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December 12, 2023 60 mins

In part 2, Mia, Robert, and Garrison discuss how the injection of conspiracy culture and the structure of left media allowed leftist media figures to make hard right turns.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media. Woo all right, guys, I did my job.
That could happen here a podcast that I just opened
by saying, woo ha.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Me.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yeah, I'm gonna throw to you. Now what are we
talking about today?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Boy? So, yesterday we did I guess, the sort of
intro legwork to the kind of stuff that you need
to know to understand the sort of new crop of
right wing Palestine grifters. And today we're actually gonna get
into who these people are and how their politics developed,
and how the sort of trajectory of this has shaped

(00:45):
a lot of the left. And to do this, unfortunately,
we need to introduce one of the main characters of this,
for better or for worse, probably for worse, Max Blumenthal.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
I just woke up.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
We're talking about Max Blumenthal and I'm just barely starting
my coffee for the morning.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Son of a bitch.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
I'm so sorry. I apologize to everyone, But unfortunately, unfortunately
this needs to be done.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, he's the human equivalent of soap scum.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Yeah, so, okay, I think the place to start with Max.
Bluementhal is a thing that's pretty common among most of
the kind of new crop of these Palestine grifters is
that he used to be a pretty normal progressive. Now
for some of the people we're going to be talking about,
pretty normal progressive was the thing they were in like
twenty nineteen. For Max Blumenthal, like he was a pretty

(01:48):
normal progressive in like the two thousands and in nine was.

Speaker 5 (01:53):
A real journalist at some point, right yeah, yeah, Like
like he wrote this book called republic Gomorrah, Inside the
Movement that Shattered the Party, which is a pretty good
book about the rise of the Christian right and how
they seize the Republican Party.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
And this is very funny because the place he is
going to end up at the end of this story
is going on Tucker Carlson and being aligned with like
the exact forces he was talking about like a decade
and a half ago. So before we really started get
into him, we need to talk about his family. Garrett,
Do you know who Sid Blumenthal is?

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Oh yeah, the name sounds familiar, but it's not ringing
any specific.

Speaker 4 (02:33):
Bells for me.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yea Clinton staffer, right.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah. He was like Clinton's hatchet man basically, Like
this is mostly originally with Bill Clinton, but like later
Hillary Clinton too. He's like the guy who does the
Clinton's like political dirty work, and he was like, here's
a big guy in the nineties. The most impactful thing
that he did for modern politics is that he is
the guy who invented birth rhythm is slightly too strong

(02:59):
of a word, but he's the guy who pushes like
Obama birth rihsm like into the mainstream because like as
an attempt basically to kill Obama's campaign so that Hillary
could win the nomination.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
How well did how old did that turn out?

Speaker 4 (03:13):
Well?

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Gave us Donald Trump, So you know, things going great,
and you know, so so this is Max Bluementhal's dad, right,
like Max, And this is I think I think that's
kind of important about him is that he grows up
very sort of proximal to power. Like he goes to
Georgetown Day School, which is a forty thousand dollars a
year prep school that has like multiple Supreme Court justices,

(03:37):
Like I've sent their kids there now. But he's so
he's like kind of a normal progressive journalist for a
long time. But in the early twenty tens, he takes
a genuine, a very principled stand on Palestine that gets
him kind of kicked out of a lot of progressive
circles because in twenty Twelvey thirteen it was and still

(03:59):
is to this day, it was very hard to take
pro palesigme positions. And he like he just ends up
in this sort of spiral where like he loses most
of his friends, his girlfriend breaks up with him, like
he's not getting work from the usual places he's been
getting work from because he's been sort of like kicked
out and isolated for taking this stance. And the product

(04:19):
of this is that he goes he takes this meeting
that is very very weird. So in twenty fifteen, Russia
today has this like week long gala thing that's for
its tenth anniversary. If you're like a Mueller investigation fan,
this is very famous. If you're a Nova person, almost

(04:40):
no one has ever heard of this thing. Yeah, so
this this gala thing is this in twenty fifteen. It
has a bunch of very very important like Russian officials.
Gorbachev is there, Like, there's a bunch of like senior
like like senior officials. Very famously, Mike Flynn gets paid
forty five thousand dollars to speak there. Jill Stein, who's

(05:02):
the Green Party can in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
This is where running again for the Green Party this year?

Speaker 3 (05:09):
Technics. Yeah, I don't know if they're gonna be this year.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
I think they got it. I think they got it on.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Lock Now, Jill jill Stein twenty four? Would she beat
Howie Hawkins? Is he not running again?

Speaker 2 (05:20):
I believe, I believe it's her. That's last last night
I heard Jill Stein is banking is making another run
for it? Goddamn all right, yeah, yeah, she has one
month ago she launched her twenty twenty four presidential bid.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Oh boy, So yeah, okay, so so Jill Stein. This
is where if you ever heard the conspiracy stuff that's
like Jill Stein is like a Russian agent. It comes
from the fact that she was at this meeting and
then started running for president. Now, what's interesting about Max
Bluman thought going here is at this point he's a

(05:55):
pro Syrian revolution guy. He writes, he writes a bunch
of articles like criticizing Western leftists for supporting Assaud, and
I want to read from a little bit of them
because it's a really interesting look into who he was
before and the fact that he knows exactly what the
playbook that he's going to be using is. Besides exploiting

(06:18):
the Palestinian cause, the Assaud apologists have eagerly played the
al Qaeda card to stoke fears of his Islamic takeover Assyria.
Back in two thousand and three, a Saud accused the
US of deliberately overstating the strength of Alkaida in order
to justify it so called war on terror. But now,
in a transparent bid for sympathy from the outside world,
Assad insists that the Syrian armed opposition is controlled almost

(06:40):
entirely by al Qaeda like jahattists who have come from
abroad to place the country under Islamic control, and is
addressed to the Syrian People's Assembly on June third, the
dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the
terms terrorists or terrorism, a whopping forty three times. That
is a full ten times more than George bush Digit
speech to Congress in the aftermath of nine to eleven,

(07:04):
enjoying the Asade regimes campaign that you legitimize the Syrian
opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational Jahatis. Ironically,
they seem to have little problem with Hesbelah's core Islamist values.
Assad's apologists have unwinningly underwritten the War on Terror lexicon
introduced by George Bush, Ariel Sharon and the Neo Khon
Cabal after nine to eleven. So this is pre twenty fifteen,

(07:26):
like twenty fifteen, like pre this meeting Max Blumenthal. So
he goes to this meeting and then after that founds
grey Zone and all of his positions suddenly flip. And
this is the thing you can actually if you want to,
if you go back and trace. So graizone is this
sort of media outlet thing that Max Blumenthal found it.

(07:47):
And it's interesting because there's a lot of like Aaron
Batte too, Like if if you go through the journalist
in this outlet, the moment they start working for Grezone,
all of their positions on stuff like Syria just immediately flip.
There's okay. So there's a conspiracy version of this, where
like if you read Liberal Accouncil with gray Zone, they
will argue that maxlely Wental went to this meeting, got

(08:08):
paid off by the Russian government and that gray Zone
is like a Russian asset. I I don't know, I
don't think that's true. Well, the thing I can say
was nobody knows where Grayzone gets his money from right,
they're very they're very sort of like like there's Patreon stuff,
but other than that, they're very sort of sketchy about it.
There's no evidence, like directly that he's been paid by

(08:29):
the Russian government to do Grayzone. The thing that I
can say is that he has taken a bunch of
money from the Russian government to go on RT like
all the fucking time. That's the part of it that
I can say.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
This is one of these things that's it's such a
sort of like confluence of like all of these people
were in the same place at the same time. It's
one of these things that generates trilling conspiracy theories. I'm
gonna say that I don't think that this is like
a giant Russian conspiracy. But he does flip all of
his positions almost immediately after going to this meeting. And

(09:01):
the thing that the position that he starts taking is
is the exact same position that he was he was
writing about like before this in twenty fifteen. He starts
talking about how like anyone who opposes a sad is
a quote head chopper, and he starts he starts selling
like one of these big things is selling this line
that like ASAWD is the defender of serious ethnic minorities,
which is like a thing that I think would be

(09:22):
used to them. And you know, and he's he starts
a podcast on moderate rebels, which is a joke about like, ah,
like the US is funding moderate rebels, but all those
people are actually like Al Kaita supporters, And I don't know,
like I think. I think it's interesting comparing his pre
twenty fifteen writing to his post twenty fifteen writing, because
he very clearly understands what he is doing, Like he

(09:48):
wrote an analysis of the thing that he's going to
be dealing.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
There's no plausible deniability with him.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Yeah, and a big part of this whole deal is
like and this is one of the things that Max
Blinthalf figures out out is that there are there is
a very large market in selling a palatable form of
Islamophobia to the left. You're gonna see this in This
is one of the things that he doesn't shing John,
where there's he's he's part of this whole sort of

(10:16):
sphere of people who are like, there's nothing happening in
Chan John, Everything's actually great. And with both that and Syria,
there's exactly the same playbook, which is to go all like,
you know, all of the resistance to this government is
CIA back Wahabi terrorists. You can find like some people
who suck and go oh hey, like these guys are
all jahadists, and you know, in Syria this is sort

(10:38):
of bleakly funny because if you know your war on
terror history, like Bashar al Assad like tortured people with
the CIA and the US like held some Weiger guys
for the CCP in Gitmo for allegedly being part of
a separatist group. But this is an important part of
how people sort of launder these right wing dictators. And

(11:00):
this is something that there's a very old sort of
tradition of this on the left that these these a
lot of people are able to sort of raft onto.
And I'm going to take an example of this because
I think it's important because one of the the er
sort of moments of all of this politics is the

(11:20):
collapse of Yugoslavia and the sort of left wing defense
of Melosovic. So I'm going to read from to take
an examples like what this shit looks like. I'm going
to read from an article that Jeremy Skahill wrote, which
is I think the worst article about Melosovik I've ever seen?
This is this is a Huffington Post piece. This is
I think the worst thing I've ever seen written about
Molosovic in a mainstream outlet. Here is Here is Jeremy's

(11:45):
Gayhill quote. Little attention therefore, has been paid to Melosovic's
long term efforts, which pre date nine to eleven, the
nineteen ninety nine NATO bombing and his own trial to
expose the presence of al Qaeda and the Balkans from
Bosnia to Kosovo. With nine to eleven, Melosovics talk of
Al Kaida was easily dismissed as laughable pathetic opportunism. But

(12:06):
those who followed Melosovic's career and importantly the events of
the nineteen nineties at Yugoslavia, no, it was none of these.
The those allegations were based on true events the US
does not want discussed in an international court. Following the
defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the eighties, many
Musha Hadeen eventually turned their sits at Yugoslavia, where they

(12:26):
went to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs
and Catholic Croats. Once again, the US and bin Laden
were on the same team. To this day, there are
reports of trading camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation.
It is also likely a training ground for future blowback.
So that's like nonsense, Like there are not there are

(12:49):
not al Qaeda training camps in Bosnia, Like what the fuck?
Like it's just it's complete nonsense. And you know, it
relies on a lot of the other sort of like
weird things that leftists like believe and don't believe about this.
There's there's a very if you want to actually read
about these sort of like transnational Islamist networks, there's there's

(13:13):
a very good book by the anthropologist Darryl Lee called
The Universal Enemy, Jihad and Jihada Empire and the Challenge
of Solidarity. But like, okay, I want I want to
ask the audience a question, right, why would members of
the Musja Hadeen be in Bosnia in the nineteen nineties,
And I want to suggest that it might have something
to do with the fact that Melosivic was trying to

(13:35):
kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He almost did it.
He was pretty close to actually doing it, you know,
but the sort of the sort of like left conspiracy
solutions like no, no, it must have been the CIA.
There's no plausible reason why ex Musja Hadeen guys would
have gone to a country where someone was trying to
kill the entire Muslim population, Like what the fuck do

(13:57):
you like? It's it's it's all stuff us like this.
Then you know, he also talks about how like Belosovic
would have like testified about the CIA institution of a
neoliberal government in Kosovo, and like what like Belosovic is
the guy who presided like he was one of the
architects of of decollectivisation in Yugoslavia, like he is like

(14:20):
before before he was this, before he was the butcher
of Belgrade. He was the butcher of the Yugoslavian social estate.
But you can you know, and so and he was.
He was just a hardline right wing Serbian nationalist. But
you can sell him to a Western audience by using Islamophobia,
by exploiting, you know, by by by doing this thing
where you're like, oh, well, actually like all of these

(14:40):
people were uh, they were all al kaeda. You can
use this to sell the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as
like the left to savor of Yugoslavia. And you know,
I think that the part about this that really sad
is like, you know, there was you know, the sort
of last true believers of the old Ego Slavin working class,

(15:01):
right were these the Yugoslavian anti war protesters. And these guys,
you know, they they're they're they're protesting to stop the war.
They see coming that the Serbians are about to win,
leash and they just get murdered in the streets by Melosovic.
You know, well because seven years later, the US society
that they didn't like him, like he's become this like

(15:23):
hero of a bunch of these like a bunch of
Arxis Leninists like see this guy as a hero, and
this is you know, this is this is just this
is their big sort of like political trick is using
the threat of like terrifying Muslim like terrorists to just
legitimize right wing dictators.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
I mean, you know, speaking of right wing dictators. Yeah,
there's this non zero chance there's an ad for someone
who will be one in the future.

Speaker 4 (15:52):
Uh right now, and we're.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
Back, so we're back to this stuff and Syria and
specifically the way people think about Syria plays a huge
role in the sort of development of the left. And
one of the reasons that the sort of new gray
zone line, which is that the entire opposition is composed
of Islamists and that a SOD is the only person

(16:26):
who can stop them, is that, like, you know, part
of the reason this works is that like, yeah, like
they're and this this is the gap that these people
always sort of come in through, is that like a
lot of the Western media was not covering Syria very well.
They weren't covering the rise of like job out on
news Row very well. And you know, they use this

(16:47):
gap to sort of like come through and rehabilitate a
SOD by going like the media is lying to you
a sad who again, I need to mention like ten
years earlier, this guy was torturing people for the CIA,
But you know, now like a saw it as actually
Nancy imperialist. And this works. This works enormously well. This
is the sort of breach through which Blueminthal enters the mainstream,

(17:07):
and this this discourse about Syria like reshapes everything about
the left. This is where this is where American Marxist
Leninism like comes from right, like a huge portion of
ideas from the people who back and saw it all.
And this is it's actually really weird. Like almost every
big sort of like leftist like podcast or media thing
like came out of the Syrian Civil War in some
way or another. Like the whole Grazo Versus Belling Cat

(17:31):
thing is a like is a thing that was originally
about the Syrian Civil War Tropo trap House, which is
like I guess if people who don't know it's this
massive like social democratic podcast also like sort of came
out of there, like it was partially about like came
out of like Turkish politics. But those were very very
similar circles like on Twitter at the time, and you know,

(17:53):
and one of their big things is like Felix Peterman's
like The Truth about Syria, which is a sort of
slightly softer like version of supporting ASAD that also supports
like the revolution in Rojeva. Like I came out of
this because I was on the pro ro Java side
because like I'm an anarchist and I have a bunch
of Kurdish friends. So there's this giant fight about what

(18:13):
the Syrian Civil War is and what the sides are
and what it means, and this is one of the
things that comes to define what the left is and
the grey zone people sort of win. And the result
of this is that this pro asod like nominally anti
imperialist position becomes the default position of a bunch of

(18:34):
sort of like people who aren't like hardline Marxislenis who
are just sort of like like kind of edgy Bernie
like Birdie supporters. And this is something that like you
can see the effect of this, like to this day
if you look at Left, if you look at like
leftis meme culture, like you can see people who are
otherwise mostly normal making line of Damascus jokes about how
like Asad is like the line of Damascus, people still

(18:57):
make jokes about barrel bombs, which is you know this
thing that Asad would do.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
There's the whole like the one that I see the most,
it's like still very very common, is there is this
whole meme of like Hillary Clinton says asd must go,
and then there's like the second panels like who must
go and Hillary Clinton's gone, and people still do this
like to this day.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
The other really common one, there's this little girl named
Bana a Labet who was a Syrian girl who got bombed,
and there's like a video of her, you know, reacting
in the way a small child would to being bombed,
and like there's a meme that's basically taking her words
and twisting it into like please America, you know, come

(19:36):
and intervene in Syria, like turn it basically like this
this girl is CIA propaganda trying to like justify US
intervention in the war. Like that's the that's the bit
you see it posted. A lot people repurposed it after
the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make fun of Ukrainians.
It's like it's like pretty fundamentally cruel.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah, And that's that's how a lot of this stuff
worked because it was it's stuff that fits into the
social values of that part of the left at that time,
which is that both the Marxist Leninists and what was
called the dirtbag left around Trapo was completely irony poisoned,
and like, I get it. I was around then, like
I did my time in the army trenches. Like it's
really hard not to react to the world's with ironic

(20:17):
detachment when it's so fucking terrible. But you know the
other side of that was like these people started like
we're doing these Assagnians because they were like because they
were edgery and contrarian, and because you know, like the
like this is like the stuff with the bond. This
is one of the things with the Bonum stuff is

(20:38):
like deliberately demonstrating that you don't have any empathy is
something that's edgy and contrarian, and like like the performance
of that was this very sort of like powerful emotional
pull that that serves to legitimize a bunch of this stuff.

(21:00):
And you know, originally, and part of the everything here
too is like everyone everyone in all of these circles,
They're big thing is trying to own the Libs. And
this is something that like the Libs cared about and
doing this thing of like how much you don't care
about it and how much you think it's like them
falling for propaganda. That was you know, that was something

(21:21):
that was heavily incentivized by the structure of housings like
Twitter work and how like retweets work, and you know
this is I mean, it's bleak in and of itself,
but it leads to stuff that's worse because the only
other people who support Asad are like white supremacists, and

(21:45):
this leads to a bunch of very very weird cross
pollution that normally you wouldn't expect to be happening between
these circles and people who are just Nazis. One of
the most common sources about Syria for both sort of
Marxist Leninists and like social democrats Twitter uses is this
person named Partisan Girl who's, like I still to this day,
like a very big media figure. So she is a

(22:08):
Syrian Australian quote unquote Syria expert. We don't really have
time to get into all of her.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Stuff on munch, I think, yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah, she's been on David Duke's podcast Davids.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
A former podcast.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
Yeah yeah, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. She
was on Richard Spencer's podcast like she is just a Nazi.
The last post that I saw from her was her
responding to another guy who's just a straight up hardline
anti semi who posted this beam that was like maybe
this is why all conservatives support Israel and has a
bunch of faces of conservatives with like us stars of

(22:45):
David on them, like including Max Blumenthal and partisan girls
response to this is not to object to the fact
that it's unbelievably anti Semitic, but to be like, no, no, no,
Max Blumenthal is actually an anti Zionist, so you shouldn't
include him with all of the rest of the people
who you've included on here because they're Jewish, even though
some of them aren't. He's just accusing random people of
being Jewish who aren't. But that's the thing, Like, she's

(23:05):
straight up an anti semi just actually a fascist. I like,
I literally, like we could sit here for ten minutes
listing the names of all of the fascist podcasts she's
been on. And this is one of these things that
people knew, Like, people knew that she was a fascist,
and I had arguments with people where I would be like, hey,
this person is a Nazi, Like she's been on David

(23:26):
Duke's podcast, and people would be like, well, yeah, she's
a fascist, but I like her Syria analysis, and this is,
you know, one of the things that happens, and this
is this is I'm gonna kind of defer to you
on this, Robert, because this is something I know a
lot less about. But one of the things that the Grayson.

(23:47):
People become really heavily involved about is the doing a
bunch of weird denialism stuff around chemical weapons attacks and duma.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, I mean that's that's it. That's a lot of
the nexus of the kind of asshole Left takes on
Syria revolve around is because if bushahah Asad was dumping
chemical weapons on civilian populations and mass which we know
he was, then there's absolutely no way you can justify

(24:20):
or defend him. It doesn't matter how many of his
enemies were quote unquote Islamists. He was pumping chemical weapons
into civilian neighborhoods. So the answer has to be that
that never happened, right, that that was the CIA faking
it or the CIA deploying chemical weapons and it got
blamed on a sad. A lot of it comes down

(24:41):
to there's this group. These guys are civil defense people.
This is there are civil defense units in any city
being bombed, made up of civilians in the area. When
I was in Mosul, i was embedded with a lot
of the Iraqi version of these guys. They go in
and they pull people out and bodies out of wreckage
after bombings. Right, they're usually locals they provide some emergency

(25:01):
medical care to the extent that that's possible. There's people
doing this right now in Gaza and in Syria. It
was the White Helmets, and you know, the White Helmets
were in large part formed by a dude named James
Messia I believe it's the way his name is pronounced.
He died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey not all that
long ago. But a big part of this chunk of

(25:25):
the left's line on Syria is that because these guys
are the first responders and they're getting in after these
chemical attacks and providing a lot of the initial evidence
in the wake of them, it's that these guys, the
White Helmets, are a CIA front and they're the ones
who are kind of planting all of the evidence of
these attacks.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, and this stuff gets really really out of control
very quickly. I mean, this is one of the you
suddenly see all of these people doing the stuff that
the Alex Jones supporters are doing about Sandy Hook. Were
like they're like taking pictures of like dead bodies and going, oh,
this is like a man can or like these are
crisis actors, and it's it's it's it's insane because it's

(26:05):
like this is all the stuff that like the Israelis
are doing now, where like they're taking pictures of a
dead baby and going like this is a doll. But
so many people were doing this with like with the
shit in Syria, and it really struck me as like
I was kind of observing it from the outside because

(26:25):
like I don't know, like I the period this was
happening as the period where occupied Ice was starting, so
I was not super involved in this stuff, but you
could just sort of see like the kind of the
level of conspiratism just like skyrocketing to the point where
like all of the stuff that's like the modern like
conspiracy canon is just getting embedded in there.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, it's where you see a lot of the stuff
that has been the norm on the right for twenty
years start to take hold in the left default reality
kind of fragmenting conspiratorial angles on verifiable things that are
happening right where you have what's obviously occurring based on

(27:09):
the evidence, and the completely errant reality fragment that that
is how you have to perceive events in order to
stay ideologically consistent. That's when a lot of that st
starts to infect the left in a way that is
now you know, pretty widely prevalent.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, one
of the things that he's able to do with this
that becomes one of the staples of a lot of
the left is this this line about color revolutions, where
every single time a protest starts in a country that
he doesn't like, or like the US doesn't like, like
everyone on Twitter would suddenly be like, Oh, it's a
color revolution. It's a CIA op. All the protesters are

(27:53):
being paid by the CIA. And I could pick like
a thousand examples of this from everywhere from like Lebanon
to Hong Kong. Like every time mass protests would start,
these people would be like, it's a it's a color revolution.
I'm gonna I'm gonna pick one that I think, I
genuinely think is the most egregious piece of slander they've
ever fucking printed, or at least like like slander of
a leftist group, which is so Ben Norton wrote a

(28:16):
piece that was about Ecuador because there been there have
been a bunch of like Ecuador has periodic mass protests,
they also had elections, and Ben Norton, who's another Gray
Zone guy who eventually, like we wouldn't even have time
to cover this, but he's gonna break with the Gray
Zone people when they take their hard right pivot because
they start doing like anti vax shit that's too much
even fain.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
Which has been at least a little bit of fun
to watch.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
Yeah, yeah, watching watching them all fighting each other has
been all gone some one of the few pieces of
satisfaction we've gotten out of this. But Norton, so he
one of the one of the people he's targeting is
the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and so we've
talked about them on this show before. They are one

(28:59):
of the most radical indigenous organizations on the planet. Like
they you know, they they they have been literally in
the case of Ben Norton, they have been overthrowing near
liberal government since before Ben Norton was born. Like their
big thing is doing is is they do these days
where like they call an uprising and it uprising happens,
hundreds of thousands of people go into the streets and

(29:20):
try to bring down the government and sometimes it works
and sometimes it doesn't. But you know, this is this
is one of their big things and gray zone, like
like Norton calls these people uh anarchists inspired ultra leftists
back by the US, which is just you.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Know, you're in for a good political analysis when someone
uses the term ultra leftists.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah, I love it as an insults like what, oh, no,
I've been ultra leftists and my politics are too good
you my takes are too based, like this is supposed
to be an insult like baffling stuff. Yeah, but like
and like, in the span of two years, they went
from like praising the from praising the Confederation if it
they just now noll Is of Ecuador to calling them

(30:01):
a cia op like again within two years. And and
a lot of a lot of this stuff is based
on the work of this guy named William Engdaw. I
don't know how aproounce this lastson. I think I think
it's William Engdahl, So he's he's a Laruchite. We've talked
about the Laruchites on this podcast before. They're famous for
like beating up leftists on college campuses in the seventies.

(30:22):
They're also like the most fetted up motherfuckers in the
entire world. Like they are they are snitching on leftist
groups to like federal agencies you've never heard of before,
Like they claim to have worked with the CIA, the FBI,
the Devents Intelligence Agency directly cooperated with Reagan's National Security Council,
like they have. They are like the biggest sniches in

(30:43):
the entire world. And you know, Bluementhal's like copying their stuff, right,
Like he's this, this is where a lot of his
stuff about what color revolutions are comes from. And eng
daw is I'm gonna I'm gonna turn to some research
by Emmy Bevincy is anti fascist researcher. So eng Da
thinks that BLM was a color revolution because he is

(31:07):
just a a really really hard line like right worker.
This is actually like a pretty common thing in these
circles of people who think that b M was color revolution.
People who think that like occupies a color revolution. And
that's sort of like the far right of these of
these sort of circles. And uh, I guess speaking of

(31:28):
the far right of these circles, uh, do you know
what is the by far the right choice for you to.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Use to use your consuming power of the of the
purchasing dollar. That's right, These these ads great job. Yeah
that was That was wonderful, and we are unfortunately back

(32:00):
well high wallet is later and I've never felt happier.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, So okay, so we The reason we're covering this
in the first place is the sort of right wing
pivot that this circle does. But before we talk about that,
we need to talk about one more thing that is
incredibly bleak, which is the time he accused a sexual
assault victim of being a co intel pro op. So

(32:30):
this is a story I don't think most people know.
I only know about it because I was there in
the DSA at the time this is happening. In twenty seventeen,
the DSA has its first as its first elections after
the giant surgeon membership from both like Trump winning and
also Bernie and they have his first elections to its

(32:54):
governing body. And one of the people who's elected is
this guy named Arl Stevens. Arl stephens Is. He's a
very popular left leftist at the time he does this
whole podcast circuit. He's very charismatic. He gets the third
most votes of anyone elected to the National Political Committee.
But it turns out he is also an abuser. A
woman publishes an anonymous letter about Steven's sexually assaulting her.

(33:15):
It is fucking brutal. Ben Norton, who's one of his
coworkers that we've talked about before, makes a giant thread
accusing the victim of being cointelpro Max Blumenthal quote tweets
it and says quote can't help but be reminded of
co intel probe while reading this thread, and even people
who are normally Max Plumenthal supporters were like, what the

(33:38):
fuck are you doing, and like the full story of
Norton and Max Blumenthal's involvement, and this is actually worse
than I can talk about on air. So after the
first thread where he where Ben Norton calls it a
coen Tel for up, he deletes that one because it's
just not obviously not sure if people are yelling at him,

(34:00):
So he makes a second thread that that threat is
still up to this fucking day. You can find the
thread of Ben Norton talking about how a DSA faction
called Momentum had like manufactured the sexual assault thing to
like destroy its opposition. And I want to make something
very clear because I was there when but when like

(34:21):
during the in this fight inside the DSA whitween Momentum
and everyone else in the fucking org. And I was
on the anti Momentum side. Right. Momentum was basically the
right wing of the DSA, not exactly the right wing,
like there's there were some other people who were further
right than them, but they were they were like the
center right of the DSA. They were electoralists. The only
thing they ever wanted to do was canvassing, like I
was on and Arl Stevens was on the other side,

(34:41):
like opposing them, and I was on Like politically, I
was in the in like on the same side as
Arl Stevens here right, Like I fucking hate the Momentum people.
I think they destroyed the DSA one one day I
will do a whole thing about them, Like these these people,
like the Momentum people literally purged my friends for the
York Right and Arles Stevens is one of their enemies.

(35:01):
And that's not what this shit was fucking about. Like
Arl Stevens is just a rapist. But you know, Max
Blumenthal and Ben Norton came in and we're like, oh shit,
this Arl Stevens guys like an anti imperialist, So we're
going to accuse the survivor of being a co intel
pro op. Oh and it's fucking it's so fucking bleak.

(35:24):
Max has deleted his tweet, but you can find it
if you. You know, I have screenshots of it and
I have wayback machine things of it because I was
there when this was happening, and none of these people
ever suffered any professional repercussions for this. They were just
fucking allowed to do this shit and nothing ever happened
to them.

Speaker 4 (35:40):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
It makes me just incredibly deeply angry.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, no, I mean it's it is like there's that
piece that goes around regularly about how like misogynists make
the best informants, and it remains a pretty durable fact
about organizing. Like if you run into people who are
immediately attacking the victim of sexual assault as some sort

(36:06):
of an informant because the person who committed it is
on the quote unquote right ideological side, that might tell
you something about the people who are doing that.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
Yeah, and you know, and this is this is this,
I mean, this is the thing that like, like to
this day, there were like really shitty left wing groups
who still do this stuff.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
You know.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Okay, so we're going to move on from that to
some very okay, so this is, you know, all of
the stuff that Max Blumenthal had been doing until that point,
that was all inside of the bounds of what was
considered acceptable on the left, and that sucks, right, like
that's not good. But by about twenty twenty one, he

(36:49):
is I found the exact I'm pretty sure I found
the exact bunth with this happened. We're in twenty twenty one,
like Bluementhal just loses it like it is its specifically
August twenty twenty one, he very specifically starts like tacking
right really fast. And what he starts doing is he

(37:10):
starts he starts doing anti lockdown stuff, and so he
starts ranting about how like Australian lawmakers or proposing fians
for sharing information about anti lockdown protests and like fans
for finans for attending rallies, and he just gets more
and more into hardcore anti lockdown stuff and then into
stuff that's effectively just straight up anti vax stuff. One

(37:31):
of the things that he ends up doing is he
writes an article about like if people back remember in
COVID there was the whole thing about flattening the curve
and trying to get less people to die. And there
was this whole debate over whether you should just like
not have lockdowns and let everyone get COVID and that
would give you like quote unquote herd immunity and everyone
would be safe. And that's like like Sweden tried that

(37:53):
and it fucking killed almost other people. So it was
a terrible idea. But like the whole sort of Gray
Zone crew starts, well except for Ben Norton, who leaves.
It starts like rallying around this stuff. And it's really
weird because like like in twenty twenty when China was
doing the lockdowns, Ben Norton was really really pro lockdowns,
but as as twenty twenty one goes on, he starts

(38:16):
pivoting into this anti lockdown stuff. And so I first
saw the stuff from this journalist named Walter Bragman back
when he goes on Twitter is he starts like, he
writes an article that has a bunch of claims from
this thing called the Great Barrington Declaration. Do you if
you remember that?

Speaker 4 (38:34):
Uh no, not really?

Speaker 3 (38:36):
Yeah, So so this this was this giant anti lockdown
like declaration that a bunch of right wingers were pushing
around that was it's this giant anti lockdown's creed that's
basically saying, like, the way to stop COVID is you
have to like open all the all the businesses again
forced when to go back to work, and then people
will get like infected with COVID and that will get
the immunity to COVID, which is a terrible idea because

(38:59):
if you get infec did with COVID, there's you know,
the chance that you die.

Speaker 4 (39:03):
Right, it's yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
But the interesting thing about the Great Barrington Decorations is
so it's created by the Economic the American Institute for
Economic Research. So we should ask who these people are.
So they are a right wing libertarian think tank, which
Bloominthal should hate, right he's supposed to be a leftist,
he should hate these people. They received sixty eight thousand
dollars from the Koch Brothers to do an economics conference,

(39:29):
a thing that they are very mad about anytime. So
everytime someone tries to bring it up and to talk
about how they're coke funded, they're like, well, we only
took sixty eight thousand dollars one time to do one
economics conference. You can't call us Coke funded. But then
like all their website they admit that they like quote
for the record, Aier received sixty eight thousand dollars in

(39:51):
Coke funding over the last ten years. And that's someone
was used entirely the offset the conference of a single
economics conference in twenty seventeen with no links to the
Great Bearrington decoration. But like you know, obviously, so the
reason the Coke's fun this thing is because these guys
have the same economics like politics as they do. And
you know, as someone who has taken zero dollars for
the Coke Brothers, I could safely say that it's bullshit

(40:12):
to say that we only took money for the Coke
Brothers once. So what what happens basically is the American
Institute for Economical Research has a like conference for a
bunch of weirdo hacks who are also technically scientists, to
put out this report saying the lockdowns that happened immediately
like after like the disease like COVID really started spreading

(40:33):
in the US. They said that that was a mistake
and they're advocating ending lockdowns, reopening businesses. And this was
an overtly pro business campaign to get a bunch of
people killed. Like that's what these people were trying to do.
But MaTx blumcdal suddenly is like pushing this stuff, like
in pieces that he's writing for grey Zone. It's very
deeply weird and this stuff just and as as like

(40:56):
twenty twenty one goes on, this stuff gets like worse
and worse and worse. By twenty twenty one, the Blue
Wenthal was writing articles about an impending attempt to implement
social credit alongside Jeffrey Lofredo. So, okay, we need to
take this in two parts. We'll get to the social
credit stuff at a second. First we need to talk
about who Jeffrey Lefredo is because this guy, so, this

(41:19):
guy used to work at Rebel News, which is this
like I mean, like Garrison, I know, you know this
is you know, you two know what Rebel News is.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
It's the Canadian Yeah, basically yeah, yeah, Canadian right part. Yeah,
it's like a bright bart info wars type thing. They
have like podcasts, no online sight. Yeah, they're like a
Canadian far right news source. Essentially, they also engage in
a lot of like activism.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
It's one of the few relatively few Canadian far right
websites that also regularly goes viral in the US.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, yeah, like, I think it's also quite popular in
Australia or they have a in Australia.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
They played a significant role in if you remember the
basically Caravan that drive.

Speaker 3 (42:00):
We're gonna get to that.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
Yeah, yeah, we're geting to that.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
Yeah. So so Bluementhal is writing like an article with
Jeremy Lafredo, who is a guy who like wrote like
a million articles for Rebel News. In fact, as best
I can tell, he was still working for Rebel News
when Bluementhal starts like directly linking to Rebel News articles
about this stuff. Now it turns out he was actually
fired from Rebel News after a bunch of tweets surface,

(42:26):
which like, okay, the kind.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Of how hard it is to get fired from Rebel News.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
I tracked down these tweets. It is I'm not even
gonna read any of them. There there, there are. There
are seven different tweets where he talks about how how
he wants to rate people. There's one where he's confascinating
that's just about him being a pedophile. There's a bunch
of him saying the N word. There's a bunch of
like incredibly racist, like Chinese anti Chinese stuff, which is

(42:54):
very funny because Max Weementhal presents himself as like the
big pro China guy, and here he is like writing
articles with this deranged gi anti Chinese racist and again
like this this got him fired like from Rebel News,
and the Max Blue went Thaw article with him is
still up now, So that that's insane enough, right. But

(43:16):
the part I wanted to talk the reason that was
a rabbit hole that I fell down while I was
looking at this article. The reason I want to talk
about this article in the first place is because he's
writing about social credit. Now. For people who don't recognize
the social credit stuff, here's the title of this article.
Quote the title is the subtitle. The Titans of global

(43:37):
capitalism are exploiting the COVID nineteen crisis to institute social
credit style digital idea sisms across the West. So what
is this social credit thing? This is like a this
is a very big right wing conspiracy theory thing, like
Alex Jones is a huge pusher of this. And basically
what they're saying is that they're going to import this

(43:57):
system from China that they say exists called social credit,
where like if you say something bad about the government,
you won't be able to like use your credit card
to buy food. And this is not how things work
in China. But it's very interesting because you know, these
right wingers are absolutely convinced that social credit is coming
to the US, Like this never happened, it was never

(44:19):
going to happen. But what's interesting about it is that
Gray Zone is specifically writing about this, which is insane
because again, this is this whole thing is an anti Chase,
an anti China conspiracy theory, and like all the sort
of Marcist Leninism's like whole one of their whole pitches
was that they are the like they they support China
against American imperialism, and then like within about a year,

(44:40):
like in like a one year span, they've just pivoted
to publishing like full on right wing social credit stuff,
and you know, by twenty twenty two it's gone even further.
This is this is this is where we get at
the Trucker's Convoy. So Garrison covered this extensively on the show. Yes, Yeah,
do you want to do like the really short version
of what that was. This A few kind of.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Quanon influencers, most of them based in Alberta, and then
a few other kind of conservative influencers tied to some
of whom were tied to rebel news kind of who
were based more throughout Canada, organized this event where a
whole bunch of truckers but mostly just regular people would
drive to the capitol and park outside until Justin Trudeau

(45:26):
would meet their demands or something like that. They were
out there for a few weeks. It really started getting
shut down by Canadian law enforcement when they started to
block one of the big trade border crossings between the
US and Canada. At that point it became enough of
a problem that the government was like, Okay, we're just

(45:48):
gonna like make you guys leave.

Speaker 4 (45:51):
And that was that.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
It caused kind of chaos in Ottawa for a few days.
It was compared a little bit to like it's like
Canada's January sixth, Not really, I mean it had a
very large mobilization of people, which was unique for Canada.
And we've started to see some of like the the
tactics and stylings of this of this trucker convoy get
adopted both in Canada and the States. We've we've had,

(46:12):
you know, versions of this tried to get started in
the States. Never they never reallycross Oh my god, there's
been there's been people have tried to do organize it
again in Canada. Hasn't really taken off the same way.
But but yeah, that is kind of the gist. I
I did a few episodes as this was ongoing, and
then I did a larger kind of piece about the

(46:33):
whole thing that was that was more scripted towards towards
the end of it. You can find those, I think
in like if you go back to like February of
twenty twenty two, you'll you'll find some some of those pieces.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
Yeah, And I think I think the other thing that's
important to emercise about this is these guys are right wingers.
Like I have pictures of these guys waving Gustaci flags.
What if you saw your like the guys you did
the Holocaust in Croatia, Like, yeah, there.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
There was a mix of like con servatives to like
actual fascists with like Nazi flags there like that. That
it was. It was pretty there was a pretty wide
ideological spectrum that's present now some conservatives weren't happy that
they're not that, yeah, trying to get them to leave.
You know, others are more ambivalent. But yes, there was
there was a large variety of of ideological representation at

(47:23):
the trucker convoy.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Yeah. So here's Max Blumenthal's response to it. The lock
down Left spent the last weeks about academic theory to
undercut support for a trucker strike. Looks on with silent satisfaction.
Is the imperial Trudeau regime imposes the Emergency Act, freeze
bank accounts. They wanted this, So he's just fully like
fully spends this whole time fully on board with the

(47:45):
truckers thing. He's trying to convince people as a trucker strike,
which is it's not it's like objectively it's not. It's
it's almost all these people are like anti union who
are participating. Yeah, and they're also they're also like the
actual people who are truckers are the people who own
trucking companies. They're not like they're not the people who
are leasing trucks out. They are like the owners of
these trucks. So he's really doing this sort of like

(48:10):
like he's really doing this this sort of like pivot right,
like she was pupting himself. By twenty twenty three, he's
just posting straight up anti vax stuff like here, here's
the thing that he wrote about. Uh, Peter Holtz, who
was this guy? He was like this guy who was
I don't know, he's like a science guy. He was
like he was a really big target of the right

(48:31):
for a while because you wouldn't he kept for like,
there's there's this whole thing where Joe Rogan was trying
to debate him about wether vaccines worked, and it was
it was this whole weird thing, meeting of the minds. Yeah, yeah,
it's a bitefol With all his like, Bill Gates made
hundreds of millions of dollars off his investment in biotech

(48:52):
thanks to government subsidies and one of the greatest fear
campaigns in history. He called mRNA a miracle, VACS a miracle.
Now he admits the vaccines were semi worthless, big pharma junk.
And then, but after contributing so much social damage with
his unrelenting sanatory in demand for hard lockdowns and the

(49:12):
mass mandating of what amounted to experimental pharma junk, including
the small children hots seems desperate to avoid accountabilities. So
this is just straight up anti vax shit, right, Like
this is like where we are like now, It's like
he spent like a whole bunch of like the last
two years just tweeting anti vax stuff, and this got

(49:33):
fused with like the lab leak stuff really quickly. And
this is the thing I think is really interesting because
it's another demonstration that like he knows what he's doing.
So back in twenty twenty one, back like right after
the Atlanta the Atlanta Spas shootings happened, he like maxlely

(49:54):
Menthol's action to it was like, oh, yeah, here's a well,
here's this in light of recent racist attacks. Here's a reminder.
Josh Rogan's Trump disinfo dump the Washington Post blaming China
for cooking up COVID nineteen. In the Lab, Rogan cited
a US funded dissident as a fake scientist legitimated propaganda.
Now this is actually the stuff with the lab leak

(50:14):
is actually true, which is sort of wild. I mean,
it's not quite like the lablak stuff I think has
directly contributed to people getting attacked. The Atlanta's shooting. I
don't know, I did a bunch. I did two episodes
about it at the like a bit later. Yeah, if
you want to hear me talk about the full explanation
of that for a very long time. So that's what

(50:36):
he's saying. In twenty twenty one, right, is he has
correctly identified that the Lableik stuff is like the OCONN,
like Trump like anti China stuff. One year later, he
has Jeffrey Sachs on the show to talk about how
the US is covering up how the Pentagon, the National
Institute of Health funded biological research that created COVID nineteen

(50:59):
am wuhan. In one year, he has gone from calling
the lab leak like a neo kon quote a quote
Trump dis info dump that was created by a neo
kont to having Jeffrey Sachs on his show to talk
about how the lab leak is real and like like
this is bad enough just as an ideological shift, right,
but we need to talk about Do you guys know

(51:20):
who Jeffrey Sachs is? No?

Speaker 4 (51:25):
Not really?

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Oh boy, okay, So Sachs is a Columbia University economists.
He is also the guy who did shock therapy both
in Russia and in Poland. Like this is the guy
who privatized the Russian economy and handed it over to
a combination of like American investors, Russian mobsters, and the
guys who would become Russia's oligarchy. Like he is the
guy who, like, if you are one of these people,

(51:48):
he should be enemy number one, right he is. He
is the guy who like destroyed if like, if you
believe this, he's the guy who destroyed Russian communism, right
he is. He is responsible. And this is this is
one of the things that people will talk about a lot,
is how like all of the shock therapy stuff like
caused the largest drop in life expectancy between World War
Two and COVID, right, and like like Sax is not

(52:11):
a bit like Sax was literally in the room. He
was in the room in the Kremlin when the USSR
was dissolved. This is like, this is one of the
greatest anti communist in human history. And here is Max
Bloom with all a man who is supposed to like
his entire thing is about like opposing the imperialist to
over through communism, like sitting down having like a very
like a very sort of like having like a very

(52:33):
palaing around interview about that that is sax pushing a
conspiracy theory, the Ladley conspiracy theory that he was literally
calling this info one year ago. And I don't know.
I thought about this for a long time trying to
figure out what was happening here, and the conclusion that

(52:53):
I came to is that this is the soul of
a man who believes in nothing. And you know, you
can you you can ask the question why do this?
And the short answer people tend to give is just
is money. And that's like true, but it doesn't go
anywhere near far enough, because I think the real answer
why these people did these right wing pivots is much

(53:13):
much worse. The actual reason people in left media suddenly
start taking right wing turns. And this is something we've
seen from like the Young Turks, like taking this like
anti trans, anti homeless pivots. There have been several other
outlets that have done a right wing turn. And this
is a structural problem in left media, which is that
if you're in left media, you have a massive and

(53:36):
you're trying to expand you have a massive problem. And
the problem is that the left in the US just
isn't that big. Right, Like there are more leftists now
than there've been for a very very long time. But
there's only so many leftists and you can't pull from
them all because leftists all hate each other. So even
if you try to corner like the market of one
faction of the left, another faction to the left is

(53:56):
going to hate you because this is just how this
is just how infighting works. And so if you're producing
something that's designed for the left and only the left,
there is built in a hard cap on how big
your audience can get. And if you're successful, you can
hit that limit. But if you want to grow more
after that, you have to expand your ideological base, like

(54:18):
the ideological base of your audience. But the problem is
there's only two directions you can go right. You can
either try to get liberals to listen to your show,
or you could try to get conservatives. But you know,
for people like Max wely Monthal or like Jimmy dre
for examples, another person who did this big like anti
vax pivot around the same time maxle Monthal was doing it,
they have a whole thing where they they're they're talking

(54:40):
about how ivermectin is actually a good COVID treatment together. Yeah,
he used to be like a like a left wing
YouTuber or like, yeah, he was a young guy from
the Young Turks and he went off into his own
thing is now like just completely only does anti vax shit.
But the problem is if you're if you're a Jimmy
dor like, you're you're gray zone. Right, Recruiting liberals is

(55:02):
really really hard because your entire brand is based on
how much you hate liberals, and this means that the
people who naturally agree with them are conservatives. And the
other important thing here is that leftists don't have that
much money, right, Like they're there's not there's like us.
There's like there there are there are leftists who are
like college students who have rich families who have some money.

(55:25):
There's like a small number of like leftist business, but
they like they don't have on average, leftists don't have
that much money. On the other hand, conservatives have an
enormous amount of money, and they are very very easily
pandered to. If you just like pump out like bottom
barrel anti vax shit, like, they will flock to you.

(55:46):
And you know, whenever you need to get leftists sort
of back on your side, right, you can just start
tweeting a Pali sign and everyone will forget everything else
you've ever done, because any like, any time anytime someone
posts posts like a pro pales sign thing, people just
click on it. Right, Yeah, this has been, This has
been like so Maxlelyen with thus met the last about
two years just doing anti vax stuff. The moment, like

(56:08):
the moment Palestine became something that people were focusing on again,
and you know, and there are reasons for that, right like,
but the moment he did that, he just pivoted back
into doing Palestine stuff, and everyone just completely ignored what
he'd been doing this whole time. And if you do this,
and you could you pander to you pander to the
anti factors and making anti vax content. And then also

(56:31):
you could just go back and regain your leftist credentials
and get like views and support from leftists by doing
Palestine stuff. You can make a lot of money, but
there's a price. Every time you sell out to these people,
you betray another part of yourself, until one day you
believe in nothing left and the right and lose all
meeting and the only thing that's left is content in

(56:52):
the culture war. And I want to close this episode
by talking by reading something from another contributor, Anya Parimpel,
who is she's another Gray Zone journalist, and she's Matthew
lu Wenthal's wife, and she she is the Gray Zone
person who's reached the end of this cycle. I'm just
gonna read what this looks like quote. The labels of

(57:15):
left and right are outdated in the US. Case in point,
leftist white men now pander to other white men by
telling women of color their bigots for saying boys shouldn't
be able to piss in the girls room. These same
punks spent months loudly advocating against bodily. I don't know, okay,
her tweet just trails office is bodily. It says dot

(57:37):
dot dot and just moves. Or I don't know. She's
not a very good writer. Gender ideology has created a
dynamic in which a bunch of men can come into
organizing circles, play victim and a certain control over what
is acceptable for others, especially women, to say and think.
Most people know it's just misogyny tied up at a
frilly bow, but are too afraid to I just thought,
thought that's off again. I deeply weird now that participants

(58:00):
in the Impression Olympics have spent weeks attacking an anti
war rally because it didn't fit their tunnel vision for
the movement. Gloves are off. Good luck winning over the
people with your message. The same people who believed workers
should not be mandated to take an experimental injection and
that did not quote stop the spread cred my body,
my choice in roe was overturned. Yet these same these
are the same people who do not even believe biological

(58:23):
women exist. Total incoherence.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
So this is this is just a collection of This
is just a collection of like very basic right wing
talking points like this is yeah, the the like the
false correlation between like reproductive health care and like vaccines
for public health, and the stuff of a gender gender ideology.

(58:49):
All of it is just very very basic like talking
points used used by the right that conflate various issues.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
Yeah, it's just like this is indistinguishable from the ravings
of any other right winger. And this is just this
is just where this stuff ends, because this this this
specific line, this is how you fucking make money. And
you know there's you know, I mean, we could talk
about a million more iterations of how this these stuff
fused together. I mean maxle Wental goes to like an

(59:18):
anti VAXX rally that has a bunch of like three
percenters and like a bunch of just straight up right
wing fascists. But you know, this is at least one
of the end points of where this stuff goes. But
tomorrow we're going to look at a group of people
who took this even further. Yeah, it's a get ready

(59:39):
for that shit because it's about to get wildly anti semitic.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Oh great, hoorayo.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 4 (59:53):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
Thanks for listening.

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