Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 312: We Demand The End Of The World

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

More updates on the progress to breed a perfectly red calf and usher in the End Times, but mostly another discussion of Israel/Palestine and current debates on/in/about the left's response to it You can find our previous episode about this over at Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I was reading this article Tom sent me that Lawrence Wright wrote in the late 90s for The New Yorker about the Pentecostal cattle breeder from Mississippi who was trying to breed a red heifer that would bring the Antichrist. versed in eschatology uh in the 90s evangelicals were absolutely insane about what it's not this similar to like what we're all doing today we're like you know we like uh we're trying to stake out like our part in this conflict you know what i mean it's like me and terrence were talking last night it's like everybody just falling on top of each other to have the perfect take on the Palestine Israel question. If your take falls short, you do not see Valhalla. You die an ignoble death. Yeah.

You won't see the second. Or in this case, you won't see the second coming of Christ when they finally breed and slaughter the red calf. But in the late 90s, probably even before that, to be perfectly honest, uh, people like Hal Lindsey, who we've talked about so on this show,

who was like a doomsday, like who always predicted the end of the world, the apocalypse, Jack van. Yeah. The apocalypticians, Jack van MP, all these guys would,

uh, we're obsessed with, yeah. Like, like we're trying to stake out our position in this conflict they were trying to stake out well my position in bringing about the end of the world yeah which is such a insane position to have it's like it is kind of like the rubik's cube thing like if you line up all the correct conditions and then suddenly like the computers all, you know, glow red and blue and green in synchronicity and then like all of a sudden God comes down and says, you did it right.

You did the doomsday equation. You solved it. Yeah, you solved it. Which is like the red heifer thing like the red cow from the bible has been a something that's like heavily debated it's not entirely clear what they're even referring to because like i guess apparently until like modern husbandry like red cows weren't even a thing so you didn't have ginger cows yeah it's like you didn't have the mutated ginger cow glowing red you know what i mean like i i

guess i just think of like brimstone red yes like an or like an ass like on the cartoons when like cartoon character sits down on like hot coals and his ass is burned. His ass is glowing red. Glowing red. That's what I imagine. A glowing red calf like an ass. That you had to shield your eyes from? Yeah. What they're doing is they're trying to GMO.

They were trying to do GMO calves to bring God. The story is about this guy whose name is Lot, by the way, who was a character in the Bible. And he wrote to the, I think the Israeli embassy or something, and said that he had red Angus cattle suitable for Old Testament biblical sacrifices, will have no blemish or off-color hair. Genetically red. Will reproduce red eye. Nose pigmentation will be dark.

Heifers at a year old will weigh approximately 600 to 700 pounds. These cattle will adapt quickly to Middle Eastern climate. Also, excellent beef quality. Why does it sound like a Sea Monkeys ad from like a child's magazine in the 50s or some shit like that i know order now to get your red heifer i know i love that it's like suitable for old testament biblical sacrifice for 1995 plus shipping and handling call now i like i i love that and it's one of the things that's fascinated me so much about jim baker

is that like they're trying in all kinds of ways to bring about God coming back. Also, what if you breed the red heifer, you slaughter it in the tabernacle, and you do everything according to scripture and Christ doesn't return? Does that upend your worldview? Yeah, does that mean he turned away from us? Or is it just like Hal Lindsey, do you just move the goalposts well i'd see i can see a um a reading where they're like okay the guy that wrote that bible verse was colorblind and so when he saw red heifer he was actually seeing a green it was actually a green heifer and said they have to go back and that's what they'll do and then

they'll restart the clock and say well we gotta come with a green heifer i guess they have to go back that's what they'll do and then they'll restart the clock and say well we got to come with a green heifer i guess uh-huh i mean just to cover your bases you might as well do rainbow heifer you might as well do rainbow heifer like a crayola box i want to i want to see a story about that like uh some like down on his luck like reprobate outcast of southern society accidentally breeds a rainbow heifer to try to bring the Antichrist to try to bring Christ back. And then the Antichrist. But he's got his he's got his rainbow heifer and everyone in town mistakes him for LGBTQ. Yeah.

He's a LGBTQ supporter. Yeah. No, no, no. You don't understand. I was hedging. I'm not gay. i was hedging i'm not gay i was hedging it's gonna it's like that flannery o'connor story uh greenleaf about that uh about that uh that that bull that cow that ends up killing uh mr greenleaf at the end except it's a

let's see uh it's an ally bull it's an ally cow oh man i i love the story though because like eventually the guy lot goes to israel to meet these rabbis who work at this lake because there's like three conditions that have to line up which is that like israel for like the christ to come back which is one israel has to be reinstated two they, they have to have control of Jerusalem. And three, the second temple has to be rebuilt. And like two of those have been met. So the third one hasn't been built yet, hasn't come about yet. Mostly because the place where they think the second temple is,

there are several mosques. And this is the fascinating thing about like christian zionism is it like christian zionism is like ultimately anti-semitic yes because it basically deeply deeply anti-semitic uh they even it's so and it's so um sort of um arrogant too because it's like no actually 200 000 jewish people will make it in right right like there's an appointed amount of jewish people that will actually make it in hard stop that 200 hard stop though yeah hard stuff i just thought it was so funny though that the guy went to israel and meet with met with these rabbis who were trying to, like, rebuild the Second Temple. And it says here, naturally, the name Lot came to the attention of the rabbis.

And not just because another Lot from Mississippi happens to be the United States Senate Majority Leader at that time, Trent Lot. Trent Lot, yeah. Genesis recounts the story of Abraham's nephew Lot, whose wife became a pillar of salt when she disobeyed the Lord and turned to look back on Sodom. Rabbi Richman told me that Lot was a Gentile and he was a very, very good cattle breeder. He should have sealed the deal by coming there with the packets of salt or like a salt shaker. Yeah.

Or actually go the whole mile and get like an ice sculpture, but instead of ice, obviously ice, it's salt.'s salt a salt sculpture yeah just like fucking with them just like before they come in the meeting room you pour like 30,000 packets of salt out to like make a little mound and just be like oh meet my wife no i'm just i'm just no no he says the rabbis thought the coincidence was a good sign. It's just like a meeting of the minds, truly. Just like absolute fucking morons all around. And also the perfect most random conditions falling together. You know what I mean? The guy, Lot, says, I really didn't know what to expect.

I came out of a religious background that taught that Jewish people were ignorant and lost in this kind of thing. It's like... Lest you need to know where these fucking millenarian, end-of-the-world people land on things. Oh, man. Well, Terrence, I don't know if you've seen this, but per all Israel news, a red heifer sacrifice could take place in in one year in jerusalem this came out on september 27th so a couple yeah last year yeah yeah so it's like basically that was a prophecy that said that they're going to sacrifice a red heifer any day now i think probably the reason

this is making the rounds again is people are saying there's some sort of significance with the current conflict okay okay okay but this was amazing just let me read the first little part of this the sacrifice of a red heifer could take place on the mount of olives in jerusalem as early as 13 months from now texas businessman byron stinson the man instrumental in locating and helping get helping get five red heifers from the United States to Israel, told All Israel News that finding the sacrifice-ready cows was not the only objective. Bona Israel, the organization Stinson is involved with, has also purchased land on the Mount of Olives that meets the requirements for a biblical sacrifice outside of a temple.

Stinson explained that a sacrifice does not necessitate a new temple. It can also be constructed at a certain height and direction and the plot on the Mount of Olives meets these requirements. What? You can't do a makeshift temple, dog. Come on.

You can't do... Listen. No, you can't do a pop-up temple. A pop-up second temple just facing the direction i love how like american officials and western officials are so credulous and like so willing to go along with every single thing israel says even to the extent that like even to the extent that you've got like democrats in america making statements that are to the right that are to the right of israeli right-wing politicians so like there are israel right-wing

politicians that are to the left of your average democratic party like they're so they're so they are so in hock to israel that like you could literally convince them that like to consecrate this war we're gonna have to sacrifice a red heifer you're all gonna have to be there and then could you like imagine it like on live tv they fucking cut the thing's throat and just like blood is squirting all over fucking clapping like mitch mcconnell like his fucking face is soaked in red and they're just like uh comment senator and that's when he and then that's when he freezes up again this time for the last time

just covered in blood and he's like the demon is fucking a thousand yards there just breathing in his fucking face just Byron Stinson says this is a big step. This is a huge step.

If we're able to do the ceremony in a year and a half to two years, he said, it doesn't mean that the temple is going to be built within one year, 10 years or 40 years, 100 years, because you have the ashes.

Solomon had the ashes of the red heifer and then lasted a thousand years. And then he lost the ashes? What happened to the ashes? He fell out of his something i mean it's hard to it's how long is a motherfucker gonna hold on to ashes for is my question it's like you can only hold on to ashes for so long yeah do they last forever do they go bad do they expire are there explanations we're gonna have to honey we're gonna have to throw out the red heifer ashes like they're they they're they're starting to smell they've got mold

on them like no just a hundred more years babe like just a hundred more please just a hundred more years i swear then the temple will come back so that's the lightest in the Red Heifer front. The Red Heifer front. Sounds like a radical group. Oh, man. The Red Heifer front. We are the Red Heifer front. We demand the end of the world. Well, alright. Well, all right.

Well, okay, I wanted to open up today's discussion with a little bit of an anecdote. Tom, would you be so kind as to share with the class what you saw on your streaming platform last night? Oh, yeah, yeah. If you need further proof that the West is banging the war drums, first thing on my algorithm on Hulu when I opened it up today was none other than Sicario 2, El Dia de los Soldados, which is, as you know, written by one Taylor Sheraton,

he of Yellowstone fame. And also, a deeply, deeply reactionary movie that opens up with the myth of, you know, Mexican asylum seekers shepherding Muslim extremists across the border. And when Border Patrol finally stops them in this opening sequence, the guy pulls out his, well, I'm not sure if he actually pulls out the prayer rug, but there are prayer rugs they find at the scene. But he does the, you know, like hold his hands toward heaven thing,

and then he blows himself up in front of the border patrol. This is the opening scene. This is the opening scene. This is the opening scene. You've already got two of the biggest bogeymen in American life. One, the drug cartels, and two, the Muslim extremists. It's like the Avengers of racism, dog. God damn it.

Right. Neither of which exist in any meaningful way, you know, in this country. Like the only, I told Tom, the only bad guy you're missing there is like a Chinese communist. Yeah. It's like, I mean, and the fact that that showed up on your streaming platform, it's like how many other people.

It's like the first recommendation though. It's Huluween too and it still was the first recommendation. Like they're supposed to show you like like uh like a nightmare before christmas and some shit like that or like slasher movies yeah yeah like yeah all that kind of stuff and then the first thing i get is sicario 2 well i think that it gets something it gets at something that is becoming a widespread phenomenon, which is that just within the last week, Hamas has been blown up to be even bigger than Russia itself. I mean, I saw one tweet.

Or just another organ of Russia. Yeah. I've seen a lot of that floating around, too. Well, I saw a tweet that said, people compare Hamas to Nazis. That's not fair. Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong. That's why they did it in secret.

Hamas is bragging about it in public. And I mean, like this. Oh, dude. My brother, you never have to give it to Hitler. You never have to give it to Hitler. This tweet had 3 million views, 25,000 likes, and i mean like this my brother you never have to give it to hitler you never have to get three million views to 25 000 likes 5 000 retweets anyways dude did you see joseph khan his comp his tweet joseph khan who's you know like directed every big music video in the 90s and 2000s

had started started to tweet with at least hitler never and somebody quickly said let me just stop you right there uh well you know i realized that um it's kind of like i mean i guess during the 2000s you know it was al-qaeda right or i guess the taliban you know and then it became isis you know and now it's hamas and not to say that you know uh it i guess hamas hasn't always been you know criticized and seen as a terrorist group and like you know fear-mongered about but um it's just the latest boogeyman you know it's the latest boogeyman yeah you know in the middle east the rest of Khan's tweet was, at least Hitler never paraded the bodies around. Dude, I mean, I just want to sort of ground ourselves here. I want to ground ourselves in the reality that, like,

we've pointed out before, anti-Semitism is on the rise globally. Like, this is not in dispute. Like, this is a fact. You've got neo-fascist groups on the rise, especially this is not in dispute like this is a fact you've got neo-fascist groups on the rise especially in europe and in america it's in the west in power in power as well yep and on the streets and then you've got like this thing that we've been talking about for fucking months almost even years now which is that like liberals and conservatives i mean across the board have started looking for ways to rehabilitate nazis

like they're rehabilitating at any chance at any chance man by either minimizing the holocaust by uh blowing up hamas to be an even more insidious evil pervasive all-encompassing ever-present omnipotent group that is simultaneously everywhere at once and that is also subhuman i mean it's and like this is kind of what like really disturbs me so much which is that you've got right now the united states and the global sort of rules-based order the international community making way for people to be expelled from gaza like you know what i'm saying like through egypt or whatever like they are basically trying like that's their negotiation point they're basically starting from a point where like well nothing can be done here so we're gonna expel you again so we're just gonna kick you out and uh and it's just like for that to be happening at the same time that you've got all these other things we

were talking about plus climate change displacement the fucking like gradual degradation of like even bourgeois social relations like the like does can you really like make the argument that like israel won't at some point be next like you know what i'm saying? Like, yeah. No. Like, how long can you, like, put that off by, like, genociding entire people within your borders and run an apartheid state before, like, the tables turn on you? I mean, all of these fucking, like, fascist right-wingers in the West and everything, whether they're, like, rehabilitating Nazis or trying to keep people out of Europe or kick them out of Europe, eventually they're fucking going to revert to their classical anti-Semitic form. Well, what it is, too, is like, you know, to use a very crude comparison, it's like you're the former Division I college athlete that as long as you play for the company's softball team

and kick ass every year, then, like, you're in their good graces. But as soon as you don't suit their needs anymore, what in these people's makeup makes you think they're not going to hate you and turn the tables on you? Yeah, scapegoat you, yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to say, too, real quick, I don't know if you were going to get into this, Terrence,

but, you know, you kind of open up talking about Hamas. And, you know, I'm you know, I'm not going to say that. I mean, this is this is I'm going to call it war because war makes it sound like it's a two sided things of two sides are equal. Right. But this conflict, you know, it's the fog of war. So you never know what's going on. Right. I'm not saying Hamas hasn't committed atrocities. The civilians haven't died. I mean, fact that i even have to say this right like civilian deaths are bad but all of the the the two biggest stories that were going around about like mass rapes being committed by hamas about babies being beheaded that was the one yesterday um

about um i think this one uh german girl that went there to a music concert or festival, and her body, they said her body was being paraded around the streets. I mean, just the fact that two of those, and again, I'm not saying that horrors, atrocities aren't being committed, right? I would say that, you know, Israel and its disproportionate violence and effect on the Palestinian people is much greater, obviously. But, I mean, they've been doing this for decades. But the fact that people were so ready to believe that stuff, and even when it was proven false and debunked or it was found to be exaggerated. It's still not.

Even this Eric Levitz thing that we're getting ready to read, and I was trying to be even-handed about it opens up with some with with the supposition that has not even been proven to be correct yet yeah yeah but the baby killing and all that kind of stuff you know the chopping the baby's heads off and all that stuff i don't know i just think you know i just i just wanted to say too i mean it's just you know i just open up with this just the the fact that people are twisting themselves into like Gordian knots, right, to like justify this genocide by readily believing in something that they already want to believe in, you know. And then even if it's been disproven, it's already it's already done to damage, you know. So I don't know, man. It's just that's been just driving me mad for the past 24 hours, man.

Just seeing how Westerners, their their the way that they view violence, their attitude and appetite for violence is wholly dependent, right? Just upon othering these people and making them subhuman, like that one Israeli minister said. Inhuman animals, as he called them, you know? Well, that's something that I've thought a lot about in the last few days. lot about in the last few days because i i myself find that like on this issue i i know myself and i know my convictions and i know like how i feel about it however i have never seen this much hand-wringing on the left about this and i know that you're saying something exactly it's exactly right and I know that the reason why is because there is a disproportionate

number of Israeli deaths than there are Palestinians for the first time for the first time in recent memory and it's an unprecedented thing and that to me speaks to a very important thing here undergirding all of this.

Nobody wants to fucking admit this. Nobody wants to own up to it. But I think that you're seeing this in the various responses to it and the way people scold other people on the left and trying to police and shape how the left responds to it and everything which is that for the vast majority of people in the west palestinian lives matter significantly less than israeli lives you can actually probably do a fucking mathematics mathematical i mean people have done that people have said that a thousand israeli lives i think it was this one famous tweet from some guy, a thousand is rarely lives. It was like 700.

Yeah. Yeah. It was the democratic Senator from television. Exactly. Wait, what did he say? What did he say? He said something like,

he said something like, Oh God, I wish I could find a fucking tweet, man. It was insane. It was like, it was like 700 is rarely lives. It's tweet, man. It was insane. It was like 700 Israeli lives. It was like 100 American lives.

It was the weirdest thing. What he was trying to say, I think, I don't even want to take a journey in that man's mind, but I think what he was trying to say was that per capita losing that many people in a much smaller country is tantamount to losing X amount of Americans. But it read like some kind of weird equivalence chart.

Yeah. You were making a stew. And you could substitute. It was just very sickening. He said losing 600 Israelis is the equivalent of losing about 20,000 Americans. So that's like, what's that, like 29 11s? What the fuck, dude? This man's done his fucking math.

Jesus Christ, that guy's a fucking... Well, I just want to say, okay, so his point was basically trying to show the magnitude of this, the scale of this. The fact that Hamas struck struck and not only did they strike they killed quite a few people all right nobody's disputing that i saw a lot of people over the course of the last week saying that like we need a new framework for this like we have to admit like that our framework of uh i think violence violent resistance is good but i do not condone all

actions and then like you twist yourself into this algebra of trying to like come on to the right side. Find out when, when, when is it okay to use violence in this certain way? And was it acceptable? And it's like, well, dude, I don't fucking know. Well, first of all, we have to go to the flow charts that are going around to, to really accurately gauge that. That they had, that they had the anti-racist training?

The anti-war crimes training? No, I saw flow charts that were like where are you on the pacifist revolutionary flow chart i find myself in the top left upper quadrant sometimes but in the bottom right it's like i'm like in a ditch like a cold ditch you know that's like the rad lib formulation of this but i have seen people on like the communist left or people who are adjacent to me even like say that like we can't say like even it's it's crude and vulgar to say like this is how decolonization work this is the decolonization process and it's like okay i guess i agree to with you to a certain extent but at the same time, there is nothing profound you can say about war.

Nothing. There's no way to put it in philosophical. There's no way to put it in sophisticated philosophical equations and like plug your inputs and say like, oh, this to the nth degree exponential power. That this excuses this. I need as many morality points for this to make it OK. It's just like, no. And the thing is and i mean like this is it and i because i just got done listening to that most recent chapo episode where

they had the guy from aj plus on a absolutely astonishing interview that i think everybody should have to listen to the degree to which it's just ignored what happens in gaza to the extent that you even have like leftist well-meaning leftist saying like there's already a two-state solution blah blah blah like I don't think I think even that line just goes to show like how deeply embedded we have erased what's going on there that like if it was a two-state solution you know what they would do the IMF would come in and say take our fucking high interest loans and we'll just grind you into dust like we do every other third-world country.

That's not even what happens in Gaza. It's so fucking bad there that, like, the Israeli government, like, counts calories. Like, how many calories they'll allow into that place so that they can barely keep people at survival level. Every day having to listen to see if your numbers up if today will be the day that you get fucking sniped in the leg or the head or whatever i mean like it's a concentration camp exactly it's concentration yeah it's not it's not a two-state thing we're like this is just a highly degraded state like a press dog it's a

fucking concentration camp and then check this yo and check this this shit blew my mind yesterday dog so there were two of two things that i thought was interesting it was that um pro-israeli rally in new york city as a response right to the pro-palestine rally right but as whereas uh aoc i think was one of the people that came out and spoke out against this. People said that she'd spoken out against one speaker. I tried to find if anyone can find the rest of her statement, then I'd like to see it. But sure, I know that these, you know, these these media will probably cut around her statements. But, dude, I think that whenever whenever the left has has to apologize right for supporting oppressed people right like it's something that we immediately have to fall in line for where she's saying that well

um you know we have to stand against anti-semitism and bigotry but the pro-israeli rally in new york where these people are actively saying they want to genocide and kill all palestinians and kathy hoker was there by the way i'm not, I don't think she was part of that contingent, but that's not the fucking point. That is just the baseline philosophy and ideology of a Zionist, right? Doesn't matter if you're a liberal, doesn't matter if you're fucking like a Christian,

a Christian anti-Semitic Zionist, right? It is about extermination. But the minute, yo, the minute that you just, not even just Palestinians picking up guns and fighting back, because that is fucking that's foregone conclusion. Right. The minute that you protest against it. Right. I mean, people are talking about and fucking in the UK banning the display of the Palestinian flag. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like what? Like what? It's not even just so much about a military hard war.

It's about like this ideological war yeah it's like even though it's a foregone precluded palestinian liberation by these people even going out and marching and rallying right it's a fucking crime dog so what the fuck what else do you expect people to fucking do the palestinians especially right well and then all you can do is raise your voice about it but what happens when you raise your voice about it i was just watching every you remember when mark lamont hill lost his job at CNN? Yeah. A few years ago?

Yep. And he's not even a fucking radical, dog. He's like a fucking left liberal progressive. Yeah, center left. Yeah, progressive dude. Yeah, you know what I mean? I mean, to me, this goes to the overall thesis here, which is that for 70 fucking years now every person in the west has been so

deeply ingrained with this notion that palestinian lives matter far less than israeli lives like i'm serious and i don't mean this in just like a hack way or just as like some like social justice oppression olympics math or whatever i mean it literally you can see it in the way that this has been responded to in the way that you have to fucking state all your priors up front and qualify this and i don't support hamas but you know exactly exactly it's like i mean just fact like i said it's the fact that like hamas managed to do something basically unprecedented that like you um from the way that you responded to this on friday are are then made to like retroactively go back and like

oh i'm sorry i apologize i didn't understand that like it was this bad it's just like like dsa releasing a statement where they had to fucking that this bad it's just like like dsa releasing a statement where they had to fucking that's another thing i forgot to mention dsa releasing a statement where they had to apologize for the insensitivity of promoting a rally that they didn't even fucking come up with you know what i'm saying yeah they didn't even fucking they didn't even fucking organize it somebody else did but they had to apologize well also you know you're in bad shape when uh the person you're tn off on or some student activists a couple of 19 year olds it has been yeah dude it has been assumed for fucking 30 years at least since the early 90s when they started the fucking siege

that like if you kill one israeli it has to be paid back with at least a thousand palestinian lives that's the fucking issue here that's i mean like that's i mean again the only reason this is even coming up is because i've never seen so much like hand wringing and um like hemming and hawing from other people on the left and it's like you don't have to do that i mean i'm you don't need my permission uh you don't need the palestinians permission because they could give a fuck less they're gonna do whatever the fuck they need to do if you were in the fucking conditions they lived in you wouldn't give a fuck about what they write about in new york magazine or what they say on twitter why it matters for us though is because what because what I do find extremely concerning is that the precedence is already there to basically close ranks around this and expel every single person who expresses even a modicum of support for the Palestinian cause, because we've seen that happen with fucking Russia.

And again, fuck Russia. I have no sympathy for them. I don't give a fuck about what they do. Whatever. But we have seen over the last two fucking years, they've basically closed out of all polite society, Russian artists, writers, whatever, athletes. It's crazy.

The number one men's player in the world still has to play under no banner. Yeah. I mean... The only athletes in the world still has to play under no banner. Yeah. I mean. The only athletes in the world have to do that. It's insane. And this is the thing. This has never fucking happened in the past when Israel just will randomly fucking kill an American journalist or, again again even that fucking doesn't even

make the fucking they killed a British journalist photographer a couple years ago as well even when they fucking randomly level hospitals and target ambulances and medics and stuff you never see any of this fucking hand-wringing only in the time that like Hamas does something

unprecedented do you have to then go out there and apologize and say oh I didn't know about it on Friday when I celebrated this that you don't have to say that what happened was that they we all fucking woke up to the reality and we were all basically forced to fucking admit that

each and every fucking one of us for years set by and just allowed it to be fucking fine that like Israeli lives matter way more than Palestinian lives and you allowed it to be fucking fine that like israeli lives matter way more than palestinian lives and you see it fucking everywhere yep yep yep i don't know i just i just don't i mean i mean i don't know man i mean you know i know we're gonna get in the circle we're probably getting started but it's just it's just i would just have to say again it's maddening because i mean i don't i don't

no i don't i'm not like a fucking arbiter of like moral justice or anything like that i don't think i have better ideas than anyone else or i'm a better person than anyone else but the fact that like you're literally supporting people breaking out of a cage i mean we talked about on the patreon and we are the ones being demonized you know now we are being demonized but i mean the fact that the palestinian the palestinian people are just seen as like they're not subhuman right but their death is inevitable you know and i mean that's again that's the thrust of zionism right the thrust of zionism is that it is about extermination and nobody wants to fucking admit that everyone is talking about solution solutions instead of stopping the fucking settlement right instead

of stopping the thing that threw all this into motion in the first place yeah fucking god man i mean i don't know man it's just i mean i like i can't even like sit here and i guess i guess yeah like if you're an enterprising person who wants to learn more look up what it's like to fucking live in gaza i mean like i guess like i could sit here and read the fucking conditions for you but it's just i just can't like i just like i really cannot countenance having to retroactively qualify my support for something just because oh you didn't realize it was this bad? It's like, okay, well, you knew it was this bad in Gaza. You knew it.

I mean, I don't know. It's just the kind of, like, example of how this has all sort of been, like, naturalized to such an extent that now you've got basically the Israeli state saying, you know, you've got global leaders, the global international community, the rules-based international order saying, well, okay, the only solution to this is basically just letting Israel completely cleanse Gaza. That's their solution to it,

and they're about to just let it happen. Well, people, that's another thing missing in the context of all this. What precipitated all this happening is the Israeli parliament, I guess, or whatever their legislative body's called. Knesset.

Yeah, yeah. Just moved to push, just basically to eliminate the Palestinian settlements settlements just to take all that now so what do you do in that situation you know because what's what you know what they say about the long run we're all dead in the fucking long run you know what i mean i guess we can read the article because i thought the article was an interesting insight into the mind

of a madman obviously but also into the mind that's either that's the article was an interesting insight into the mind of a madman, obviously, but also into the mind... That was my problem with Lev. It's just going into this. It's because this guy is one of the preeminent left scolds. Dude, you can actually set your watch by it, and I do think that the next person who writes a shrunken white about like online like

writing ticks has to come up with a law for this okay i'll come up with it i'm gonna i'm gonna abolish what we used to call ray's law and we're gonna rely we're gonna rewrite ray's law ray's law is when you this is a writing tick that's very common with left liberal writers who see themselves as like the vanguard of like interpreting the left to the rest of America. They're the normie speakers. Yes, yes.

They do this where they do this thing. Levitz, Will Stancil. Yes. But what they do is they like find three or four hypothetical leftists and basically expand them out to be emblematic of the entire left because like i've noticed will stancil did this today he said oh i'm just like some people were calling him on it because he was like oh this is just bad news for left groups like Like the wholesale sort of acceptance of mass slaughter

is not going to be good for their long-term prospects. And I'm already seeing it. And people are like, what groups are you talking about, Will? Oh, just some people here in Minnesota. People in Minnesota are like, no, no, please tell me. Oh, no, you don't know these groups. They go to a different school. Every time I see this guy,

it's him being asked to produce the people he's hypothetically talking about. And him saying, well, I don't have them right now. They're just out of frame, though. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every single time. This motherfucker, dude. No, like, I don't know.

Levitz I kind of consider also. He's not quite. He's like psychopathic he's not like he's not like a mad iglesias or a no opinion like we read about on the show sunday he even makes some cogent points in this but it's it's just where he starts from it's his starting point that is it's his thumb on the fucking scale from the word go well it's it's the assumed like paternalistic nature of like the left liberal project over the last 50 or 60 years which is like i know best uh i know from my high moral ivory tower perch that like and because i am currently employed at the intelligencer right and i would like and because i am currently employed at the intelligence sir right and i would like to and i would like to keep getting those jobs exactly and i want my more conservative peers to take me

seriously more so than i care about actually bring a socialist message to uh to normal or say working people right maybe maybe i should just read it um i think that like the headline itself is sort of indicative of what i'm getting at okay and to be fair sometimes we know you don't get to choose those headlines yeah you're out of those brief well i mean even if you you're right okay you're right to be fair you don't get to choose the headlines but jonathan chade's headline on his thing is also kind of indicative of what i'm talking about your moral equation must have human beings on both sides ignoring universal humanity is the path to murder so it's like by saying that it is a kind of like all side all

lives matter type deal both sides yeah but like they're all lives mattering this thing right right but it's well or go ahead no no i just wanted to say what it says is that what it says is that um the palestinians have as much as big an obligation to stem the loss of life as the people have been slaughtering them for 70 years and it's just like it's just so asymmetrical there's even that premise which is why it's fably yeah which't. Two wrongs don't make a right. Exactly. Which is why, dog, I'm not going to denounce, I'm never going to denounce Hamas because, like, I mean, like, not to say that, like, sure, shit happens.

You're not their press secretary. Yeah, but I'm not their fucking keeper, dog. Like, what the fuck do you want me to do? Also, it gets at a fundamental thing here, which is that why the fuck would they care about what I think? Why the fuck would they care about what i think why the fuck would they care about what i think if your average lifespan is like 25 you have a high likelihood of losing at least one of your limbs by a sniper by dying from malnutrition disease fucking rocket strike like what what what am my good vibes what are you

gonna you're not am i gonna you're gonna have what are you gonna form revolution by osmosis based off my good pacifist vibes like when i saw that when i saw those statistics i can remember being a child and when the angolan national team at the height of the HIV crisis in the early nineties was playing in Barcelona and everybody on the national team had already exceeded their expectation for their lifespan proportional to folks back home. Like we're talking about cutting that in half and transferring that over there you know and i'm not doing this like you know equivalency weird richie torres shit but i'm just saying like that's how

stark it was to me like i remember being disturbed by that as a kid and that waking something up in me about how people live in other places that's what i'm saying like what they're dealing with isn't even a state that's been gradually worn down by like our our surplus extracting like sovereign debt you know mechanisms of like the imf and the world bank and like trade policies and just global capitalism in general like this is something that far exceeds even like capitalist admiseration this is something that far exceeds even, like, capitalist admiseration. This is something that, like, speaks to the absolute depravity and darkness of human beings that they would, like— Yeah, they're incapable of. Exactly. Like, this isn't just, like, a structural inefficiency or even a structural oppression where, like, we're exploiting their resources

or we're putting them in debt traps. This is, like you said, Aaron, before, an ontological evil that speaks to the worst things human beings can do to each other. And in that situation, A, how do you expect the people on the other side of that to just go along with it and then also go along with B, Western standards of like tit for tat morality. This life equals this life. When in all reality, let's be. It really doesn't. Let's just quit bullshitting ourselves for two seconds yeah exactly exactly exactly tough i mean yeah you say that

rhetorically but you don't believe it exactly you don't believe it which is which is why which is why you know which is why you'll fucking be like well they're beheading babies or i'm not sure if these things are true but you know i speak out against the loss of life but then it's like well dude but you know what the fucking you know what the norm is fucking like a two million people getting carpet bombed every fucking day indiscriminately dog you know what i mean i'm just sorry i don't even mean also put it on the scale of like oh well this is worse than but i mean like come the fuck on dude it's just disproportionate right and that's the thing that's the thing it's like i saw some people saying like well we have to be real we have to like admit that there like, atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel.

And it's like, well, OK, no one was ever fucking say the minute I heard they were firing rockets into Israel. Just like every time I've heard that in the past, I've thought, well, someone's going to die on the other side of that. I mean, it's like confetti, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's like, what world were you living in where the fucking previous rockets fired weren't fucking killing people? It's like, oh, is the number making you fucking queasy? Yes, it's fucking bad. That's fucking war. This is what fucking happens when you cordon people in concentration camps.

It's fucked up. I mean, it's like... And they're willing to do fucked up things in order to achieve liberation, dog. And it's not up to me, a thousand fucking miles away, with my my fucking closet full of sneakers to tell these people what they can't fucking do yo i mean you don't have any i don't know and also like and and well yeah you're exactly right aaron and like where i'm going with that it's like even kind of like trying to correct the the record on like beheading babies and stuff it's like okay well the day well the the purpose has already been achieved the purpose has already fucking been so you can they could walk that back

tomorrow and you'd still have michael imperioli out here talking about it you know what i mean like i had people i had people people trying to say to me give me get that the burden of proof was on me even though i'm not making the claim i'm not the one that believes in the claim but the burden of proof the burden of proof is on me to prove that it did not not happen what the fuck is wrong with you bro it's on you aaron thorpe of atlanta georgia so me to prove a negative yo to prove a negative i'm gonna put on my blue un helmet and i go over to palestine and like fucking do reporting on the ground. It's just a shocking... What it is, is it's a...

It's willful ignorance at best. If you can't read the tea leaves on this shit by this point, it's willful ignorance at best. It's willful ignorance, but it's also a shocking abdication of realization of where you fucking sit in the world. All right? I sit in fucking America, right i sit in fucking america right

like rural fucking uh wasteland that's just been destroyed by fucking coal mines or whatever i am under no illusions that my opinions one way or the fucking other are going to affect this what i can control is how the left responds to this stuff and how we build a leftist movement in the united states and how this gets sort of reformulated and digested through the media in the united states and and helps build towards liberatory movements in other places those are the only things i can fucking control i can't control what happens there i can't control how many people do or don't get killed that's not that's all out of my control. I can't, listen, man, as Angela Davis said as well, man,

the thrust of any revolutionary movement lies in its goals, right? Its tactics are another story. But nobody ever talks about the everyday violence, right, that we all undergo, especially Palestinians, right? Like a sort of violence that is just ultra-violence, which is just, I mean, just in the modern world, i mean just in the modern world like i mean they're they're modern world they're horrible horrible places to live we're talking about a place that is purposefully as you were saying terrence a concentration camp that has these

people are not being fucking exploited for their resources for their labor they're being concentrated there in a slow social death yo yeah i mean this is a concentration camp before it's an extermination camp essentially well and as they pointed out in the interview on Chapo, like a lot of the people in Gaza have never even met Israelis. They have been in confinement for so long. That's fucking insane. They've never even met an Israeli. So like, think about that. Dude, that is insane.

That you are confined for your entire life by people you've never even fucking met. Dude, it's like the fucking panopticon shit almost dog you got this unknown enemy around you at all fucking times that you haven't even seen met and so insane if if that's your world where you're constantly fucking sniped at and like and tried to be bombarded and killed by by that how the fuck are you going to make distinctions about who fucking did this and who that who's innocent's a noncombatant and this, that, and the other? There's no fucking way any leftist in America could sit down and do the Rubik's Cube math. Pull out a chart and start charting shit out.

And then dig into the fucking nuance on that at a protest. And you then fucking tell, you signal to your neighbors that you think that the other is correct. And also just the disproportional amount that you know coming out of Gaza. Right? There's a very specific reason. Like, anybody that's a veteran of the prison abolition movement knows that, like, when you try to go into some of these places with fences and cages and stuff, you might get in, you might not.

You know why? And there's a very specific reason for that, because they don't want you to fucking know what goes on inside they don't want you to talk to people on the inside no which is why they're fucking shooting journalists like they shot that journalist a couple years ago dog yeah i mean who would have been reporting on it now i said like that's the thing it's like i um have you ever met someone that's been in prison for longer than like five to ten years like i hate to break it to you but their worldviews are incredibly bleak and violent and like that's because you put people in those conditions it reproduces that's the that's the whole point the whole point is to dehumanize you. And then justify their justified genocide. Yeah.

Which is like why we say when we're abolitionist, it's like this is a systemic issue. It's not just like a more individually moral thing like, oh, X guy killed Y person. Therefore, he's a bad person and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. he's a bad person and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison it's that we've created and a whole industrialized system of it that's not fixing the problem of crime murder violence or anything else and is actually furthering that and that's why you oppose the system you can't dig into the morality of specific individuals yep i mean just the shocking like again it's just people like not even grappling with that systemic aspect of it and like really dialing in on a few bad apples here and there and then like blowing that up to like i mean we

haven't even fucking read the article i'm really sorry but like no no no it's just i i don't know um well let me let me read the headline uh a left that refuses to condemn mass murder is dude bro bro bro bro can i just say bro bro bro first of all there is no left i mean i don't mean to be bleak about it but they ain't no left we ain't got no power bro anything that we say anything that i tweet anything that like i mean march israeli sure but we're not the ones that are shifting the course of this like like you know i'm saying of this is of this fucking landscape you know what i mean not to say that we don't have obligations to stand to stand in solidarity but like the people that are committing the most violence are the people that are giving this israel bonds and shit like that also let me also say the liberals that justify that shit

let me also say this if palestine was a uh you know an officially recognized country with its own military navy and all that stuff you wouldn't refer to it as mass murder but because you're trying to fucking put cold pull some something out of nothing and you're having to get in bed with these with hamas and some of these different groups like then it it allows you to be opened up to scrutiny because be called terrorist and you serve those ends and it's just like a snake eating its tail you know what i mean because they're not official state actors right or it's not even a state technically right it has no fucking autonomy right yeah so that means anything it does is illegitimate you know what i mean right dude it um you're right there's so much packed into that headline that it's really astonishing okay a left okay you're right aaron what is the left

the left is a loosely defined group of a few organizations most of which are trotskyist in origin and like teamsters and shit uh like you've got unions you've got a you know let's call them justice dims and you've got like dsa and just like the kind of like connective tissue being like ngos and non-profits in between, all basically trying to lobby a fucking legislature that is more ineffective than like the sorrest Russia, like fucking like, you know, little Potemkin legislatures they set up to like please liberal intellectuals. Arguably more anti-communist, more anti-leftist as well. Yeah, Eric Levitz, you act like like and you say you're one of us so you act like we have these meetings on thursday where we all get on the zoom and we all like talk

strategy shut the fuck up nah we just don't invite you brother because you fucking suck yeah okay so that left that refuses to condemn mass murder uh okay again i do condemn mass murder i have been for the past 10 years it's been what they're doing in gaza and the west bank i think that's why i'm a leftist it's a big part of me big part of me being left is it's condemning mass murder you know i mean like contextualizing this strike is is not like like what what i hate and what i completely reject is this trying to say that people that are trying to contextualize this track and talk about it in the context of this occupation as the same as these right wingers that were tap dancing on those people that got stabs grave

last week yes and to that i say you can go to hell motherfucker yeah you can fucking suck a dick dude fuck you pete the fact that you would include the fact that you would talk about somebody who was um who was effectively powerless yo and against like a fucking apartheid state you know what i mean to to his credit his last column was about that so i will give him that i'll give him prompts on that his column was about the right wingers tapped in well okay so it might still be fresh on his mind or something yeah i like but like i just but you don't even have to go that far because a fucking video i think one of you referenced it earlier there was a video earlier of these of a pro-israel rally in new york where they're going by and they're interviewing them and they're basically holding up their phones and showing blank fucking desolate wastelands of land and saying, this is what we mean by river to the sea.

Wipe the Palestinians off the face of the earth. And that is accepted speech in the West that will not get you fired. It will not get you ostracized from society. It will, in fact, get you welcomed into society because that's howacized from polite society it will in fact get you welcomed into society because that's how fucked up we are maybe you can run for fucking office yeah yeah yeah and that's the richie torres that is the fundamental paradigm we are discussing here that like that's okay and that for you to spend a thousand words while that is being implemented that's i guess it's certainly

your choice i guess it's certainly my choice to sit here and fucking talk about it for an hour but just a running dog of imperialism and listen i want to be fair too and i understand like proximity to these things you know what i mean and i want to be like sensitive about that too because it's like i know that my fucked up racist uncles if they were to die i would feel some kind of way about that you know what i mean and i'm not making any presumptions about people's family or anything like that but even when your family's fucked up you feel a certain kind of way about that so i can understand that but like you can't extrapolate that out to the broader conversation and sort of use it to like sort of all lives matter things like that you know what

i'm saying i'll just read here this weekend in israel a far-right islamist group perpetuated the largest mass killing of jews since the holocaust murdering entire families including babies in their beds and slaughtering 260 concert goers can i just say real quick man and i'm going to be sensitive about this can i just say real quick terence i know we get it but i just want to point that out just underscore because i've been hearing this a lot yeah i've been hearing the laying of jews since the holocaust and what i just i'm not saying that's not true i'm sure it is true i mean it is true right but i mean dude so is the is the is the is the genocide the genesis the continuing ongoing genocide of

palestinians that has been going on since since the 60s i mean before that is that not a genocide of its own you know what i mean is that not something at all as well it's not you can call a holocaust you know what i mean in a genocide which you don't want to happen again if you don't want a fucking repeat of what happened you know what i mean it's just i just don't like that holding it up in like you know in this unique it is a unique historical thing but that doesn't mean that it cannot be uh happen again you know i'm saying that that that it can't be experienced upon by other people you know yeah well that their suffering is any less you know what i mean well and that the construction of the post-war international order basically necessitated that the people who who carried

out that holocaust would basically get away it, with the exception of a few high-ranking officials. They'd basically get away with it, and then we would fast-forward 80 fucking years later, and we're just rehabilitating all the fucking people that did it so that we could fight Russia in this weird post-Cold War thing. I mean, it's just like, you're right, Aaron. It's just like you've got that fact added with the element

that you're seeing Holocaust revisionism everywhere. Yes. The fucking spread of anti-Semitism and far-right movements across Europe. It's like you get to choose when the Holocaust matters, right? If it's in service of fucking othering

or dehumanizing other people, right? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's just like, come on, dude. Israel's far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza's two million residents and then preparing a military assault

more intempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. Israel's defense minister, Yoav Galant, made the brutality of what is to come plain on Monday saying we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly. And no small number of supposed leftists found in all this cause for celebration. Others, meanwhile, loudly refused to condemn Hamas's atrocities, insisting it was not their place to decry the military strategy or violent resistance of oppressed Palestinians, which I guess is what we've just met the last hour doing. So sorry.

But you know what, Terrence? Hold it real quick. Hamas, by the way, if you're listening, tsk, tsk. Bad, bad Hamas. No, no. Yeah. Oh!

Finger wagging. I did it then. Did Aaron Thorpe just criticize my... What are you talking about? Like, Hamas says, like, a Patreon, and we fucking comment it on the comment box. We're gonna cancel Hamas is what we're gonna do. In my view, these responses constitute a betrayal

of the left's most fundamental values. Either one upholds the equal worth of all human lives, opposes war crimes, and despises far-right ethno-nationalist political projects, or one doesn't. What's more, cheering or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn the murder of children isn't just morally grotesque, but also politically self-defeating. I want to see who, yo if i say that i've said it i fucking denounce the killing of children right i don't think that's the same fucking thing as saying that i support palestinian liberation right by any means necessary dog you know what i'm saying like that's not saying that i want them to go out and kill children like what are you fucking talking about listen listen here's yeah that's exactly that's exactly a good point

and it's like there's no serious person that would say... If we could rewind the clock back to right before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and the PLO was willing to come to the table and compromise and also, not for nothing, meet all the U.S.'s requirements before they got turn-coded. Yep. If we could turn that back and we could have peace talks and all that stuff, but, like, that's just, like, that takes... Well, yeah.

...some willingness from the dominant power here, and that's just not been demonstrated. Well, and also, what fucking kills me about this is the sentence, like, what's more cheering or publicly announcing your refusal to condemn the murder of children isn't just morally grotesque? Why didn't you write this article every single fucking time Israel dropped a bomb on an apartment complex or a hospital or a school? Or shot a child in the fucking head.

I mean, it's just like, okay, I know that you, you know, this might sound unfair. He did the same thing we all did it was just abstractions to us you know what i'm saying he did the same thing we all did yeah we all support palestine freedom and liberation in the abstract you know what i'm saying yeah yeah but when it comes down to brass tacks well but that's and that's the thing that gets at the central thing here which is that like we've all internalized the lie that palestinian lives are worth less than israeli lives that's why every previous time this has happened to with palestinians on the opposite side there's not been this hand wringing there's not been these articles because we've all internalized that but when hamas manages to

break down the walls and like fucking do a sneak attack on them and catch them by surprise then we have to have this and then we have to go back and revise our priors and say that like oh i guess maybe i am deep down uh i guess i'm maladjusted i guess i'm a maladjusted yeah morally repugnant person it's like i have to fucking question that because if you're pressing that line if you're if you are seriously going out there and saying that like people should i mean okay i do agree that maybe you should do a sort of like moral inventory if you are someone who cares about changing the world but i do think that there's a limit to that where if you go out there

and you try to obscure the fucking lines on this so much and move the goalposts so much you're you are going to get a situation where people start falling away and then people like stancel whining about like oh this will break the left it won't be because of any actual fucking values or anything like that it'll be because everybody's blurred the fucking lines on what is morally acceptable and what's not. And nobody could fucking take a definitive stance, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Without six qualifiers. Exactly. Exactly. Which makes it meaningless at that point. That is exactly right. How can you seriously expect anyone in the future to have any kind of principled stance on anything? Let me drop a little Bible on you.

The scripture says, let your yes be a yes and your no be a no. The rest is the work of the devil. That's really good. Holy shit. That's is the work of the devil. That's really good. That's bars. I'm telling you, that's bars. I think about that all the time. And I know we live in like a kind of a gray world and all this kind of stuff. But like, you got to say it with your full chest.

Well, I just, the thing is, it's like, it's hard to even have this conversation when like, it's acceptable for a human being to go out in public and say, I think Palestinian babies should be killed. That's acceptable. I'm not saying that about Israeli babies, by the way. None of us are saying that, by the way. None of us are saying that. But it is acceptable to say that in public. And so how the fuck can you do this moral like, moral algebra thing when that's the reality?

Yep. Yep. Again, it's the all-lives-matterization. The West's apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel's brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and their discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israel apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority.

For decades, the Israeli government's knee-jerk defense—this is like the whole when they go low, we go high shit. I mean, it's like—I mean, it's just—if that's your principled stance, like, okay, fine. just if that's your principled stance like okay fine like yes the the practice of non-violence is something that i do admire i mean i've never even had to fucking been pressed on that right it's just like i don't really have an opinion on it one way the other uh you know i guess like if i'm getting my ass beat by a cop i'm probably not gonna throw a haymaker just because i'm not trying to get shot but if i'm getting my ass beat if i'm getting my ass beat by an all right dude i'm gonna try to fuck him up so it's like i don't try to fucking break his head

yeah it's like i mean i don't really like i've not really sat down and like thought about like the finer details of like oh man am i like martin luther king and all this? I don't know about that. I mean, it's, but like. Yeah, that ventures into a little high-mindedness. We all should do well to avoid. Well, and I also just think that like when that question was being asked and when it was kind of like being mediated and thought out, like those were different conditions. That was a different world.

Like there was a social compact in order. There was a system kind of holding it all together. We don't live in that world anymore. So it's like, but I don't have any. We can't even get our facts straight on the rules of engagement and all this stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I don't have any feelings. I don't have any adverse feelings

to people who've adopted nonviolence at all. No, I don't think you're a pussy or I don't think any feelings. I don't have any adverse feelings to people who've adopted nonviolence at all. No, I don't think you're a pussy. I don't think you're unrealistic, dude. If anything, you know, I think that's, you know, it's idealistic. In a way, that's the ideal. That you're striving for that is inspiring. But that's not even what's on the table here. What's on the table here is that you signify in the correct triangulated social media fashion

your values and principles towards the non-violent cause in a part of the world in a situation that is so depraved like so beyond human comprehension for like hell on earth it's like it's it's like it's an abstraction that like can only to me tell me that like if you were writing this you must be self-obsessed i can't think of yourself yourself yourself important not only do you think that your goodwill can have an outcome and an impact on the materiality of what's going on there but you even are speaking out people who are fighting against that materiality with the only means that they know how which is violence you know i'm sorry you know yeah i'm fucking sorry now a loud minority of palestine self-styled champions are blithely affirming this smear insisting that solidarity with palestine requires

callous indifference toward or at least the very silence about, the mass murder of Jews. In so doing, they are making it easier for their adversaries to discredit and marginalize the broader cause of Palestinian liberation. Why is that, though, Eric? Right. Why is that, though? Because, again, we've all internalized this idea that Israeli lives are worth infinitely more than Palestinian lives.

Yeah. Well, and also, no one on the left is saying that i mean literally when you formulate it that way and i'm glad you did formulate it that way eric because no one is literally saying that there we should have a callous indifference toward the mass murder of jews i'll tell you who is saying that the canadian parliament bro i tell you victor orban victor orban like i mean like why is the left paying for the crimes of like the global surge in right wing is it is it is it have they internalized like the bernie loss and what that meant in places like you know hungary and all these places like france and all these places had sort of nascent right-wing movements that sort of flourish whereas ours didn't really get off the ground like are we

paying for that yeah yeah well it's like central to his argument here is that by being callous and basically doing what we've just done and i I do take this seriously. I really hope it doesn't come across as callous. But I think central to his argument is that by being indifferent or being kind of glib and cavalier about it, we then turn off potentially convertible people to the Palestinian cause. And there is perhaps some credence to that, but there is a massive difference between what I say in public at a face-to-face level and what you're seeing online that's been geared up by a fucking algorithm or uh just like what people

think they have to do to like get a post to go viral and to be fair he acknowledges that further on down in the piece but i do feel at the same time that when you've got a situation where it's okay to say like i'm this is not me exaggerating or being hyperbolic it is okay in american society to say that palestinian babies should be murdered slaughtered and when that's on the table and that's okay you know what you know you know what it is can i give you a example real quick it's like it's like this um i took this uh. I took this political science course when I was studying at Georgia State and had this mentor. Really nice guy, man. He was a cool dude. He was a social democrat, but he knew my politics.

But he encouraged me to go further with my studies. And he said one thing in his office one time that I've heard white people say. We're talking about Black Lives Matter. And he was like, well, why don't you say black lives matter too because i think if you added the two to it right it would be more inclusive to people who would naturally be apathetic to your goals and i was like nigga bro are you talking to like my lived i don't hate to say lived experience my lived experience has really never really depended upon how i carry myself sure right you know you go through the world in a certain way

but the fact that i exist right well who as i exist as a black person they're just preconceived notions that i just can't help and affect you know yeah so why the fuck would you tell the people that they should be worried about how they're going to come across to other people when the material circumstances and ideology is what shapes their opinion in the fucking first place right exactly and it's like you can you can see that like what the way we live in in the united states and why like uh better mental health was offering uh 15 discount to people personally affected by this like no what america says to the black man is no what you need is a better marketing

situation you need a better pr firm pull up your pants yo pull up your pants you know what i mean yeah yeah and then we say that to everybody you know what i mean yeah um so apparently uh so he writes it is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of palestine celebrated hamas's atrocities. The National Leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine declared the weekend's events a historic win for the Palestinian resistance. The Connecticut chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauded the Palestinian resistance's unprecedented anti-colonial struggle, pledged its solidarity to that struggle, and vowed no peace on stolen land at a rally co-sponsored by socialist organizations in nyc one speaker spoke approvingly of the mass murder of israeli teenagers saying there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in and electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters some left can i just

say real can i can i just my bad my bad terms can i just say real quick you know i know we talked about this before but and i'm just say this like on the main yo dog i wouldn't go you said this turns i want to go party near a volcano you know what i mean this is another thing about material circumstances and reality dog that's not me making fun of that i'm just saying like the fact that they would be able to do that should give you an indication should be indicative of the power relations here right yeah yeah it's like so like okay like the word choice there i mean who the fuck knows it's a rally you know maybe you're emotional maybe you're fired up fired up whatever i mean calling them hipsters whatever who even gives a shit about the word choice i'm not here to fucking uh police any of that scold any of that i don't give a fuck but you're right there is a structural reality here and there is a increasing tendency to overlook that

for the actions of a group of individuals we don't have any kind of structural analysis because that would be if once you do that once you get any kind of structural analysis because that would be if once you do that once you get any kind of structural analysis then you have to fucking look at history and no one has done that is there any fucking like it's like the new york times editorial board no mention not a single fucking word about what has happened in the last 10 years that could have led up to this. Same here. Nothing. It's just vibes. Just vibes. Which is malpractice. And that's the thing. Once you start looking at the structural reality here, then you have to fucking incorporate history. Nobody wants to do that.

Well, also, I have to beg the question, too. Like, why do we have to apologize for somebody making a tasteless comment, but there's never any account given for the people that call to make Gaza a parking lot. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. On the other alley. You know what I'm saying?

I don't understand why that has to be the case. Well, I think, and the thing is, it's like, the thing is, is partially to do with these writers' audiences. We got at that at the beginning here. His audience is basically like other leftists ostensibly and like saying like well you're not gonna make any ground

if you couch things in this way i have to say i mean uh you know uh it was the funniest part about that as you saw plenty of that going on on twitter like oh you're gonna alienate all these politicians you work to put in there because you know you can't say these things and it's like it took aoc all 24 hours to fucking renounce any semblance of principle she had yeah there's not any point in i mean i don't know to me calling out how fucking absolutely absurd they are is how i persuade them to change their mind. It's kind of like... Making fun of them.

Not by tailoring my views to something that I think is more palatable to these motherfuckers that you put in office. It's like the Rick James, like Dave Chappelle thing. It's like, yo, we gave them some hell. It's like, by fucking lambasting them i am trying to fucking get them to change their stupid ass opinions anyways uh some left-wing intellectuals meanwhile chose to gussy up their ardor for war crimes in layers of impenetrable jargon their ardor for war crimes speaking plainly would have required such thinkers to acknowledge they were endorsing the mass murder of children and thus to assert the extraordinary burden of justifying this stance, which is to say the burden of explaining why we should believe

that Palestinian liberation can be achieved through the killing of Jewish children and only through the killing of Jewish children. It's understandable then that instead of forthrightly making this case, many choose to convey the sentiment oppressed people have a right to commit mass murder with as much opacity and pseudo profundity as their hard one vocabularies would allow um these i just i just also like too that violence is always seen as something that's like um it's just inherently i mean violence is bad of course it is but just it is just so far removed from what palestinians should be doing you know what i mean it's almost as if it comes with a value judgment before you've even against contextualized what is actually happening here you know yeah well i mean shit like i'm just as guilty of that as anyone i mean i feel like i made a post about like aoc and the squad kind of like wavering as a sign that like uh i guess maybe the gist of the post

was that like this was an act of resistance maybe that's kind of like what is the core of this maybe like eric levitz and a lot of these guys don't think that this was an act of resistance or that it was um or that like the content of it thereby negates the form and so and can possibly jeopardize the cause and could possibly jeopardize the cause and i don't know like i guess i guess i just fundamentally disagree because if you look at it from a systemic standpoint i mean again yeah there aren't there the actions don't leave much room for like celebration if you're like looking at like atrocity but also like the idea that like that i don't like this assumption that like we treat war like it's like a football game yeah right right you know like where we pick a side based on aesthetics and who our favorite

players are. Right, right. You know what I mean? Well, that's the implication here, that like, we've got hard-won vocabularies and like, we are academics and PhDs that are out of touch with, you know, the world, and it's like, I don't know, man, where did you go to school? Can I look

that up? Yeah, like, maybe that's you. Maybe you're projecting it, brother. I'd say to Prakas, too, us too if you're writing for the intelligence or you ain't in no position to cast stones my man um anyways um he quotes a um article from the drift which is a socialist magazine um in this intellectual's telling, the killings of entire families in their beds are not atrocities that contradicts the left's fundamental commitment to the inherent worth of every human life. They are drastic actions in need

of no apologia. Such sentiments were not altogether aberrant among left-wing public intellectuals. A Marxist professor at Birkbeck University of London declared that the murder of 260 Israelis at a rave was a consequence for partying on stolen land. Other academics and a wide variety of campus student organizations issued statements pointedly refusing to criticize Palestinian resistance. Meanwhile, social media was replete with claims that Hamas's atrocities constituted heroic progress toward decolonization and that Jewish Israeli israeli civilians were fair targets for violence

as they are settlers occupying stolen lands by the way didn't the government didn't the israel government say that they're gonna start giving guns to settlers uh i mean like bro again i think it's just a fundamental you would you did a good point because um it's just like this this idea that violence is not uh an acceptable act of resistance you know what i mean so it's just like this idea that violence is not an acceptable act of resistance. You know what I mean? So it's like all of it's just all these double negatives, right? I guess that go for Israel, but Palestine

can't do it. And again, I'm not giving a value judgment or I'm not trying to qualify it, but I just don't know how you can approach this topic honestly without understanding the proportionality of it right and i'm not saying that like again like you know what i mean like you commit the same atrocities but like it's not about my opinion this is a historical process this is a process

of struggle you know and that's it like i don't know what else to fucking say about i think the part a big part of the issue is social media in the sense that like as Gabe Wynott. It's like Gabe Wynott's tweet kind of hit the nail on the head. It's that like we're all turned into like our own personal like press secretaries and we have to have the perfectly triangulated opinion on this and formulated opinion. Whereas like that's A, that's not how humans work. But B, it's also just not really how history works in the sense that, like, so what you think that, like, okay, as he says, like, talking about, like, how people celebrate. Or they said it was a consequence of them partying on stolen land. And it's like, well, man, I mean, so what else do you want? It's just true.

It doesn't mean that I agree with it. Dude, it's also conflating. It's also conflating my understanding of historical social process with condoning it. It's not even about condoning. And I hate to even say, well, are you waffling because you don't condone? and i hate to even say well are you waffling because you don't condone but i'm like bro even if i said it was bad that what by one word is not like it's not gonna fucking like like fall come out of my mouth and like well fall into the ether of history and influence it like like throw it a pebble at a pond or some shit like that you know what i mean

what the fuck is wrong with you i mean i yeah i yeah i mean i guess there's no way to avoid it. It's just like, I don't want, listen, I don't want to take a victory lap on the loss of life or anything like that. I swear to God on everything I love, I don't. But the image itself is grotesque. I'm sorry. Yeah. The image itself is grotesque of partying next to an open-air prison.

And I'm not saying they deserve to get murdered or anything like that. No, no, like that i reject that out of hand i do think though that like even calling it an open air prison massively massively undersells what goes on there what kind of evil is brought on the human race that when the you know superior intelligence super organism fucking finally does visit this place in like 5 000 years they look back and they say this is a stain upon their legacy that can never be redeemed by anything they did afterwards in the same and in the same way the holocaust was exactly in this exact same fucking way and in that sense you're right it is a grotesque image that like needs to be meditated upon you can't just sit down and just sort of wave it away and

say as he says this is morally sick and intellectually bankrupt to say that it's a natural consequence of this okay you that is you waving it away we all have to sit down and meditate on that image that you can even have a fucking rave next to a place where so much human misery goes on that's that to me it is astonishing that we're just even glossing past that. That we're just moving past it fast enough. That there's two people that are literally spatially close to one another. Two groups of people in one group of people are able

to have the movement of freedom of mobility where they can literally dance and play music and have fun. And it's not just... And then fucking parallel to that there's a place where people cannot even literally dance and play music and have fun right and it's not just and then you're right and then and then fucking parallel to that there's a place where people cannot even move yo i don't i just don't understand how you could look at that situation and and say that anyone is that we're cheering for that and that we're not even criticizing the fact that this state even exists

that this exists in the state that does you know i'm saying yeah that's insane to me well and that you would then go and blame if i i hope i'm not mangling the argument here but blame that part of that is the left's fault for being morally bankrupt and using too many highfalutin words and not properly lobbying our congress to change this or that the other that it's not the israeli government's fault that it's not the u.s state government That it's not the U.S. state government's fault? You know what I'm saying? I hate to break this to you, but people dropping white phosphorus on people

got a little more culpability than the editor of Drift Magazine. Dude, you're right. You're right. We need a serious perspective shift. Listen to yourself, bro. They're dropping fucking like white phosphorus and thermite and that like that is somehow fucking that is somehow

they're carpet bombing two million people about to cut off food i think today they cut off electricity or fuel this morning right you know food electricity i mean babies are gonna die if you're worried about fucking babies children are gonna fucking die dude this is really this is astonishing here's the thing if you're concerned about killing babies and all that stuff really concerned about it and not just doing some sort of moral equivalence thing to chad people then you call for the occupation be ended which is which is insane that most people on this issue here are to the right of where Haaretz is on this. Who publicly in our pen is saying,

the local paper is saying, no, we need to really seriously consider this. This is not a tenable position, and this was always going to lead to that. You have to ask yourself, it's like we said on Sunday, do I want to like inhabit a world like a society that is so sick that it allows statements like the ones we were just talking

about that that are acceptable in society that like you can kill palestinian children and that that's fine it's like what world what in what world do like what you were saying aaron like in what world are we able to even rationalize with that that is such a sick and fucked up thought like so demented how will any bit of pleading and intellectual rationalizing and uh you know equations of morality this that and the other are gonna fucking convince people otherwise when that's the pervasive sense i mean it's not like you just give up that's not what i'm saying at all i'm not saying that you fucking give up i'm just saying that like it doesn't make any you don't give in you don't give in you don't fucking relent you don't relent to these people that are calling for genocide literally calling for genocide and also also i think it's a fucking huge um

i think it's a massive abdication of responsibility, duty, to let this be framed in this light, to basically paint the entire... You're the one fucking doing harm to the left by painting the entire fucking left like this. It's irresponsible is what it is. It's irresponsible. It's malpractice.

I think what it is. I think what he probably would, if we're really just... Everybody's got what they will say publicly versus what they'll say privately. And I'm sympathetic to this. But I think for folks that have proximity to this, I think it's probably an upsetting, confounding time. I think it's probably an upsetting, confounding time. You know? And I think what happens is, like, you start trying to, like, you know,

throw paint at the canvas and see what comes up. You know what I mean? In terms of, like, where to center blame and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Because, you know. And I understand. That's what we do as human beings. We're messy man but just be honest about it well tom tom that is an excellent point this gets at something that we all

realized on friday which is that we're in a new era we've been dancing around it ever since fucking ukraine russia real really since covid since trump you fucking name it but we are entering an era of accelerated conditions and accelerating deterioration of the the social relations we've all assumed to be you know status quo and hegemonic for so many years in a world that's increasingly unstable due to climate change, where you're seeing more fucking armed conflict and ethnic cleansing, the mass fucking rehabilitation of fascism and historical fascism in the West, Holocaust revisionism,

we are entering a world that is increasingly destabilized and that will be increasingly hard to adjust to and i think that like trying to like play this game like we're still in the fucking 1960s or something is that's malpractice to your audience what you should be doing is going out there and saying like this is the new fucking world we're in wake the fuck up yeah exactly exactly it's i mean i'm serious like that's what i'm telling my audience you need to wake the fuck up because like you can't be this naive in the fucking world we're entering i'm sorry you're as they as the kids say you're not gonna make it you're not gonna yo you're not gonna you can't bend the knee to

these motherfuckers man because you're not gonna make it dog i mean maybe we should just cut this off here but like he basically says what we witnessed was not the palestinians mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood and soil nationalism hamas's project is antithetical to the values of the left uh it is also completely at odds with the progressive he basically sounds like the israeli project yeah that sounds exactly like the Israeli project, dog. What do you call it? And to be fair to Eric,

he does at least point toward that in certain parts of this. You know what I'm saying? But also, here's the thing, man. This is like... I'm sorry. I'm playing fast and loose with a heavy concept, but it's like... Man, like... This is not football. This is like, I'm sorry, I'm playing fast and loose with a heavy concept, but it's like, man, like, this is not football.

This is not sports. Yeah. You know what I mean? This is not like, oh, two shitty teams, and I guess I got to pick the one that, you know, that's like, whatever. You know what I mean? It's not what this is. You look at things in totality.

One team has nuclear weapons. We could just also just say, I think one way to sum it up is that's why you look at things in totality when one team has nuclear weapons when when when when we could just also just say i think one way to sum it up is that i i don't know i think somebody put on twitter this way um i don't know about uh any war any uh war that's equivalent that's uh of equivalency where one side can shut off food water electricity also one side has nuclear weapons right i'm just saying dog not saying they're going to use in palestine but i'm just saying that's the kind of that's the kind of power that we're talking about you know what i mean well and also i mean at this point we're just rehashing all the same arguments we've been saying for days and that we said on sunday but

like again israel basically wanted hamas to be there Hamas has power because they're the only ones who even know how to get shit in and out of Gaza. This isn't some fucking like, oh, a community got flooded. Let's give them mutual aid. This isn't even like Ukraine. You can't fucking send supplies there. There's a blockade. People die trying to get in and out of it. It's like this is the real world, motherfucker.

And it's also another thing is that i think that we're dancing around here is that if you don't have a structural analysis then this is where you lead up if you where you where you wind up if you don't have any kind of like mark actual marks it's not what he fucking is red baiting and like you know basically in his like weird anti-communist way basically trying to like slander actual leftists for believing if you don't have a marxist or structural analysis to this then then this is where you end up basically you just see this as goodies and baddies and then chatting people for not being appropriately incensed about certain things that are acts of

war that none of nobody should be thrilled about a fucking act of war well and you're right and he's right which is that like yeah hamas uh are they like uh are they like secular like socialists like whatever yeah no they're fucking islamists obviously but like again if you don't have a structural analysis of this, I mean, how else do you explain this? I'm not trying to draw these two parallels because one is talking about a violent occupation, but the way they talk about this, it's like nobody talks about what drives people to things.

You know what I mean? Right. Or why people voted for Trump, for example. I mean, again, it's not a one-to-one. It's a very crude comparison. Well, you're exactly right. And again, this speaks to the importance of an actual Marxist analysis, which is that you have to fucking deal with history.

History doesn't just fucking disappear. It's not like something you lose under the rug. People fucking, history moves through all of us at all times like we are all swept by its tides and we engage with it and like it brings us to points and it brings certain groups of actors to certain points and conjunctures and then they have to fucking react and then what winds up coming out of that is sometimes the antithesis of their actions and then that creates a synthesis you know what i'm saying like this is the movement of history you can't just look at this like it's in a vacuum of just like moral and immoral actors like are you a fucking

baby that's what fucking babies believe wake up when you when you do that i think what you end up doing is that you end up this with this material the dematerialized moralistic analysis that like doesn't really offer anything except like like you know this idea of like it's just vibes based is what it is man you know if we just had the better vibes right and also too i want to mention another thing one thing too uh there are other groups besides i mean i know hamas is the one i guess like i'm kind of heading this this this uh this uh i guess this attack but like there are other groups involved in palestinian liberation i saw on twitter somebody was posting a picture of communists right

like actual communist communist faction that was like i think taking back like a uh like an israeli base or something like that so i mean there are like a lot of different groups i think like fighting for the same goal of liberation, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, well, we talked about Mustafa Barghouti. I mean, like there's various, the Palestinian cause has had various elements in it. Marxist, socialist, Islamist. I mean i mean again this is a historical development thing but there are

currently things going on in the middle east that again this is another thing not even fucking mentioned here like the potential coordination between Israel and Saudi Arabia in, uh, in their intelligence agencies as a maneuver to ostracize and, and push out the Iranians. And in so doing these utopian motherfuckers really thought that they could push into the new era of world history and just forget about the Palestinians, forget that they ever exist,

and that's what everyone wants. That's why they're all basically signing off now on ethnic cleansing because in their minds, this could all just go away if we just finally let Israel do whatever the fuck they want. And it's like Corey Robin tweeted, we'll just do land acknowledgements in 100 years. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like cory robin tweeted we'll do we'll just do a land acknowledgements in 100 years exactly exactly and it's driving them fucking crazy everyone from the most moralistic left lib to the most bloodthirsty fucking settler imaginable it's driving them crazy the palestinians

will not go away and that is a cause for inspiration and that's what they're trying to fucking make you forget when they write these stupid fucking articles that like oh let's fucking moralize and let's like let's let's see if they checked out all the right boxes no in a fucking thousand years they'll look back at the historical fucking record and they'll say they did not fucking go away they tried to assert their fucking presence in the historical stage and i mean people tried to sweep it under the rug but you can't man and people tried to sweep it under the fucking rug before and after and i'm sorry i i that is not what i'm gonna fucking do so fuck off you know i just want to say man too i know i brought the story up before uh but um it really did make me think uh

the pretended by daryl a sm A. Smith is a short story. And basically it talks about this future, this indeterminate future where there's a race war that kills all black people, right? But white people, out of their guilt, right, they end up creating these androids, right, that are caricatures. I mean, literally, it's minstrelsy, right, of black people, right? But the whole idea is that you couldn't recognize somebody as a human being. Right. Even through a social death and trying to kill them. Right. You can't recognize them as a human being. You had to create something in place of them as a as a living thing with integrity. Right. In order for you to pass on all of your bigotry, all of your hatred and also for you to excuse yourself and your own complicity in their existence, right?

Yeah. But you can't fucking do it. You're not gonna fucking turn these people into robots. You're also not gonna fucking turn them into rubble, yo. You're not gonna fucking do that, dog. Yeah. Because they're gonna keep fucking fighting, yo. They're gonna keep fucking fighting, dude.

I mean, that's what humans do. I mean, I just, like, I'm sure that if it was like 1850 you know we would probably in twitter was still around would probably still be saying the same shit like oh well they uh you know rape women and kill children on the prairie and they you know what i'm saying it's like the thing is and people fuck i mean people fucking were like i didn't like the hand-wringing and whatever over like western settler colonialism in the u.s well guess what motherfucker that's not a complete project either i mean they're still fucking here let's say that we gotta name that i mean seriously like the

american indian movement was only 40 years ago. This is not something that's fucking settled either. So it's like, you know, you cannot escape history. If anything, if you should take anything away from Marx's teaching, it's that you cannot escape history, motherfucker. It'll fucking come for your ass. Why are you sleeping at night, yo? Just fucking come to your house, yo.

Pull off the sheets like, I'm here, motherfucker. That's the whole fucking point. I'm here, motherfucker. What do you think he was getting at with a specter is haunting Europe? I mean, like, it surrounds us at all times. It's spectral. It's fucking ghastly. It fucking weighs on our brains like a nightmare.

It doesn't go away. It's metaphysical almost. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, anyways. Do y'all want to keep reading this? Have we thoroughly exercised the demon? I think that's the perfect stuff.

Yeah, that's the perfect stuff. Y'all just came with the bars. All right. Well, there's a lot of other bullshit in there. Just remember, I just want people to remember that um i'm like actually a listener you know uh like don't don't don't apologize and don't bend the knee to these fucking people man because they what they want you to do is that you they want you to sign on to and accept extermination right you know what i mean they want they want you to feel as if also too that like anything that you feel right is wrong inherently wrong right and that you are maladjusted you know

that you're maladjusted you know what i mean to throw in your lot with people who are being referred to as inhuman animals and they want you to accept the murder of children after you remember you have to remember that they want you to accept the murder of children yo you have no you have no obligation online or your personal life to denounce amas you have fucking no obligation to remember that they want you to accept the murder of children, yo. You have no obligation online or your personal life to denounce Hamas. You have fucking no obligation to say that Israel has a right to exist. Because all of that is dematerialized and ahistorical, right? And they'll call you an anti-Semite and they'll call you a fucking radical and they'll call you out of touch with the American people. And, well, this isn't decolonization, but you know what?

If there's one people I want to be out of touch with, it's the fucking American people. Exactly. Jesus Christ. They're maladjusted. I'm not maladjusted. They're maladjusted to historical forces. Somebody said that. Somebody's like,

a people whose political legacy is yelling at target workers because they saw a rainbow flag or something in there. Trust me, I want to be out of step with that fucking people. If I'm maladjusted, then I'll be maladjusted.

Also, I think that this shit just tries to distort your morality and yes and even more i think it is belittling and condescending to your in your sense of history and yeah i like i think that it is a complicated thing to be a human is a complicated it is not easy we are It is a complicated, it is not easy. We are all of us moving towards the same fucking bright light at the end of the goddamn tunnel. No one makes it out alive. It's not easy. It's complicated.

And the thing is, is that people would really like it if history was not complicated. People would really like it if resistance and, uh, oppression and whatever, where these like binary, like linear, uh, it's easy to sit down and having a beer with your buddy, man. That's what they fucking want. Or that, or yes, exactly. And that like oppression itself. And, and I feel like this has been our project from day fucking one. It's why I sat down to try to like complicate the narrative of the opioid crisis because people have to have this idea of history as this linear static thing of like injury and response of good and well-meaning actors that

like it could just never be it could never be uh the case that like it's way more complicated and even perhaps dialectical that perhaps history moves in a fucking dialectical motion or that there is any kind of like pattern to it at all that would help us build a better future because that's what's on the table and like and i again i'm not like trying to i'm not trying to like impugn this dude and say that like he doesn't mean well and he like wants to whatever i should i did some impugning earlier i'm sorry about that i'm trying to engage with this in good faith. I think I just... I went into it with a bad taste in my mouth because of his past misdeeds.

Well, the thing is... I would say that I don't think he's an idiot. I think it's willful ignorance. Denial? You're going with denial? I think so. I think so, because it's easier. It is easier. It's easier easier then you can look away yeah i think you're right tom i mean usually you are correct when it comes to understanding people and their motivation um i say that sincerely like genuinely i think you're

correct well uh i guess that's about covers it for this week um we recorded an episode about this on Sunday I guess you could consider this to be a sequel to that in some ways it's over at our Patreon a lot of people liked that episode apparently a lot of people liked it asked us to unlock it

my main objection to unlocking it was I figured it would be outdated by the time we recorded uh by the time this week so uh and who knows we'll see i mean maybe i'm sure it will be outdated by a week from now so um but you can go check it out at the patreon um until then i appreciate you all for listening um please don't dogpile anyone please don't dogpile that asshole yeah don't dogpile anyone. Please don't dogpile that asshole. Yeah, don't dogpile Eric Levitz. He might be able to go on, but you know.

Don't dogpile us either. Yeah, don't get mad at me. Yeah. I'm passionate, man. All right. Well, we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening. Peace.

Bye.