It Could Happen Here Weekly 111

grifter that we've become accustomed to on this show. They aren't Chris Ruffo, they aren't of TikTok, and although they will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they are cut from that pre existing template. These are our monsters. These are monsters birth by the left. I grew up in by the generation of new socialist radicalized by Bernie Sanders, the

Syrianceivil War, and the election of Donald Trump. This is largely going to be a set up episode to understand the background of the kinds of people who are going to come later. But I wanted to start the story with a taste of where it's going to end. Max Bluemothal is a left wing journalist with the outlet Gray Zone. He was for a very long time well regarded in anti imperialist circles. In many ways, he is the ideological

predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left. In twenty twenty one, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's chief health official, went on Face Nation to face allegations and calls by Senator Ran Paul and Ted Cruz for him to step down and quote be prosecuted over the course of COVID nineteen.

painful experience. Bluementhal responded, quote Nobel winning inventor of the PCR test, Carrie Mollus on Anthony quote, I am the science Fauci quote and this is from Molas Tony Fauci does not mind going on camera in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera. By the way, the part where he says lie instead of lying, there is a direct quote that is him, not me. So to understand how absolutely it absolutely absurd, this is we need to talk about who Carrie Burris

actually is. So Max Bluemoenthal is correct that Carrie Mollis won the nineteen ninety three Nobel Prize for the invention of the PCR test, which is now one of the basic building blocks of biology. Like they let undergrads and college do this stuff, But he is also an enormous crank. Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote a profile of him when he

died in twenty nineteen. They described him like this quote, He'd become a vociferous critic of widely accepted scientific theories ridiculing the notion that CFCs caused the ozone hole, that humans caused climate change, and that HIV caused AIDS. Now, okay, climate change denihilism, I think is something we all understand. The ozone layer stuff is extremely funny. This interviews from

the nineties. So in the nineties, we were using these things called CFC's, which is a class of chemical that we used in like hairspray and refrigerators, and using them tore a hole in the ozone layer. So the world, for maybe the last time, actually performed a collective action stop using them, and the whole fixed itself. So okay, Obviously,

carry mollis unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But the last part, the part where carrying Mullus claims that HIV does not cause AIDS, we need to talk about a bit more because it is absolutely monstrous and it is going to give molos a body count. Even Kissinger would not in respect to So, okay, we need to talk about what HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm I'm just gonna go to the CDC for this one. HIV Human and amino deficiency virus is a virus that attacks

the body's immune system. If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS acquired amino deficiency syndrome. There is no effective cure. Once people get HIV, they have it for life, but with proper medical care, HIV can be controlled. People with HIV who get effective HIV treatment can live long, healthy lives and protective partners. And this is something that people fought and died for. If you have HIV, there are simple and easy tests for it now you can

get treatment and you can live a normal life. On the other hand, if HIV isn't treated, you can get acquired immuno deficiency syndrome AIDS, and that can and will kill you. It is what killed so so many, almost an entire generation of queer people. It killed them for decades and decades and decades, and it's still killing them now. Carrie Mullis, the guy who max bluemitthal is tweeting a video of to Go After. Anthony Fauci doesn't think that

HIV causes AIDS. He thinks that AIDS is caused by malnutrition in poverty, and he is going to spend the rest of his life telling anyone in everyone he can getting mainstream press coverage telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He is the Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS in nihilism. Lots of people believe him, including for example, the FOO fighters Dave Gruel. They believe him because he is apparently

a reputable source. The man has a Nobel prize. But unfortunately, as we've already seen from his climate denial and his CFC denial, he is spreading unbelievably dangerous lies, and this specific lie that HIV doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people. Here's from that Berkeley article. Again, I don't like the way they're phrasing it. It's the you know, it's Berkeley, right like, so some stuff going to some stuff's going to be racist. His views on AIDS don't just look bad,

they may have had deadly consequences. By the late nineteen nineties, South Africa was in the midst of a catastrophic A's epidemic. President Thumbo mcbecky, under the spell of AIDS denialist including Mullis, declared that A's was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many

South Africans were denied access to treatment. A two thousand and eight study published in the Journal of Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, thirty five thousand babies were born with HIV and three hundred and thirty thousand South Africans died of AIDS on it. Necessarily, this

is monstrous. And here is Max Bluementhal, who was up until very recently, at the very least nominally a left wing journalist, tweeting a video of this fucking guy to attack Anthony Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right wing anti lockdown rules. Now, I especially want to do this because if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it is very very easy to do from the left. You can attack him for his response to the original HIV AIDS pandemic, and you know, lots of queer people have

done this. Instead, Max Bluementhal is tweeting a guy is tweeting a video from an unbelievable right wing crank who was responsible for the death of three hundred and thirty thousand people. And so the question we're going to be answering for the next three episodes is how did we get here and what is happening now, and to do this we need to talk about the rise of American

Marxist Leninism. I'm going to try to present the ideology as sympathetically as possible, because it's important to understand how people came to believe in these things, because part of the horror and tragedy here is that not all of these people are the grifters and shills in right wing fanatics that the IDEOLOGI spawned and who were now having to deal with people who are on info wars agreeing

with Alex Jones. Most of them were people like us, people who saw the horrors of this world and wanted to make it better. A lot of the writing about this is clinical and antiseptic, largely coming from either academic journals or very very angry liberals. And I can't be clinical about this. I can't cover this neutraally, and I can't do that because some of these people were my friends. There were people I loved and respected and cared about, and they're people who have now lost, and so I

owe it to them to be fair about this. So what is is the modern generation of Marxist Leninism. You could start with the history of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's consolidation of power and the development of Marxist Leninism as an ideology, and you could trace it through the twentieth century, and you could trace, you know, the ways in which it is and isn't the ideology that Lenin had originally been developing. But that really is the wrong place to

start here. If you want to understand how this ideology came to be and why so many people came to follow it, the right place to start is America. It's with a generation of young people who grew up in the wake of the two thousand and eight financial collapse and the ruthless suppression of occupy by the Obama administration. It's a generation of people who grew up on the Internet who began to learn about the lies we've been fed our entire lives about the world and America's role

in it. They learned the lies we've been told about the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam, about Allende and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about American imperialism in Lebanon and Haitian, Guatemala and Honduras and Iran, about Patrice Labumba and the DRC, about Sukarno and Suharo in the Killing Fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Shai Guavara, about the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a thousand crimes of the American Empire crime as we could spend

an entire episode just listing by name. They learned in a tremendously short amount of time that the American Empire was born of genocide. It was built by slavery, and he is sustained by replicating those genocides across the world

and at home. That the governments, they were taught from birth to love and respect, slaughtered children in the streets with health fire and missiles, and then had the unmitigated gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders of the free world and the upholder of the rules based international order. And so they started learning about how our

capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx, and then they started reading Angles, and it led to other Marxists into the great international enemies of American imperialism from the last century ho Chi Minh Castro to Lenin, to struggles against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like phenomen and

militants like Asada Shakur. It led them to believe, to really believe in the struggle against capitalism and racism and imperialism, and that led them to Stalin and Mao, And eventually it would lead them down a darker path, a path where anything and everything could be justified if it meant defeating the American Empire, a path that told them it was their duty to back every state in the world who could even conceivably check the advance of American power.

It led them to modern geopolitics, to the belief that modern China and Vietnam or socialist states still resisting American imperialism. It would lead them eventually to backing the very Russian oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR. And it would lead some of them into the very heart of darkness itself, to an alliance with anyone and everyone who opposed liberal interventionism. It would lead to the Sekin alliance with the arch

right wing anti communist Donald Trump. But it didn't start that way. The co option of the ideology is a process that took almost a decade and comprise a series of debates inside the left about what capitalism, socialism, and imperialism really are, and how the left should relate to nationalism in the state. We'll talk more about how these debates led to a right wing turn at episode three.

But the core beliefs anti imperialism, objection to capitalism, a rejection of liberal interventionism, and some of the darker and more conspiratorial tendencies, like accusing any protest movement against the government they supported of being CIA assets, spread like wildfire. There were contradictions from the beginning, of course, how do you square your opposition to capitalism with your support for China, a country with almost one thousand billionaires. The solution was

to lie. Lies about China, in particular abound it. Many Marxist Leninists believe, for reasons that are deeply unclear to me, that China has public housing that automatically guarantees every citizen a home. This is not true. This unclear to me if it's ever been true, even through this so, I mean, I guess you could argue it was sort of true during the socialist period. It has not been true for a very very long time. China has a lot of

homeless people. But you know, these sort of lies persist because they are what you need to believe in order to believe that China is a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common line is that China has

a fully socialized healthcare system. This is unbelievably not true. China, in fact, used to have something like a universal medical system that they operated in extreme difficulty with groups of people called the barefoot doctors who would go to rural villages that had never really received proper medical care before and attempt to treat them. This was the thing that China used to have, and then they tore it up and privatized it, and now Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster.

Calculations by the Chinese Journal Twang estimate that almost the entire Chinese economy is based on corporations not paying their required contributions to healthcare plans, and that if corporations actually paid into the healthcare plans of micro workers, the entire economies of entire provinces would immediately go under as an

enormous majority of their corporations immediately went underwater. And so what we're getting this sort of picture of is people begin to believe things that need to be true in order for their ant to square their anti imperialism, or their version of anti imperialism, which is opposing at all costs the United States with their anti capitalism when the two began to conflict in terms of, you know, attempting to support a very obviously capitalist economy, and this leads

to some very very bizarre twists in turns. One very common thing is for socialists and socialist organizations in the US, or at least I say socialists, I made Marxist Leninists organizations to advocate for a fifteen or twenty dollars midiroom wage in China while simultaneously celebrating thirty two cents an hour as the end of poverty in China. This has never actually penetrated the minds of the new Marxist Leninists.

With their endless parades of flags and new countries added every day, from the genocidal austerity bongers in Ethiopia to the hardline, murderous anti communists to rule meenmore by baton and bullet, new Marxist Leninists were able to effectively insulate themselves from reality. This left them as prey for a new generation of right wing grifters. Would cynically exploit them

for wealth and status. They also garnered the hatred of the more internationalist factions of the left, and then, as their numbers expanded, the increasing ire of liberals, who, stealing a term from anarchists, began to call the Marxist Leninist tankies. This, I suspect, if you have heard of these people, is probably the word you've heard used to describe them. So we should talk about what this word actually means. But first,

unfortunately some ads, and we're back. To explain what a tanky is, we have to go back to, bizarrely, the nineteen fifty six Hungarian Revolution. So all right, in nineteen fifty six there was a massive uprising in Hungary. The Hungarians effectively forced their government to break with the Soviets. The Soviets respond to this by rolling a bunch of tanks across the border, claiming everyone in the revolution is

the fascist and killing them all. And they were fairly successfully able to convince a large number of communists that the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They were aided in this by the fact that the liberals also lied about what the Hungarian revolution really was. And this is a

lie that they continue to spread to this day. The liberal version of the revolution is that it was, you know, it was a liberal revolution by people who wanted liberal democracy against the Soviets'll tell Terrrianism, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising and what most of it was was a rebellion by the Hungarian workers' councils, So workers across their factories seized control of their factories, threw their bosses out, and began

to manage the democratically. The different workers' councils like foreign regional federations. It is very stunningly, very very similar to the original Soviets of the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution, which in theory the USSR is supposed to be named after. But when they reappeared again, the the Soviets just absolutely smashed them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned

one party state. And what this actually meant was tanks rolling up to the gates of factories blasting apart the very workers' councils who are supposed to be the basis of communism. This was an attempt in some sense yes, to implement democracy, but it was an attempt to implement democracy in the factory, and it was attempted by the working class to seize control of the means of production

and manage them themselves. Now, the smashing of the Hungarian Revolution led to a split in enormous numbers of communist parties all across the world. There are people leave communist

parties and droves. This is a big enough deal that it spawns effectively like a crisis in China, where there is a series of bast strikes and people chanting like here another Hungary, and in particular the British Communist Party had a guy on the ground in Hungary reporting of what was happening, and his reports split the party between the people who supported the Hungarians and the people who

supported the Soviets. The latter faction became known as tankies for their support of rolling tanks across the border and slaughtering in the working class. The term was revived in the twenty tens to describe the return of Marcist Leninists, so though much of its usage was about Russia and

Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising. Now it is true that all of these people do actually support they do actually believe that the Soviets were crushing like the return of fascism, but that that actual belief, like the belief in you know, that the Soviets were right to crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively irrelevant now except as a sort of marker of loyalty, because you know, the USSR is gone and the Hungarian Revolution is gone too,

and so what's left is a term that on the one hand, does correctly, you know, it does correctly describe a part of their political tradition, but it has it has a tendency to sort of anchor these arguments in

the past instead of the present. With the substance of disagreements with the Marxist Leninists actually are now Marxist Leninists, they're also just yeah, they're called mls to Marxist Leninists absolutely hate being called tankies except under, you know, the circumstances where they adopted ironically, and I'm of two minds.

I have called these people's tankies a lot. But the biggest problem with calling these people tankies is that the original tankies, the people who supported the Soviets butchering the Hungarian working class were actually communists. They were Marxist Latinists who supported the USSR and believe that state ownership of the means of production was the socialist transition to communism. These modern quote unquote Marxist Leninists don't even believe that.

Both Stalin and Kruish Chef, for all the differences, would have had these people's shop for supporting capitalists in their imperialist market economies. If you tried to explain to Mao that Deng Jhao Ping, with his people's billionaires and a trillion dollars of American treasury bond singing it sitting in his coffers, was doing communism, he would have branded you a capitalist, wrote and sent you to your re education

camp at the end of the day. Whatever else, the original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR were communists. Their modern day equivalents don't even have that to height behind. They have been reduced to capitalists with a hammer and sickle fetish. So who are these people really? What they've become is suicide net socialists, because the suicide nets are the actual content of their politics. This is the actual content of backing states like the people's Republic of China.

It is full throated support for the suicide nets to fly under the roofs of the Fox confactories in Shenzhen. The reality of their suicide net socialism is that the Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than live under it. And it was these suicide net socialists who sins spawned their bastard children, patriotic socialism, and eventually Maga communism. So how do we understand what these people are? I am going to give the final word to Karl Marx, the

man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going to read from one of Marx's most famous works, the eighteenth through Mayor. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on the show before. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like

a nightmare on the mina into the living. And just as they seemed to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history and time, honor, disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther Martin Luther put on the mask of the

apostle Paul. The French Revolution of seventeen eighty nine to nineteen fourteen draped itself alternatingly in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of nineteen forty eight knew nothing better to do than to parody now seventeen eighty nine, now the revolutionary tradition of seventeen ninety three, seventeen ninety five. This is precisely the

trap that Marxist Leninis have walked into. Faced with mass social upheaval, they knew nothing better than the down the mask of Stalind and Mao. It was a terrible mistake. Here is Marx again. The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutionaries required recollections of past world history in order to

smother their own content. The Revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content. Here, the content goes beyond the phrase. But we never buried our dead. The memories of dead generations still weigh like a nightmare in the minds of the living. And in the next episode we will walk face first into that nightmare and behold the abyss within.

a big guy in the nineties. The most impactful thing that he did for modern politics is that he is the guy who invented birth rhythm is slightly too strong of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like Obama birth rhism him like into the mainstream because like as an attempt basically to kill Obama's campaign so that Hillary could win the nomination.

long time. But in the early twenty tens, he takes a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive circles because in twenty twelve thirteen, it was and it still is to this day, but like it was, it was very hard to take profalesime positions, and he like he just ends up in this sort of spiral where like he loses most of his friends, his girlfriend breaks up with him, like he's not getting work from the

usual places he'd been getting work from because he's been sort of like kicked out and isolated for taking this stance. And the product of this is that he goes he takes this meeting that is very very weird. So in twenty fifteen, Russia today has this like week long gala thing that's for its tenth anniversary. And if you're like a Mueller investigation fan, this is very famous. If you're a Nova person, almost no one has ever heard of this thing. Yeah, so this this gala thing is this

in twenty fifteen. It has a bunch of very very important like Russian officials. Gorbachev is there, Like there's a bunch of like senior like senior officials. Very famously, Mike Flynn gets paid forty five thousand dollars to speak there. Jill Stein, who the Green Party can in twenty sixteen? This is where.

I want to read from a little bit of them, because it's a really interesting look into who he was before and the fact that he knows exactly what the playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Assaud apologists have eagerly played the al Qaeda card to stoke fears of his Islamic takeover Assyria. Back in two thousand and three, Assaud accused the US of deliberately overstating the strength of Alkaida in order to

justify it so called war on Terror. But now in a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world, Asad insists the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost entirely by al Qaeda like jahadists who have come from abroad to place the country under Islamic control, and is addressed to the Syrian People's Assembly. On June third, the dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the terms terrorists

or terrorism a whopping forty three times. That is a full ten times more than George Bush digit he speech to Congress. In the aftermath of nine to eleven, enjoining the Asade regimes campaign that g legitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch off irrational Jahatis. Ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hesbelah's core Islamist values. Assaud's apologists have unwinningly underwritten the war on Terror lexicon introduced by George Bush, Ariel Sharon and the Neo Kon

cabal after nine to eleven. So this is pre twenty fifteen, like twenty fifteen, like pre this meeting, Max bluementhal So he goes to this meeting and then after that founds grey Zone and all of his positions suddenly flip. And this is the thing you can actually if you want to, if you go back and trace. So graizone is this sort of media outlet thing that Max Blumenthal found it.

And it's interesting because there's a lot of like Aaron Batte too, Like if you go through the journalist in this outlet, the moment they start working for Greyzone, all of their positions on stuff like Syria just immediately flip. There's okay. So there's a conspiracy version of this where like if you read Liberal Accouncil with Grayzone. They will argue that maxlely Wenthal went to this meeting, got paid off by the Russian government and that grey Zone is

like a Russian asset. I I don't know. I don't think that's true. Well, the thing I can say was, nobody knows where Grayzone gets his money from. Right, they're very they're very sort of like like there's Patreon stuff. But other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it. There's no evidence, like directly that he's been paid by the Russian government to do Grayzone. The thing that I can say is that he has taken a bunch of money from the Russian government to go on RT like

all the fucking time. That's the part of it that I can say. I don't know. This is one of these things that's it's such a sort of like confluence of like all of these people were in the same place at the same time. It's one of these things that generates a trilling conspiracy theories. I'm gonna say that I don't think that this is like a giant Russian conspiracy.

But he does flip all of his positions almost immediately after going to this meeting, and the thing that he starts taking is is the exact same position that he was he was writing about like before this in twenty fifteen, he starts talking about how like anyone who opposes a SAWD is a quote head chopper, and he starts he starts selling like one of these big things is selling this line that like a SAWD is the defender of serious ethnic minorities, which is like a thing that I

think would be newsed to them, and you know, and he's he starts a podcast called Moderate Rebels, which is a joke about like, ah, like the US is funding moderate rebels, but all those people are actually like ol Kaida supporters, and I don't know, like I think. I think it's interesting comparing his pre twenty fifteen writing to his post twenty fifteen writing, because he very clearly understands what he's doing, Like he he wrote an analysis of the thing that he's going to be dealing.

Chan John, Everything's actually great. And with both that and Syria, there's exactly the same playbook, which is to go all, like, you know, all of the resistance to this government is

CIA back Wahabi terrorists. You can find like some people who suck and go oh hey, like these guys are all Jahadists, and you know, in Syria this is sort of bleakly funny because if you know your War on terror history, like Bashar al Assad like tortured people with the CIA and the US like held some Weiger guys for the CCP in Gitmo for allegedly being part of a separatist group. But this is an important part of

how people sort of launder these right wing dictators. And this is something that there's a very old sort of tradition of this on the left that these these a lot of people are able to sort of raft onto And I'm going to take an example of this because I think it's important because one of the the er sort of moments of all of this politics is the collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left wing defense of Melosovic. So I'm going to read from to take

an example of like what this shit looks like. I'm going to read from an article that Jeremy Skahill wrote, which is, I think the worst article about Melosovik I've ever seen. This is this is a Huffington Post piece. This is I think the worst thing I've ever seen written about Molosovik in a mainstream outlet. Here is here.

Here is Jeremy's Gayhill quote. Little attention therefore, has been paid to Melosovic's long term efforts, which predate nine to eleven, the nineteen ninety nine NATO bombing and his own trial to expose the presence of Al Qaeda and the Balkans from Bosnia to Kosovo. With nine to eleven, Melosovic's talk

of al Kaido easily dismissed as laughable, pathetic opportunism. But those who follow Melosovic's career and importantly the events of the nineteen nineties in Yugoslavia, no, it was none of these. The those allegations were based on true events the US

does not want discussed in an international court. Following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the eighties, many Musha Hadeen eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia, where they went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and bin Laden were on the same team. To this day, there are reports of trading camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation. It is also likely a trading ground for future blowback.

So that's like nonsense, Like there are not there are not all Kaida training camps in Bosnia, Like what the fuck? Like, it's just it's complete nonsense, And you know, it relies on a lot of the other sort of like weird things that leftists like believe and don't believe about this.

There's there's a very if if you want to actually read about these sort of like transnational Islamist networks, there's there's a very good book by the anthropologist DARRYL Lee called The Universal Enemy in Jihad and Jihada Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity. But like, okay, I want I want to ask the audience a question, right, why would members of the muja Hadeen be in Bosnia in the nineteen nineties, And I want to suggest that it might have something to do with the fact that Melosivic was

trying to kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He almost did it. He was pretty close to actually doing it, you know. But the sort of the sort of like left conspiracy solutions like no, no, it must have been the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex Musja Hadeen guys would have gone to a country where someone was trying to kill the entire Muslim population, Like what the fuck did you?

butcher of the Yugoslavian social estate. But you can, you know, and so and he was he was just a hardline right wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting, you know, by by by doing this thing where you're like, oh well actually like all of these people were, uh, they were all al Kaeda. You can use this to sell the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as like the left to

savor of Yugoslavia. And you know, I think that the part about this that really said is like you know, there was you know, the sort of last true believers of the old Yugoslavia working class right where these the Yugoslavin anti war protesters and these guys, you know, they they're they're they're protesting to stop the war. They see coming that the Serbians are about to win, leash and

they just get murdered in the streets by Melosovic. You know, well because seven years later the US society that they didn't like him, like he's become this like hero of a bunch of these like a bunch of barxsis Leninists like see this guy as a hero, and this is you know, this, this is just this is their big sort of like political trick is using the threat of like terrifying Muslim like terrorists to just legitimize right wing dictators.

come in through. Is that like a lot of the Western media was not covering Syria very well. They weren't covering the rise of like job Outel news Row very well, and you know, they use this gap to sort of like come through and rehabilitate a sod by going like the media is lying to you a sad who again, I need to mention like ten years earlier, this guy was torturing people for the Cia. But you know, now like Asad is actually Nancy imperialist, and this works, This

works enormously well. This is the sort of breach through which Bluemithal enters the mainstream. And this, this discourse about

Syria like reshapes everything about the left. This is where this is where American Marcist Leninism like comes from right, like a huge portion of ideas from the people who backed the SOD And this is it's actually really weird, like almost every big sort of like leftist like podcast or media thing like came out of the Syrian Civil War in some way or another, Like the whole Grazo versus Bellingcat thing is a like is a thing that was originally about the Syrian Civil War Tropo trap House,

which is like I guess if people who don't know it's this massive like social democratic podcast also like sort of came out of there, like it was partially about like came out of like Turkish politics. But those were very very similar circles like on Twitter at the time, and you know, and one of their big things is like Felix Peterman's like The Truth about Syria, which is a sort of slightly softer like version of supporting ASAD

that also supports like the revolution in Rojeva. Like I came out of this because I was on the pro Rojava side because like I'm an anarchist and I have a bunch of Kurdish friends. So there's this giant fight about what the Syrian Civil War is and what the sides are and what it means. And this is one of the things that comes to define what the left

is and the grey zone people sort of win. And the result of this is that this pro acod like nominally anti imperialist position becomes the default position of a bunch of sort of like people who aren't like hardline Marxistlenis, who are just sort of like like kind of edgy

Bernie like Birdie supporters. And this is something that like you can see the effect of this, like to this day if you look at left, if you look at like leftist meme culture, like you can see people who are otherwise mostly normal making Line of Damascus jokes about how like a sod is like the line of Damascus people still make jokes about barrel bombs, which is you

know this thing that ASD would do. Uh, there's the whole like the one that I see the most, it's like still very very common, is there is this whole meme of like Hillary Clinton says, asod must go, and then there's like the second panel as like who must go and Hillary Clinton gone, and people still do this like to this day.

intervention in the war. Like that's the that's the bit you see it posted A lot people repurposed it after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians. It's like it's like pretty fundamentally cruel.

detachment when it's so fucking terrible. But you know the other side of that was like these people started like we're doing these Assadmians because they were like because they were edgy and contrarian, and because you know, like the

like this is like the stuff with the bond. This is one of the things with the Bonum stuff is like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is something that's edgy and contrarian, and like like the performance of that was this very sort of like powerful emotional pull that that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff.

And you know, originally, and part of the everything here too is like everyone everyone in all of these circles, their big thing is trying to own the Libs, and this is something that like the Libs cared about and doing this thing of like how much you don't care about it and how much you think it's like them falling for propaganda that was you know, that was something that was heavily incentivized by the structure of housings like Twitter work and how like retweets work, and you know

this this is I mean, it's bleak in and of itself, but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only other people who support ASAD are like white supremacists, and this leads to a bunch of very very weird cross pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between

these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of the most common sources about Syria for both sort of Marxist Leninists and like social democratic Twitter users is this person named Partisan Girl who's, like I still to this day, like a very big media figure. So she is a Syrian Australian quote unquote Syria expert. We don't really have time to get into all of her stuff on.

Response to this is not too object to the fact that it's unbelievably anti Semitic, but to be like, no, no, no, Max Blumenthal is actually an anti Zionist, so you shouldn't include him with all of the rest of the people who you've included on here because they're Jewish, even though some of them aren't. He's just accusing random people of being Jewish who aren't. But that's the thing. Like she's

straight up in anti semi just actually a fascist. I like, I literally, like we could sit here for ten minutes list the names of all of the fascist podcasts she's been on. And this is one of these things that people knew, Like people knew that she was a fascist.

And I had arguments with people where I would be like, hey, this person is a Nazi, like she's been on David Duke's podcast, and people would be like well, yeah, she's a fascist, but I like her Syria analysis and this is you know, one of the things that happens in this is this is I'm gonna kind of defer to you on this, Robert, because this is something I know

a lot less about. But one of the things that the grays On people become really heavily involved about is the doing a bunch of weird denihalism stuff around chemical weapons attacks and Duma.

chemical weapons into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to be that that never happened, right, that that was the CIA faking it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and it got blamed on a sod. A lot of it comes down to there's this group. These guys are civil defense people. This is there are civil defense units in any city being bombed made up of civilians in the area. When I was in Mosul, I was embedded with a

lot of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go in and they pull people out and bodies out of wreckage after bombings, right, they're usually locals. They provide some emergency medical care to the extent that that's possible. There's people doing this right now. In Gaza and in Syria, it was the White Helmets, And you know, the White Helmets were in large part formed by a dude named James Messia I believe it's the way his name is pronounced.

He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that long ago. But a big part of this chunk of the left's line on Syria is that because these guys are the first responders and they're getting in after these chemical attacks and providing a lot of the initial evidence in the wake of them, it's that these guys, the White Helmets, are a CIA front and they're the ones who are kind of planting all of the evidence of these attacks.

like this is a doll. But so many people were doing this with like with the shit in Syria, and it really struck me as like I was kind of observing it from the outside because I don't know, like the period this was happening as the period where Occupy Ice was starting, so I was not super involved in this stuff, but you could just sort of see like the kind of the level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing to the point where like all of the stuff that's

like the modern like conspiracy canon is just getting embedded in there.

stay ideologically consistent. That's when a lot of that start starts to infect the left in a way that is now you know, pretty widely prevalent.

protesters are being paid by the CIA. And I could pick like a thousand examples of this from everywhere from like Lebanon to Hong Kong. Like every time a mass protest would start, these people would be like, it's a

it's a color revolution. I'm gonna I'm gonna pick one that I think, I genuinely think is the most egregious piece of slander they've ever fucking printed or at least like like slander of a leftist group, which is so Ben Norton wrote a piece that was about Ecuador because there been there have been a bunch of like Ecuador

has periodic mass protests, they also had elections. And Ben Norton, who's another gray Zone guy who eventually like we wouldn't even have time to cover this, but he's gonna break with the gray Zone people when they take their hard right pivot because they start doing like anti vax shit that's too much.

most radical indigenous organizations on the planet. Like they you know, they they have been literally in the case of Ben Norton, they have been overthrowing near liberal government since before Ben Norton was born. Like their big thing is doing is is they do these days where like they call an uprising and it uprising happens, hundreds of thousands of people go into the streets and try to bring down the

government and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But you know this is this is one of their big things. And Gray Zone like like Norton calls these people uh anarchists inspired ultra leftists backed by the US.

the work of this guy named William Engdah. I don't know how a pounce this Leason. I think I think it's William Ngdah. So he's he's a Laruchite We've talked about the Laruchites on this podcast before. They're famous for like beating up leftists on college campuses in the seventies. They're also like the most feted up motherfuckers in the

entire world. Like they are. They are snitching on leftist groups to like federal agencies you've never heard of before, like they claim to have worked with the CIA, the FBI, Defents Intelligence Agency, directly cooperated with Reagan's National Security Council, like they have. They are like the biggest snitches in the entire world. And you know, Bluementhal's like copying their stuff right, Like he's this, this is where a lot of his stuff about what color revolutions are comes from.

And eng Daw is, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to some research by Emmy bevinse Us, an anti fascist researcher. So eng Daw thinks that BLM was a color revolution because he is just a a really really hard line like right worker. This is actually like a pretty common thing in these circles of people who think that b Alema's color revolution, people who think that like occupies a color revolution, and that's sort of like the far right of these of these sort of circles, and uh, I

guess speaking of the far right of these circles. Uh, do you know what is the by far the right choice for you to.

the DSA at the time this is happening. In twenty seventeen, the DSA has its first has his first elections after the giant surgeon membership from both like Trump winning and also Bernie, and they have his first elections to its governing body. And one of the people who's elected is this guy named Arles Stevens. Arl Stevens is. He's a very popular leftist leftist at the time he does this

whole podcast circuit. He's very charismatic. He gets the third most votes of anyone elected to the National Political Committee. But it turns out he is also an abuser. A woman publishes an anonymous letter about Stevens sexually assaulting her.

It is fucking brutal. Ben Norton, who's one of his coworkers that we've talked about before, makes a giant threat accused the victim of being co intel pro Max Blumenthal quote tweets it and says quote can't help but be reminded of cointelprobe while reading this thread, and even people who are normally Max Plumenthal supporters were like, what the fuck are you doing? And like the full story of Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement, and this is actually worse

than I can talk about on air. So after the first thread where he where Ben Norton calls it a coen Tel for up, he deletes that one because it's just not obviously not sure if people are yelling at him, So he makes a second thread that that threat is still up to this fucking day. You can find the thread of Ben Norton talking about how a DSA faction called Momentum had like manufactured this sexual assault thing to

like destroy its opposition. And I want to make something very clear, because I was there when, but when, like during the in this fight inside the DSA, which Momentum and everyone else in the fucking org And I was on the anti Momentum side.

fucking hate the Momentum people. I think they destroyed the DSA one one day I will do a whole thing about them. Like these these people, like the Domentum people, literally purged my friends from the York right. And Arl Stevens is one of their enemies. And that is not what this shit was fucking about like Arl Stevens is

just a rapist. But you know, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton came in and were like, oh shit, this Arl Stevens guy is like an anti imperialist, so we're going to accuse the survivor of being a co intel pro op and it's fucking it's so fucking bl Max has deleted his tweet, but you can find it if you. You know, I have screenshots of it, and I have wayback machine things, right because I was there when this was happening, and none of these people ever suffered any

professional repercussions for this. They were just fucking allowed to do this shit and nothing ever happened to them. I don't know. It makes me just incredibly deeply angry.

But by about twenty twenty one, he is And I found the exact I'm pretty sure I found the exact bunth with this happened where in twenty twenty one, like Bluementhal just loses it like it is it'specifically August twenty twenty one, he very specifically starts like tacking right really fast. And what he starts doing is he starts he starts

doing anti lockdown stuff. And so he starts ranting about how like Australian lawmakers or opposing fians for sharing information about anti lockdown protests and like fans for finans for attending rallies, and he just gets more and more into hardcore anti lockdown stuff and then into stuff that's effectively

just straight up anti vax stuff. One of the things that he ends up doing is he writes an article about like if people back remember in COVID, there was the whole thing about flattening the curve and trying to get less people to die, and there was this whole debate over whether you should just like not have lockdowns to let everyone get COVID and that would give you like quote unquote herd immunity and everyone would be safe. And that's like like Sweden tried that and it fucking

killed almost other people. So it was a terrible idea. But like the whole sort of Gray Zone crew like starts well except for Ben Norton, who leaves starts like rallying around this stuff. And it's really weird because like like in twenty twenty, when China was doing the lockdowns, Ben Norton was really really pro lockdowns, but as as twenty twenty one goes on, he starts pivoting into this

anti lockdown stuff. And so I first saw the stuff from this journalist named Walter Bragman back when he goes on Twitter, is he starts like he he writes an article that has a bunch of claims from this thing called the Great Barringing Declaration. Do you if you remember that?

chance that you die, right.

a thing that they are very mad about anytime. So everytime someone tries to bring it up and to talk about how they're Coke funded, they're like, well, we only took sixty eight thousand dollars one time to do one

economics conference. You can't call us Coke funded. But then, like all their website, they admit that they like quote for the record, aier received sixty eight thousand dollars in Coke funding over the last ten years, and that someone was used entirely the offset the conference of a single economics conference in twenty seventeen with no links to the Great Barrington decoration. But like you know, obviously, so the reason the Coke's fun this thing is because these guys

have the same economics like politics as they do. And you know, as someone who has taken zero dollars from the Koch brothers, I could safely say that it's bullshit to say that we only took money for the Coke

Brothers once. So what happens basically is the American Institute for Economical Research has a like conference for a bunch of weirdo hacks who are also technically scientists to put out this report saying the lockdowns that happened immediately like after like the disease like COVID really started spreading in the US. They said that that was a mistake, and they're advocating ending lockdowns, reopening businesses, and this was an overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of people killed,

Like that's what these people were trying to do. But MATC. Blumenthal suddenly is like pushing this stuff, like in pieces that he's writing for grey Zone. It's very deeply weird. And this stuff just and as as like twenty twenty one goes on, this stuff gets like worse and worse and worse. By twenty twenty one, the bluementhal is writing articles about an impending attempt to implement social credits alongside Jeffrey Lofredo. So, okay, we need to take this in

two parts. We'll get to the social credit stuff at a second. First we need to talk about who Jeffrey Lofredo is, because this guy, so, this guy used to work at Rebel News, which is this like I I mean, like Garrison, I know, you know this is you know, you two know what Rebel News is.

It is I'm not even gonna read any of them. There are there are there are seven different tweets where he talks about how how he wants to rate people. There's one where he's confascinating that's just about him being a pedophile. There's a bunch of him saying the N word.

There's a bunch of like incredibly racist, like Chinese, anti Chinese stuff, which is very funny because Max Blumenthal presents himself as like the big pro China guy, and here he is like writing articles with this deranged anti Chinese racist and again like this this got him fired like from Rebel News, and the Maxi blue Waw article with him is still up now, so that that's insane enough, right, But the I wanted to talk the reason that was a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was

looking at this article. The reason I want to talk about this article in the first place is because he's writing about social credit. Now. For people who don't recognize the social credit stuff. Here's the title of this article. Quote the title is the subtitle The Titans of global capitalism are exploiting the COVID nineteen crisis to institute social credit style digital idea sisms across the West, So what

is this social credit thing? This is like a this is a very big right wing conspiracy theory thing, like Alex Jones is a huge pusher of this. And basically what they're saying is that they're going to import this system from China that they say exists called social credit, where like if you say something bad about the government, you won't be able to like use your credit card to buy food. And this is not how things work

in China. But it's very interesting because you know, these right wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming to the US, Like this never happened, It was never

going to happen. But what's interesting about it is that Gray Zone is specifically writing about this, which is insane because again, this is this whole thing is an antich is an anti China conspiracy theory, and like all of the sort of Marcist Leninism's like whole one of their whole pitches was that they are the like they they support China against American imperialism, and then like within about a year, like in like a one year span, they've

just pivoted to publishing like full on right wing social credit stuff. And you know, by twenty twenty two, it's gone even further. This is this is this is where we get at the trucker's convoy. So Garrison covered this extensively on the show. Yes, Yeah, do you want to do like the really short version of what that was?

for for a few weeks. It really started getting shut down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to block one of one of the big trade border crossings between the US and Canada. At that point, it became enough of a problem that the government was like, Okay, we're just gonna like make you guys leave, and that was that. It caused kind of chaos in Ottawa for a few days. It was compared a little bit to like it's like

Canada's January sixth, not really. I mean it had a very large mobilization of people, which was unique for Canada. And we've started to see some of like the the tactics and stylings of this of this trucker convoy get adopted both in Canada and the States. We've we've had, you know, versions of this tried to get started in the States. Never they never really turned cross. There's been there's been people have tried to do organize it again

in Canada. Hasn't really taken off the same way. But but yeah, that is kind of the gist. I did a few episodes as this was ongoing, and then I did a larger kind of piece about the whole thing that was that was more scripted towards towards the end of it. You can find those, I think in like if you go back to like February of twenty twenty two, you'll you'll find some some of those pieces.

a truckers thing. He's trying to convince people as a trucker strike, which is it's not it's like objectively it's not, it's it's almost all these people are like anti union who are participating. Yeah, and they're also they're also like the actual people who are truckers are the people who own trucking companies. They're not like they're not the people who are leasing trucks out. They are like the owners

of these trucks. So he's really doing this sort of like like he's really doing this this sort of like pivot right, like she was suporting himself. By twenty twenty three, he's just posting straight up anti VAC stuff, like here's here's the thing that he wrote about. Uh, Peter Holtz, who was this guy. He was like this guy who

was I don't know, he's like a science guy. He was like he was a really big target of the right for a while because he wouldn't he kept for like there's there's this whole thing where Joe Rogan was trying to debate him about whether vaccines worked, and it was it was this whole weird thing meeting of the minds. Yeah, yeah, it's ffol with all his like Bill Gates made hundreds of millions of dollars off his investment in biotech thanks to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear campaigns

in history. He called mRNA a miracle, VACS a miracle. Now he admits the vaccines were semi worthless, big pharma junk. And then, but after contributing so much social damage with his unrelenting sanatory in demand for hard lockdowns and the mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including to small children, Hoates seems desperate to avoid account of building. So this is just straight up anti vax shit, right,

Like this is like where we are like now. It's like he spent like a whole bunch of like the last two years just tweeting anti vax stuff and this got fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly. And this is the thing I think is really interesting because it's another demonstration that like he knows what he's doing.

So back in twenty twenty one, back like right after the Atlanta the Atlanta Spas shootings happened, he like maxlely menthol'sractionto was like, oh yeah, here's like, well, here's this in light of recent racist attacks. Here's a reminder of Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump the Washington Post blaming China for cooking up COVID nineteen. In the Lab, Rogan cited a US funded dissident as a fake scientist, legitimated propaganda. Now this is actually the stuff with the LAB leak

is actually true, which is sort of wild. I mean, it's not quite like the lab leak stuff I think has directly contributed to people getting attacked the Atlanta's shooting. I don't know. I did a bunch. I did two episodes about it at the like a bit later. Yeah, if you want to hear me talk about the full explanation of that for a very long time. So that's

what he's saying. In twenty twenty one, right, is he has correctly identified that the lab leak stuff is I like theoconn like Trump like anti China stuff.

as an ideological shift. Right, But we need to talk about do you guys know who Jeffrey Sachs is?

the guy who destroyed Russian communism, right he is. He is responsible. And this is this is one of the things that people will talk about a lot, is how like all of the shock therapy stuff like caused the largest drop in life expectancy between World War Two and COVID, right, and like, like Sax is not a bit Like Sax was literally in the room. He was in the room in the Kremlin when the USSR was dissolved. This is like, this is one of the greatest anti communist in human history.

And here is Max Bloem with all a man who is supposed to like his entire thing is about like opposing the imperialist you over through communism, like sitting down, having like a very like a very sort of like having like a very paling around interview about that. That is sax pushing a conspiracy theory, the lady conspiracy theory that he was literally calling this info one year ago.

And I don't know, I thought about this for a long time trying to figure out what was happening here, and the conclusion that I came to is that this is the soul of a man who believes in nothing. And you know, you can you can ask the question why do this? And the short answer people tend to

give is just is money. And that's like true, but it doesn't go anywhere near far enough because I think the real, the real answer why these people did these right wing pivots is much much worse the actual reason people in left media suddenly start taking right wing turns. And this is something we've seen from like the young Turks like taking this like anti trans anti homeless pivots. There have been several other outlets that have done a

right wing turn. And this is a structural problem in left media, which is that if you're in left media, you have a massive and you're trying to expand, you have a massive problem. And the problem is that the left in the US just isn't that big. Right Like, there are more leftists now than there've been for a very very long time, but there's only so many leftists and you can't pull from them all because leftists all

hate each other. So even if you try to corner like the market of one faction of the left, another faction to the leftist is going to hate you because this is just how this is just how infighting works. And so if you're producing something that's designed for the left and only the left, there is built in a hard cap on how big your audience can get. And

if you're successful, you can hit that limit. But if you want to grow more after that, you have to expand your ideological base, like the ideological base of your audience. But the problem is there's only two directions you can go right. You can either try to get liberals to listen to your show, or you could try to get conservatives. But you know, for people like Max wely monthal or like Jimmy Dre for example, it's another person who did this big like anti vax pivot around the same time

maxle Wenthal was doing it. They have a whole thing where they they're they're talking about how ivromactin is actually a good COVID treatment. Together.

like they're there's not there's like us. There's like there there are there are leftists who are like college students who have rich families who have some money. There's like a small number of like leftist business, but they like they don't have on average, leftists don't have that much money on the other hand, conservatives have an enormous amount of money and they are very very easily pandered to. If you just like pump out like bottom barrel anti

vax shit, like, they will flock to you. And you know, whenever you need to get leftists sort of back on your side, right, you can just start tweeting with a Palestine and everyone will forget everything else you've ever done, because any like, any time anytime someone posts posts like a pro palesiine thing, people just click on it. Right, Yeah, this has been. This has been like some Maxleen thoals met the last about two years just doing anti vax stuff.

The moment, like the moment Palestine became something that people were focusing on again, and you know, and there're gore reasons for that, right, like, but the moment he did that, he just pivoted back into doing Palestine stuff, and everyone just completely ignored what he'd been doing this whole time.

And if you do this, and you could you pander to you pander to the antivactors and making anti vaxed content, and then also you could just go back and regain your leftist credentials and get views and support from leftists. By doing Palestigne stuff, you can make a lot of money, but there's a price. Every time you sell out to these people, you betray another part of yourself, until one day you believe in nothing left and the right and lose all meeting and the only thing that's left is

content in the culture war. And I want to close this episode by talking by reading something from another Gray Zone contributor, Anya Parimpel, who is she's another Gray Zone journalist, and she's Maxi blue Wenthal's wife, and she she is the Gray Zone person who's reached the end of this cycle. Now I'm just going to read what this looks like quote. The labels of left and right are outdated in the US.

Case in point, leftist white men now pander to other white men by telling women of color they're biggots for saying boys wouldn't be able to piss in the girls room. These same punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily. I don't know, Okay, her tweet just trails offices bodily. It says dot dot dot and just moves. I don't know.

She's not a very good writer. Gender ideology has created a dynamic in which a bunch of men can come into organizing circles, play victim and a certain control over what is acceptible for others, especially women, to say and think. Most people know it's just misogyny tied up at a frilly bow, but are too afraid to it. Just dots

off again. I deeply weird now that participants in the Impression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti war rally because it didn't fit their tunnel vision for the movement. Gloves are off. Good luck winning over the people with your message. The same people who believed workers should not be mandated to take an experimental injection that did not quote stop the spread, cried my body, my choice, and

roe was overturned. Yet these same these are the same people who do not even believe biologue women exist total incoherence. So this is this is just a collection of This is just.

right wing fascists. But you know, this is at least one of the end points of where this stuff goes. But tomorrow we're going to look at a group of people who took this even further. Yeah, so get ready for that ship, because it's about to get wildly anti semitic. Oh great, hooray. It's it's an introduction to the podcast.

welcome to part three of This Nightmare. Yeah, so, okay, all the way back in episode one, I said that Marxist Leninism was based at a series of arguments about the state, the nature of socialism, and the left relation to nationalism, And today we're going to go through some of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise of a new kind of nationalist socialism, one that's focused on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and

from Zionists. They call it baga communism, but you might almost call it a kind of national socialism. So how do we get from Marxist Leninism in ideology, who's defining thing is pure total opposition to the American Empire, to maga communism and think about how great the US is and how much they.

the left's discourse on nationalism. So one of the things that Marxist Leninism did, and this is one of its key political achievements, on the left was to rehabilitate nationalism and talk about it in a way that was very, very different to what was happening in the left before this.

And you know, because the left around twenty eleven, like around Occupy, but after that tended to be very skeptical of nationalism because you know, they had come out of like the Bush era and where you know, had had had had first hand experience with like what American nationalism really looks like and how much it absolutely sucks now. And the Marxis Leninists are something to bring this bring nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this the

arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. Their argument is effectively that anti colonial nationalism and anti colonial nationalisms, because there's a bunch of them, and particularly like non white anti colonial nationalism, like, aren't the same thing as American nationalism, and that these anti colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary. And this is true in a lot of cases, right, Like Palestinian nationalism is

like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah, and you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle, but I'm not going to like tell some Kourdish kid that they need to like abandon their desire to speak

Krimungi because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever. Right, Like, but this is where we kind of start running into problems because you know, okay, so what about like Bathism For example, Bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement right and they are opposed at least non lead to

American imperialism. But they are one hardline anti communists and two hardcore Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable if you were Arab, but like, God help you if you are like Kurdish or Syria or Yazdi or like any other national minority under bath Party rule, where you know, they're going to ban your flags, they're going to ban your language, they're going to like keep your keep you

from like naming your kids like your names. This is literally a thing, Like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah, like it was illegal to give your kid like a Kurdish name in both in both sort of Bathist Syria and Bathists I Raq. And you know, if you try to resist, they'll kill you. And I'm using Baphism like as an example for this, because like there are people now who are genuinely Bathists. But it's like it's really hard to find people who support the bath Party.

because it's it's the easy tall. But like this is this is a question you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements, and it's one people don't like asking, which is whose nation is being liberated. And you know what kind of class collaboration and ideological collapse do these national movements produce? And these aren't abstract questions, right. One of the big examples of this is West Papua, which is a place that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia.

But you know Sukarno, who's this great sort of like Sucarno is this great like anti imperialist hero. He's the guy who did the band Dun Conference, which is the giant assembly of all of the sort of like Asian and African states to like join together to resist imperialism. And but but like, one of the things that that that this left wing Indonesian nationalism is about is their right to colonize Papua. So the West Papua wins just

get absolutely screwed over by by the Indonesians. And this is this is this place where you have to ask, like, whose nation is being liberated? And the answer is not the West pap Wins. Right, They're just getting absolutely screwed because the nation that's being liberated is this new nation

of Indonesia and not them. And you know, I mean, I've talked about this on the show before, like I'm so skeptical of left wing nationalist movements because I'm from China, Like, like my family is from China, and we had two left wing national liberation movements traded back by the USSR, and the first one, which is the Chinese Nationalist Party, made it about seven years before they turned on the Chinese working class and bushered them in the streets with

machine guns and then spent the next seventy years is like a fascist desk squad party. And then the other one, the Chinese Communist Party, lasted yeah, it maybe like forty years.

I mean they lasted like how many years in power, like seventeen years in power before they get to the Cultural Revolution where they were also shooting workers in the streets and bulldozing moss and ching John, which is the thing that they continue to do to this day as part of what is and I shit you not the name for the quote unquote counter terrorism operation that China runs in Ching John is the People's War on Terror.

I wish I was making this up. I'm not right this and this is a probauct of Chinese nationalism, right, like like it's Chinese is amophobia and Chinese nationalist some

that sort of do this stuff. I'm very skeptical of nationalism as like a liberatory framework, but like it's complicated, right, It's genuinely is sure one of these things that's you know, like there there are there are there's lots of nuances to it, and you know, I think you have to take a kind of middle ground of like you have to keep it kind of under control, but also like I'm not going to go tele a Palestinian care that their nationalism is bad, right, like it's you know, I should.

I realized that I've never explained this the whole time I was doing this. So mL is an abbreviation for Marxist Leninist that people say because saying Marxist Leninists over and over again, like I've been doing for these past two episodes is wearying. Yeah, So the MLS decided to take the other extreme, which is just mainlining every single non Western nationalism that can get their hands on, because they're trying to hold nationalist positions that are contradictory at

the same time. So for example like that, they're trying to be both. Okay, I guess I should explain this a little bit so part of it is people being nationalists for countries that they're not from, which is deeply weird. Part of it also, and this is this is part of the reason this stuff spread is you know, you get like Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists, like in response to like COVID and anti Asian violence or just sort

of in general as like a pipeline. But you know, you get people trying to have both being both like Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese nationalist at the same time, and that doesn't make any sense. I mean, like the whole apparatus that all of these sort of revolutionary anti imperialist nationalisms would work together was sha like should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution to this is

just to pretend that it never happened, you know. And and but but like like Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists like don't like each other, like on the Vietnamese side in

like modern Vietnam. So they have like a basically their own vers it's not actually their own version of like it's not actually like a QAnon branded thing, but they have a conspiracy theory that like their version of the like sovereign citizen like q thing, and their version of it is that it basically says that the Vietnamese government sold the country to China in nineteen ninety and they're like embarking on like a forty year plan to like fully sell the country to China, and like the Globe,

like Western House just completely ignore this stuff because it's not convenient for them, and they just pretend that all these people get along. But this stuff gets, you know, it gets incredibly bizarre and like just weird really quickly.

Like one of the things I remember from back in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, I started I was hearing like leftists talking about how Ukraine wasn't a real nationality and how they've been invented by Nazis and that Ukrainians are inherently fascist, and I was like, what, like why is some random kid from New Jersey suddenly screaming about how

Ukraine is like a fake nationality? And you know, it turns out, yeah, like it's because these people were like really getting into Russian nationalism, and like in like twenty sixteen, it was just deeply weird. And then you get to like twenty twenty two and all these people are just straight up supporting like Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that like Ukraine isn't a real place and also

is only Nazis and stuff like that. And this has real sort of ideological consequences for what Marxist Leninism becomes, because it begins to pivot around a collection of nationalism, so the point where it's not even it's not based

on communism anymore, it's just pure economic nationalism. And this is a product of these incredibly convoluted justifications they have to put together for supporting China, which is objectively a market economy and like very obviously a market economy, will you know, so they have to support China while also nominally being anti capitalist. I'm not going to go into these arguments because they're just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just

just weird intellectual posta ring. I think it's more useful to look at where it ends up, which is have have you ran into the people advocating bricks. It's like the great anti American thing. Do you know what bricks is? No?

guy who invaded Haiti? Is it the butcher a Gujarat? Is it Vladimir quote, we will show Ukraine true decommunization putin is it the African National Congress of selling your comrades out to Bank of America or is it quote we must combat Welfaism shijianping, Like none of these states are even remotely socialist, but you know, people are people are holding them up as like anti imperialist powers because you know, their their sort of faux anti imperialism has

completely devoured whatever their anti capitalism used to be. And you know, you shouldn't look too close to yet, like India's relations with the US either, pay no attention to the fact that Indian and Chinese truth periodically beat each other to death in the mountains. You know, it's a disaster. But this is what happens you mix nationalism with your socialism. And because of where this is going, we should talk about the history a little bit, about the history of

displacing class struggle with the struggle between states. Because one of the people who does this is a man that a garrison. I bet you have heard of. His name is Benito Mussolini.

and capitalists nations. So this is you know, you can you can start to see the outlines of how we're going to get to a national socialism from here. But first, do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is it the products?

cancel culture all the time, like they're just they're just boomers, right, but they're boomers who the thing they're a boomer for is marked just leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing with this was to just ignore it effectively, you know. And and they're they're they're able, they do a really good job at ignoring this is happening right, like the fact that Russia has passed a series of laws that ban all gender affirming surgery and changing like all They

bann all gender affirming surgery. They banned like anything that allows would have allowed you to change your gender on like any any like any state identification documents. Uh, they've banned same sex marriage and the Constitution. They banned anyone like the recent one is they banned anyone from saying that same sex relationships are quote normal or good and those are their words, not mine.

been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know. One of the things that they do too, is like they've been trying to they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no, these places are actually good for group people. I see this with China a lot, where they're like, no, no, China has one trans person who was a talk show host, So conditions for trans people there are really good. Meanwhile, like actually being a transperson and trying to fucking sucks ass.

There's really only like a tiny number of of gender clinics, like you have to like you have to like there's like this whole thing where you have to like get approval from a bunch of people to get surgery. You have to like prove you're not a criminal or something. You to have like a great it's it's it's completely nuts. The whole system is just nuts, right, But you know they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or

just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave a space, like leave room in these Martians lenited spaces for people who are not really leftists at all, but are just like hard lined, homophobic, like transphobic, anti American nationalists. And I started seeing this with because so one of the problems that Martcis Leninism has is that it's not it's not an ideology that exists outside of like the US, Britain, Australia, a bit of Europe, right like, it doesn't exist in China.

The closest equivalent to this stuff in China, like people who are pro like very hardline pro Chinese government and are also like pro Chinese nationalism. The only people in China who believe this stuff are hardline right wingers, like people who are people who in the US would be

classified as fascists. And you started to see these people like moving into like Marcius Lendino spaces because you know, nobody gave a shit that they were like incredibly homophobic and transphobic and they were just I mean again, just objectively right wingers, right, and they start to sort of

creep into these spaces. Now, this may or may not have ever turned into a real thing, we don't know, but there were two break points that really like kicked the sort of birth of the the of like maga, communism and patriarchs and like the sort of right trajectory of this stuff, like into focus. There was some stuff that happened in the middle of the twenty twenty uprisings and then surprise, surprise, January sixth. So do you remember you probably yeah, you were probably busy while this was

going on. Do you remember that the giant outcry over the book in Defensive Looting? Uh?

about this book. Like everyone from like everyone from Tucker Carlson who like sitting members of the US Senate were going on record announcing like I think I think the Democratic Party like officially denounced it like it was I have never seen this kind of like cross partisan every like hate longering about a book, and like the entire time I've been on the left, and you know, and this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and conservatives

and fascists whore freaking out about this. This extended to a bunch of the left. There was there's a lot of like like Ian the editors of the New Republic right or like writing articles announcing this stuff like it is it's and it spreads across the social democratic left because the social Democrats are mad that people are looting small businesses. And the other group that really really comes out against this is like, are the Marxistlennon is like

as people like the gray Zone. People really come out against this, And you know, okay, so like why am I talking about people not liking a book. The reason I want to talk about this is that what emerges from this specific thing. So Vicky, the author of this book, is both trans and Jewish, and what emerges here is this very specific combination of transphobia, anti semitism, anti black racism, both explicitly anti black racism and in the form of

crime panics. And if you look at all of those elements together, that has been the entire right wing strategy for you know, putting all of the like uppity minorities back in their place after the uprising right that was their entire strategy, the defense of small businesses, you know, and then and then turning that into crime panic to rebuild support for the police. This was you know, that anti semitism and transphobia. That is their entire strategy for

post twenty twenty. And this is like, this is the place where it was first. All of it was put together in one spot. And again like a lot of people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist Londonists like join in on this because even though the point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property.

is oh no, the horror. And the second thing that really reshapes the environment, like the whole sort of ecosystem like of the left is January sixth, and so I don't know if people how much people remember the initial reactions to it. I think the reactions to January sixth and the left can be divided into roughly three different reactions, although people have mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny, reaction two, oh my god, the fascists tried to do

a coup and installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three January sixth was the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians. Now, okay, objectively, we can say that January safe was not the white working class. It's revenge with the politicians.

like it is. The world was just like, hey, this is what fashions crops like. I mean it is, well, I think there's I think there's a lot a lot.

consider fascists. But they are a crop of conservatives that are that have the financial and social resources to be able to go across the country to this, to this big event to watch the soon to be ex president speak like they they have enough capital and sports to be able to do this, which is very different than a whole bunch of like broke punks writing on trains to go protests like halfway across the country like these these are two very different social factions, but yeah, it is.

large group of white people and the working class. And these are the people. Okay, it's not good they keep doing this like they were. They were doing this with like a bunch of like like French anti vaxxers. Yeah, there's like a bunch of people who were convinced like and this is this is one of the everything we talk on this last episode, like these people support the Canadian trucker's convoy even though they're just right wingers. The other big example of this is the Belgian farmers protests.

This is huge farm protests in Belgium that are like a very big car caused to left on the right, and literally the thing they are protesting about is that they're incredibly pissed off that there's environmental regulation to try to get them to not like dump fertilizer in the fucking rivers. It's like that's the kind of thing that they're mad about, Like they're mad about environmental regulation. They're mad about like like not being allowed to completely destroy

the environment completely. But because it's like a large, massive people, there's all these people who are like, ah, it's the revolution. It's like no, these guys are like they're small business owners on farms.

going to make people not hate us, you know. And you can tell how well this worked by tracking the number of people in the Communist Party as they adopt the strategy in the late thirties and seeing how it plummets. So you know, winning ideas great, great, great moves here.

But okay, so the thing about patriotic socialism is that it never did that well because it sucks because you can't There was originally an attempt to pull in people from the left right, but everyone who looked at this was like this is lame and sucks, Like why would I want to get? Why would I want it?

who were really into like a classical Marxist theory. Yeah, but like not but I yeah, it's like but from they were from from very like statist yeah, American imperial aspective.

But yeah, he's like a twits streamers. He's stuff is completely unreadable, like it's nonsense, like to the point where even when this politics gets big and Hinkle tries to get people to read it, no one will fucking read it. His own followers won't read it because it's awful.

brand like that. All the guys who are pushing this really hard, none of them were serious about any kind of political theory. Tied to this notion. They were all plugging their twitch stream, plugging their YouTube, their new book that's coming out, like all of it was just to sell content. I read on a lot of the guys that at least initially started pushing this thing as a as like a meme.

to this. It doesn't work and like him and Moppin and like the other people in the space like are

so unbelievably uncharismatic, and so it just doesn't work. The thing about this too, right, is like the reason it doesn't work partially because the people aren't charismatic, and partially it's because they really are obsessed with writing theory bullshit, like like yeah, like the theory betialty is completely incoherent, but they're like reading their theory on streams and shit, and like nobody likes that they need to produce some

theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but like husband's almost time they're fancy about Hagel. It's like, does anyone want to list Like no, Like.

left right. If you want to actually build a large scale brand, you have to pull from the right. And so he's one of the people who first gets really big into this thing called Maga communism, which is like kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideologies, like mostly a troll ideology, Like.

he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way less smart than Hawes. But because he's not smart, he kind of half stumbles and half figures out into how you make content for the right, which is just incredibly simple propaganda. Right You reach wheet write wing social media people. You make posts with very very simple slogans and like sentences with like words that don't go above two syllables, and you get You get in every single time a right

wing grievance thing happens. You just get in and you just keep cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day. He does this on his YouTube channel, he does this on his Twitter. He now has two point three million Twitter.

you mean you're a communists? Like what the fuck? And Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why Americ like communism is when no globalists, it's just.

who courts unbelievable misogynist young man. That's the basic of it, you know, I mean, he he's he's kind of he's gone to the point where he's he's not quite in the same circles as Nick Flentes, but that's largely because Flentes is like a hardline Christian fascist, and Sneko's like, is like a Muslim fascist in the same wow like fat He's like, he's like a far right wing Muslim in the same Vein is like, I don't even I don't.

I don't think Sneko is really id politically driven, like like like consciously so he's he's he's just a he's just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you say certain things, you can get a twelve year employees to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's that's it's really, it's really the I think that the core of.

a good thing. And Hinkel's response is no, no, no, all of the Nazis were gay in trans so they had to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover up the fact, like to hide the evidence that they were all gay in trans Like this is a level of like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so far beyond the like normal shit that like and you know, and and and this, and like even Sneko is like what are you talking about?

He does that less now because it's outlived usefulness and a lot of this now it's now it's easier to be a a Palestine. Uh Yeah, like and quote unquote Anti's Zionist influencer. In reality, he just is extremely anti Semitic. Like this is yes, that is his actual politics. Yeah, let's talk about well okay, she's like it's genuinely unclear to me whether he personally is really anti Semitic, Like I don't know he might be. I mean, like it doesn't matter. Like that's the thing, Like he's.

the traditional hard right on anti Semitism. So let's let's let's let's take a look at like exactly the kind of anti Semitic ship that he's on, because he is just straight up an anti Semite. Right, this is not a like think I'm saying because of the Palaside stuff, so grant the Like last week the trailer for Grand

Theft Auto six came out. Yeah, and there's like a bunch of women tworking in it and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis and stuff, and there's like this enormous, like really weird, incredibly pathetic right wing like thing about it, saying that it's like anti Christian and it's like spreading porn to children and teaching people to do crimes, and that like shooting cops is bad

and no one should ever play it. And because this is like the current right wing media panic, Hinkle starts tweeting about it, and his tweet is, so this starts with an Israeli flag, and it starts with like that like siren thing that people post when they're about to do an alert quote, why are the Zionists all capitalized at Rockstar Games releasing this all caps sexualized video game for children in America? Get hashtag ban GTA six. This

is also in all caps trending right now. So this is straight up neo Nazi shit, right, This is neo Nazi shit about the Jews, conspiracy right, Like that's yeah, yeah, it's like this is a right of neo Nazi shit. And he's been trying to use the fact that he is more anti Semitic than openly anti semitic, even than so even than someone like Elon Musk, right sure, and he's been trying to use this as a way to

basically to o their bases. So like two days ago when this goes up three uh really recently there was this giant like call, like there's this giant like Twitter space thing that had Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Trey and Vivik Ramaswami in it, and Hinkle just like keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's gonna turn on the starlink like internet stuff or Palestine, and these people basically tell him to shut up and like kick him off.

But then he does that. He starts doing this like giant like I've been censored like media thing about it. And what he's doing here, this is the thing he does constantly. He's trying to take the basis from people like Alex Jones, people like Elon Musk, people of Manedu Tate who wants more open anti Semitism, right like these people are anti He's trying to flank them.

And we're going to talk about that in a second.

aloud in newsrooms across across the country. Like he is he has succeeded in grifting off of off of this conflict to promote his personal brand in almost an almost unparalleled way. Like there's never been someone who's done this as successfully as Hin called us for any other conflict. It is, it is. It is quite quite quite surprising that there's just this one guy sitting in sitting in on his phone in America has has been this successful by essentially just tweeting NonStop.

like he yeah, there was. He was for almost I think the most of the month of October, he was person with the highest digital impressions on the platform like he he yea, his stuff was being seen by more people than anyone else, like he yeah, So let's let's talk about what that stuff actually is. It's large, It's like it's a combination of him just retweeting other people, stealing other people's like videos of like press conferences from

a coma. Most of it is dead babies, like it's a bunch, it's a bunch of dead babies, it's a bunch of dead Palestinians, just over and over and over and over again. And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire, like how could the Zionists do this?

His like a lot of his tweets about Palestine are translated into Arabic and they're posted all over like Arabic Instagram of Arabic Twitter, Like it's like they're they're spent fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either like don't know who he is, right, because they're only seeing him Palestine stuff, right, They're not seeing his like raving about how GTA six is anti Christian, right, They're only seeing that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more

popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is one of the really grim parts about this, which is that you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting fucking killed all the time, Like every single day, another Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed, Like more and more Palestinian

intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill the void left by the fact that the Israelis have been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own

fucking grifting brands. And he's able to do this because you know, Kinkle is incredibly safe, just fucking living it up in the US while the people who's suffering, he's exploiting, are getting fucking murdered in the streets.

draw more people to his platform. He's he's he's just like figured out a specific thing, like he's he's been trying to do this for a few years with very with various types of like you know, conflicts or like little little like bits that he he like tries to tries to do this media strategy thing on and this

this one has happened to work. There there was there was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to to get get platformed by many, many, many unwitting people, and at this point, deplatforming is not even an option, Like it's it's like, you can't you can't deplatform someone with three million followers. Really, just that just isn't that He's strategy and it too, like yeah, yeah, it just it just that's right, It just doesn't even follow anymore.

anti Semitism. And this sucks because he's, you know, he's he's effectively using he's using Palestinians as a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses in order to build a brand.

fucking transphobes and anti Semits. We can't be having all of these fucking homophobic right wing nationalists like in leftist basis, they just like they can't be here because if if there had actually been you know, a kind of sustained effort to get these people fucking out before before they pulled all of this shit, we wouldn't be here right now.

But that wasn't done. Were people were just completely okay with having all of these right wingers just being there because they supported the same states that they do, and because of that we're here.

who are like hardlined. I am a Marxist Leninist. I am affiliated with these Marxi Leninist organizations, and those are the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind of almost like prey on to like gain followers and gain some poy.

dragged because they had liked to tweet about this. They were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee where Gloria Rivera, they're fucking like eternal presidential candidates started doing a bunch of fucking transphobia shit and then covering it with the exact same gray zone, Like I'm a woman of color, thing, you know, but these groups were like on they were on the edge of colla like basically becoming a non relevant because they've been supporting Russia during

the war in Ukraine for this whole time. But then Palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like, is the one issue that their stance is like, you know,

tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all all of these people have been using Palestine, even all these people who've been fucking pivoting harder, harder and harder right for years and years and years now have been have like have I've been exploiting the exploiting the fucking genocide and Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftist clicks back. And it's utterly grotesque. Yeah, that's that's That's what I've got about this.

It was coined by Judith Butler in this blog post from twenty fifteen, when Butler is asking the question when is life grievable? In twenty sixteen, Butler wrote a book called Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? And this is a quote from this book. One way of posing the question of who we are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who

are grievable in those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, That is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who weigh war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others, even if it means taking those latter lives. So that quote

kind of encompasses the idea of grievability. I really just thought it was poignant to talk about and relevant because we are being inundated with all these numbers every day of casualties and death counts and collateral damage. And people accept these things because it's part of being human. It's just the way war is. But I really don't think we should accept that as the reality. I think that

makes us callous. And I think accepting human death, no matter in what context, is a little bit inhuman And so I think maybe that's why this concept fascinated me, because tying grief to the concept of being alive, it truly is indicative of if that life is worth something

to you or to the world. And so we're reading and hearing about all these lives lost, and we're giving these numbers and stories, and these numbers are repeated every day, and they increase every day, and this repetition seems endless and impossible to change. And Butler is saying that we don't often consider the precarious character of the lives lost

in war, and Butler defines precariousness as the following. To say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is the living normatively construed. I am arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter work, food, medical care,

and legal status. Butler goes on to explain that although this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot be properly recognized. Butler says it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition, just as it can be refused by such norms. But the main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared condition of human life, so precariousness being a condition that links

human life and humans to non human animals. So, for instance, to say that a life is injurable, that it can be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death is to underscore not only the finitude of a life and that death is certain, but also the precariousness of life, that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as

a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means that one's life is always, in some sense, in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know, a dependency on people we know or barely know, or know not at all. This existential reality that everything ends and everything is temporary.

This encapsulates our relation to death and to life. Precariousness underscores what Butler calls our quote radical substitution ability and anonymity, and that dying and death is just as socially facilitated as humans persisting and flourishing. So Butler is saying it's not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is intrinsic with birth itself, and

birth is by definition precarious. It means that it matters whether a newly born infant survives, and its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so it may live. I put the following sentence in bold because I think it's kind of underlying what I'm trying to say, even though

it sounds really simple. But only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. And again, maybe it sounds simple, but I don't think we actually absorb the meaning of what that means to value a life and to mourn a life. And this is how we come to the idea of grievability, the idea that grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters. Butler gives us this example, so let's think about this.

An infant comes into the world, is sustained in and sustained by that world as an infant, and through to adulthood and old age, and finally eventually it does. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, that this future possibility is installed as the condition of its life.

Life is celebrated because it can be lost. In ordinary language, Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the value of life comes from the reality and certainty that it will end. And if we think about this idea of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that happens when death happens, grievability is a condition of a life's

emergence and sustenance this future. Concept that a life has been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived. In other words, Butler says, this will be a life that will have been lived is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know it sounds heady, and I really had to read this

multiple times to even try to comprehend it. But essentially, without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there is no life, or rather, there is something living that is other than life. This other than life thing is a life that will never have been lived in the first place, because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it

is lost. The unease and anxiety and apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and apprehension of precarious life, and so grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living exposed to

non life. From the start, to put it in maybe a simpler way for me to understand even is that a life is worth grieving because we already know it will die, and that life is worth celebrating because it has already been to death or the implication of certain death. From the start, it is pretty heady. But maybe I'll just leave you to marinate with that during a break, and we can get more heady when we get back. Okay, we're back. Let's go back to the idea of war.

One way of posing the question of who we are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable war is essentially the division of populations into those who are a grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted

as life at all. And we see this division of the entire world into grievable and ungrievable lives when we look at the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend their certain communities. Is kind of reiterating the quote that I'd started with at the top from twenty sixteen, But essentially to defend these certain communities against the life of others, it usually implies the taking of

those other lives. Butler here makes a reference to nine to eleven, explaining that after the attacks of nine to eleven, the media showed us graphic pictures of those who died, along with their names, their stories, and the reactions of their families. Public grieving was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation, which meant that, of course, there was considerably less public grieving for let's say, non US nationals,

and none at all for illegal workers. Butler says the differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance, and Butler asks, why is it that governments so often seek to regulate and control who will be publicly grievable and who will not? Because it means something to state and to show the name of someone who has died, to put together some remnants of a life, and to publicly display and draw attention to the loss.

So Butler is asking, in this context, what would happen if those killed in war were to be grieved in such an open way? Why is it that we are not given the names of all the war dead, including those the US has killed, of whom we will never have the image, the name, the story, never have a testimonial shard of their life, nothing to see, to touch, to know. Open grieving is bound up with outrage. Outrage in the face of injustice or of unbearable loss has

enormous political potential. Butler draws a similarity here to Plato. Apparently, one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban the poets from the republic is that he thought that if citizens went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw, and that such open and public mind. In disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul would disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well.

And I didn't know this, but to put it in that context is really fascinating to me, because it's essentially saying that if we expose human beings to the reality of tragedy in life, they might care too much and start to fuck up our politics. Essentially, so, whether we are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking about effective or emotional responses that are highly regulated by

regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The blog post I'm referring to that Judith Butler wrote was written in twenty fifteen, So Butler uses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of what they're trying to say. For the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, we saw how emotion was regulated to support both the war effort and

more specifically nationalists belonging. When the photos of Bougrabe were first released in the US, conservative television pundits argued that it would be un American to show them because we were not supposed to have graphic evidence of the acts of torture the US has committed. We were not supposed to know that the US had violated internationally recognized human rights. It was Unamerican to show these photos, an Unamerican to glean information from them as to how the war was

being conducted. Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create a negative image of the US, and that we had an obligation to defend a positive image of the country. Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, suggesting it was anti American to display the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider, and neither did the vast majority of people in power. But the American public should have a right to know about the activities of its military, and it should have

the right to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on the basis of full evidence is, or at least it should be part of the democratic tradition of participation and deliberation. So what was this really saying? Butler's asking they say, it seems to me that those who sought to limit the power of the image in this instance also sought to limit the power of effect of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq as it died, it did.

I feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to what we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting horrific images of what is happening to them because of the state of Israel, and how there's selective outrage because it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images

that only show reality. It really feels like people are only outraged when they consider a life grievable, which takes us to this whole topic brings us back to the question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable, and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that should be honored. This ties indirectly to the idea of how effect or emotion is regulated, and what we mean

by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references the anthropologist Talal Assad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing. In this book, the first question he poses is why do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the same way in the face of state sponsored violence. He asks this question not in order to say that these forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even to say that we ought to feel the same moral

outrage in relation to both. But Asad finds it curious, as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first take form as effect, are tacitly regular by certain kinds of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel.

or so Assad assumes. Asad is saying something here that is really important about how the politics of moral responsiveness really feed into public perception. That what we feel is in part conditioned by how we interpret the world around us, that how we interpret what we feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself. If we can accept our emotion could be affected and structured by things we do

not fully understand. Can this help us understand why it is that we might feel horror in the face of certain losses, but in difference or even righteousness in the light of others. Conditions of war bring something really interesting here,

this feeling of heightened nationalism. In this feeling of heightened nationalism, it's as though our existence is bound with others, with whom we find some kind of national affinity for who are recognizable to us, and who can conform to certain culturally specific notions about what the culturally recognizable human is. And sure, maybe some of you are like, well, this is really obvious. Of course, some people care more about people who look like them or about things that directly

affect them. But what I'm arguing is that I can't accept that as reality. I don't think we should accept humans as by default. There's no way change happens that way. I think we have to question why we unconsciously are more outraged by certain losses than others, or why the public is this way. Even if you are not, Oh, that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of information. Let's take our second break, we can just marinate with all of that, and uh, we'll be right back to

wrap this up. Okay, we're back. So we discussed the differentiation of the population of the world into grievable and ungrievable lives, and now we are going to differentiate between the populations on whom your life and existence depend on and those populations represent a direct threat to your life

in existence. This is a concept that really struck me as something we don't even give a second thought to that when a population appears as a direct threat to your life, they do not appear as lives, but as a threat to life. Butler asks us to consider how this is shown with how the world views an intern or Islam. Islam is portrayed and seen by our media, whether it's implicit or explicit as barbaric or pre modern, as not having yet conformed to the norms that make

the human recognizable to the West, to the American. So those who Americans kill by following this line of thought are not quite human. They are not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over their loss of life as we do the loss of life that bear national or religious similarity to

our own. And again, this isn't a novel concept. In simple terms, it can be whittled down to the reality that most people only care about things that directly affect them or things that happen to those who look like them. And again, maybe that seems like an obvious realization to make about our society. But what I'm asking you to do is not just accept this as part of the human condition and to question why it is like that

in the first place. True deep understanding of ourselves and of our humanity is dependent on us excavating ugly truths about ourselves and humanity that we are not even maybe aware of. I think this is something that bothers me about how Israel's narrative or desion, this narrative of the conception of Israel almost makes them seem sinless. They had done nothing wrong, the Arabs or barbarians that didn't leave

them alone. The same can be said about how American history books talked about Columbus and the Native American people.

when I read about this stuff. But anyways, tallal Asad is wondering why modes of death dealing are apprehended differently, Why we object to the deaths that are caused by suicide bombing more forcefully and with greater moral outrage than we do those deaths that are caused by aerial bombings. And then Butler takes this back to how we differentiate populations, how some are considered from the start very much alive and others more questionably alive or as living figures of

the threat to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as quote socially dead, which is the term that Jamaican American historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of the slave war relies on and perpetuates a way of dividing lives into those who are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when they are lost, and those that are not

quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it should come as no surprise that the death of ungrievable lives would cause deep outrage on the part of those who understand and are seeing that their lives are not considered to be lives in any meaningful sense of the

word in this world. Butler explains that although the logic of self defense portrays such populations as threats to life as we know it, they are themselves living populations with whom our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us.

systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to deny the ongoing, irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason I am not free to destroy another, and indeed why nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences.

That is doubtless true. But what may be finally more true is that the subject I am is bound to the subject I am not. That we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and in this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.

That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article as a whole, or this blog post as a whole, kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're all the same and our divisions are truly man made. Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives, or just this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining. I think it's worth examining how now in real time, we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This

is across the board. I'm not just talking about one group of people. Grievable lives, I think are this concept for me, and tying grief intrinsically to life is essential to understanding why it is life is valuable at all. It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it.

And I think this also can go back to how we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right now describe Palestinians or Arabs or most This all leads to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem inhuman and in a way unlive. So well, all of that. I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah, until next time, you know how it goes through. Kalsteine.

what's happening. Why are we talking about Joseph robin and Biden today, Well, because you will remember that Biden made some promises when he was campaigning in twenty twenty, and it will shock you to hear that he is throwing

migrants under the bus again. In an attempt to get Republicans in the Senate to stop stamping their feet and whaling and having a tantrum, specifically, the Senate failed to pass an emergency spending bill which would fund military Among other things, it would fund military a to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. And the reason they did that is because these Republicans are having a little tantrum about quote unquote border security. Border security probably doesn't mean what you think

it means. In practical terms, what border security means is killing more innocent people, more people who are fleeing the worst things that are happening in this world at our southern border. It is making America a more deadly place for the most desperate people on earth. That is what border security means. That is what I want you to think of when you hear people saying we should secure our border because the people you're securing it against are the Azd mother I saw carrying her children to try

and come to a safer place. They are the Afghan grandmother who I saw walking through the mountains last weekend. Those are the people who we're securing our border against. Right, And this is sorry, this just pisses me off to

an unfathomable degree for many of you. But the reason we're talking about this today is because whatever happens at the border, right, whatever policy we have at the border, migration won't change because what people are leaving is worse than that, and so they will still come here because they believe the lies in America tells the world, and it tells its citizens about itself too, that this is a safe place. And for some people that has been

a safe place, and that's a good thing. But what will change is how people are treated when they get here. Because what Biden has proposed is a return to Title forty two. I made a whole series on Title forty two that you can listen to. But what he's proposing this time is a very similar policy by which the border patrol agent who meets people after they cross the border in between ports of entry, can send them directly back to Mexico without them having a chance for an

asylum hearing. Right, this is illegal under international law and parts of the US law. It doesn't It's not clear what Biden's proposing or what the administration is proposing to do about it. Maybe they could change the immigration law. They could probably get enough vote for that, given that people in Congress seem to care very little about migrants.

But this isn't a well fleshed out proposal. But what it very clearly shows, right, is the intent to throw some of the most desperate people but on earth bit a buth and that is It's disgusting, it's ab horror, and it shouldn't be unexpected either.

shouts or the former Bomber administration staff. It's by the way, for showing their whole ass by the screaming racist shit at Muslim people in the last few weeks for people who hadn't already kind of worked out how terrible the Bomber administration's policy was. So I want to talk a little bit about the thing that they're trying to do. So the first and foremost would be allowing border patrol to summarily expel migrants. Let me explain to you exactly

how fucking stupid this thing is. I was present with a border patrol agent last week who was trying to discern who was a child or not. Who was hampered in this by not being able to count in Spanish. Border patrol agents do take a Spanish class in their academy, right, but how the fuck are we expecting this guy to discern the veracity of someone's asylum claim when he can't

count to eighteen like this person? Right under this proposed Democratic proposal would have the effectively life or death choice of whether someone can make an asylum claim or they get immediately bounced back to Mexico. Right, this person would, for instance, have the choice to send a trans woman who would not be safequote unquote remaining in Mexico while she applied for asylum here back to Mexico to apply

for asylum here. Right, this person will be able to send someone who has very credible fears of violence in Mexico back to Mexico where they often have no network, they have no resources. It once again be putting the strain of our foreign policy and the fucked up shit we've done all around the world that is destabilized regimes, specifically across South America, but also all around the world.

As a consequence of that, people aren't safe there. They're coming here to find safety, and we're placing it in the hands of a random border patrol agent who may very well not speak the language. You understand anything they're saying to bounce them back. That's not how we should do think I think it probably goes without saying. They also want to begin a process of what's called expedited removal.

This allows immigration officials to deport people without court hearings if they don't ask for asylum or if they fail there an asylum interview. Again like this treating of people seeking asylum like they don't have rights or right like they have to they're guilty and to proven innocent almost in this system, right and to be proven to get these court hearings to do well in these court thinks

they need money, They need lawyers. Those lawyers can cost anywhere from six to twelve thousand dollars from what I've heard. But these people aren't allowed to work in the United States. So we're creating a de facto system that privileges wealthier migrants. Right, ten twelve thousand United States dollars is a lot of money if you're coming from large parts of the world. We're waging so much lower, Right, So having that kind of money isn't something that people who may be in

desperate need of help would have. For instance, yesterday I was speaking to a USD family. Is ed however you want to say it who people will be familiar with the way their community was treated by isis right.

could be immediately rejected. They could if they fail their asylum interview, they could be placed in this expedited removal process by which they wouldn't have a right to a court hearing, a lawyer or translator, all those things. And the final thing that they've indicated that they want to do, and I think this is the most bizarre one, is that they have decided that they want to mandate the

detention of certain migrants while their claims are adjudicated. This one, it seems like obviously like a massive session into this sort of insane Republican right wing sort of demand that we criminalize all asylum seekers.

legal immigration. Yeah, they and we're just here now where it's like no, like like you try you, if you attempt to come into the US legally, we are going to fucking put you in a camp. Like it's fucking insane. It's like like this is shit that like even like fifteen years ago people would have been like what the

fuck are you talking about. But the way that the way that this has been accelerated and this is something that's and you know, and like the fact that Biden is fucking just like just going like oh yeah, yeah, yeah we should this is this is fine, Like we're gonna like this is this is stuff that would have been unimaginable for a Republican president in the two thousands. Yeah. Like the thing about this too, is that none of

this would have been possible without democratic implicity. This is this is just the way the system has worked this entire time. Right there is the reason they called a bomb of the deporter in chief, because he was the guy who could could have actually turned the tide against this stuff and just didn't and was just like, fuck you, We're gonna deport millions of people. And that's that's how

we're fucking here with this shit over again. People who are literally coming through the country legally, which is what all these people said, spent all this fucking time saying you're supposed to be doing.

has tried CBP one. People but an't Like, no one wants to pay someone to drive them off road across the desert to a shitty hole in the wall in the middle of the freezing mountain range eighty miles east of here, and then to sit with their children while it rains, snows, freezes, and wait for one, two, three nights in this shitty conditions, with maybe a tent that we dumps to dive from a Susan g Comen event, right, or maybe if they're really lucky, like a yurt that

me and my friend's built from palaps right. And no one in their right mind would want to do that. These people don't want to do that. They've tried fucking CBP one. Most of them who I have spoken to are carrying visa rejection letters, right. They've been to embassies all around the world, have just been summarily dismissed. They don't give a reason for rejecting your visa, right, and they've exhausted all their options. No one wants to spend

their life savings and walk across the desert. It's dangerous, right, but that is the only way they can do it. And as you say, it is perfectly legal to enter the country between ports of entry and immediately surrender to the first law enforcement agent you see to claim asylum. That that is how one claims asylum when one is fleeing persecution. And when we have shut the door through this stupid app that only recognizes white faces and crashes all the time and isn't in those languages, and it's

entirely understandable that people are taken this route. We have cooked the bottler of migration and then shaken it up right for three years with Title forty two, which is this Trump era policy that co opted the COVID pandemic, which they allowed to rip through large segments of the United States community and pretended that by expelling migrants are protecting us. It didn't have any provisions for vaccination, it

didn't have any COVID testing. It was just a cynical attempt to use the pandemic, and we've seen through public records request is something they've planned long in advance to evict people from this country without giving them a chance of an asylum hearing, and now Biden is doing it

without even the pretense of an excuse. Right, at least Trump made up some bullshit it was transparent, but Biden isn't even bothering to do that, and he's just going to boot these people back into a place where they're going to be vulnerable. I've spoken to migrants who have been abused, who have been robbed in Mexico. It's not a safe place of vulnerable people, and the more vulnerable people you put into it, they're less safe. It's going

to get and nor is it. Mexico's a fucking problem, right, Like Henry Kissinger didn't fucking run Mexican policy and then get to live to one hundred and die in his bed. Right. It's a lot of these countries people are coming from. They're coming from because we fucked up their policy as a country. We fucked up their future.

died because they can't afford insulin. And the reason they have died is because these fucking ghouls want to extract every penny out of those of us who have diabetes. So I'm sorry that you heard those adverts and you won't ever again. But here's some other adverts we are back without, hopefully adverts for evil pharmaceutical companies. It's me and me and we're talking about Joe Brandon and his

terrible immigration policy. So the final part of this, and perhaps the most bizarre one, is that the White House mandating the detention of these migrants pending their claims. The US has never had enough enough detention space to do this, and we don't now. It remains extremely fucking unclear how this will be done. I will say that there was a big fuss made me and maybe remember this, that Biden was canceling private prison contracts when he first came

into our office. Do you remember his executive order on

this vaguely? Yeah, yeah, I think it got a lot of attention that may have specifically applied to people who are in federal criminal incarceration, it's certainly never applied to people seeking asylum because those people have always been detained by third party contractors like cor Civic right, and they continue to be so into the Biden administration because again, right, it is seemingly the implicit policy of the Democratic Party that these people are of less value and have fewer

rights than US citizens or then people seeking permanent residents in this country through other means.

to resist doing the exact same fucking things Republicans are doing, and it's really effective. And the consequence of this is that now we're fucking here with like trying to bring fucking the same shit Trump was doing back.

So a bunch of people have been shipped to Chicago and it turned and there they're eventually were protests here.

But like our fucking progressive mayor tried to have a basically a concentration camp company set up like a camp for these people on land that it turned out have been a toxic waste dump and only just didn't do I I don't even think he ever backed up the A story here is kind of I think what happened, if I'm remembering correctly, is that the governor was like, like pritz Crew was like, what the fuck are you doing? You can't have this stuff beyond a toxic waste site.

But so that's like temporarily been stopped. Like that's that's the kind of shit that's happening, like in you know, like like Brandon Johnson like nominally is one of the most left wing mayors in the US, And this is what is fucking happening even in this from of the sort of progressive wing the Democratic Party, like the concern like the the Joe Biden conservative wing is like even worse on this stuff.

wouldn't move to the right. It does now. And this means that there is not an electoral option for you, right, you cannot just vote if you give a single fuck about innocent people living outside of this country wanting to come here and be safe.

we always talk about. Like this happened a little bit in twenty twenty, it happened a little bit under Trump, but like now, more than ever, the need to do mutual aid, especially for migrants, but also for and house people within your community, for all the fucking human detritus of Joe Biden's dogshit governance. It's right now, and like it is as I've seen personally, within the power of a very small group of people to impact the lives of a very large group of people through organizing. I've

participated in mutual aid for a while. I'm sure many of the people are listening have as well. But like if you if you haven't found the play or the way to do so, Like it's it's a great time to start organizing something. The options in the next electoral cycle are that things get worse or that things get much worse. I don't think we have an option which is dismantling the structural racism that is within the United States, or even just not hunching down on some of the

most vulnerable people in the world, it would appear. And so to protect those people, it follows upon our communities. And that's that's a big burden to shoulder, right, When the state has enough money to send one thousand pound bomb States rail, that means that we have to pay for beans for hungry children.

And it doesn't matter because the whole point of this, like and this is one of these things with the sort of ratchet, right is, eventually you're going to get to fucking like you know, I mean, like the situation we have now right now in Greece where you have effectively a fascist government who's up like pot Like when like when when boastload boatloads and people go down to the Mediterranean, like go down to the Mediterraneans, ever a hundred

people die, their popularity goes up because you know, and then and this is the thing you're gonna, We're gonna, We're We're not that far away from in the fucking us. Is the Republican demand in like maybe like eight maybe ten years is going to be just shooting like literally just machine guns at the border like that. This is this is, this is where this is fucking going, right.

the Democrats. This is like, you know, and like people people thought this about Obama and people also thought this about Biden, was that we're going to vote for these people because they're going to be good on immigration, and like this is the reason why we're all fucking are

where we are now. So like there is no solution to this that doesn't revolve around like fundamental systemic change to what the US is, because otherwise we're just going to every single fucking year, we're going to be back here.

people cut it with angle grinders. Right. But what happens with Title forty two, what happens right now, under what's called Title eight of the United States Immigration Law, people enter the country through a gap in the wall, and they wait and they surrender to a border patrol agent and say I'm here to claim the silent Right. Then they end up in these open air detention sites in Cucumber,

et cetera. What happens in a Title forty two is that if you think you're going to be bounced directly back to Mexico, and you believe that you aren't safe there, you attempt to avoid border patrol right, And so you go to the places where they're going to be watching

these gaps in the war, one would issue. So you go to the furthest places and the hardest places, highest places, in the most rugged places, right, and you try and walk through those routes instead, you try and walk through, for instance, Value of the Moon, which is just to the east of the Cumber where just last week, some of my friends are involved in the search and rescue operation for a four year old child who'd become separated from their family coming from Afghanistan, and then they found

that child, fortunately, but fucking no one else would have done if they hadn't been there, right. The result of this is that people will die in greater numbers crossing our border. And that's what we saw rounder title forty two hunder Trump, and it's what we saw in title forty two on Biden, because there was that like I have attended, that you've heard about on this podcast, and the ones that they haven't and that you haven't heard about on this podcast are not going to stop because

Joe Biden offered a concession to the Republicans. They will keep happening. The poverty that we have created in much of the world is not going to stop. It will keep happening. Transfer a thing that we have exported culturally, that film Branton Too, which definitely yeah, island of terms.

will that be? The week after next? Like, yeah, I'm gonna we're going to replay the epithet like the interviews that I did with Maxice trans organizers talking about the turfs there because they are armed and they will fucking like, actually they will attack people.

doesn't change migration. Migration happens because people aren't safe where they are, and that's why they leave. They don't take this journey because it seems easy, because even right now, it's incredibly hard. People walk thousands of miles, They walk across mountains, they run and they take risks and hop on trains. They get extorted, they get robbed, that they

get assaulted. Young women often get sexually assaulted. Like it's a terrible and dangerous journey, and people won't stop taking that journey because Joe Biden decided to do something different. The things that are driving them to leave their homes will still keep happening, and they will now have to take a more dangerous journey.

we chose an anti fascist guy in twenty twenty. Like, it's a pretty fucking bleak vision of politics in this country and the impact it has for people who don't get a choice to vote in this country.

every day. And you know, and this is also one of these things where it's like, I mean we literally saw this in twenty twenty. The people who got sent in to put down the uprising in Portland, it was fucking Bortac right, it was. It was it was the the it was, it was it was the border patrols like special forces units, right, Like that's that's the inevitable logic of this state, is that you any person who wants to resist the state, eventually one day these people

will fucking come for you too. And the question is whether you know, it's whether you start. Because Portak didn't win really and like the stuff that they were trying to do in twenty two, like they they basically kind of got beaten, but you know they're still there. They're still getting fucking money, like they're getting I mean to

give more money. Yeah, So you know, either either we stopped them now before they fucking have another trillion dollars to spend on this shit, or you know, we fight them again in like five years when there's more of them and they're better funded.

ends up with all of us being surveiled more. If you attended a protest in twenty twenty, you might have been surveiled by border patrol.

of that surveillance. Right, And a big thing with undocumented immigration is it essentially makes you a legible and therefore untaxable to the government.

pay their taxes. Like this border of security is a thing that will eventually be used against you. And I don't think it's in any of our interests to just keep handing these tools to the state that end up being used against the most desperately in the world. And so hopefully I know there's no one you can fucking vote for to change that. Yeah, yeah, you can feel

free to write your legislators. I have been on the phone to my legislators about individual cases of people who I care about very deeply, who are in a very grave amount of danger and they haven't done shit. So instead I go to the border and I build shelters, add of palettes and tops for people because it's the only thing that makes me feel like I'm not completely

fucking powerless. And so if you want to take that paradynamic back, you know, cook some beans, make some rice, buy some tops with your holiday money, and go out there and start doing mutual aid. You don't even have to go on x dot com or Reddit to do it. Just fucking go out and start helping people. You'll find other people who want to help. You can organize and it's bad. The only way I can see that you can make things meaningfully better right now?