The Right Wing Palestine Grifters Part 1: The Left Creates a Monster

In the first of three episodes about the right wing grifters exploiting Israel's crimes in Palestine we look at the conditions on the left that made their rise possible

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to I Could Happened Here, a podcast about a
world sliding ever further into the abyss. I'm your host,
Mia Wong. As the wave of atrocities committed by Israel
and the Gaza strip rate is on and the moral
authority of Biden and his liberal cohort crumbles day by day,
a new generation of right wing media grifters have seized

(00:24):
on Palestine as a way to boost their own reactionary brand.
But these are not the standard kind of right wing
grifter that we've become accustomed to on this show. They
aren't Chris Ruffo, they aren't libbit of TikTok, and although
they will eventually appear on Tucker Carlson, they aren't cut
from that pre existing template. These are our monsters. These

(00:48):
are monsters birth by the left I grew up in,
by the generation of new socialist radicalized by Bernie Sanders,
the serience of a war, and the election of Donald Trump.
This is largely to be a set up episode to
understand the background of the kinds of people who are
going to come later, But I wanted to start the

(01:08):
story with a taste of where it's going to end.
Max Blumenthal is a left wing journalist with the outlet
Gray Zone. He was for a very long time well
regarded in anti imperialist circles. In many ways, he is
the ideological predecessor to enormous portions of the modern left.
In twenty twenty one, Anthony Fauci, the former head of

(01:29):
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Biden's
chief health official, went on Face the Nation to face
allegations and calls by Senator Ran Paul and Ted Cruz
for him to step down and quote be prosecuted over
the course of COVID nineteen. Yeah, after the Saint if
you happen to Face the Nation, release a tweet about it.
Bluementhal responded with an incredibly disturbing video. I'm going to

(01:52):
read the tweet. I'm not going to play the video
because this guy listening to him is a painful experience.
Bluementhal responded, quote Nobel winning inventor of the PCR test,
Carrie Molus on Anthony, quote I am the science Fauci quote,
and this is from Mollas. Tony Fauci does not mind
going on camera in front of the people who pay

(02:14):
his salary and lie directly into the camera. By the way,
the part where he says lie instead of lying, there
is a direct quote that is him, not me. So
to understand how absolutely it absolutely absurd this is we
need to talk about who Carrie Burris actually is. So
Max Bluemoenthal is correct that Carrie Mollis won the nineteen

(02:39):
ninety three Nobel Prize for the invention of the PCR test,
which is now one of the basic building blocks of biology.
Like they let undergrads and college do this stuff, but
he is also an enormous crank. Berkeley's alumni magazine wrote
a profile of him when he died in twenty nineteen.
They described him like this quote. He'd become a vociferous
critic of widely accepted scientific theories, ridiculing the notion that

(03:03):
CFCs caused the ozone hole, that humans caused climate change,
and that HIV caused aids now Okay, climate change denihilism,
I think is something we all understand. The ozone layer
stuff is extremely funny. This interviews from the nineties. So
in the nineties we were using these things called CFC's,
which is a class of chemical that we used in

(03:24):
like hairspray and refrigerators and using them tore a hole
in the ozone layer. So the world, for maybe the
last time, actually performed a collective action, stopped using them,
and the hole fixed itself. So okay, obviously, carry mollis
unbelievably and very quickly proven unbelievably wrong. But the last part,

(03:45):
the part where carry Mullus claims that HIV does not
cause AIDS, we need to talk about a bit more
because it is absolutely monstrous and it is going to
give mollos a body cout. Even Kissinger would not in
respect to. So okay, we need to talk about what
HIV AIDS actually is. So I'm just gonna go to

(04:06):
the CDC for this one. HIV human and aminio deficiency
virus is a virus that attacks the body's immune system.
If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS
acquired amino deficiency syndrome. There is no effective cure. Once
people get HIV, they have it for life, but with
proper medical care, HIV can be controlled. People with HIV

(04:28):
who get effective HIV treatment can live long, healthy lives
and protective partners. And this is something that queer people
fought and died for. If you have HIV. There are
simple and easy tests for it. Now you can get
treatment and you can live a normal life. On the
other hand, if HIV isn't treated, you can get acquired

(04:48):
ammino deficiency syndrome AIDS, and that can and will kill you.
It is what killed so so many, almost an entire
generation of queer people killed the for decades and decades
and decades, and it's still killing them now. Carrie Mullis,
the guy who Max bluemitthal is tweeting a video of
to go after Anthony Fauci doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS.

(05:12):
He thinks that AIDS is caused by malnutrition in poverty,
and he is going to spend the rest of his
life telling anyone in everyone he can, getting mainstream press coverage,
telling people that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He is the
Andrew Wakefield of HIV AIDS denihilism. Lots of people believe him,
including for example, the Foo fighters Dave Gruel. They believe

(05:32):
him because he is apparently a reputable source. The man
has a Nobel prize. But unfortunately, as we've already seen
from his climate denial and his CFC denial, he is
spreading unbelievably dangerous lies, and this specific lie that HIV
doesn't cause AIDS fucking kills people. Here's from that Berkeley
article again. I don't like the way they're phrasing it.

(05:53):
It's the you know, it's Berkeley, right like, so some
stuff going to some stuff's going to be racists. His
views on AIDS don't just look bad, they may have
had deadly consequences. By the late nineteen nineties, South Africa
was in the midst of a catastrophic AIDS epidemic. President
Thumbo mcbecky, under the spell of AIDS de nihilist including Mullis,

(06:16):
declared that AIDS was caused by poverty, not HIV. Many
South Africans were denied access to treatment. A two thousand
and eight study published in the Journal of Acquired Immuno
Deficiency Syndromes estimated that as a result, thirty five thousand
babies were born with HIV and three hundred and thirty
thousand South Africans died of AIDS unnecessarily. This is monstrous.

(06:40):
And here is Max Blumenthal, who was up until very
recently at the very least nominally a left wing journalist,
tweeting a video of this fucking guy to attack Anthony
Fauci on behalf of a bunch of right wing anti
lockdown rules. Now, I especially want to do this because
if you want to attack Anthony Fauci, it is very

(07:01):
very easy to do from the left. You can attack
him for his response to the original HIV AIDS pandemic,
and you know, lots of queer people have done this. Instead,
Max Bluemandal is tweeting a guy is tweeting a video
from an unbelievable right wing crank who were responsible for
the death of three hundred and thirty thousand people. So

(07:23):
the question we're going to be answering for the next
three episodes is how did we get here and what
is happening now? And to do this, we need to
talk about the rise of American Marxist Leninism. I'm going
to try to present the ideology as sympathetically as possible,
because it's important to understand how people came to believe

(07:43):
in these things, because part of the horror and tragedy
here is that not all of these people are the
grifters and shills and right wing fanatics that the ideology
spawned and who were now having to deal with people
who are on info Wars agreeing with Alex Jones. Most
of them were people like us, people who saw the
horrors of this world and wanted to make it better.

(08:07):
A lot of the writing about this is clinical and antiseptic,
largely coming from either academic journals or very very angry liberals.
And I can't be clinical about this. I can't cover
this neutraally. And I can't do that because some of
these people were my friends. There were people I loved
and respected and cared about, and they're people who have

(08:29):
now lost, and so I owe it to them to
be fair about this. So what is the modern generation
of Marxist Leninism. You could start with the history of

(08:50):
the Bolsheviks and Stalin's consolidation of power and the development
of Marxist Leninism as an ideology, and you could trace
it through the twentieth century, and you could trace, you know,
the ways which it is and isn't the ideology that
Lenin had originally been developing. But that really is the
wrong place to start here if you want to understand
how this ideology came to be and why so many

(09:12):
people came to follow it. The right place to start
is America. It's with a generation of young people who
grew up in the wake of the two thousand and
eight financial collapse and the ruthless suppression of occupy by
the Obama administration. It's a generation of people who grew
up on the Internet who began to learn about the
lies we've been fed our entire lives about the world
and America's role in it. They learned the lies we'd

(09:35):
been told about the war in Iraq, about Afghanistan, about Vietnam,
about Allende and Pinochet, about Cuba, about the Sandinistas, about
American imperialism in Lebanon and Haiti and Guatemala and Honduras
and Iran, about Patrice Lamumba and the DRC, About Sukarno
and Suharto in the Killing Fields, about Thomas Sankara, about Saikuavara,
about the Black Panthers, about a thousand wars and a

(09:58):
thousand crimes of the American m Empire crime as we
could spend an entire episode just listing by name. They
learned in a tremendously short amount of time that the
American Empire was born of genocide, It was built by slavery,
and he is sustained by replicating those genocides across the
world and at home. That the governments they were taught

(10:18):
from birth to love and respect, slaughtered children in the
streets with health fire and missiles, and then had the
unmitigated gall to turn around and proclaim itself the leaders
of the free world and the upholder of the rules
based international order. And so they started learning about how
our capitalist economy really functions. They started reading Marx and

(10:38):
then they started reading Angles, and it led to other
Marxists into the great international enemies of American imperialism from
the last century ho Chi Minh Castro to Lenin, to
struggles against colonialism in Algeria, and to intellectuals like Phenonen
and militants like Asada Shakur. It led them to believe,
to really believe in the struggle against capital and racism

(11:01):
and imperialism, and that led them to Stalin and Mao,
and eventually it would lead them down a darker path,
a path where anything and everything could be justified if
it meant defeating the American Empire, a path that told
them it was their duty to back every state in
the world who could even conceivably check the advance of

(11:22):
American power. It led them to modern geopolitics, to the
belief that modern China and Vietnam or socialist states still
resisting American imperialism. It would lead them eventually to backing
the very Russian oligarchs that had destroyed their beloved USSR.
And it would lead some of them into the very
heart of darkness itself, to an alliance with anyone and

(11:44):
everyone who opposed liberal interventionism. It would lead in the
seeking alliance with the arch right wing anti communist Donald Trump.
But it didn't start that way. The co option of
the ideology is a process that took almost a decade
and comprised a series of debates in side the left
about what capitalism, socialism, and imperialism really are and how

(12:05):
the left should relate to nationalism in the state. We'll
talk more about how these debates led to a right
wing turn at episode three. But the core beliefs anti imperialism,
objection to capitalism, a rejection of liberal interventionism, and some
of the darker and more conspiratorial tendencies, like accusing any
protest movement against the government they supported of being CIA assets,

(12:26):
spread like wildfire. There were contradictions from the beginning, of course,
how do you square your opposition to capitalism with your
support for China, a country with almost one thousand billionaires.
The solution was to lie. Lies about China, in particular
abound it. Many Marxist Leninists believe, for reasons that are
deeply unclear to me, that China has public housing that

(12:50):
automatically guarantees every citizen a home. This is not true.
This unclear to me if it's ever been true, even
through this so I mean, I guess you could argue
it was sort of true during the socialist period. It
has not been true for a very very long time.
China has a lot of homeless people. But you know,
these sort of lies persist because they are what you
need to believe in order to believe that China is

(13:13):
a socialist state and not a capitalist one. Another common
line is that China has a fully socialized healthcare system.
This is unbelievably not true. China, in fact, used to
have something like a universal medical system that they operated
in extreme difficulty with groups of people called the barefoot
doctors who would go to rural villages that had never

(13:34):
really received proper medical care before and attempt to treat them.
This was the thing that China used to have, and
then they tore it up and privatized it, and now
Chinese private healthcare is absolute disaster. Calculations by the Chinese
Journal Twang estimate that almost the entire Chinese economy is
based on corporations not paying their required contributions to healthcare plans,

(13:56):
and that if corporations actually paid into the healthcare plans
of migro workers, the entire economies of entire provinces would
immediately go under as an enormous majority of their corporations
immediately went underwater. And so what we're getting a sort
of picture of is people begin to believe things that

(14:17):
need to be true in order for their ant to
square their anti imperialism or their version of anti imperialism,
which is opposing at all costs the United States with
their anti capitalism when the two began to conflict in
terms of, you know, attempting to support a very obviously
capitalist economy, and this leads to some very very bizarre

(14:40):
twists in turns. One very common thing is for socialists
and socialist organizations in the US, or at least I
say socialists, I made Marxist Leninists organizations to advocate for
a fifteen or twenty dollars midiroom wage in China, while
simultaneously celebrating three two cents an hour as the end
of poverty in China. This has never actually peneted raided
the minds of the new Marxist Leninists with their endless

(15:03):
parades of flags and new countries added every day, from
the genocidal austerity bongers in Ethiopia to the hardline, murderous
anti communists to rule Meenmore by baton and bullet, new
Marxist Leninists were able to effectively insulate themselves from reality.
This left them as prey for a new generation of
right wing grifters would cynically exploit them for wealth and status.

(15:24):
They also garnered the hatred of the more internationalist factions
of the left, and then, as their numbers expanded, the
increasing ire of liberals, who, stealing a term from anarchists,
began to call the Marxist Leninist tankies. This, I suspect,
if you have heard of these people, is probably the
word you've heard used to describe them. So we should

(15:45):
talk about what this word actually means. But first, unfortunately some.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Ads, and we're back.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
To explain what a tanky is, we have to go
back to, bizarrely, the nineteen fifty six Hungarian Revolution. So
all right, in nineteen fifty six there was a massive
uprising in Hungary. The Hungarians effectively forced their government to
break with the Soviets. The Soviets respond to this by

(16:27):
rolling a bunch of tanks across the border, claiming everyone
in the revolution is the fascism, killing them all, and
they were fairly successfully able to convince a large number
of Communists that the Hungarian revolutions really were fascists. They
were aided in this by the fact that the liberals
also lied about what the Hungarian Revolution really was, and
this is a lie that they continue to spread to

(16:48):
this day. The liberal version of the revolution is that
it was, you know, it was a liberal revolution by
people who wanted liberal democracy against the Soviets, hotel Terrrianism, etc.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Etc. Etc.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
And that's also not true. The reality of that uprising
and what most of it was was a rebellion by
the Hungarian workers' councils. So workers across their factories seized
control of their factories, threw their bosses out and began
to manage and democratically the different workers' councils like foreign
regional federations. It is very stunningly, very very similar to

(17:24):
the original Soviets of the nineteen seventeen Russian Revolution, which
in theory the USSR is supposed to be named after.
But when they reappeared again, the Soviets just absolutely smashed
them because they weren't advocating for a Soviet aligned one
party state. And what this actually meant was tanks rolling

(17:45):
up to the gates of factories blasting apart the very workers'
councils who are supposed to be the basis of communism.
This was an attempt, in some sense, yes, to implement democracy,
but it was an attempt to implement democracy in the factory,
and it was attempted by the working class to seize
control the means of production and manage them themselves. Now,
the smashing of the Hungarian Revolution led to a split

(18:06):
in enormous numbers of communist parties all across the world.
The people leave communist parties and droves. This is a
big enough deal that it spawns effectively like a crisis
in China, where there is a series of bast strikes
and people chanting like here another Hungary, and in particular,
the British Communist Party had a guy on the ground

(18:26):
in Hungary reporting of what was happening, and his reports
split the party between the people who supported the Hungarians
and the people who supported the Soviets. The latter faction became
known as tankies for their support of rolling tanks across
the border and slaughtering in the working class. The term
was revived in the twenty tens to describe the return
of Marcist Leninists, so though much of its usage was

(18:47):
about Russia and Syria rather than the original Hungarian uprising.
Now it is true that all of these people do
actually support or they do actually believe that the Soviets
were crushing like the return of fascism, but that that
actual belief, like the belief in you know, that the
Soviets were right to crush the Hungarian Revolution, is effectively

(19:11):
irrelevant now except as a sort of marker of loyalty,
because you know, the USSR is gone and the Hungarian
Revolution is gone too, and so what's left is a
term that on the one hand does correctly, you know,
it does correctly describe a part of their political tradition,

(19:33):
but it has it has a tendency to sort of
anchor these arguments in the past instead of the presence
with the substance of disagreements with the Marxist Leninists actually
are now marxistlenin Iss. They're also just yeah, they're called
mls to Marxist Leninists absolutely hate being called tankies except
under you know, the circumstances where they adopted ironically, and

(19:57):
I'm of two minds. I have called these people's tankies
a lot. But the biggest problem with calling these people
tankies is that the original tankies, the people who supported
the Soviets butchering the Hungarian working class, were actually communists.
They were Marxistlninists who supported the USSR and believed that
state ownership of the means of production was the socialist
transition to communism. These modern quote unquote Marxist Leninists don't

(20:20):
even believe that both Stalin and kruis Chef, for all
the differences, would have had these people shop for supporting
capitalists in their imperialist market economies. If you tried to
explain to Mao that Deng Jao Ping, with his people's
billionaires and a trillion dollars of American treasury bond singing
it sitting in his coffers, was doing communism, he would
have branded you a capitalist, wrote and sent you to

(20:40):
your re education camp at the end of the day.
Whatever else. The original tankies, the British supporters of the USSR,
were communists. Their modern day equivalents don't even have that
to height behind. They have been reduced to capitalists with
a hammer and sickle fetish. So who are these people really?
What they've become is suicide net socialists because the suicide

(21:04):
nets are the actual content of their politics. This is
the actual content of backing states like the People's Republic
of China. It is full throated support for the suicide
nets to fly under the roofs of the Fox confactories
at Shenzhen. The reality of their suicide net socialism is
that the Chinese working class would rather kill themselves than
live under it. And it was these suicide net socialists

(21:25):
who sins spawned their bastard children, patriotic socialism and eventually
Maga communism. So how do we understand what these people are?
I am going to give the final word to Karl Marx,
the man whose ideology in theory spawned theirs. I'm going

(21:46):
to read from one of Marx's most famous works, the
eighteenth through Mayor. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it on
the show before. The tradition of all dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the minds of the living, And
just as they seem to be occupy with revolutionizing themselves
and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely
in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up

(22:09):
the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from
them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present
this new scene in world history and time honored disguise
and borrowed language. Thus Luther Martin Luther put on the
mask of the Apostle Paul. The French Revolution of seventeen
eighty nine to nineteen fourteen draped itself alternatingly in the

(22:32):
guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and
the Revolution of nineteen forty eight knew nothing better to
do than to parody. Now seventeen eighty nine, Now the
revolutionary tradition of seventeen ninety three seventeen ninety five. This
is precisely the trap that Marxist Leninis have walked into.
Faced with mass social upheaval. They knew nothing better than

(22:54):
the down the mask of Stalin and Mao, and it
was a terrible mistake. Here is mark again. The social
revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take us poetry from
the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin
with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about
the past. The former revolutionaries required recollections of past world

(23:16):
history in order to smother their own content. The revolution
of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their
dead in order to arrive at its own content. There
the phrase went beyond the content. Here the content goes
beyond the phrase. But we never buried our dead. The
memories of dead generations still weigh like a nightmare in

(23:39):
the minds of the living. And in the next episode
we will walk face first into that nightmare and behold
the abyss within.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
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