to defend the camp, and to push back against abject police brutality, is what we're saying. And to be able to do that bravely, when you're out, I mean, when you're squaring off with police and you're like 19, 20, 21 years old, like, this might be the first physical altercation you've ever been in. And it's incredibly scary. They have guns. They have the power of the law behind them. They can, you know, take you to jail. You can get docks, all this stuff. And to see the courage, to see the cooperation. to see the cooperation, the coordination, it's absolutely beautiful and it's thrilling and all

hats off for sure. And some of these have actually, some universities have taken different taxed, right? You see in UT a disgusting display of violence and an almost gleeful enjoyment of the violence by, you know, Abbott and reactionaries in Texas. In other universities, universities have been slightly better on this issue. Students might have gotten some of their demands met. There's a whole, sort of smorgas board of reactions by universities. Allison, have there been a couple deals struck? I think you mentioned Brown and Northwestern. Can you kind of talk about what some of those deals were? Yeah. So currently two deals have been struck. I think they are a good chance to talk about where things go from here and some of the dangers that can come here. So probably one thing that I will

say is just as we've seen tactical differences among students, we've also seen admin respond tactically differently, right? So at UCLA, police mobilization has been very minimal up until this point. They've been letting the Zionists come in and do the violence, right? On campuses like UT or campuses like Columbia, just constant waves of repression have been coming in, this less hands-off approach. So we've been seeing admin take different approaches. And a number of camps, admin has entered into negotiation with students. I don't think that's a bad thing. Negotiation is one of the ways you can get your demands met, right? You're going to have to have those conversations. Eventually, But there are two deals that we've learned about in the last 24 hours that I think get at where things are going to start getting more complicated.

And I think we're going to see in the next 48 hours or so more situations like this. And it will be very fascinating to see what the students decide on. So at Brown, an agreement was reached, I believe about an hour ago from the time of recording this, that the students would disband the camp by Thursday. And in October, the university would take a divestment vote. Right off the bat, one big concern about that. is October is months and months away, right? And the encampment won't exist to put pressure on the university when that vote gets taken, right? So there have been voiced concerns that I have seen that I think are very reasonable that while this could lead to divestment, it also means that if they just

vote no, then all the momentum and the leverage that students have built will be gone, right? So there is a potential risk there. The other place that we saw a similar deal get met was Northwestern at Northwestern, students took a, well, some students, there's controversy around this, took an agreement to at least reduce the encampment size, possibly remove the encampment size in exchange for disclosure about university investments, and for a place on a non-binding advisory council on investments. As you can see, there are concerns that have been raised there. Actually, among the students on social media, we've seen discussion about whether or not the people who made the deal have the authority to make that deal, right? But both of these deals make concessions from

the encampments in exchange for non-binding agreements from the university that may not result in divestment, right? So that is going to be interesting. See, I think universities will offer more deals like that at other places. One of the things that I really tip my hat off to Columbia students is that they've made clear the deals they've been offered and why they've rejected them. And you can see them rejecting similar deals because they're non-binding and they require them to give up their leverage, right? So the Columbia students, I think, are leading the way here. Who knows? I don't want to dismiss what's happening at Northwestern and Brown.

Maybe they'll win divestment over the long term, but it definitely feels like a potential pivot point in the movement where universities are saying, okay, well, let off the police, will let off the repression. You get to be advisors on investment, right? And that may not necessarily be enough to stop divestment. It certainly won't do anything about divestment before the impending invasion of Rafa that we are seeing now, which is why we're seeing calls from PYM at Columbia, saying now is the time not to de-escalate in negotiations, but to escalate on the eve of a Rafa invasion. Absolutely.

And so there's, you know, this is, I think, how these movements go, right? When you have these mass political movements, different lines that are willing to take different compromises develop, and we are seeing that now and we will see how it plays out. Obviously, I'm just some fucking dumb old head at this point who's been around for some protests and done a lot of this in my time. I would urge students not to take those kind of deals that are non-binding and to continue to fight it out, but it's those students whose bodies are on the line right now. who are engaged in potential serious consequences for this.

So I understand, and I'm going to try to continue to stand in solidarity with them. But I definitely think there's some kind of counterinsurgency move coming from admin now that could be a bigger threat to this than police repression. Because so far, the police repression has only made the movement bigger. Yeah, the age thing is just as a total aside. It is very interesting. And it's actually kind of inspiring now that, you and I, I'm in my mid-30s, we're aging into our 30s. we, you know, and then we look back in, and people that were like literally toddlers when you and I started reading books about imperialism are now, you know, going to war with the cops over

Palestinian, something unthinkable 15 years ago. And that's one of the things I kind of wanted to say is about the lessons learned from previous movements. But before we get there, I just want one clarifying question, what is the relationship? And I know this probably differs from university to university, but in your experience and based on what you saw in California, what's the relationship between the student and faculty on campus and off-campus pro-Palestinian movements? Yeah, so I can only really kind of speak to what I saw at UCLA. So at UCLA, there's definitely been a welcoming of off-campus people when, you know, two very different experiences actually. When we came on Friday night for Kabbalah Shabbat service, we also

brought supplies that they needed. So there was a check-in process where it's like, okay, you're not a student, here's some community guidelines that kind of talk you through it. And then they let you in, right? So they're vetting, which I think is important, but, you know, very open to non-students coming in. There were definitely other non-students there to participate in prayers to participate in reading groups going on. That openness to non-students was awesome to see. Sunday, I think correctly, the situation was very different. The camp was put under a lockdown at 8 a.m. with no one who had not been in the camp allowed in yet, which makes sense going into this situation where things are more intense and the defense of the camp is needed on the outside, being very selective.

about who knew what into the camp seems smart to me. When I got to the camp on Sunday, I had to call a student to vouch for me to let me in and had a brief vetting process in order to be able to access the camp. I think that was awesome, disciplined, strategically very smart. But even with that kind of vetting to access the camp, there was nothing but goodwill and appreciation for the non-students who had come in and were getting beat up by Zionists on the other side of those barricades, right? there had been nothing but a positive relationship between those two groups and closing off the camp to non-students and outsiders who hadn't been vetted or vouched for, you know, I think was just a strategic defensive position, which makes sense in that kind of moment of crisis. Since then, people have been allowed back in. There's been calls for more people to come.

This isn't true across all campuses, but I definitely think the ones where we've seen the most radical organizing have had a very positive relationship to non-students and encouraging the community more broadly to. come in. Fascinating. Yeah, I love that whenever it can happen, that unity and that, you know, it's not just confined to the campus, which is sometimes a criticism lobbed at various forms of student activism is like there's no broader connections to the community around you. And I think that issue is sort of being transcended in this uprising. One of the things I wanted to talk about is, of course, the lessons learned. And I wrote this thing on Rev. Left's Instagram, and I'll just read it because obviously when I write something, it's a little bit more articulate than me speaking contemporaneously. But I just basically said that I love how this campus uprising carries forward

elements of previous movements of the past two decades or so here in the United States. From the Occupy strategy of camping out on strategic plots of land, intense, and refusing to leave, to the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, militant and brave confrontations with the forces of state repression, to the anti-colonial solidarity fostered in advance by movements like Standing Rock. We can also see the lessons of the war on terror being learned, as well as previous anti-war movements like the one against the Vietnam war 50 years ago. I mean, as a side note, them taking over the same hall that during the anti-Vietnam protest that Columbia students took over is a beautiful homage to those who came before

them. And all of this is bolstered by a total rejection among young people broadly, even those outside of the movement proper of corporate media and a complete ability to see through in a way that was not true in the early 2000s in the wake of the 9-11 and the war on terror to see through the creation of false narratives. And I think a lot of that is due to, you know, independent media that has arisen in the years prior. The Gen Z is not getting their news from CNN in the New York Times. For better or worse, they're getting it from people like Allison and I and millions of others. But it's beautiful because it allows them to not be kowtowed by this attempt that has worked previously, which is lob accusations of anti-Semitism, you know, demonize them as violent,

thereby justifying state repression. And the only thing that most Americans outside the campuses get is the corporate media narrative. And if you're under 40, you are not imbibing that nonsense. And with each movement, with each struggle, and I think you're going to speak about, you know, how the acceleration of the broader crisis makes these movements much more rapid in succession so you don't have to go back 30 years to try to learn from the last time this happened you go back to 2020 or to 2011 or to 2015 and you can pull lessons and you were probably alive at that point and you and you you know learned about those things etc and and the masses and the youth are learning new tactics they're getting politically educated

they're gaining inspiration and determination everything is connected and the movement toward liberation grows bigger and more mature with every step but that that connection between previous instantiations of uprisings and learning those lessons instead of simply recreating the failures, something you and I have sort of pulled our hair out on this podcast for many years I'm talking about. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to see. Is it perfect? Of course, not nothing is, but it is really an advancement. And it is wonderful to see that level of organization, that level of discipline. And it's a beautiful thing. And those things are absolutely necessary tools in the toolbox for all further

struggles, which are coming down the pike at faster and faster rates. What are your thoughts on all of that? Yeah, no, I mean, I think the carrying on of lessons from previous uprisings is so latently clear here. You know, let me try to paint a picture for you, I think, of kind of how I'm tracing some of these developments. I cut my teeth on Occupy Wall Street, right? I think a lot of people are aged it.

Same. And one of kind of the big things with Occupy was this huge aversion. to making demands, right? Occupy was weirdly opposed to having a concrete set of demands. There was a lot of resistance to it. This kind of anarchisty idea of it, it's hard to say exactly where it came from. But I think one of the major failures of Occupy is that as long as it lasted, no clear demands were made that could have actually built power, right? And when Occupy was eventually shut down and destroyed by the police, all that momentum just kind of faded away because of that. And I think that, you know, people, our generation, I like to think, learned some lessons from that. But

to connect this to another set of uprisings, I kind of see the next step of maturation that happened within the United States as the George Floyd uprisings, right? There were obviously uprisings that came before. There were Black Lives Matter uprisings that came before. There were all the anti-fascist fights that happened after Trump's election. But what was really interesting with the George Floyd uprisings was like Occupy. They had this kind of national scale to them very clearly, right? It wasn't just anti-fascist brawling in Charlottesville and Portland. It was everywhere. And the size of those uprisings, I think, was really impressive to see. And one of the things that I think people did start to realize as that summer dragged on was we need to go from

just being in the streets to making demands, right, to having something. And first, that demand looked kind of like abolition of the police, which then got watered down into defunding the police. And then through, I would say, strategic democratic counterinsurgency, Democratic Party counterinsurgency got watered down into kind of defunding some departments, which mostly have been refunded since. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I think that represented a clear development in the movement in the United States beyond occupied, because demands were starting to solidify, but they went into electoral and reformist directions, which isn't to say there's no room for electoralism ever, but in this particular context, it certainly was co-opted.

by counterinsurgency strategies and really took away these demands to abolish police departments into very minor reforms, right? But what's interesting, one of the things that I've thought about a lot is that a lot of the seniors at these encampments right now participated in the George Floyd uprisings, right? A lot of them were involved in the summer of 2020. I know people who were involved in those uprisings and are now involved in these encampments. And you can see something really fascinating happening, I think, which is similar to the uprisings of 2020. We saw this massive move to the streets, huge marches in Los Angeles in San Francisco in New York. And people rightfully asked sort of, well, how are these marches going to turn into something more?

And instead of turning to trying to get people elected, you try to work with Democrats to get their demands met, the students actually made solid demands, i.e. divestment, and pushed for them in an escalatory, rather than a de-escalatory manner, right? through actual disruption of universities and life happening within the United States. And to me, that seems like the next progression that we're seeing beyond the George Floyd uprisings, where if the George Floyd uprising saw the masses begin to understand how to make their demands, what we're seeing now is the masses understand not only how to make demands, but make them in a way that is not as easily cooptable, right? And that keeps a presence in the street, keeps a presence disrupting and moves forward.

So I think, you know, we are really seeing this. And one of the things that I think is important to think about is that from a Marxist perspective, capitalism is constantly moving into a state of crises. And as contradictions develop and worsen within capitalism, the interval of those crises get smaller and smaller, right? And so now we have these kind of uprisings happening within the United States at such a frequent rate that people are able to carry these lessons over, right? And the same generation is able to fight in multiple of these and build on them and move in directions. And it's kind of in that regard that I see just a profound amount of hope in what is happening right now and in the

younger generation really really really building on the past 20 years in ways that are incredible to watch absolutely I agree with all of that and yeah the US is and I've said this many times and I'm actually going to do a series where over the next several months just a monologue style series on Rev Left where I write out and lay out the crisis that the US is in right now and where it may lead you know possible trajectories from here etc in the lead up to this election which is an election of crises right and we'll get to that in a second but you're they're facing a geopolitical and you know suffice it to say for now this is simplified terms a geopolitical and imperial crisis the postwar u.s. hegemonic global order is coming to an end

and that presents and you can see the u.s. and its allies become overstretched right in europe with ukraine's proxy war against russia israel gaza situation the possible Taiwan China situation China more writ large, trying to contain China. It's, and, you know, having to get out of Afghanistan in part to be able to face these other threats. And alongside that material stretching out of their capacities is also an ideological awakening inside the country and around the world that all of the things, the ideological narratives that the U.S. and its allies used to promote no longer work on more and more people, especially

young people. So there's this geopolitical and imperial crisis. And Israel is a real flashpoint. that because Israel really is this sort of cornerstone of U.S. imperialism, particularly in the region, but writ large around the world much more broadly. Israel is, every negative thing the U.S. has done in the last 75 years, Israel has been at its fucking side and vice versa. And so we're seeing that be incredibly threatened at a deep level. And on top of that geopolitical imperial crisis, they have an internal crises, multiple crises internally. You have a class crisis

where, you know, and Allison and I, I was thinking about this other day, you know, when COVID happened, Allison and I made a strong point to say what is going to happen from this? What you're going to see is a process of proletarianization. You're going to see people pushed out of the quote unquote middle class down into the lower echelons of the working class. You're going to see poor people end up on the fucking streets. You're going to see small business owners get incredibly angry as they're pushed back down into the proletarian position. And you're going to see a monopolization at the top of fewer and fewer hands. controlling more and more of the wealth, the assets, and in political control of this country.

And I just have to say, four years on, Allison and I were spot on. So you have that class crisis. You have homeless people in every single major city stretching for blocks. You have insane levels of inequality not seen since the gilded age, et cetera. You have a generational crisis. The ideas, the values, the material realities of young people are in direct concrete opposition to the people, the gerontocracy that actually rules this society. The, you know, boomers that have taken fucking everything

have plundered several generations of the future so that they can live lives of extreme comfort and are now completely unwilling to cede any sort of political control to anybody younger than fucking, you know, ancient, anybody younger than 50 or whatever. And that's not just a mere, shallow generational point. That's a material point because the boomers and the people in power materially came

up in a much different environment. They have a much different ideology than young people who have come up in a totally different material environment and therefore have generated much different principles and values and ideologies. And that clash between young Americans coming up who have their entire fucking futures on the line, who can't ever think of themselves as owning a house, who can't access health care, who see the world fucking burning and who see the money that should be spent on solving problems here at home, housing, health care. you know, homelessness and a million other fucking problems being making it rain on fucking Zelensky and Netanyahu why we suffer at home.

And that's just a couple of the internal contradictions, not to mention the contradictions among the ruling elite themselves in the form of this panic over Trump as if, you know, Trump represents like this, this uncharted territory, completely unacceptable. And the other side of the ruling class represents real democracy. And it's all bullshit. And then they're losing grip on the media narrative. that's another contradiction, the rise of independent media, the rise of a communicative technology that allows people to see what's actually happening and go around and under and over the corporate

media that used to have a complete grip on the narrative. So these crises are all happening at once. And that is what we are fucking living through. I was saying on a recent episode that 9-11 was the shot across the bow, you know, sort of like symbolically representing the beginning of this crisis period in 2008 as my friend matthew furlong said was it was a hole in the hole it was like a torpedo to the whole of the ship that the crisis starts properly in 2008 um and we are living through that protracted process um and so that is i think the the broader context that's happening and that's precisely why we're seeing a much more accelerating and rapid succession of these uprisings of various types right occupy was different than standing rock was different than george floyd is

different than these campus uprisings. They're all actually addressing slightly different issues, but now people are seeing how they're all deeply connected as well. And so that is an advancement and at the same time, things are going to get uglier before they get better. That's for sure. Another thing I wanted to say about the George Floyd Uprisings is keep an eye out for an episode coming out. We've already recorded it. It's going to drop soon with the authors Two Black and Razuel Mowat who just co-authored a book called Laundering Black Rage in which they do a really deep material analysis of all of American history and how the co-option and opportunism happens for these movements, but particularly the 2020 movement. They talk about opportunism, they talk about corporate

advertisement, Democratic Party co-option, and it's a really interesting dive into that movement that we can pull even more lessons from. So keep an eye out for that. I think that's interesting. But one of the other things that I've noted in this crisis period, and particularly in these campus uprisings is that, you know, just like I always make this analogy, just like emotionally, if you repress something within yourself, some trauma, some insecurity, it has a way of coming out in a neurotic and unhealthy fashion. And so emotionally, we're taught, like, if you want to have a healthy emotional life, you have to face your traumas, face your insecurities, you know, in Jungian terms, you have to integrate your shadow, whatever. That's also true politically and

collectively because this movement um is being immediately met with brutal attempts to repress it the zionist and the american elite want to squash it but by their very attempt to squash it they make it spread it's like when you when you light shit on fire and put it on a porch somebody tries to stomp it out their shoe catches on fire that's what we're watching the american elite attempt to do and the the wildfire only spreads every time they try to tighten their grip on it and strangle it in its crib and i think that is another feature of the crisis and of them losing control. They're trying to unleash brutality and their narratives to squash the movement, but the very attempt to do so only generates more solidarity,

only generates more campus uprisings. And that is precisely a hallmark of their declining power, their declining grip over this society, its narratives and its material reality. And this crisis coming to a head. Because the crisis I described is coming to an head. We're living. in the process, but whatever, five, 10, 15 years, somewhere in there, this thing is going to come to some sort of resolution. If not all the contradictions, some of the major ones are going to come to a head and have to be resolved in one way or another. And we are living through this, you know, decades-long process by which those contradictions mount and mount and tell the only thing that can happen is that they need to get resolved at some level. And we're not there yet. And the ride to that

point is going to be, is going to continue to be incredibly fucking bumpy. So, buckle up, but be ready to fight as well. Yeah, no, I think all of that's fantastically said, and I think really the thing that stands out to me so much, the thing that makes me feel profoundly hopeful, it's exactly like you said, the more repression they're

mobilizing, the bigger the skits, right? Every time they try to crack down, new encampments pop up. Every time Columbia has tried further repression, more people have showed up, more faculty, more community members. The encampment has grown, the protests have grown. And that is an incredible thing to see. I cannot even begin to explain

watching some of the footage out of UT Austin of them pushing police off the campus. It's an incredible thing to see. And I think one of the funniest little moments that I saw in a clip is at some point police through flashbang grenades. And you can hear one student the video say, it's just a fucking flashbang. It doesn't do anything. It's just like utter lack of concern with what is being used against them, this bravery and this courage to be able to face down unbelievably violent state troopers in Texas, right? It is really incredible to watch. It is really, really something to see how the students are not backing down in light of that. And I think given that reality, that is all the more reason that we need to be as careful as we

can about co-option and counterinsurgency, right? That, I think, is the bigger threat than force here, because the students have demonstrated that they are willing to face the force and they're willing to bite through it, and they're willing to continue to grow in the face of it. And so we have to be extremely, extremely on guard against more subtle ways of resolving this by giving symbolic victories, by giving non-binding victories in ways that can demobilize students, because I think the students are not particularly scared of the cops at this point. That isn't going to put it into this. But those kind of demobilizing tactics are a bigger threat. So I do think that needs to be on the forefront of everyone's mind as we move forward in this moment. Totally agree. Co-option

is a huge threat. It's happened every single time. So, you know, What are the bulwarks against co-option, high levels of organization, concrete demands that are made incredibly clear, and basic discipline in approach, in strategy, cooperation, etc. Those are the ways that you protect yourself against these various forms of co-optation and to just not allow, for example, any element of the Democratic Party apparatus to try to sympathize with you. Now it gets a little interesting. and I'm actually really interested in your thoughts on this, Allison. There's a figure like Elon Omar, whose daughter is participating in these movements on the ground and who obviously comes from that part of the world and has deep sympathies with that part of the world and always has been pretty good on this issue for sure.

And then there's a figure like AOC, who I have called, and many people have called the millennial Nancy Pelosi, who is, I think, in some qualitative way, even different. than an Elon Omar. So with those figures in particular in mind and with the notion that the whole Democratic Party and Joe Biden is not going to try to take the side of the students, right? They're the ones smearing them. But there's going to be these outreaches, these elements, these ostensibly progressive elements of the Democratic Party apparatus who will be sent in.

And it's not even like a conspiratorial thing where Biden is in Obama are sitting around and like send AOC in, right? But it's just a natural sort of way that these processes work, sort of above and beyond the direct conscious control of any single individual. How do you think about co-optation in that regard? Do you see a qualitative difference between an Elon Omar and an AOC? And what do you think should be the approach that students take when an AOC type figure comes on to their campus to ostensibly show solidarity even after she's endorsed Joe Biden and taking a picture with him, et cetera? What are your thoughts on that? because I kind of, I've seen, I've seen good faith people kind of wrestle with this a little bit.

And so I'm curious to your thoughts, if you have any. Yeah, I do think there's a pretty qualitative difference between the two of them as politicians. AOC, I think, is a much more brazen opportunist in many ways, which I think is what you're getting at. I think in both cases, though, regardless of how, you know, there is that difference, I do just think distance from the Democratic Party is central right now, even if it's coming from someone within the Democratic Party who is more of a dissentive. voice, right, and who is more of a radical and better on this position because just proximity to that party and to its apparatus allows them to get their tendrils in in a lot of different ways. Ultimately, students are going to do what they're going to do. The fact that it does seem

like there's been much more pushback to AOC is not surprising to me. I think that that makes sense. I think if someone at AOC shows up at your campus for a photo op, you tell them you can do that right outside the gates of it, right? You don't have to drive them off, but certainly not let them in, not let them get that moment, not let them build off of what you're doing in that co-optive manner. But I also understand it's tough, right? And even with organization, there's going to be disagreements within the encampments when someone like that shows up. It's probably a reason that having these conversations ahead of time and developing a political line on relation to Democratic politicians is necessary. So in the chaos of it, you're not just, you know, getting caught off guard with no idea

what to do. But in my mind, I think as much distance from the Democratic Party as possible is really necessary regardless of who within the Democrats were talking about because we've just never seen an instance of co-optation where that proximity to the party wasn't central to that co-optation. And so I would think that it's necessary to take a very cautious approach. Yes. And there's a general suspicion of AOC and when people are reflecting on it that I think does signify a certain sort of advancement. We're in previous iterations, it would be seen sort of as a wholly good thing if, you know, during Occupy, you know, any sort of policy. politician came out and like was trying to give lend their credibility quote

unquote and their power to this movement it would be seen as a good thing but I think the youth are sort of catching up on on the mechanisms of co-option and being much more suspicious even if they're nice like you're not supposed to like I don't want you anybody to assault aOC or anything you know right now now if um what's that motherfucker's name Tim Tom Cotton comes on your motherfucking cameras sure assault that motherfucker you know in Minecraft I'm sorry that was a joke um but you know There are, but whatever, the advancement lies in a generalized suspicion, which is, is a sort of progress from previous iterations.

But the thing that I think makes it a little bit different is that there is this AOC photo op thing, whereas I don't know if Elon Omar has done this, but my, my sense of it is that Ilhan Omar is sort of like sitting back, praising the students, arguing for Gaza, but not telling, maybe she is, and I don't follow her that closely, you know, but I don't get the sense that she's telling us to vote for Biden or that she's trying to go out there and get a photo op opportunity. And I think that there's a difference there. Like, you know, can you just like support us without needing to show up? Can you support us without trying to like tell us that we should ultimately vote for Biden even though you understand how difficult it may be like, right? Can you

just sit back and just be like, they're right, 100% good for them, keep fighting, you know, without making it about you? You know, that would, that would signal to me that at least there's like on Ilhan Omar's perspective, there's not an attempt to co-op or to center herself, but just a general sense of support. And, you know, I don't know everything. So maybe she has done some of those things that I've criticized. But that's the qualitative difference I've seen between those two for sure. Totally. Yeah. And it does feel like there's a difference. The only thing I've really seen is footage of her talking about the encampment that Jonathan Greenblatt retweeted to try to paint her as an anti-Semite, right? So it very much feels different than what we saw with

AOC. And she, and Omar always gets fucking, like, slandered. And the racism is just like so obvious with her and shit. And of course, AOC, all politicians face, you know, that sort of stuff. But Omar has been repeatedly the whipping horse of the American elite for many years now on many different fronts. And so I'm a little bit more sympathetic to her. Right. So let's see. Do you have anything else that you wanted to talk about? I might have a couple things to say if you don't. But on my end, I think I pretty much said what I need to say. Um, you. you know, at the end of the day, I'm just inspired. I feel really hopeful. Things are intense right now. The younger generation is really involved in some really wild stuff.

I think, you know, the violence that we saw that I witnessed at UCLA was scary to see, but the bravery in response to it has been really, really incredible. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really have much else besides just so much solidarity for these students who are out there. Absolutely. That goes without question. We love and salute all of you hands down. I have two more quick points I just want to make. One is just sort of interesting and one I think is a bit more substantial. The just merely interesting point is the parallels to 1968. I was looking this up and I actually saw somebody do some things online about it

and I kind of put some pieces together. And it's kind of interesting. In 1968, you had Colombian students holding the dean hostage, taking over the campus and anti-war protest against Vietnam. You had RFK Jr.'s dad. RFK Senior, running for president. So he had a Kennedy running for president. He obviously got assassinated.

The youth turning against the Democratic Party and creating and exacerbating huge splits within the party. The DNC was in Chicago, and I think it's also going to be in Chicago this year, which I'm not 100% sure on that, but I'm pretty sure the DNC is also going to be held in Chicago. Yeah, okay. And that was the famous situation where,

I know you had massive anti-Vietnam protests in the streets, police when they used to wear blue, helmets and blue shirts, you know, beating college kids and young anti-war protesters, et cetera, ultimately leading to the victory of a Nixon who was running on a law and order campaign. But there's just some interesting parallels there, but not to make too much of it, but the thing I think is different between the 60s and 70s and the 90s and early 2000s and like, you know, leading up to occupy is that the 60s and 70s still had deep Marxist, Leninist, and

Maoist influences. The students for democratic society, of course, anarchists were present as well. The Black Panther Party, you had a lot of Marxist influence in the 60s and 70s. And this is, of course, during the time globally where you have these decolonization movements around the world, many of them using Marxism to advance national liberation. And so that was in the left milieu in a way that got jettisoned after the Reagan era. So after the 70s into the 80s, then you have Reagan, a lot of the hippies turned into Yuppie. you had this you had the the the embrace of of third way conservative politics by the clinton administration solidifying a bipartisan consensus around Reaganism and those were dark times

for the left but what was emerging in the late 90s with the wTO protest in seattle in 1999 with the animal liberation movements of the 90s as well is a much more anarchist inflected left wing movement that manifested itself with a sort of suspicion of leaders, of discipline, of the party apparatus, of demands. And I think that being the dominant left-wing strain in American politics led to the horizontalism and spontaneity and suspicion of leadership that manifested itself in Occupy. Now, and, you know, at this ad-busters is a sort of pseudo-anarchist outlet at the time as well, which really spurred on Occupy.

And of course, I'm not shitting on anarchists. You know, they're good comrades. there are, I'm sure there are anarchists in these student uprising protests. They were anarchists back in the 60s and 70s putting in work. So I'm not hating. It's just that certain ideas are dominant at certain times and others aren't. And what I think I see coming back into the equation on the American left is a sort of, you know, is a sort of Marxist-infused. Hey, discipline's important.

Hey, demands are really important. Leaders are important. Organization is a fucking central if you want to get anything done. And so, you know, they're not obviously calling themselves. Marxists, they're not calling themselves anarchist. They're just a bunch of people who are disgusted by the genocidal mass murder campaign of Palestinians and are acting because they have beating hearts and functioning brains, unlike the elite in this fucking country.

So I'm not shitting on anybody. I'm just trying to give an explanatory reason why things might have been a little different in the 60s and 70s compared to the early odds and early 2010s and how things are kind of shifting in a better direction now, which I just think is interesting, as well as those 1968 comparisons. We'll see how the we'll see how the DNC plays out. The last point I want to make is zooming out and

reintroducing what's going on geopolitically, what Israel is planning on doing. You mentioned the imminent invasion of Rafa which they've pushed all the Gazans from the northern and middle parts of the Gaza Strip down into the south. There's not enough

resources. They've cut off their food and water. We know the horrific stories of what's going on they've been bombing them all the time and now they're going to do an invasion on the ground into into rafa which which seems pretty much unavoidable at this point um and that is going to be absolutely fucking catastrophic if this you know this entire fucking thing has been catastrophic but that's going to be catastrophic now there have been negotiations this entire time in the background you know hamas leadership through the katar government negotiating with israel in the United States and the current negotiations which the U.S. press secretary, the mouthpiece for the

White House, has portrayed as a generous offer from Israel. Like, oh my God, Hamas is not taking this offer that Israel is so nice in offering. Israel wants its hostages back because Israel, desperate Netanyahu in particular, desperately wants to quell internal divisions happening within Israel right now, specifically around hostages and families being like, you know, seeing very clearly, the IDF kills their own hostages. They don't give a fuck but their hostages. And that's causing a lot of turmoil and chaos internally within Israel. So what Israel is offering in America is pretending like this is some beautiful fucking thing,

give us the hostages back and we'll give you a 40-day ceasefire. That's what they're acting is like this generous fucking negotiation move by Israel. But the truth is Israel wants, obviously, it's hostages back just to quell internal divisions so it can clear the way for an unimpeded, you know, know final knockba in gaza including and especially centering around this invasion into rafa and so that's what they want to do and that's a clear cynical fucking move that the hamas leadership clearly sees from a mile away and understands what is hamas want humas wants a permanent ceasefire they want to allow gossans to return to the north right so after you fucking devastated

the north of gaza pushed everybody to the south turned all of that into rubble we want you to to guarantee that you're not going to just now take over the north in the middle of the Gaza Strip causing more mass misery, pushing people into the Sinai Desert, whatever your goals are at that point. So they want a permanent ceasefire and they want to

allow Gosses to return to the north and Hamas said, we will put down our arms in exchange for a Palestinian state with 1967 borders. So they're willing to cease hostilities completely release the hostages,

and do a permanent ceasefire and the conflict if you will just give us the two-state solution, right? Which is already a compromise for the Palestinians. They don't have to do that. They're being nice about it. You know, for the 1967 borders. Well, we'll take that. And of course, you know, Netanyahu and Israel has made it incredibly clear they are not interested at all.

Of course. In a two-state solution whatsoever. So once again, Israel is being this belligerent, disgusting, a government. Mass-Murdering, genocidal freak-fuck, fascist, you know, entity that it is. The U.S. is providing ideological cover for it at every step of the way, including trying to gum up the works with new movements by the International Criminal Court, the ICC, to try and arrest some of these fucking Israeli leadership criminals. So the U.S. is playing bodyguard, basically, in every sense, ideological and materially,

to Israel. So it can continue its mass genocide. It's mass murder campaign of innocent human beings. And the fact that they're presenting a 40-day ceasefire in exchange for hostages being released as generous and as Hamas being unreasonably recalcitrant is, I think, the disgusting hypocrisy and depravity of the United States. And that's exactly what the students are responding to. This is their tax dollars, their universities, that their tuition, which bridles them with decades of debt, that they're going to have to pay the rest of their life, is going to be.

going into materially investing in funding, arming, and allowing for, aiding and abetting in every sense of the term, the continued genocidal mass murder campaign of Palestinians. And they're saying, here's a leverage point. Our universities are materially involved in this process. And we are taking a stand at the precise point that we can at our own universities. And we are disrupting the status quo until you stop this shit. Stop the murder. End the fucking war.

give the Palestinians their state and you know that's what's really happening here and so they are brave they are correct they are on the right side of history for whatever that's worth in the present and they have nothing but are full

uncritical love and support and solidarity from our end as speaking for myself Hamas and the PFLP and the DFLP and Hezbollah and the Yemenis have my at this point fuck it uncritical support. I'm not doing critical support anymore. They are on the right and they have every right

to be doing what they're fucking doing. And the humanity and the connection of like, you know, Yemenis holding up signs with pictures of students being arrested, you know, and showing solidarity and Gazans on the scribbling on the side of their refugee tents. Thank you. You know, God, man, it brings tears to my fucking eyes. If you have a heart in this world, if you have a functioning heart, how could it not bring tears to yours? So, so love it. in solidarity to the Palestinian people, to everybody around the world fighting for the Palestinian cause, everybody taking any sort of action to advance the humanity and freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people and particularly the students in the U.S. who are representing, as I said

earlier, the absolute best that this society has to offer. Yeah. I'll just close out on my end by saying this. I want to just directly say to the students that are out there. We'll be hopefully releasing us in the morning. I think these encampments will still be out there. If anyone listens to this and is in the encampments and is facing the tough decisions that are being faced, I think I just really, really want to say that you should know deep, deep, deep down inside of you that you are taking actions right now and making decisions that you are going to be proud of for the rest of your life, and that history is going to vindicate you. And 50 years from now, everyone is going to fucking pretend like they did what you are doing

right now. Everyone is going to pretend like they said something during this genocide, like they were brave, but you know that you were there, and you were actually putting your body on the line to do something about it. And so you might be feeling scared of what's happening right now. It looks like Eric Adams is starting to make statements about needing to clear Columbia. Things are picking up. And if you are out there fighting, you are taking actions that for the rest of your life will be a badge of honor and courage and that people around the world are going to remember. So stay brave, stay strong. Don't compromise. You really, really, really will be vindicated by history.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the river to the sea, free, free, free, free, free, free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, free, free, free, free. How can I start? Can't get the image out of my heart when we've seen the bodies found in a mountain of parts, Netanyahu told you just another child of the dark, clear it's going to take much more than thousands to march, more than a speech, more than a poem, more than a track of music, going to take more than a sit-down with Basim Yusuf, even bringing back ambassadors isn't act as useless, long as you pump boil for Apaches and the tanks they're using freedom just beyond reach. For people you cannot see, he's wheezing and cannot breathe, and screaming through the concrete, looking for his four children. The bombs leave structures that I wouldn't want to call buildings. My fingers pointed at this government. You all killed them.

Tell me that you wouldn't take up arms if those were your children. Let me make the factor clear. If bones were manufactured here, and they want the land of stairs because of natural gas in there. Feel death in the atmosphere while we hapless stand and stare. And a little boy begs for his brother's strand of hair. Truth is I don't know how anyone can live. After digging for their dead kids, buried under bricks.

Israel is a terror state. Terrorists at terrorise. I testify my television, televise. I'm telling lies. This is not a war, it is systematic genocide But whatever they try, Palestine will never die They're not prepared to face the pain so they're scared to see your name They're not prepared to face the pain so they're scared to see your name

They're not prepared to face the pain so they're scared to see your name They're not prepared to face the pain so they're scared to see your name From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the river to the sea, free, free, free, free, free, free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea, free, free, free, free. They bomb churches and paramedics, it's hurting the panic, spreading hospitals where the doctors do C-sections, no anesthetics, the pressure is manifesting. Humanity stands connected. Masses seem apathetic and actually just accept it.

When our grandchildren ask us, what did we do to stop it? I'm determined to say it. I did more than make music on it. It's why we shut down arms factories. You can try it stopping us. Palestine actions, the opposite of white phosphorus. We tell them on the television, but they never listen. Tell Pierce Morgan that resistance isn't terrorism. They want them fled or missing, dead or prison, endless killing. I've seen her father hold his baby up. Their head was missing. of home where your parents live in kings won't say a thing but at least we know the Yemen's with them ethnic cleansing it ain't hard to see the stages but Gaza as a graveyard of the invaders ears close to the savagery clear though when

there's clarity the journalists and doctors are heroes of humanity the sordid and as gory as this story is for now are they depopulating Gaza for Ben-Gurians canal Israel is a terror state terrorists that terrorize I testify my television televise I'm telling lies this is not a war it is system genocide, but whatever they try, Palestine will never die. I'll have your own, and I shud on your hands and I push the earth, and I'll

under myanical and I'll I'llad you, and I should on your hands and I push the earth and, behind myaul and I'll say,

From the river to the sea, to the sea, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, free, free, free, free, free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea, free, free, free, free. From the river to the sea, pearl a smile you're all the tree.