It Could Happen Here Weekly 141

while you drive your cars to work. Cool. The mon Olympic Games is it draws links to ancient Greece, right, And it does that because at the time that the modern Olympic Games in the late nineteenth century were being created by a guy called Baron Pierre de Kubitain, the aristocracy of Europe were obsessed with drawing links to the classical period.

do play, right. So if we're looking at like kind of the classic text on this, it's it's a book called Homo Ludens, but we probably don't need to read that. It's not a banger. We very few academic books are bangers. I like to think mine's in a sort of semi banging category. But yeah, it's also overpriced and you shouldn't buy it. Just go to your library and get it for free. Play is it's pretty obvious what play is. It's the difference between play and sport is that sport

is bounded. It happens in a certain place, within a certain set of rules. Play doesn't. So the archetypal kind of example of transitioning from play to sport would be folk football in Britain. So back in the day, in the place where I come from, for holidays, the Saints' Days and other days when people didn't work, they would have a game of football which consisted of a ball inflated pigs bladder or a similar similar device, and you have to get it from one village into the other village.

And those are about all the rules, right. Sometimes they had specific rules against stabbing. There have been like an outbreak of stabbing incidents, but other than that, it was pretty much you do what the fuck you wanted, right. You want to go on a five mile detour and come around people come in the back way, no problem. You're on a form of phalanx of all your mates and just kind of go through like a wedge style. Not a problem at all. You know, you want to

start hitting people with sticks, yeah, not an issue. It was very loose, right, and every village or pair of villages that will play had their own kind of understanding of the rules, but it wasn't a codified set of rules in existed across all incidences of folk football. And we go from there to association football. Right, That's where soccer comes from, right, ass soccer soccer association becomes assoc assoc becomes a soccer that becomes soccer. Does that make sense, kin, Yeah,

I'm going to say yes. It's a very like nineteenth century posh British effect that takes the word association football and comes out with soccer. That's so funny. Yeah, that's where it comes from. So association football codifires the rules. Right, there's a pitch that pitches the same size as a goal. The goal is the same size. You can't pick it up now, And from that comes rugby football, right, So rugby football is type where you pick up the ball.

There's a kind of founding myth for rugby football that this guy called William ware bellis with a glorious disregard for the rules. Quote, picked up the ball and ran with it. It's a bit weird that, like they've created a founding this for due to effectively just like sucked at football. So he picked it up and ran with it. Like it doesn't seem like he deserves a literal statue

that he has. Yeah, and that happened at Rugby School, right, which was one of these English boarding schools that existed to prepare young men to be officers and administrators in the British Empire. And that is really what's the codification of sport as far as we can sort of create like a reason for it is to prepare young men and just men to be administrators in the British Empire. Right,

it's supposed to make them physically strong. It's supposed to make them obey the rules and learn to do what they're told, even in stressful situations. Right, it's part of an idea called muscular Christianity. And like, as far as we can attribute this whole combination of things to one person,

it would be Thomas Arnold. Right, Thomas Arnold being the headmaster at Rugby School, he develops his idea of educating young Christian men and doing so using sport as well as academia and sports very quickly develop a set of rules around amateurism. Amateurism like sometimes we just use amateur now to me not very good, but at the time its specifically meant not paid to do the sport. And

so yeah, this is the early Olympics. Actually, the Olympics still relatively recently have an amateurism rule, right that people can't participate if they are paid to do the sport. They have exemptions for fencing coaches, which I think tells you about everything you need to know that this isn't

this isn't there for any purity reason. It's there to serve as a class barrier, right, And we see it used as a class barrier first of all in football, right, Like that's why we have rugby league at rugby union because the rugby league people tended to be working people and they needed to be paid. It's the rugby league allowed for professionalism. Rugby union did not, and those tended to be wealthier people, right. But it's used at the

Olympics extensively to police class. Like probably the most prominent example would be Jim Thorpe. You're familiar with Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe's the cool guy. Actually, I got to read some of his correspondents. He actually wrote a history of the Olympic Games, which is very sad when you consider that Jim Thorpe himself he's a member of the sac and Fox Nation, right, so he's indigenous to North America.

He won a medal for the United States in the nineteen twelve Semmer Olympics who went to Gold Males actually won in pentathlon and won decathlon. So like decathletes are kind of like the uber athletes, right, Like you're doing ten ten different sports that you have to just be good at exercising, and Jim Thorpe was good at exercising. He also played collegiate and professional football, professional baseball, and

professional basketball. See he's an all around sport to dad. Unfortunately, he lost his Olympic title because he had been paid at some point for playing baseball, even though he didn't do baseball in the Olympics. That's all fucked. Yeh. It's very clearly used as a way to class and race police the games, right, And I think this gets to our point about what the Olympics are. So the early Olympics tend to coincide with what are called World's Fairs.

Familiar with worlds Fairs shreen Yeah, yeah, yeah. People sort of get together and they have these big exhibitions and they show off there you know if you really got yeah us whatever, Yeah, look what I stole from this country that I have colonized and under force extracted these the following things. If you're in Britain, like the most famous sort of Worlds Fair site would be Crystal Palace, right, Crystal Palace was built, burned down, but it was built

for the Worlds Fair. If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park, right was built fourteen. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I knew that somewhere in my head. Yeah, when you go to Balboa Park, little niche San Diego diversion for the millions of you are not in San Diego, you can just tune out for ten seconds. Those are little cottages like the Internet national Cottages and Palestine House and yeah, Palestine House. Cool that they got recognition in San Diego.

At least those are from the World's Fair. Each country would have that little exhibition in their house right and all down the Prado. So yeah, that's actually has zoo started as well. Someone in their exhibition had lions and then fucking left them when they left, and they were like, uh, I guess we better start a zoo. Got a couple

of lions on our hands. Yeah, incredible, incredible vibes. So the Olympics happen at the same time as Worlds for its a long time, and that is because the Olympics are essentially a gathering of transnational borche worse he That's not a phrase I came up with myself. It's from my friend David Goldblat, who's written a really excellent history of Olympics. That's called the Games. And if you're going to read one book about the Olympics, that it should

be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure he's not listening, hello, David. If you are, I would recommend his book because I think his analysis is great, right, that what these become is a place where the sort of the that people who make money from finance capital all around the world can gather together and share their little ideas and play their little games. And we see that, for instance, in the nineteen oh four Saint Lewis Olympics.

Saint Louis. In addition to like the World's Fair, they have the Olympics and they have something called the Anthropological Days. Have you heard about this, Sharne oh Willieve, I have no. It's one of the more fuck things happen in Saint Louis, which I think is saying a lot. They essentially kidnapped people from around their various imperial possessions, brought them to Saint Louis, which in itself is a crime, and then forced them to compete in events that they didn't fully

explain to them. What the fuck yeah, and then concluded from this that like white people were better.

you're probably right. Well, indirectly it will, you know, because as a sort of source of wealth.

on pic metals than they do as lumps of gold. Anyway, you can sell them, and people have sold them online because, as it turns out, like spending your entire youth exercising and then getting to a point where you're too injured or old to compete, it's sometimes not great for your future career prospects and I've unfortunately seen lots of friends take that path. And so I want to talk about like the Olympics in the twentieth century, and specifically I

want to talk about the Olympics in the nineteen thirties. Right, so when the Olympics. By the time we come to the nineteen thirties, the Olympics have really become like they're an American thing. The Los Angeles Olympics gives us a lot of the modern Olympics, and the rest of the mode Olympics we get from friend of the podcast Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Of course, yeah, I knew that you were expecting them. We never never don't expect Hitler.

So nineteen thirty two is great. Like nineteen thirty two Olympic village. They build this Olympic village. They haven't patrolled by cowboys, just like Hollywood cosplay Dude joh On horses cowboy and around. It's the first. It's very weird. It's the first Olympic village. And it's it becomes a real estate investment, right like as soon as the Olympics are done there in classic Los Angeles fashion, flipping the houses

for more than they were paid. So it also creates this idea of like the Olympics as a mass spectacle in nineteen thirty two is sometimes called the Hollywood Olympics, right, and it really changes the game from rich people getting together for rich people to a spectator event and a mass spectator event. In nineteen thirty one, Spain's Dicta Blander collapses and Dicta Blander is like a soft dictatorship as opposed to Dictadoro as a hard dictatorship. Right, So, and

Spain becomes a republic. Nineteen thirty one. It's also the time when the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona, and for geographically challenged listeners Barcelona, it's in Catalonia, but Catalonia is within Spain at this time. So the IOC is all most entirely comprised of very rich people, and many of them are like barons, counts, princes, other people who like their job is being someone's kid, right, and they just do things like being on the IOC to

occupy them what they spend their parents' money. So they're in Spain at the time when Spain has just deposed a monarch and it has this revolutionary republic, right, the anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin a campaign of two years of removing the church from its official position, like anti clericalism and of land reform. These

are things which rich people do not like. And so the vote happens in Barcelona about where to hold the next Olympics, and the two leading candidates are Berlin and Barcelona.

After Barcelona, I think a little weird happens. See IOC members all go home and not everyone has come to Barcelona, right because of the because of the change in the situation, and instead of being like, okay, well we had a vote in Barcelona one, the IOC makes an interesting and relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram, and in the telegram vote they instead of going for the unstable Spanish Second Republic, up for a more stable and

liberal democracy, which is of course viy my Germany. Of course, yeah, good choice by their better rich folks. They really helped us out there, and it's very interesting, Like I've spent a lot of time with these telegrams, like the actual paper telegrams in the International Olympic Committee archive in Lausanne, trying to ascertain did they just like did the vote happen.

And then they were like, no, fuck, we can't go to Barcelona, like we got to redo, We've got to work out way to dig this, like we can't go to this republican place, or that they claimed that there weren't enough votes, right, that they didn't have like a quorum.

But I've looked at previous and subsequent votes, and there are there are plenty of other votes that have fewer participants, And it was relatively normal at this time for not everyone to show up at a meeting, right Because it's nineteen thirty one, Traveling is hard, and so I can't categorically say what's happened. But maybe that's what I suspect

has happened. I can't really see any way I could find out now, and as I went to every member of the International Olympic Committee at the time and looked in their personal archive. But either way, they decided to give the Olympics to this little place called firemar Germany in between ninety thirty one and nineteen thirty six. History fans will know that the Nazis game to parent Germany. Nazis not very nice people and no bad Many people are saying, yeah, many people are saying the mosquitoes of

the world. Not sorry, we just recorded the Mosquito episode. Yes, yeah, in any ways, like the mosquito could be eradicated, maybe wouldn't be bad. Yeah, my favorite georgiowelline one of my favorite joints or all lines. I joined the militia to kill a fascist because if all of us did so, then there wouldn't be any of them left. Wow. Yeah, yeah, very prescient. So the Olympics, when the Nazis going to power,

first they want to do away with it. Right then when they're like, fuck this, this is some bougie shit. We're not into it. We don't want to see other people, we don't care about other nations with arians. And then over time the administrators of the Olympics, including guy called Carl DM who would be classified, according to the nazis own sort of standards, as a Jewish person, they persuade the Nazis that having the Olympics will be good for them.

It will let them exhibit their shit on a world scale. And they are not wrong. Right, The Olympics turned into a massive boon for Nazi Germany. We don't have enough time in this short episode to explain the whole boycott movement. There was a substantial boycott movement, including in the United States. The United States very nearly boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but in the end it ended up not doing so you had opposition from really interesting groups. Actually had opposition obviously

from Jewish groups, right because Nazis. You have opposition from elements of an NAACP, but not from other elements because they have this very reasonable objection. They're like, well, America is also racist as fuck. Actually, like we also like this is a time where we exclude black folks from a lot of yeah, not yeah, And so you have black folks boycotting, and you have black folks being like, now,

fuck it, like we'll take the chance, you know. And then you have the opposition from an interesting group like the liberal Catholics, right, because the Nazis had their own ideas on religion, and so a lot of Catholics were anti Nazi at that point, including Jeremiah Mahony, who was president of the Amateur Athletic Union at the time, who

was kind of leading the boycott movement. The United States decides not to boycott, lots of other places in the world decide that they are going to boycott, right, and lots of other people around the world. And that's where Barcelona. They had a conference in Paris, actually the International Conference for the Respect of the Olympic Ideal, and that is the conference out of which the bars that remember bars Oonner applied in thirty one. Right, So they have all

their shit together. They actually have the site of a former World's Fair and that's what they're going to use. So the Catalans come to this conference in April of thirty six and are like, hey, we can have another Olympics, which isn't shit, And they go ahead and have their Olympics and shit, now first happened the Nazi Olympics, Right. The Nazi Olympics give us so much of what we consider to be the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay, you know, the torch relay. They go to Olympia and

bring the flame. Yeah, that's a Nazi thing. Actually, it comes from the Nazis. The idea of drawing a link from ancient Greece to Berlin was a Nazi idea. Why don't we still do it? Yeah, that's a good question, Sharen. Isn't it a good question. As we enter the Paris Olympics. One thing they have done away was the Olympic salute because it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazis. So they also start in no, the Olympic salute predates it.

So you have these interesting mark people march like were they the parade at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, right, and lots of these The pageantry of the opening ceremony also comes from the Nazis, by the way, And we got people walking in and the French come in and they're doing a salute, and people like, is that the Nazi salute they're doing? It's at the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure it's the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure.

They just did what they'd always done and which was to not dip their flag, and that that Olympiad is a great success for Hitler, right, Like this is where a lot of this like, oh, but yeah, he's very efficient. He makes a trains run on time. Kind of shit comes from, right. They use it as a pageant and they downplay their racism. They include a couple of Jewish athletes on their team, which is one of the demands of Avery. Brandage, head of the American Olympic Committee. Brandage

Brandish is an interesting dude. Brandage. You can read more about Brandage in my book Rubber Did Behind the Bastards. On Brandage, I don't think he begins the nineteen thirties is an anti Semite. But after the boycott campaign, which he calls a Jewish Communist conspiracy, well yeah, he absolutely becomes an anti Semite. Like he grows closer to Hitler when other because like his idea is that politics shouldn't influence the games, which is inherently a political choice. When

the games have been given to fucking Adolf Hitler. So the ninety thirty six Olympics go ahead in Germany, lots of fascism, lots of zeg hiling, a real success for Hitler. Ninety thirty six Olympics in Barcelona don't go ahead because the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona Olympics are like an alternative to the Berlin Olympics. Yeah, at this time, also, it should be pointed out that you got the Winter

Olympics when you've got the Olympics. So the Nazi had already had their garments part in Kirshen Winter Olympics and had predicted to be done a bunch of Nazi shit right, which didn't stop anyone going to the Summer Olympics. Saran, do you know what won't do a bunch of Nazi ship what? James, it's the products and services that support this show, Saran. I found it.

of them. The popul Olympics are call The main reason they're call is because I've written a book about them, but other reasons include that they had like elite amateur and then provincial races, so like you could just show up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to fucking check my hand the ring one hundred meters, let's see how I do, and there would be a place for you to compete.

or the nation that would win. Right, They competed as nations rather than states, So the exiled Jews of Europe competed together for the obvious reason that, like, if you're a German Jew in nineteen thirty six, you don't want to compete for fucking Germany, so even at the Populalympics, they competed to Jewish workers sports associations. And you have exiled and anti fascists from Germany and Italy competing under

their own banners. And you have Glicia, Catalonia Skendy, the Basque country competing s own ould nations, right, and the same with the colonized people of North Africa. And you have the women students of the world with their own old team, which is nice. They also made a big deal of including women, allowing women to do sports that men do at the time in nineteen thirty six women can run more than two hundred meters. Well, but they actually could, as it turns out, Yeah, yeah, right, they

just weren't allowed to c Yeah, shocking discovery. They didn't just involve that capacity since thirty six. But these Olympics don't go ahead because the Spanish evil War starts. Lots of the anti fascist affete who came state to fight, right, including people I've written about in my book. We did a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this. So you can listen to more if you want to. In Margaret's feed. I'm sure if you search popular Olympics will be there. By the way, you sometimes see it

translated as People's Olympics. I prefer popular because it's inherently tied to the idea of a popular front, right, which is a policy of like united front between everyone from the liberals to the communists to the anarchists against fascism. Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular Front because it is dominated by communists, and the communists, in fact love to kill anarchists a lot more than they love to kill fascists, and they use the Popular Front as

cover for doing that, as we see in Spain. But the anarchists did participate in workers or popular sport in Barcelona, at least to an extent. So these games that said, they don't happen. You can read about that in my book, or you can listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But I want to talk about what the Olympics represent today,

the modern Olympics. Right, they have become as they always were. Right, they continue to be a spectacle that they've been since thirty two, and they continue to be a vehicle for capitalism as they have been forever. Right, if we look at their research, Olympic Games. Right, we look at London, we look at Rio. I think Rio is a really great example, right the Olympics, that they were able to

clear areas of the city using the potential Olympics. Right, displace favela communities, displace poor and excluded and marginalized people, and take advantage of incredibly underpaid labor. And there's probably it's a bit rarer now. But for like most of the last eight years, you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana mostly right, the US has been especially racist and bigoted towards Haitians, and you can I wrote a piece for NBC about Biden's hypocracy on Haitian immigration. But there were

people who had worked on the Olympic Stadium in Brazil. Right, So they've gone from Haiti, like after the earthquake or the economic and political issues, so they've had ever since the earthquake, they've gone to Brazil. And then they've worked in Brazil building the stadia, getting paid fuck all and

doing dangerous work. And then eventually I've been able to find work that visas had run out or they'd otherwise chosen to come north to the United States, and they often end up not being able to they end up stuck in Tijuana or living in Tijuana and find finding work there. Right, So often Olympics take advantage of migrant labor. They are used as a means of like reshaping the city into like sculpting it under capitalism, right, pushing folks

out of their neighborhoods. They don't do the Olympics in bougie neighborhoods. They use it as an excuse to gentrify a neighborhood, to remove in trenched working class communities. Yeah, Like it's really sad. It's when I read so much of the stuff about, like specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games, Like we see these people who are unquestionably good people, right, Like they genuinely believe that through what they see is

the ideal of the Olympics, they can liberate women. They the Barcelona organizers so like, they didn't have much money, right, they were putting people up. And I found these forms in the arch if they'd go around people's houses and be like, hey, do you have a spare bedroom? And in the form you can tick I have one, two, three spare bedrooms. I can serve breakfast. I can't serve breakfast and that's how they would bill at the athletes, right,

the athletes didn't have an Olympic village. They had a hotel and then any surp plus you would just stay with with a local person. It was a very different vision of what the Olympics could have been. Right. They really believed in the youth of the world coming together.

They really thought that at the popul Olympics they could show the strength of anti fascism, that anti fishing wasn't just a talking point, that it was that it was young and it was healthy, and like most importantly, that they could fucking kill you, right, like that that sport all Well again double or Well quote episode or Well called sport War without the shooting, and I think he's spot on. Actually it is good. He's got some bangos sharene you do say that, Yeah, he's a word guy,

George Orwell. People do love to misquote George your Well, but I like to quote him correctly. You know you can you can always when someone misquote Georgia Will you can always just quote tweet them with the I had joined them Unlicia to kill a fascist, right or the other absolute banger from all Well. I have no particular love for the idealized worker as he exists in the

mind of the bourgeois communists. But when I see a real flesh and bug worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I don't have to ask myself which side them on. Ooh, it's a banger, that's that's poetry. Yeah it is. It's great. Like it's something that when I get around, will have tattooed on my body maybe like maybe when I have to cross fewer borders. It's probably not something you want to be showing after the intelligence

agencies of various countries. Yeah, it's really sad to see this thing, and I think it does have potential. I

think it's a potential. What I want to end on is like I think we can recover that potential, Like we can take the Olympics away from the people who did nineteen oh four and the people who did nineteen thirty six, and like it doesn't mean to have to use that obviously that the IOC is not fucking coming with us, right, I've been to the IOC, very nice building, but like this is the you know, the the interests of finance, capital and the interesting iOS here inherently tied

coca coat. Every massive corporation in the world is a massive spot for the Olympics, right, And it's also been a platform for some really good things that we think about. Tommy Smith and John Carlos right at the ninety sixty eight Olympics giving a raise fist salute on the podium. I'm sure you've seen it. There's a statue of them, several statues of them, I think, actually, but yeah, very

famous Olympic moment. The whole ninety sixty eight Olympics actually kind of gave a platform for protest, and Parisians have been protesting against this Olympics, and Angelino's are already protesting against what it's going to happen in twenty eight. You can look up no Olympics LA for those folks, and

I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I don't think that the idea is inherently bad, the idea of coming together to play and like sports are, where we decide who's on our team and who's not on our team, right, And what the popular Olympics did was said working people are all on the same team. And they've played that out right. The day the games were supposed to start. Some of those athletes were in the

streets killing fascists and they weren't. Right that day, that minitary coup failed in Barcelona, and a lot of them left really feeling like they got something out of the games that they couldn't have got, or that they came to play and then they saw like what they were playing for acted out. And I think there's still something really powerful in that, but we can only get there by acknowledging how fucked up the Olympics have always been.

I see this like liberal narratives that the Libs the Olympics were once great and about sportsmanship and now they're about capitalism. No fuck that, Like they have always been inherently about capitalism, they've been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics. Right, the medal table. We don't do the medal table for shits and giggles. The medal table is there to prove like the superiority of one race. Like that is why

Hitler is obsessed with the medal table. Right, He's extremely worried that like either they like folks in the United States, or like God forbid, the Japanese do well in the Olympics.

It's like, and then the Olympics trying to sort of posit itself as inherently pro human rights I think is very problematic when yeah, we look at like how Olympics Stadia get constructed by whom they get constructed and where they get constructed, Yeah, who they effect and yeah, and who who they're for and who who they take from. So I know, I'm not saying don't watch the Olympics.

Like when I was a kid, the Olympics were like fucking formative in me wanting to do sports, and when I was an athlete, the Olympics I wanted to do. I have friends who are going to be at the Olympics, and like, I guess I wish them the best, but still a bad thing. And like I certainly don't blame folks who come from like resource coorse settings for taking that chance.

to really consider what your role is. I know some of my friends listen who are still like professional athletes and there just think about out what you can do, and like, I will tell you that when you stop getting paid to exercise, all of it seems very unimportant and like you suddenly realize that in my case, but there's important shit that you can do if you have a chance to do it, and you should do it

if you get the chance. But yeah, I think hopefully, you know, if people want to know more about the Populalympics, I will fucking talk Carreer of med Email. Yeah, my book, I think it might be on libcom now as well. I think you can. I think it's been pirated, which is good to see. You can get it from your library. I'd love you to get it from your library, because the it's fair for someone else libraries. Yeah, I do love a library. Yeah, we should do a library episode.

a fun fun facts. End the episode. A general pattern, right, American war guy entered the pentathlon at the Olympics and used such a large pistol that they were unable to determine the size of his grouping of shots on the target because he just viscerated the whole target his handcannon. Yeah. So, embody that the pentathlon a sport that was designed to train offices. Right, you have to run, swim, ride a horse, sword fight, and shoot. Yeah, so make a better pentathlon,

make make an anti fascist to cathalon. Yeah, send us your You can tag us with your your decathlon ideas on on x dot com. We both use at I write, Okay, bizarrely we have the same the same Twitter handle. Yeah, send us your sporting ideas. Enjoy your little Olympic viewing. Now that I've ruined it all for you, I guess.

radical people. But you know, the interesting thing about Donald Harris is that he is not the Marxist that you would expect to see coming out of sort of like that Miliu, because those people's Marxism, you know, I mean, he is very interested in sort of underdevelopment and you know, sort of like imperialism, but he's he's not well from one of the sort of like Baoists inflected kinds of Marxism, which are the kinds that tended to be sort of floating around.

and I am not a Marxist. And so for one hundred years, since then, one hundred and fifty years, people have been calling themselves Marxians instead of Marxists.

been a long time. But the episode's about inflation that we did with the with the folks over at Strange Matters. Those people are the sort of the int one of one of the groups that are the intellectual heirs to sort of post Kanesianism. It's a you know, I guess it's post Kansianism, is kind of it's I guess it's like the largest of what's called the heterodox economics UH schools.

We're gonna get more into what it is later, because it's not just like you know, so it's post Kanesian after like John Vader Kanes, it's not really Canes and that that's that's gonna become very important as second. But you know this, this is sort of an issue because it means that it's actually it's really really hard for a normal person to figure out what the fuck is

going on with this book book. And this is something that I discovered, you know, partially just from reading it, and partially also I mean this like, I have a pretty good background to do this, because I know a lot of Postcansian economics, and I also have studied a lot of Marks, and you need both of those to be able to write about this. However, come I discovered

two hours to put this recording. I discovered that the economist had set some hack who they refused to name, to write about this book, and this person managed, okay, on top of just like straight up, like not literally, their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong.

In just four paragraphs, they managed to make an error so egregious that if I had turned this shit into my professor's in college, it would have failed before it So okay, okay, So one of the things the author talks about is this thing called the Cambridge capital controversy. And this author claims that this controversy was fought between

the neo and post Kansians. Now, this is probably gibberish to like nineteen percent of people listening to this, but in terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent of not knowing who fought in World War Two. Like this

is the Cambridge cancer controversy. Is It's it's basically these single moments in which this kind of like this kind of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in a way that like they were able to force the sort of mainstream neoclassical economists to take to pay attention to. And this battle should, like intellectually should have completely destroyed

all of neoclassical economics. Right, everything you've ever heard about how price equal supply and demand like so all those curves, all of that is fucking bullshit. All of it was destroyed by one single happening about the course of a decade between the sort of post Knesians, mostly Serappha but also Joe and Robinson I think actually started it. We're

gonna talk about those people more later. This is a battle between them, and there is specifically the neoclassical economists, and by the end of it, the neoclassical economists were forced to admit that they couldn't they couldn't figure out a way to like measure the value of a bundle of like capital goods. So if you have two different machines, neoclassical economy cannot tell you the value of And this

this completely annihilates neoclassic economics. All of it is fucking fake because you know, they need this for the production function. Without the production function, like you can't even get to supply and demand, right, every literally everything, all of their

stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to like attempt to an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy was what it was actually about here, because it's it's a little bit it's something that you can understand, but it's a little bit technical and it's hard to explain in podcast form if you if you're really curious about this, the book Capital as Power. Capital as Power has a really great explanation of it in chapter five that's pretty short.

You can just literally find a PDF of Capital as Power by just googling it. But this is a level

of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're like the person the economist assigned to write this like knows so little about it that and you know, the other thing about this, this whole controversy is that the Cambridge Cancel capital controversy is in the book, and in the book, Donald Harris very specifically talks about the There's an entire chapter of the book that it's just him using the products of the Cambridge capital controversy to completely destroy a classical economics.

the fuck is this book about? The very the shortest answer I can possibly give is it's an attempt to build a sort of mathematical model of how how of of sort of like that measures the growth of an economy and can sort of like determine based on like different sort of inputs of uh, you know, we'll get to the bore of the second and like in terms of like inputs of capital and like parts of labor, like how how you can have an economy that grows

stably over time. But in order to like get into really what this is, we need to do something that actually is the first part of this book. We need to do a brief survey of the last two hundred and thirty two hundred and forty years of economics. But before we do that, do you know what economics exist to sell you?

important classical economists. This is this is an argument, and this is one of the arguments that Donald Harris makes in the opening of this book is about who these people are. So his argument is it's Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. We don't care about Mauthus for our purposes. He's most well known for being the like the the like out of control population growth will kill one on Earth. We need to like slow populate stuff like. That's not super relevant for us. Everyone, I think kind of has

a has a basic familiarity with Adam Smith. But for our purposes, the important one is Ricardo, who is not very well known at all. Ricardo is sort of concerned with basically the distribution of surpluses between the classes. So for him, that there's there's there's three major classes, right,

there's landlords as capitalists, and there's workers. And he's concerned about how the sort of the the surplus product of a society, which is like all of the sort of stuff that's produced in an economy that isn't literally directly necessary for everyone to survive. How is that sort of surplus like distributed and how does this sort of impact economic growth? The post Kanesian tradition that Donald Harris is in is in a real sense they are successors to Ricardo, right.

A lot of I've mentioned Piero Siraffa, who is like probably the central figure of post Kanesian economics. He's a really interesting guy. He knows like everyone, like he knew Canes. He was weirdly friends with Antonio Grampsi, the former head of the Italian Communist Party, who's enormously influential work was like new him, And a lot of what Sarafa's work is is kind of like getting Ricardo's economics to like work properly and then turning that into sort of a

new framework for how you model economies. Now, the other part of this, you know, so okay, who isn't isn't the classical economist is also a huge source of debate because there's a lot of people who throw marks in as part of the classical economy, that's a traditional way to view it. Harris doesn't think that he's a classical economist.

He thinks that he's his own thing. So for our purposes, you know, it's and and Harris is also I mean, I think he considers himself a Marxist, even in this period and a lot of this book is an attempt to sort of merge Marxian political economy with like the sort of neo Ricardi and stuff that s Rafa is doing.

like eat, sleep and like have kids. There are more workers, but the rest of their labor time is stolen by capitalists and is thus unremunerated. This unpaid labor time is called surplus value. And this is what capital has made off. So this is like a very very basis of sort of what Marxism is, and you know, in in sort of Marxism. And this is sort of different than Ricardo, which is like work. Ricardo understands that there are classes

and that they are in conflict to some extent. But you know, for marx the central dynamics of capitalism is, you know, is the conflict between the bourgeoisie or the capitalists who own the means of production and then you know, and buy that ownership, like extract surplus value from the proletariat and the proletariat or the working class or forced to sell their labor to capitalists, et cetera, et cetera.

nature of value is. So you know, in the Marxist tradition, right, surplus value is still in labor time, and the value of producer sort of flows through the economy, and it's what turned you know, like stealing this labor time is

what turns capital into more capital. Right in the post in post Cantine economics, surplus is you know, so so in in sort of like a seraf in work or in this book too, right, you have basically a production matrix, which is like as a MATC that models how production works, and it's what it's doing is modeling the entire output

of society at one time. And in this model, so there there's sort of like you know, there's all the commodity and labor inputs that compose the economy and they come back out and there's a certain amount of commodities. This is the thing we talked about with the Kardo, right, there's there's certain amount of commodities you need to produce so that everyone can the entire system can reproduce itself,

and beyond that is surplus. So what you're dealing with is this weird mixture because Harris is trying to work with both of these at the same time, where like, on the one hand you have surplus as like like stolen value in a form of like stolen labor time, and on the other hand you have it in this regarded sense of like there's a bunch of commodities that we've produced that's like access to our like ability to to like our needs to reproduce ourselves. And he's trying

to square these and it doesn't work. It just sort of breaks down, like.

gonna he doesn't solve it. He just gives up and says that you can't do it because they're in two separate spheres, which is the most compound answer I've ever seed in my entire life.

This is your like every time someone starts lecturing you about how the economy works.

basically to get everyone who talked about it fired. And this actually worked, Like they's basically massive social cleansing campaign of like all of the sort of heterodox economists they got they got the ball fired and it worked. And Harris actually weirdly was kind of was like one of the last holdouts into the nineties, but he just like retires in like the late nineties, and that's like basically ever all of them get rent out.

have money and we have force. So we're going to defeat your ideas by simply destroying you all tightlightly actual physical force.

they're like based on classical economics. The neo Kansians are just regular Kansians basically, but they had to change the math to be shittier and make themselves more right wing to like survive.

I ukotomby after as I fucked up? The state interventions can be beneficial for the economy, And it emerges like in the I guess post Great Depression, Like I guess maybe from the from like you know, the New Deal and these these and then post World War two, right, like it's very influential in the kind of build up

after World War Two. The idea that like the state shouldn't necessarily be like what's happen Adam handed the invisible hand, the fucking invisible hand, maybe isn't killing it and we needn't stead the hand of the state.

So Kids was like shit, yeah, And I mean, you know, he's like in sort of like more detail, like his thing basically is about like he's he's obsessed with sort of like like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by using states, betting to like, you know, like his things basically is that, like capital will misallocate resources, you have to use the state to like kick the bastards into line, like the

stable economy. And the problem is that by by the late seventies, the Kansians are in crisis because in in original likea Kansian theory, it wasn't supposed to be possible for there to be both rising unemployment and rising inflation, but that was like happening over the entire world, and so they got kind of annihilated. And this is the thing that like the neoliberals used to like take power.

And it's interesting because the post Kansians like they use you know, and like the beginning of this book is a bit of like Kansian stuff. But then he just like you know, they go off and do other more interesting things. But it's very funny because because this is still seventy eight, he Harris calls himself a neo Kansian, and he calls all of his collaborators Theokansians because the real Neokansians hadn't like developed yet.

to what Donald Harris is. But you know, you know what Marxism in theory isn't supposed to support.

about developing a sort of growth model that you can sort of you know, that that that that accounts that that can be modified to account for all of these things. So the initial thing that they're trying to produce. Is is like a model of what they call a Golden age, which is a thing that's from Joan Robinson. Yeah, that's basically like it's the Golden age is a theoretical like economic configuration. You have, you have full employment, you have constant,

stable economic growth, and the system can reproduce itself. Yeah, and you know, I'm going to read a passage from this book so you can understand. Partially so you can because it's about this, right, and partially so you can understand, like this isn't even a particularly technical paragraph.

labor force, and a given set of expectations. To ask whether such a situation exists is to ask whether the conditions which define it are mutually compatible or self consistent. So this is Basically what he's doing, right, is you can you can build these models of like these sort of Kanzian models that like and I started a post Kansian model that you know, if you if you, if you set up all the elements right, you can theoretically

generate stable growth. But then you know, obviously his thing is like this doesn't work, right, Like, no, no, no economy will ever generate this because there's only really like it's extremely hard to actually get you know, your sort of like input levels and your technological development whatever the fuck like at the same rate to do this. But he's he's using this as basically the model for as like as like a sort of toy model that you can then sort of warp to fit the rest of

the the rest of the capitalist economy. But in order to do this, he has to generate a crisis theory. And this is where he just like suddenly all the marks comes back in and he's like, so his he's the product he's trying to do is he's trying to use a post Kinesian model of how economic growth works and then and then combine that with Marxist crisis theory to produce basically a model of you know, what, what

kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like crisis state? Now, ooka, the every thing is very weird about this, right, It's like he doesn't do normal, Like there's like an entire school of Marxist crisis theory, and he doesn't do it. He instead like rewrites a bunch of Marxist equations and then comes up with his own like version of crisis theory of like different kinds of crises. And I like what, it's so weird, it's so baffling.

actually a Marxist, like politically. And the reason I don't think this is because, you know, so we talk about surplus value, right, the surplus value is supposed to be this value it's extracted, but it's the magnitude of it. One of the things like how much value you extract, like how many hours of the day you can steal from a worker, depends on how many hours of the day you'd need to pay them for in order for

them to survive. Right, And one of the crucial things about this is that that and then Marx is very explicit about this that rate of like how much you need to pay them to survive is determined by social struggle, right, because like you know what what a worker quote unquote needs to survive in like in different places in context is different, and you can fight in order for that

rate to be higher. And this is like an incredibly basic part of Marxism, right, It's the part of Marxism where the economy is also determed, like the function of the capitalist economy is produced by class struggle.

And this is this is the thing that like fundamentally has convinced me that what what he's doing isn't substantively Marxism. He's using the tools of merchistpolitical economy, but he's he's he's he's viewing capitalism as purely a sort of like top down thing, right as and not something that's actually like you know, like he he acknowledges there are classes, but he doesn't see them as actors at all.

enough to maintain itself. Commodities are produced by separate industries and are exchanged for one another, et cetera.

about the production process. He cares about the sort of like like that there are he cares that there are workers that are doing the production. He cares about the sort of historical conditions that created you know, these these things. Don't like as Kamala Harris's mom, this is actually very important. The Kamala Harris you didn't just follow out of the coconut tree exist in the context of all that came

before you. That's Kamala Harris's mom, who is like, I think, a better Marxist than Noel Harris's and Harris will occasionally, like Donald Harris will occasionally gesture to this one. He'd be like, well, yeah, obviously this is all determined by historical conditions, and then he just has no interest in ever pursuing any of that. He's just like, yeah, this is we left a later book that he never wrote.

And what you get to is is this this is like a real issue with sort of Postkansianism is that it doesn't have like Marxism at least in theory, has

politics embedded into it. Postkansianism kind of doesn't it. Just like I have a lot of friends who I like, I deeply care about who are Postkansians, right, they are political like you know, they're they're leftists because they're leftists, right, Like it's it's not something that's an automatic generation of your theory, and you know you can kind of write it that way, right, Like this is the thing about Frederick Lee, who's the sort of the a lot of

my like a lot of the Traine writers people sort of like learn economics from, like I mean indirectly, but like through his book. But you know Lee Lee is a committed anarchist and that shows up in his work. But he has to like add that in pure like pure Sarraffa by itself, you could theoretically like run any form of government you want with it.

of the built in natural environments. Build an innovative and competitive modern economy of big and small firms by strengthening business networks and removing supply side constraints. Modernize and improve the efficiency of government. Social inclusion through community renewal, expand as south agency in equity and proactive partnership between government and private sector ALSOSO A giant thing in this about crime.

So what has happened is that these two people have circled back around and they now have the same politics which is like tough on crime, austerity.

like way for it to be distributed. It can be distributed in an enormous number of ways, and the trick is finding out how it's actually done.

kind of. Yeah. That there was some Kinesian influence, I guess, but certainly nothing the one would call combus or even really socialist.

very popular then. But it is absolutely just like this. This is not like black Panther, black panther inflected Marxism. This is not what I trists by the economists here.

And this is also like, you know, I think that this kind of political trajectory is kind of also you can see in it like how his child, even though he wasn't in her life, Munch is going to end up as the person she is. And I think that's why that's my final conclusion from this is he's.

the genocide in Gaza. On Sunday, July twenty first, Biden said that he was ending his presidential re election campaign after a week's pressure from party officials, donors, Democratic Congress members, voters, and pro Palestinian organizers and advocacy groups. This move comes months after organizers led a nationwide campaign to vote uncommitted during Democratic primary elections to push Biden to end his unconditional support for Israel during his genocide in Gaza or

risk losing their vote in the general election. In several states, uncommitted or no preference received far more votes than other candidates challenging Biden, and so Biden dropped out surprise. Ever since his announcement to withdraw, Democratic politicians and commentators in the US have come out to heat praise and laud the president's character, and draw attention to all his contributions

over the years. None of that matters to me, though, and it shouldn't matter to you, because for me and many others, Biden will be remembered for nothing else than his support for Israeli crimes. But let's hear from our us ridiculous public servants, shall we. Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer said, Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader, but he's truly an

amazing human being. His decision, of course, was not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first. House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries called the president quote one of the most accomplished and consequential leaders in American history. Representative Maxine Waters called Biden a kind and decent man. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised his vision, values and leadership. She said in a statement, his legacy of vision, values in leadership make him one of the

most consequential presidents in American history. She also called Biden quote a patriotic American who has always put our country first. I did find it a little funny that multiple people described Biden as consequential, because out of all the words you can choose to describe him, that one doesn't necess Saily screamed positive to me, so that did amuse me quite a bit. Former President Barack Obama issued a statement acknowledging the difficulty of the decision that Biden faced.

will do well to follow. Gandhi Audiada. Democratic governors also latted Biden. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called him a great public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes to defeat Donald Trump. California Governor Gavin Newsom thanked Biden, calling him a quote extraordinary history making president. Kentucky Governor Andy Basheer said Biden's decision is quote in the best

interest of our country and our party. Several Democrats who had publicly called on Biden to step aside also issued statements praising the president's decision. Representative Jerry Nadler said, Joe's announcement today reflects what we've known all along. He is an American patriot who was willing to put America's interests

over his own. Senator SHIROD. Brown from Ohio thanked Biden for his years of committed service, and his son Hunter Biden issued a statement lauding his father as a selfless leader, writing he is unique in public life today in that there is no distance between Joe Biden the man and Joe Biden the public servant of the last fifty four years. Well, yikes.

I also wanted to mention an end with how his wife, the First Lady Joe Biden responded, which was with a heart's emoji in response to his announcement on X. But while political leaders and I guess his family showered Biden with compliments, bombs continued to rain down on Gaza, killing dozens to add on to the nearly forty thousand Palestinians killed and sparking another wave of mass displacement in ran Yunis.

For many Palestinian rights advocates, the carnage and abuses in Gaza will define Biden's place in history books, especially as the US remains steadfast in its support of Israel's onslaught on the Palestinian land. Nadine Kaswani, an organizer with the Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, said, nine months of saying genocide Joe has got to go, he finally got the message, but not before committing a heinous genocide against

the Palestinian people. I bet Eyub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee the ADC, said He'll be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured and displaced in Gaza. There is no way around it. Genocide

Joe is what he's going to be remembered as. And before continuing to shit on Biden, because trust me, I would love to do that, let's talk about what is currently happening in Gaza since Israel's genocide Gaza started on October seventh, while really escalated starting October seventh, because the genocide of the Palestinian people has been ongoing since Israel's

inception in nineteen forty eight. But since October seventh and well before that, Biden has offered the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin and Yahoo unconditional military and diplomatic support. Only once did Biden withhold a shipment of bombs to Israel over humanitarian concerns, and even then he released part of that cargo a couple months later amid pressure from

n Yahoo. Israel's genocide meanwhile has killed at least thirty nine thousand Palestinians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and fueled a man made famine, and also has destroyed nearly all of the territory. United Nations experts and other observers have outright called what is happening in Gaza as a textbook case of genocide, and the cumulative effects of Israel's genocide could mean that the true death toll is much much more.

Ordering to a study recently published from the journal Lancet, the death toll could reach more than one hundred and eighty six thousand people. The study pointed out that the death toll is likely higher because the official death toll does not take into account the thousands of dead buried under rubble and indirect deaths due to destruction of health facilities,

food distribution systems, and other public infrastructure. Conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, the study said, and even if the God's genocide ends immediately, it will continue to cause many indirect deaths in the coming months and years through things like disease. The study said. The death toll is expected to be far larger given that much of God's infrastructure has been destroyed. There are shortages

of food, water, shelter medicine. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRA has also seen its funding cut. Israel's relentless bombs has collapsed Gaza's health care infrastructure, and the destruction of Gaza's water infrastructure in particular is

more than just a little significant. One reason for this is that Israel just reintroduced polio to Palestinians, but of course Israel's only providing vaccinations to the Israeli army, and this is according to Herot's Polio is a fecal oral disease and infections can be linked to contaminated and poor sewage systems, and it can lead to paralysis. On June twenty third, twenty twenty four, samples were collected from two environmental surveillance sites in kan Uness and Dead and Badach.

Polio variant two was found in six wastewater samples. According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, currently only sixteen of the thirty six hospitals are partially functional and forty five out of one hundred and five primary health care facilities

are operational. The impact on health systems insecurity, in excessive ability, population displacement, and the shortages of medical supplies, coupled with poor quality of water and weakened sanitation, have contributed to routine immunization rates and an increased risk of many vaccine

preventable diseases, including polio. The World Health Organization considers there to be a high risk of spread of polio within Gaza and internationally, particularly given the impact that the current genocide continues to have on public health services, and even if vaccines were able to be given to Palestinians in Gaza, the continued bombing and a decimated health care system, coupled with the intentional devastation of water and sanitation infrastructure, would

render the vaccines close to useless without an immediate ceasefire. The threat from polio being reintroduced in Gaza will disproportionately affect Palestinian babies and eventually Israeli babies as well. In November twenty twenty three, the World Health Organization warn Israel of diseases spreading due to Israel's indiscriminate bombing and attack

on health care infrastructure. And then on July twenty second, twenty twenty four, three days after the news came out about polio being reintroduced to Gaza by Israel, the Israeli Parliament voted to declare UNRA a terrorist organization and UNRA

is a key partner in vaccine campaign distribution. With this and with many other things, Israel has shown its genocidal intent calculating the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, because if there is any war on Gaza, it's an epidemiological war, weaponizing health and medicine and the incidents, distribution and control

of disease. Back to the Lancet study, it said, quote in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, and after they applied a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per wark undirect death, they said it is not implausible to estimate that up to one hundred and eighty six thousand or even more deaths could be attributable to the Gaza quote

unquote war. Such a number would represent almost eight percent of Gaza's pre war population of two point three million people, half of which, may I remind you, are children. The Lancet study also noted that Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and the World Health Organization all agree that claims of data fabrication leveled against Palestinian authorities in Gaza over its

death toll in particular, are implausible. It pointed out that the toll is likely much higher because the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza has made it extremely difficult to maintain account that is not lower than the actual death toll. It said, quote Documenting the true scale is crucial for ensuring historical accountability and acknowledging the full cost of the war.

It is also a legal requirement. The STU pointed out that the International Court of Justice said interim rulings in January in a genocide case brought against Israel that it needs to quote take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts under the Genocide Convention. Before we continue on, let's take our first break and we'll be right back, and we'rebec I was talking about the International Court of Justice earlier,

and speaking of the International Court of Justice. On July nineteenth, twenty twenty four, the ICJ said Israel's presence in the Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian Territory amount to annexation. It ruled that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and should come to an end as quote rapidly as possible.

The judges pointed to a why list of policies, including the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank in East Jerusalem, the use of the area's natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands, and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated

international law. As of July twenty twenty four, and since October, Israel has killed one hundred and forty three Palestinian children in the West Bank on Palestinian land that is occupied by Israel. Because since Israel began committing genocide in Gaza over nine months ago. It has been attacking and killing hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank, including these one hundred and forty three children. UNICEF reported that Israel has killed an average of one Palestinian child every two days

in the West Bank. UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said, we are seeing frequent allegations of Palestinian children being detained on their way home from school or shot while walking on the streets. This report by UNICEF came out just days after the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and that its occupation of the West Bank is illegal and must end.

The Court went on to say that Israel has no right to sovereignty in any of its territories and it is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force, as well as impeding Palestinian's right to self determination. It said that other nations were obliged not to quote render aid or assistance in maintaining Israel's presence in the territory. It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and existing settlements

must be removed. And this is all according to a summary of the more than eighty page opinion read out by the Court President Nawaf Saddam, The Court said, Israel's abuse of its status as the occupying power renders its presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the regime associated with them have established and are being maintained in violation

of international law. Mind You, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have always been illegal under international law, but that has never stopped Israel from continuing to expand its illegal settlements. Since nineteen sixty seven, when the borders of what is currently seen its occupied Palestine, which are the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, were established, Israel has since built settlements in the West Bank and

East Jerusalem and steadily expanded on them. It also had settlements in Gaza before a two thousand and five withdrawal. And I said what is currently seen its occupied Palestine because in reality, the whole of Israel is occupied Palestine.

But as far as the UN and the majority of the international community goes, they consider the Palestinian territory as defined in nineteen sixty seven as Israeli occupied Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Maniki told reporters in The Hague that the ruling signaled a quote watershed moment for Palestine, for justice and for international law. He said the ICJ fulfilled its legal and moral duties with this historic ruling. All states

must now uphold their clear obligations. No aid, no assistance, no complicity, no money, no arms, no trade, no nothing, no actions of any kind to support Israel's illegal occupation. Riad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said the ruling was quote a significant step in the direction of ending the occupation and attaining the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including their right to self determination, the statehood

and the right of return. The right to return for those who don't know, is it demands that Palestinians who were forced from their homes in the nineteen forty eight Nekba as well as the nineteen sixty seven Nexa, be allowed to return to them. Monsour said his team would study the entire opinion and dissect every sentence. We will consult with an army of friends at the UN and

in all corners of the globe. We will produce a masterpiece of a resolution at the UN General Assembly and then Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the opinion as fundamentally wrong and one sided. Nhennyahu's office issued a statement in which it called the ruling a decision of lies that distorted the truth and asserted that the Jewish people

are not occupiers in their own land. Jeffrey NICs, a human rights barrister, told El Jazeira that it will be hard for world leaders to completely disregard the ICJ ruling, even though it is non binding. This is one part of the legal system saying enough is enough, he said. He also said it would be difficult for the interested, informed, concerned public not to say its time is reel put

its house in order. El Jazeera's senior political analyst, Marwan Dishada said there is a lot of room for hope that this ruling will support a movement, an international movement across the board in the West and elsewhere in the world, in favor of more sanctions, more pressure on Western governments to put more pressure on Israel. In a separate case brought by South Africa, the ICJ is also considering allegations

that Israel's committing genocide into war on Gaza. And yes, a preliminary ruling has been made in that case, with the court ordering Israel to prevent and punish incitement to genocide and to increase its provisions of humanitarian aid, and of course Israel has done nothing to do this. In May, the ICJ had also ordered Israel to halt its offensive on Rapah, the border city in southern Gaza, citing immense risk to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians taking shelter there.

But Israel has continued its attacks on Gaza, including Raphah, defiance of the UN court. So it's clear Israel doesn't give a shit about international law. But it's also clear that no one is doing anything to actually stop them from continuing their genocide on the Palestinian people. Before I forget, let's take our second break here and we'll be right back.

Let's go back to abed Au, the executive director of the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, who said Biden will be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured and displaced in Gaza.

Biden frequently calls himself a Zionist proudly and argues that Jews across the world would not be safe without Israel. He infamously said in June nineteen eighty six, over thirty seven years ago, when Biden was just a young chap of forty three, that quote. Were there not in Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent in Israel.

I want to just throw it out there that even in this quote, Israel exists to protect America's interest in the region, not to protect the Jewish population, because it never has done that in the first place.

that Trump advanced with the twenty twenty Abraham Accords. That push for normalization, however, came without progress toward the recognition of an independent Palestinian state or the dismantling of the systemic anti Palestinian discrimination that has existed since the jump

a Ka apartheid. And then the outbreak for the genocide in Gaza further underscored Biden's pro Israel policies, and then mere weeks after October seventh, Biden traveled to Israel and publicly embraced n Yahou in what many critics described as a bear hug, and that sign of friendliness was widely understood to be an endorsement of Natanyahu's response in Gaza.

Even early in the conflict, human rights groups accused Israel of horrific violations rising to the level of genocide, a push to destroy the Palestinian people, and within the first week alone, the Israeli military said it had unleashed twenty thousand strikes across Gaza, a strip of land. May I remind you that is roughly the size of Las Vegas. According to ap WS January twenty twenty four, the Israeli military campaign in Gaza now sits among the deadliest and

most destructive in modern history. In just over two months, researchers said that the offensive caused more destruction than the raising of Sirius Aleppo between twenty twelve and twenty sixteen, Ukraine's Mariupil, or proportionally the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. Israel has killed more civilians than the US led coalition did in its three year campaign against Isis.

An analysis was done of data from the Copernicus Sentinel I satellite by Corey Scherr of the Kuni Graduate Center and Jaman Vanderhoek of Oregon State University, both of whom are experts in mapping damage during wartime. Corey Scherr said Gaza is now a different color from space, it's a different texture, and he has worked with Vanderhoek to map destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol. They say the visible damage in Gaza is worse than they

have found in both places. But how does the destruction of Gaza stack up historically? By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced the Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. According to Robert Pape, a US military historian, between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty five, the Allies attacked fifty one major German cities and towns, destroying about

forty to fifty percent of their urban areas. Pape said that this amount to ten percent of buildings across Germany, compared to the thirty three percent across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just one hundred and forty square miles. Pape said Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history. It now sits comfortably at the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns.

according to an Associated Press investigation at the time. During the twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen campaign to be Isis in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly fifteen thousand strikes across the country, according to air Wars, a London based independent group that tracks recent conflicts by comparison. The Israeli military said itself that in a single week in January,

it conducted twenty two thousand strikes in Gaza. Again, compared that to the fifteen thousand in the three years the US was fighting Isis three years compared to one week. One week had more strikes in Gaza than three years in Iraq. To further put it in perspective about how alarming this is from the jump that what is happening is not fucking normal warfare and instead it is genocide.

On October twelfth, twenty twenty three, merely days after October seventh, the Israeli air force had dropped about six thousand bombs throughout the Gaza Strip. At the time, military experts stated that the number of strikes carried out by the IDF since the outbreak of hostilities was quote striking, and it said it was greater in number than the US military used in the month of the campaign against ISIS in

Iraq in Syria. Mark Duralsko, a Dutch military adviser and former UN war crimes investigator in Libya, said in less than a week, Israel dropped the number of bombs that the US dropped in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller and denser area where the margin of error increases.

During the most intense year of the American fighting in Afghanistan, a little more than seven thousand, four hundred and twenty three bombs were dropped during the entire war in Libya, NATO reported dropping more than seventy six hundred bombs and missiles from aircraft and not even a month after October seventh. On November two, twenty twenty three, Euromed Human Rights Monitor said in a press release that Israel had dropped more than twenty five thousand tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip,

equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The press release said that due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, noting that the area of the Japanese city is nine hundred square kilometers, while the area of Gaza does not even exceed three hundred and sixty square kilometers.

The rights group's statement underlines that Israel uses bombs with huge destructive power, some of which range from one hundred and fifty to one thousand kilograms, and they cited a statement at the time in November by Israeli war Minister Yoev Galant that declared that more than ten thousand bombs had been dropped on Gaza City alone and then Israel's use of internationally banned weapons in its attacks on the Gaza Strip has been documented, said EUROMED Monitor, especially the

use of cluster and phosphorus bombs, which are waxy, toxic substances that react quickly to oxygen and cause severe sound, second and third degree burns. The Euromed Monitor team also documented injuries among Gossins due to Israeli airstrikes that are similar to those caused by the aforementioned cluster bombs. These small, high explosive bombs cause penetrating shrapnel, wounds and explosions inside the body, leaving victims with severe burns that lead to

skin melting off and sometimes to death. Fragments from these bombs cause unusual swelling and poisoning of the body, plus internal injuries from transparent fragments that do not even appear in X rays. Euromed Monitor said Israel's use of highly explosive bombs in densely populated areas poses the single greatest threat to civilians and modern armed conflicts, and explains the complete leveling of residential neighborhoods in Gaza and the overall

severity of the widespread devastation there. According to euromed Monitor, which is a Geneva based human rights organization, the Israeli Army as admitted to bombing over twelve thousand targets in the Gaza Strip, with a recordality of bombs exceeding ten kilograms of explosives per individual. It highlighted that the weight of the nuclear bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in August of nineteen forty five was estimated to

be about fifteen thousand tons of explosives. The Rights organization further stressed that Israel's destructive and arbitrary attacks are in violation of international humanitarian law, which stipulates that the protection of civilians is obligatory in all cases and under any circumstances, and that killing civilians is considered a war crime in both international and non international armed conflicts and may amount

to a crime against humanity. The Hague Conventions of eighteen ninety nine and nineteen oh seven and the nineteen forty nine Geneva Convention both regulates fundamental human rights in times of war to prevent lethal health effects from weapons that are prohibited by international law, some of which because they

have the potential to cause quote unquote genocide. According to Article twenty five of the Hague Regulations relating to the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare, quote, the attack or bombardment by whatever means of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended is prohibited, So think of all of that as you listen to this next bit. Biden has since authorized continuous arms transfers and more than fourteen billion

dollars in additional aid to sustain Israel's Gaza offensive. Moreover, Biden's administration has vetoed three UN Security Council proposals that would have called for a ceasefire. Hatem Abudeya, the chair of the US Palestinian Community Network, said Biden will be remembered above all for enabling Israel's crimes against humanity.

could happen here. My name is Sharene Still, and today is part two of our two part series about a Palestine update as well as a testament as to why Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. In the last episode, we talked about the amount of weapons that Biden had has been sending to Israel and what this destruction has caused, as well as the reactions to his withdrawal from his campaign. So I want to get into a brief history of Biden's history and politics, as well as what his relationship

has been like with Palestinians in general. So let's start in nineteen seventy. Following his entry into politics in nineteen seventy, Biden quickly rose from local to national prominence, mounting a successful dark horse campaign to represent Delaware in the US Senate in nineteen seventy two. After nearly four decades in Congress, he became vice president under Barack Obama, and in twenty

twenty one, he won the presidency himself. So the current president does not hail from a political dynasty, and he is not an exceptional orator. His success in politics is often credited to his interpersonal skills and his ability to project empathy. That sense of compassion, however, has never extended

to Palestinians. After Biden's announcement of withdrawing from the race, Jewish Voice for Peace Action said in a statement quote, for nine and a half months, President Biden has funded and armed the brutal Israeli genocide of Palestinians and Gaza, making the US directly complicit in the killing of at least thirty nine thousand people, including over fifteen thousand children.

Americans have watched in horror and outrage as Biden sent to the Israeli government the weapons it used to wipe out entire generations of Palestinian families, to destroy hospitals, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, universities, refugee camps, homes, and Gaza's entire healthcare system and electricity and water grids, and beyond policy. Even Biden's rhetoric at

times seemed dismissive of Israeli atrocities and Palestinian suffering. Last October, he said, I have no notion that the Palestinians telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocens have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war. It's terrible, fucking terrible. But that stance has

clearly caused Biden issues both domestically and abroad. Even before Biden delivered a disastrous debate performance on June twenty seventh, he had started to trail Trump in public opinion polls. Parts of his Democratic base, including young people, progressives, Arabs, and Muslims, voiced for months their frustration and anger over

Biden's support for Israel. Groups like the USCPR the US Campaign for Palaicing in Rights argued that Biden's age and debate performance were only one factor in the pressure that forced him from the presidential race. I'm going to read their statement because it's quite good quote. Nothing will erase the fact that Biden's legacy is and always will be genocide. It was not Biden's failed debate that showed he is unfit to lead. It was the tens of thousands of

bombs he sent to kill Palestinian families. It was his callous, dystopian disregard for Palestinian lives as he ate an ice cream cone while speaking of a potential ceasefire that he took no action to make Israel agree to. It was his condemnation of thousands of student protesters on college campuses demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Other commentators likewise argued that Biden failed to show enough concern for

the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. Aaron David Miller, a veteran former US official, described the situation bluntly in an interview with The New Yorker in April. Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis. No, he doesn't, nor does he condicate. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Additionally, Biden's withdrawal from the race followed a particularly deadly month of violence

in Gaza. Two Israeli airstrikes killed more than sixty people the week leading up to his withdrawal, including in Israeli designated quote unquote safe zones and at a UN's school where families were sheltering, and then the ICJ, the UN's top court, ruled only a few days before his withdrawal that Israel must end its illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, removing settlers from the Palestinian territories,

and pay reparations to Palestinians. The court also found that Palestinians under occupation suffer quote systemic discrimination based on race, religion, or ethnic origin, and it urged other states to stop supporting Israel in maintaining the current situation, which is also

called apartheid. USCPR Action executive director Ahmad Abuznid in the group's statement, the millions of people who have mobilized in the streets and the voting booth demanding a permanent cease fire and an end to military funding to Israel have been clear. There is no going back to the status quo. It remains unclear how differently the next Democratic nominee might

approach Israel. Harris, the most likely nominee as of now, obviously, has repeatedly asserted Israel's right to defend itself while expressing sympathy for Palestinians when calling for at least day six weeks ease fire in March, which is a little hypocritical. But she was also part of the Biden administration that sent all those bombs to Israel. She does not get a pass. She does not get to be distanced from that.

And on the other side of things, Trump called Biden quote a very bad Palestinian during the first presidential debate on June twenty seventh for not helping Israel quote finish the job in God's During Trump's presidency, he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he recognized Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Syrian region of the Golan Heights, Whorrena Enyahu named a Jewish only settlement after Trump. But as the genocide in Gaza continues, organizers are quick to

point out the Democratic Party's complicity as a whole. Hu Taifa Ahmad, spokesperson for the Abandoned Biden Campaign, said, we don't think this is solely a Joe Biden problem. This is an institutional problem. In an online statement, the group invited Harris to meet with its organizers. The Abandoned Biden Campaign was one of the first coalitions to call for

Democrats to replace Biden. We were mocked, denigrated, spoken down to, he said, but organizers stood firm in their principles as they gained momentum, and they will continue to do so as the quote disastrous and criminal approach to Gaza continues under the Biden foreign policy, with officials like Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGirk. Ahmed said, abandon Biden means abandoning this legacy and the decisions Biden made surrounding Israel.

Given the Democratic Parties lionizing the president since his exit from the race, its becoming increasingly clear we may have to extend this to whoever becomes the next nominee. He indicated that they will continue to call on voters not to support any candidate who maintains Biden's blanket support for Israel. The Abandoned Biden Group released a statement referencing the June debate, during which Biden at times was noncoherent to say the least.

It was largely his performance that triggered a wave of calls, including from prominent Democratic Congress members, for Biden to step aside. The statement read, it is clear that the DNC machinery pressure Joe Biden to step down only after losing confidence in his ability to lead due to his cognitive decline. This action came not when he was enthusiastically supporting and sponsoring the genocide in Gaza, but when his declining capabilities

could no longer be concealed. Biden's departure from the race comes ahead of the party's upcoming national convention, which is slated for August nineteenth, through the twenty second in Chicago, and now with just under three months before the general election. Harris, whom the Clintons and other Democratic leaders have also endorsed, will need to gain the support of the majority of the nearly four thousand delegates to win the party's nomination. But for many voters pushing for an end to the

Gaza genocide, the path forward remains the same. A coalition of more than one hundred and twenty five anti oppression organizations said in a statement that it is still preparing to gather tens of thousands to march on the Democratic National Convention on August nineteenth. The Coalition to March on the DNC said when it comes to the genocide and Gaza, there is no difference between Biden, Harris or any of the likely candidates for the nomination. They are all complicit.

This protest is about more than the name at the top of a ballot. It is about stopping the most horrific crime against humanity that we have seen in this century. The statement said that the organizations that joined the coalition quote recognize the links between the Palestinian liberation struggle and their own struggles involving issues like police accountability, immigration, labor,

reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA plus rights. They also recognize that Democratic Party higher ups often neglect their communities in favor of serving the rich and powerful. Quote those responsible for the genocide and not just Biden are often obstacles to progress in the same movements they pay lip service to in order to boost their campaigns. USCPR Action said the masses of millions of Americans protesting in the streets will

certainly not wait for the next president. While US made bombs paid for with our tax dollars are dropping in Gaza. Regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee and candidate elect is, the next steps are clear. The group called on all members of Congress to disrupt or protest the Nyaho's plan addressed to Congress which happened last week, and they urge lawmakers to pass an arms embargo against Israel. The group said, quote, as Israel kills a Palestinian every four minutes and escalates

regional war, justice could not wait another day. Let's take a break ry here before we jump into speech.

the representative of Michigan's twelfth congressional district, was present. She is, mayor remind you, the first Palestine American woman to serve in Congress and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. She was there sitting during the Enyahu's speech, wearing a coffea and holding a sign that read war criminal on one side and guilty of genocide on the other side, and she was holding the sign up throughout his speech. July twenty fourth, the day of Nan Yahoo's speech,

also happened to be her birthday. So if my blood was boiling thousands of miles away watching on my little computer screen, I could only imagine how she felt sitting in that room as everyone cheered and applauded and stood up for this war criminal who was spewing lie after lie in the entirety of his speech, as our tax dollars are supplying him with more weapons to kill innocent people. The almost certain Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris, was

also not present. Though she would ordinarily preside over such a speech in Congress as vice president, her campaign cited scheduling conference. I guess she gave a speech in Indianapolis earlier that day. I also just wanted to highlight quickly the hypocrisy of the vast majority of Democrats right now, especially the ones that criticized the speech that the nayah who gave it Congress or said that he should have

given speech at all. How much stronger would it have been if they sat by Rashida in that room instead of leaving the only Palaestini member of Congress sitting by herself on her fucking birthday listening to the person that has genocided her people. It would have been such an amazing demonstration of support and strength to have her colleagues sitting with her, but instead she was alone Naenyah who gave this speech seeking to rally support for continuing Israel's

military campaign aka genocide in Gaza. He was greeted by anti war protesters outside the Capitol understandably so. The day before the speech, over five hundred Jewish people flooded the Capitol building demanding arms embargo to Israel and demanding a ceasefire. They shouted things like let Gaza live, free Palestine, not

in our name, and stop genocide. And then during the Enyahu's speech, he blasted these protesters from his podium, calling them Iran's useful idiots and calling pro Palestinian protester as broadly as Hamas supporters and as nt Enyah who praise Israeli military members as lions of Judah. Capital police was using pepper spray against pro Palestinian protesters just outside the doors. The irony of this speaks for itself, and we all know by now. I hope that our police trains with

the Israeli military. Adam Abusala, a Arab American activist from Dearborn, Michigan, said, it is a shame that the Enyaho was invited to speak to Congress. It's a disgrace that members from both parties have invited him to speak here. It's a disgrace that Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, will meet with him. Abu Salah told Al Jazeira this at an anti na Enya who protest that was near the Capitol. He said, we are here to say enough

is enough. As Americans, we will not stand for that. In his speech, Naenyahoo praised the US Congress as a citadel of democracy and described the genocide and Gaza as a clash between barbarism and civilization. He said and repeated lie after lie, and people stood up and applauded after practically every sentence he repeated, proven untrue, hasbar propaganda lies, repeating false claims about October seventh about how men were

beheaded and babies were burned. Alive investigations, including those done by Israel, have found that little evidence has emerged to substantiate some of the most gruesome stories pushed by Israeli leaders like Naan Yahoo. And these lies were a part of a methodology that was designed to bolster a false

notion of Palestinian's being an inherently subhuman people. I'm going to play this clip from Mehdi Hassan about the most egregious lie, in my opinion, that was spread around for months and is still being spread around today as we see from Danyahu's speech. But it's about the forty headed babies.

their investigation, they were all lies. In fact, according to data released by Israel's Social Security Agency, Tragically, there was one baby killed on October the seventh, ten month old Miela Cohen. Maye her memory be a blessing, but in the interests of facts, she was not beheaded. Now, one baby killed is one baby too many, a tragedy, a crime, But forty beheaded babies is just a cynical, reckless, repulsive lie that was then used to justify the killing of hundreds of Palestinian babies.

abuse perpetrated by Hamas October seventh. In these interviews, len Dau comes off as almost like a used car salesman. One of his claims is that he found a pregnant woman whose quote, stomach was butchered open and whose baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed. And he insists in the reporter that if you want to see

their picture, I have a picture of it. And then the reporter apologizes when looking at this photo because they can't see a baby there, and then Lendau's stammers and tries to cover his tracks because the photo, as it turns out, depicts what the narrator of this documentary describes as a quote unidentical piece of charred flesh, which, as it happens, is not some unlike many of the bodies that phil Lendau's accounts of unspeakable depravity, and as the

documentary further notes, the IDF has repeatedly debunked those stories on the bay of basic forensic evidence, most notably when it revised its total death count by two hundred because it realized that some of the dead bodies were Palestinian. And even though the IDF lies a lot, it does

concede eventually with enough pressure the truth. By November, the IDF conceded that it had actually deployed Apache helicopters and tanks to the Nova Music Festival that may have killed some of the Nova Festival concertgoers in accordance to something that is called the Hannibal directive, which I will also mention in a bit, but it's a doctrine named for a general who poisoned himself rather than be questioned by his robin captors, and in a similar vein this directive

is basically when the Israeli army is ordered to fire upon its own troops to prevent the enemy from taking those troops hostage around noon on October seventh. According to Israeli newspapers that were cited in this documentary, the IDF may have invoked a version of the Hannibal Directive and expanded it to include Israeli citizens, and in accordance to this, began to blindly open fire with rockets and helicopter gunships on any person or a vehicle seen moving across the

border to Gaza. In particular, the documentary visits Kabbutz be Air, where a munitions expert demonstrates very strong evidence that some of the houses had been hit with IDF tank fire. It was Israeli troops, not Hamas murderers, according to one resident, who killed twelve longtime residents there. But let's go back to Nanyahu's speech. He also lied about civilian casualties and Israel's liberate starving of Gaza. He said in his speech, this is not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash

between barbarism and civilization. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together, because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win, they lose. Of course, he didn't mention the most daming part of October seventh, the Hannibal Directive. Earlier this month, Haretes reported that the IDF ordered the Hannibal Directive on

October seventh to prevent Hamas from taking soldiers captive. It said there was a crazy hysteria and decisions started to be made without verified information. Documents and testimonies obtained by Heretes revealed the Hannibal operational Order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, and it was employed at three army facilities that were infiltrated by Hamas. And this potentially endangered civilians as well, which

we know Israel has killed. We know Israel killed some of its own citizens on October seventh, and now we know that it killed some of its own soldiers.

highly recommend reading the Harets report in full. It is damning and important, especially as you see these leaders spouting lies and then the NYAHUO praised the families of captives being held in Gaza, and these families are a group that has consistently expressed frustration with the n Yaho back in Israel, but they of course figure prominently in his messaging overseas because he uses them for his own benefit.

Believing this whole genocide or a war, if you want to call it that, whatever about the hostages is disingenuous at best.

have walked out of nan Yaho's address to Congress. The PM goes on to pledge not to rest until the hostages are home, leading the vast majority in the room to stand and applaud, save for roughly a dozen or

so hostage families. Israeli opposition leader air Lapede bashed nan Yaho's speech in a social media post, saying that the Israeli leader went through his speech without endorsing the deal to bring the remaining captives home on x He called speech a disgrace and to use an exclamation point for emphasis, disgrace,

that's how it read. Nanna, who also said that a regional alliance must be forged to counter the influence of Iran, and he thanked Biden for his efforts to that effect and for calling for an extension of the so called Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords were signed on September fifteenth, twenty twenty, during Trump's presidency, and it's something that Trump,

of course often takes credit for. The accords in brief, normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE as well as Bahrain, and then later a renewal in ties with Morocco. So as part of the two agreements, both the UAE and Bahrain recognized Israel's sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations. During his speech, n'annah who said, I have a name for this new alliance. I think we should

call it the Abraham Alliance. And then he also thanked Trump, of course for Trump's efforts promoting normalization efforts between Israel and other countries in the region. And as I mentioned, his speech was filled with nothing but lies. Some that I've already mentioned, here are some more highlights. Nn Yaho said the majority of Americans support Israeli actions, but polling says otherwise. He said, quote, the vast majority of Americans

have not fallen for this Hamas propaganda. They continue to support Israel. But a recent Gallup poll showed that forty eight percent of people in the US disapprove of Israel's actions in Gaza, compared to the forty two percent who are supportive. A May poll by Data for Progress also found that about seventy percent of all voters support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which Natnyahu has firmly rejected time and time again. And many things men Yaho said made

me pray that I would get an aneurism. And one of those things is when he said that Israel is going quote beyond what international law requires to avoid civilian casualties. Meanwhile, of course, numerous rights groups have said Israel is flaunting international law and targeting civilians in Gaza, where it has systematically cut off supplies of food and water, displacing more than ninety percent of the population and wiping out entire

neighborhoods and generations of families. And then you have media outlets reporting that the Israeli forces in Gaza see large swaths of the strip as quote free fire zones. And then there was a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza who recently spoke to a reporter and he accused Israeli snipers of targeting Palestinian children. He said, the children are being shot right in the heart and in the head, so much so that a stethoscope was unable to go

over their heart. That's how precise these shots were. I'm talking about Doc Mark pearl Mutter about his medical mission in Gaza, and I want to play a clip of him here because I think what he has to say is very important and needs to be heard.

of that were shot so perfectly in the chest. I couldn't put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately and directly on the side of the head in the same child, No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best sniper and they're dead center shots.

chickens who support the restaurant of KFC. And this bit might have been my favorite quote, just because the level of stupidity reached a level I didn't know what was possible. Quote, these protesters hold up signs saying gaze for Gaza, they might as well hold up signs that say chickens for KFC. And then, of course, after he said this, nearly every member of Congress stood up and clapped Naen Yahoo, for whom the ICC prosecutors are currently seeking an arrest warrant

for for his alleged war crimes. Has said that pro Palestinian protesters stand with evil. In his speech, he said they stand with hamas they stand with rapists and murderers, adding that they should be ashamed. He also said quote the outrageous Slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish state, to demonize Jews everywhere, and no wonder, no wonder, we witnessed an appalling rise and anti Semitism in America and

around the world. And of course, Dan Yahoo praised Biden for his heartfelt support for Israel in his speech, Dan Yah, who said quote, after the savage attack on October seventh, Biden rightly called hamas sheer evil, and then he played up their more than forty year relationship because they're both fucking old and shouldn't be in power anymore. I guess

one of them won't be, he said. Biden dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Middle East to deter a wider war, and then he came to Israel to stand with us in our darkest hour, a visit that will never be forgotten. And yet it won't be forgotten because Biden's legacy will forever be his complicity and assistance in the genocide of Palestine. After the speech was concluded, Hamas said that the speech shows n En Yahu's lack of interest in a ceasefire.

Hamas senior official Sammy Abuzuhui said that Natanyahu's remarks demonstrate that he is not interested in ending the war, and this is according to the US news outlet Reuters. He said Nahnyahu's speech was full of lies and it will not succeed in covering up for the failure and defeat in the face of the resistance. He added that the address would also not quote cover up for the crimes of the war of genocide his army is committing against

the people of Gaza. In a statement, Zat Oldish, a member of the Palestinian Group's political bureau, slammed the speech by the quote unquote criminal Naanyahu as a party of lies. At that Yusef, a thirty two year old Palestinian American, told Al Jazeera that she traveled to Washington, d C. From New York to voice her concerns by Nanyahu's address to Congress, and she called the Prime minister, a quote war criminal who should stand trial. Yes he should, that's

what international quote wants, she said, quote. We are just here to cause a disruption, shut it down, and say not in our names, not with our consent. She called the N Yahoo's invite to Congress disgusting.

the N Yahoo and invite him here. And I'm really hoping this next part is true, because while Naanyahu's speech sought to shore up support for Israel, El Jazeera correspondent rosalind Jordan reported that it is unlikely to alter the political landscape in the US, where the opposition to the war in Gaza slash the genocide in Gaza is widespread. She said, it's not going to change the political reality

here in the United States. There are many millions of people who are disgusted by what they see how happening in the war in Gaza. They see the mounting death toll nearing forty thousand, men, women, and children, and many thousands more injured, the entire population essentially homeless inside Gaza. She also added that schisms have emerged within the Democratic Party over support for Israel, while the Republican Party remains largely united around calls for continued and even increased support.

My good friend and yours, Robert Evans said about Nanyahu's speech at Congress, this is both the most resistance to Israel I have seen from US political leadership and the most public embrace of Israel I have seen.

which have all been well documented and plentiful. But that doesn't matter though, because then Yahoo still gave his ridiculous speech and bombs are still raining down on Gaza. And with that we have concluded this two part series about why Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. Until next time, please continue to talk about Palestine and what's happening there.

We provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think tank ghoules, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by popular speakers at the event. We'll have some more in depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention. But on top of our regular coverage, I also had a special assignment that I'm more or less assigned to

myself on this show. We often talk about right wing extremism and issue facing gay and trans people, including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment, and physical violence. As these are two of our most frequently covered topics, being at the Republican National Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between

conservatism and homosexuality. For years, I've heard rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans flocking to the gay hookup app Grinder to get laid during the RNC. Whether they be twenty year old Republican twinks from Miami or fifty three year old self hating, closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages, Curiosity has often gotten the better of me, and I needed to know how

many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grinder. In case you're unfamiliar, Grinder is technically a dating app that serves the LGB community, but in actuality, it is a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers in their forties to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures of their penis. Grinder was launched in two thousand and nine and is arguably the largest and most popular gay

dating app, especially among men. Grinder has only been around for two in person RNCs prior to this point, twenty twelve and twenty sixteen, since all convention activities moved online during twenty twenty for the pandemic. So this July, for the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around the country could gather in one city and once their wives fell asleep, log on to Grinder and this episode, I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience.

Before traveling to the city that was about to be invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers liked that terrible place. Based on the massive increase in violent anti trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew that I would be dusting off my old boy

motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male. Although my ability to pass as a straight mail is debatable, I can at least easily pass as a not quite straight male. My trans feminine fashion taste has been skewing more mask lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue. I packed up basically all my button up collar shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige

London fog trench coat. Basically, the vibe I was going for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy dressed as a nineteen fifties FBI agent. I refer to this as Dale Cooper Moting. I was unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like

Baron Trump meets Total Swinton. In Constantine, I was kind of Gabriel maxing for most of the convention, and though most attendees were unable to pick up on my diikish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did get she heard by the Secret Service when entering the convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke, So that

was my general look for the convention. I also completely remade my grinder profile for the RNZ for Simplicity's sake, I got to emphasize my twinkish past and removed the explicitly non binary transgender aspects of my profile, replacing some of my more trans coded photos with pictures of my light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay. Perhaps next rn C I can experiment with discovering how many of the RNC

attendees are chasers. But for safety's at sake, I went to more stealth, both online and in person at RNZ related events. For my main profile picture, I chose a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted. I chose the yet elegant user name Twink, and for my bio wrote gen z in town for convention, which I thought was pretty funny and signals to people that yes, I am here for the RNC, but leaves the exact

reason why still a bit mysterious. So this was my bait. On my way to the airport, I was already dressed for the part, as I suspected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part of the whole RNC experience. I arrived at the gate and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with even whiter hair, wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range. They all kind of looked like

my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were all cause playing their favorite female Fox and News anchor with bleached blonde hair. There were a handful of delegates as well as Republican super fans wearing Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention, the way a nerd would be excited to go to

San Diego Comic Con. Others at the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the Atlanta airport, but I could still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their RNC expectations and in hushed tones asking others at the gate if they were going to the convention. And that's what everyone called it, not the Republican Convention, not the GOP convention or the RNC

the convention. As I was bording the plane, an older woman with straw like blonde hair sitting a few rows in front of me waves me and asked, young man,

are you going to the convention. I gave my best yes, ma'am, took my seat, and then heard her remark to her friend about how happy she was that more young people are attending the convention, and I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the convention and what I was doing there, mainly trying to collect as much information about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans as I can. And you will hear more about those

weird Grinder RNC Republicans after the break. This episode is brought to you in part by the top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening to as I was coming out from adderall while writing the second half of this episode, as well as these products and sponsors. Okay, back to the Grind. Most convention activities took place in the Peiser Forum, which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce.

This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my grinder cruising so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into the Pfeiser Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up Grinder and refresh my feed to see what

profiles were in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grinder, one of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector, telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away. Every night, when I got back to the hotel after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check a Grinder to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the

hotels by the airport. The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grinder, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby

hotels roughly fifteen hundred feet away from my bed. The Grinder proximity detector was quite useful to me and locating profiles active around the footprint of the R and C, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the RNC from out of state. Because Milwaukee is about six hundred and fifty miles away

from Atlanta. If someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the rn C from out of state, even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons for why their distance markers might not line up exactly.

And I think they have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay, you've been very patient, and now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my grinder in box. And I gotta say I think I started off pretty strong. While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started, I got one of the very first messages I received from a twenty one year old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and

vegenta tie. Already frendous vibes. He asked me if I was quote unquote with the GOP, and I said, I was attending with friends, and then I got no further response. I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then after the convention was over, he moved like three hundred miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for

the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative quote but not a hardcore Republican unquote, and he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would quote meet my future husband unquote. The first chaser I encountered with the bio looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass, saw through my sister gender disguise and messaged me cock question mark.

I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be Tea for Tea, who asked me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an anime convention in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me, quote hope you're finding what you're looking for smiley face, which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking

for some other gay Republican. Another local with the name Older for Young sent me the message quote boomer who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck. I asked him if the quote unquote talk politics pickup line works very often, and he replied, quote less often than I would hope for on here zero unquote. He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app telling me that they have infiltrated grinder. He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at. So

that was the end of that conversation. A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely excited that the RNC was in town. They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going,

as most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend. One such fellaw, who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd unquote, would have liked to attend, but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed quote extra staffing just in case unquote. Now, the worst profile picture I found was an older guy wearing a baseball camp and one of those half faced skull masks like Adam

Offfen used to wear. He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the RNC but to visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent. Very baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking you're a Republican and I said not really, putting

it lightly, and he never got back to me. I did find a thirty one year old chaser named Greg I do believe with attending the convention, and his bio read quote anon come drain me trans CD as crossdresser sissy fem to the front of the line. I asked, you like trans and he responded yes. We had no

further conversation. I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grinder at the Heritage Foundation party. And lastly, really the only guy I saw who openly claims to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a thirty two year old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the user name

suck me Off one word. He described the convention as exhausting but awesome and told me he was quote proud to support President Trump unquote and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump, talked about Corey Compretour, the man who was

killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after mister suck me off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was, I just replied to him, poor Corey, and he messaged me back Corey Who, and that he told

me what exact hotel he was staying at. Now, part of the danger of trying to use Grinder directly in the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non zero chance that some passer by or persons sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dickpic that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages. And this is simply a non negotiable

part of the Grinder experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some Balding, forty three year old married man will appear in your inbox ordinarroly. I would check the profile first to see who might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a DM. Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible.

But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my dms, this was impossible without opening up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chatlog. Due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grinder at the RNC, about halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently. But the main glitch I had to deal with, which has since been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile

from the DM's page. I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.

So there I was watching Ted Cruise's speech sitting underneath about fifty Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of Dick pics to see who was local and who was here for the r and C, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the r and C. Around midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over

one thousand users reported a Grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the website down detector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the final day of the r and C that quote reports that the Grinder app crashing increased by more than ninety percent in the past forty eight hours

across the country unquote. The down detector heat map showed Grinder outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hot spot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in act and you will hear more about that activity after this

ad break. This episode of It could Happen Here is brought to you in part by the Challenger's soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I was listening to as I wrote most of this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is also brought to you by these products and services. We once again returned to the grind. We got to keep on grinding. We're almost done, but we got to grind a little more. Just one more grind bro I swear about addictors. One more grind broach,

one more grind. During the influx of reports about the Grinder app breaking during the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive increase in activity. Quote breaking, an executive of the gay dating app Grinder says the Republican

National Convention is quote basically Grinder's super Bowl unquote. This quote from a Grinder executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the Internet about five different articles, and even a disgraced former New York Congressman, George Sentos, commented on the phenomenon, content warning gay Republican.

the RNC. Other active destinations including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach, and Trump Tower showed no comparable increase in active users. Unquote. Many of the local twinks and trans folks certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app. People would often first ask me if I was a Republican or why I was in town before trying to hit on me. One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something,

but I had to check. As the week progressed, more locals told me that they had found a handful of out and proud patriots online, but really not many. In fact, multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who were online for the same reason than I was, to see if there was an influx of closeted Republicans. Someone told me, quote for the record, it's like three

times busier here than normal. Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up to, and the chasers have come out of the woodwork unquote. Far from being the app's super Bowl. According to Weiss, the twenty sixteen rnc's sixty six percent bump in activity is less than one half of the increase in Grinder activity that was seen at the last in person DNC, an event, which was

also a whole day shorter. I'lade from Wes Quote. However, from Sunday to Monday, the week of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher one hundred and forty eight percent increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia.

claim about Grinder purposely outing gay conservatives. Both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.

from over one hundred and fifty different people. Over ninety percent of the messages I received and profiles visible online even while inside the Pfizer forum were from locals completely unaffiliated with the RNZ, and any boost activity that can be attributed to people visiting for the r and C is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy festival of out of town gay Democrats who travel to the DNC, and like, if you think about

this logically, this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has spent the past two years screaming about how all drag queens are child groomers. And though this was the first year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to and attacks against trans people and really any display of a visible queerness, like, come on, this is

the Republican Party. There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are secretly gay. And while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed homosexual preacher, this is not the norm, and all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving

force of legislative homophobia. It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism, and now for people like Elon Musk and more, young Republicans of fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people white people aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people,

resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex. Never mind the fact that queer and trans people oftentimes can and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit. So no, Grinder wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans

that are going to be attending the RNC. And while there may not be as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored. Basically figured out based on my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of local Grinder users and journalists I talked with who were online during the twenty twenty four rn C, and considering the twenty sixteen Grinder data, I can report that merely a small minority of activity was

due to ordinary RNZ attendees. The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly used Grinder or were specifically curious about who might be online during the RNC. I observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone who attends the RNC are guests or delegates. A lot of people work at the convention center or work tech, and a sizeable chunk of people are like myself, researchers, pollsters or journalists who attend

conventions like this for work. And lastly, the final group that fills out the bump in grinder activity, one that for some reason didn't really expect to see upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense.

toned and muscular people. He messaged me saying, hey, now I got a lot of Hayese in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grinder. You will probably mostly get hay as a message as well as just like, you know, a picture of someone's penis, but between a penis and hey, those are probably the two most received messages you will

get on Grinder. There was another guy with a username DL military who said in his bio he was working security for the week and that Grinder messages had completely broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat. The DL in DL military stands for down low. It's a tag that only the worst people on Grinder will use, mainly like self hating gay men who are closeted and it's download because they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay. Just absolutely the worst. We do not

fuck with DL, both literally and figuratively. There were a bunch of other non locals who I would describe as cop types. I can't one hundred percent say for sure that they are cops, but they have like the look, you know, like the look, the cop look. I don't know. They could also be like a bodyguard or working private security. But one of these cop looking guys message to me asking if I was a trans guy, which I always love to see. It means I'm doing gender very well.

And a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages. So yeah, a lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the fact that basically half the cops in the country were at the Republican National Convention in some

form or another. A few final notes, Now this didn't really make up a sizeable chunk of the Grinder population, but after saying I was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grinder just completely unprompted told me that they were attending the protests against the RNC.

interesting anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't think Trump is going to win. I can missed for Hillary in twenty sixteen, and at least here it doesn't feel the same.

Stay safe out there. Be careful if you're ever on grinder, please especially I don't tell someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests, but in general, be careful on these types of dating apps, and I will see you on the other side. Message from Quickie Grinder said you were super close yesterday. Wasn't stalking?