December 13, 2023 • 52 mins
In part 3, Mia and Gare discuss the rise of increasingly fascist media figures who exploit the suffering of Palestinians to build careers off their media brands
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's an introduction to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I'm your host Bia Wong with these Garrison. Hello, Hello,
welcome to Part three of This Nightmare. Yeah, so okay,
all the way back in episode one, I said that
Marxist Leninism was based on a series of arguments about
the state, the nature of socialism, and the left relation
to nationalism. And today we're going to go through some
(00:36):
of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise
of a new kind of nationalist socialism, one that's focused
on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and
from Zionists. They call it baga communism, but you might
almost call it a kind of national socialism.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So how do we.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Get from Marxist Leninism in ideology, who is defining thing
is pure total opposition to the American Empire to maga
communism and think about how great the US is and
how much they like trump patriotic community. On that path,
these are two distant Patriotic socialism and maga communism are
(01:19):
two technically distinct things. Will be getting into that. It's
a it's a long dark road ahead, but there's no
light at the end of it either. It just it
just keeps being long and dark. So I think I
think the place to start if you want to understand
how this sort of like or a borous of shit
(01:41):
emerged from the left is by talking about the left's
discourse on nationalism.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
So one of the things.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
That Marxist Leninism did, and this is one of its
key political achievements on the left, was to rehabilitate nationalism
and talk about it in a way that was very,
very different to what was happening in the left before this.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And you know, because the.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Left around twenty eleven, like around Occupy, but after that,
tend to be very skeptical of nationalism because you know,
they had come out of like the Bush era and
where you know, had had had had first hand experience
with like what American nationalism really looks like and how
much it absolutely sucks.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
And the Marxist Londonists are something to bring this bring
nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this the
arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. Their argument is effectively that
anti colonial nationalism and anti colonial nationalisms, because there's a
bunch of them, and particularly like non white anti colonial nationalism,
like aren't the same thing as American nationalism and that
these anti colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary. And this is
(02:47):
true in a lot of cases, right, Like Palestinian nationalism
is like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah,
and you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle,
but I'm not going to like tell some Kurdish kid
that they need to like abandon their desire to speak
Krimuji because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever. Right Like,
(03:11):
But this is where we kind of start running into
problems because you know, okay, so what about like Bathism
For example, Bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement
right and they are opposed at least nomin Leagio American imperialism.
But they are one hardline anti communists and two hardcore
Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable if you
(03:32):
were Arab, but like, God help you if you are
like Kurdish or Syria Yazdi or like any other national
minority under bath Party rule, where you know, they're going
to ban your flags, they're going to ban your language,
they're going to like keep your keep you from like
naming your kids like your names. This is literally a thing,
like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah, like it
(03:54):
was illegal to give your kid like a Kurdish name
in both in both sort of Bathist Syria and Bathists
or rock and you know, if you try to resist,
they'll kill you. And I'm using Baphism like as an
example for this because like there are people now who
are genuinely Bathists, but it's like it's really hard to
(04:14):
find people who support the Bath Party.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
Yes, for reference, I have never heard of this despite you.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Never heard of the Bath Party Isadasins party?
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Okay, Well, in terms of the it's revelancy to the
modern kind of workings of of of the sort of
political sphere as I operated, this is not something that
has come up in Yeah, I've in my.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Conversations, I've ran into them there. I've ran into a
few neo Bathists who are either like Saddam well so
so the big bastion of kind of.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Like it's not even really Bathhism anymore.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But like like Basharo saw, it technically is like a
bath Okay, although his they're not really Baptists anymore. They
just kind of have this party apparatus still around. But
like you know, most people are like, Okay, this sucks, right,
but but you know, I'm using baptism because it's it's
(05:13):
the easy sample. But like this, this is a question
you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements.
And it's one people don't like asking, which is whose
nation is being liberated? And you know what kind of
class collaboration and ideological collapse do these nationalist movements produce?
And these aren't abstract questions, right. One of the big
(05:34):
examples of this is West Papuo, which is a place
that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia. But you
know Sukarno, who's this great sort of like Sukarno is
this great like anti imperialist hero. He's the guy who
did the Bank Dun Conference, which is the giant assembly
of all of the sort of like Asian and African
(05:55):
states to like join together to resist imperialism. And but
like one of the things that this left wing Indonesian
nationalism is about is their right to colonize Papua. So
the West Papua wins just get absolutely screwed over by
by the Indonesians. And this is this is this place
where you have to ask, like whose nation is being liberated,
(06:15):
and the answer is not the West. Pop wins, right,
They're just getting absolutely screwed because the nation is being
liberated is this new nation of Indonesia.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And not them.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
And you know, I mean I've talked about this on
the show before, Like I'm personally skeptical of left wing
nationalist movements because I'm from China, Like, like, my family
is from China, and we had two left wing national
liberation movements traded back by the USSR, And the first one,
which is the Chinese Nationalist Party, made it about seven
years before they turned on the Chinese working class and
butchered them in the streets with machine guns and then
(06:49):
spent the next seventy years as like a fascist desk
squad party. And then the other one, the Chinese Communist Party,
lasted yeah, maybe like forty years. I mean they they
lasted like how many is in power, Like seventeen years
in power before they get to the Cultural Revolution where
they were also shooting workers in the streets and bulldozing
Moss and ching John, which is the thing that they
continue to do to this day as part of what
(07:10):
is And I shit, you not the name for the
quote unquote counter terrorism operation that China runs in Ching
John is the People's War on Terror. I wish I
was making this up. I'm not right this and this
is a product of Chinese nationalism, right, like like it's
Chinese Islamophobia, Chinese nationalism that sort of do this stuff.
(07:31):
I'm very skeptical of nationalism as like a liberatory framework.
Like it's complicated, right, It's genuinely is sure one of
these things that's you know, like there there are there
are there's lots of nuances to it, and you know,
I think you have to take a kind of middle
ground of like you have to keep it kind of
under control. But also like I'm not going to go
tell a Palestinian care that their nationalism is bad, right,
(07:53):
like it's you know, I should I realized that I've
never explained.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
This the whole time I was doing this.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
So AM is an abbreviation for Marxist Leninist that people
say because saying Marxist Leninists over and over again, like
I've been doing for these past two episodes is wearying. Yeah,
So the MLS decided to take the other extreme, which
is just mainlining every single non Western nationalist and that
can get their hands on because they're trying to hold
(08:19):
nationalist positions that are contradictory at the same time. So
for example, like that they're trying to be both. Okay,
I guess I should explain this a little bit. So
part of it is people being nationalists for countries that
they're not from, which is deeply weird. Part of it also,
and this is part of the reason this stuff spread
is you know, you get like Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists,
(08:41):
like in response to like COVID and anti Asian violence
are just sort of in general as like a pipeline.
But you know, you get people trying to have both
being both like Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese nationalist at the
same time. And that doesn't make any sense. I mean,
like the whole apparatus that all of these sort of
revolutionary anti imperialist nationalisms would work together with sha like
(09:04):
should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution
to this is just to pretend that it never happened,
you know. And and but but like like Chinese and
Vietnamese nationalisms like don't like each other, like on the
Vietnamese side in like modern Vietnam. So they have like
a basically their own verse. It's not actually their own
(09:25):
version of like it's not actually like a Q and
no branded thing, but they have a conspiracy theory that's
like their version of the like sovereign citizen like Q thing,
and their version of it is that it basically says
that the Vietnamese government sold the country to China in
nineteen ninety and they're like embarking on like a forty
year plan to like fully sell the country to China,
(09:47):
and like the globe, like Western m house just completely
ignore this stuff because it's not convenient for them, and
they just pretend that all these people get along. But
this stuff gets, you know, it gets incredibly bizarre and
like just weird really quickly. Like one of the things
(10:07):
I remember from back in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, I
started I was hearing like leftists talking about how Ukraine
wasn't a real nationality and how they've been invented by
Nazis and that Ukrainians are inherently fascist, and I was like, what,
like why is some random kid from New Jersey suddenly
screaming about how Ukraine is like a fake nationality, and
you know, it turns out, yeah, like it's because these
(10:30):
people were like really getting into Russian nationalism, and like
in like twenty sixteen, it was just deeply weird. And
then you get to like twenty twenty two and all
these people are just straight up supporting like Putin's invasion
of Ukraine on the grounds that like Ukraine isn't a
real place and also is only Nazis and stuff like that.
(10:50):
And this has this has real sort of ideological consequences
for what Marxist Leninism becomes, because it begins to pivot
around owned a collection of nationalism, so the point where
it's not even it's not based on communism anymore. It's
just pure economic nationalism. And this is a product of
these incredibly convoluted justifications they have to put together for
(11:13):
supporting China, which is objectively a market economy and like
very obviously a market economy. Well, you know, so they
have to support China will also nominally being anti capitalist.
I'm not going to go into these arguments because they're
just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just just weird intellectual posturing.
I think it's more useful to look at where it
ends up, which is have you ran into the people
(11:35):
advocating bricks. It's like the great anti American thing.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Do you know what bricks is?
Speaker 4 (11:42):
No?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Oh god, Okay, so I don't know. I don't think.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
So bricks is a thing that stands for Brazil, Russia, India.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
China and South Africa. Oh god.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
It was originally a asset class developed by the chairman
of asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how
you know it's really anti imperialist, right, Like.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
This it's a golden golden sacks carrier of the red flag.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Yeah, like it's it's it's an investment, It's an outline
of an investment strategy.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Right.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
But a lot of a lot of these people become
convinced that like bricks is like it's like a real alliance,
and these people are like gonna like create the multipolar
world where the US is no longer the only power.
This is anti imperialism, and like.
Speaker 6 (12:24):
Uhhh yeah, this is like on a fundamental level, if
you're pushing bricks as an anti imperialist formation, like what
are we even doing here? Like who is doing the
socialism in Brazil Russia, India and China and South Africa, right, like,
is it the guy who invaded Haiti?
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Is it the butcher a Gujarat? Is it Vladimir quote
we will show Ukraine true decommunization putin is it the
African National Congress of selling your comrades out to Bank
of America? Or is it quote we must combat welfaism shijimping,
Like none of these states are even remotely socialist, but
you know, people are people are holding them up as
like anti imperialist powers because you know, they're they're sort
(13:06):
of faux anti imperialism has completely devoured whatever their anti
capitalism used to be. And you know, you shouldn't look
too close to yet, like India's relations with the US either.
Pay no attention to the fact that Indian and Chinese
truth periodically beat each other the death in the mountains.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
You know, it's a disaster. But this is what happens
when you mix nationalism with your socialism. And because of
where this is going, we should talk about the history
a little bit, about the history of displacing class struggle
with the struggle between states. Because one of the people
who does this is a man that a Garrison. I
(13:48):
bet you have heard of his name is Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Oh yes, I'm I'm slightly familiar with his with his work.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Yeah, and Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in
the beginning is that, you know, okay, So, like the
Marxist line is that there's class struggle between the proletariat
and the borgeoisi rights. So the capitalists and working class
are fighting it out, and that's the you know, the
logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting
it out, and Mussolini goes, no, No, proletarians and bourgeoisie
(14:18):
have been replaced by the struggle between like proletarian nations
and capitalists nations. So this is you know, you can
you can start to see the outlines of how we're
going to get to a national socialism from here. But first,
do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is
(14:42):
it the product okay this podcast?
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure advertising hates hates the tenants
of national socialism.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
We're back, okay.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
So we have the nationalism parts in national socialism, and
one of the other parts about this nationalism is that
it's the vector by which a bunch of right wing
social values start creeping into these Marxist Leninist spaces because
there are still a lot of like old school Marxistlninist
(15:26):
parties left over from like the sixties, but a lot
of them are just basically right wingers now. Like they're
unbelievably homophobic, they're transphobic, they like scream about cancel culture
all the time, like they're just they're just boomers, right,
but they're boomers who the thing they're boomer for is
Marcis Leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing with this
(15:49):
was to just ignore it effectively, you know, and they're
they're able. They do a really good job at ignoring.
This is happening right, like the fact that Russia has
passed a series of laws that ban all gender affirming
surgery and changing like all They banned all gender affirming surgery.
They banned like anything that allows would have allowed you
(16:09):
to change your gender on like any any like any
state identification documents. They've banned same sex marriage in the constitution.
They banned anyone like the recent one is. They banned
anyone from saying that same sex relationships are quote normal
or good, And those are their words not mine.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, I have seen this.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
Yeah, And you know, they've also declared the quote global
LGBTQ Movement as an extremist organ immediately started doing raids
on like queer bars and nightclubs. And this has changed
the minds of zero of the MLS who've been supporting,
who've been supporting like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they
just don't care. And because they don't care, because they've
(16:53):
been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know. One
of the things that they do too, is like they've
been trying to they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no,
these places are actually good for group people.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I see this with China a lot, where you're.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Like, no, no, China has one trans person who was
a talk show host, So conditions for trans people there
are really good. Meanwhile, like actually being a transperson and
trying to fucking sucks ass. There's really only like a
tiny number of of gender clinics, like you have to
like you have to like there's like this whole thing
(17:25):
where you have to like get approval from a bunch
of people to get surgery.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You have to like prove you're not a criminal or something.
You have to have like a great it's it's completely nuts.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
The whole system is just nuts, right, but you know
they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or
just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave
a space, like leave room in these Martians Lenin spaces
for people who are not really leftists at all, but
are just like hard line, homophobic, like transphobic, anti American nationalists.
(17:54):
And I started seeing this with because so one of
the problems that Marcis Leninism has is that it's not
a it's not an ideology that exists outside of like
the US, Britain, Australia, a bit of Europe. Right like
it doesn't exist in China. The closest equivalent to this
stuff in China, like people who are pro like very
hardline pro Chinese government and are also like pro Chinese nationalism.
(18:17):
The only people in China who believe this stuff are
hardline right wingers, like people who are people who in
the US would be classified as fascists. And you started
to see these people like moving into like Marxist line
into spaces because you know, nobody gave a shit that
they were like incredibly homophobic and transphobic, and they were
just I mean again just objectively right wingers, right, and
(18:39):
they just start to sort of creep into these spaces. Now,
this may or may not have ever turned into a
real thing, we don't know, but there are two break
points that really like kicked the sort of birth of
the the of like maga communism and patriarch so like
(19:00):
the sort of right trajectory of this stuff like into focus.
There was some stuff that happened in the middle of
the twenty twenty uprisings and then surprise their prize January sixth.
So do you remember you probably yeah, you were probably
busy while this was going on. Do you remember that
the giant outcry over the book in Defensive Looting?
Speaker 5 (19:23):
Uhhh slightly, yeah, I know that liberals were mad about
the title of the book, that's yeah, and conservatives selfiously
oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
So so in the middle of the uprising kind of,
I guess, kind of towards the tail end of the uprising.
Completely by coincidence, my friend Vicky Austin whil had been
writing a book called Indefensive Looting, which people should actually
go read because it's really interesting, and she got an
interview with NPR about it, and people lost their fucking
minds about this book. Like everyone from like everyone from
(19:57):
Tucker Carlson to like sitting members of the us SE.
We're going on record announcing like I think, I think
the Democratic Party like officially denounced it like it was.
I have never seen this kind of like cross partisan
every like hate longering. I'm at a book and like
the entire time I've been on the left, and you know,
(20:17):
and this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and
conservatives and fascists who are freaking out about this. This
extended to a bunch of the left. There was there's
a lot of like like I mean, the editors of
the New Republic right or like the writing articles denouncing
this stuff like it is. It's and it spreads across
the social democratic left because the social Democrats are mad
that people are louding small businesses. And the other group
(20:41):
that really really comes out against this is like ar
the Marxist London is like as people like the Gray Zone.
People really come out against this, and you know, okay,
so like why am I talking about people not liking
a book. The reason I want to talk about this
is that what emerges from this specific thing. So Vicky,
the author of this book is both trans and Jewish,
(21:04):
and what emerges here is this very specific combination of transphobia,
anti semitism, anti black racism, both explicitly anti black racism
and in the form of crime panics. And if you
look at all of those elements together, that has been
the entire right wing strategy for you know, putting all
of the like uppity minorities back in their place after
(21:26):
the uprising right that was their entire strategy, the defense
of small businesses, you know, and then and then turning
that into crime panic.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
To rebuild support for the police.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
This was, you know, that anti semitism, transphobia, that is
their entire strategy for post twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
And this is like, this is the.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Place where it was first. All of it was put
together in one spot. And again like a lot of
people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist
Lennon is like joining on this because even though the
point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property,
well that.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Is ostensibly the point, I think, yeah, but.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
In reality, like like the Margin's London is like they
don't actually oppose capitalism. They just think it should be
run by someone else. So they everyone, like everyone falls
in line and joins this sort of like you know,
joins the sort of ritual denunciation of this book. And
this is one of these things that really sort of
cleaves like it really it cleaves the left in between
(22:27):
the people who like actually fully support the uprising and
the people who were like, oh no.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
The small business is oh no, the horror.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
And the second thing that really reshapes the environment, like
the whole sort of ecosystem like of the left is
January sixth. And so I don't know if people how
much people remember the initial reactions to it. I think
the reaction is to January sixth, and the left can
be divided into roughly three different reactions, although people have
mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny. Two, Oh
(23:00):
my god, the fascists tried to do a coup and
installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three January sixth was
the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians. Now, okay, objectively,
we can say that January safe was not the white
working class. It's revenge with the politicians.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
If you are one of the first two opinions. That's fine,
that's normal, that makes sense. If you're the last of one,
you should stop listening to this podcast.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, and you know I want to actually so I
spent a bunch of time after this, and some other
people did this too, like trying to figure out the
actual like who from who was arrested, and who we
know was there, what their actual class backgrounds are. And
it turns out the three most common kinds of people
who were there are troops, cops, the small business owners,
which is it is as pure of an expression of
(23:51):
the social base of fascism as you can possibly.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Get right like it is.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
The world was just like, hey, this is what fashionsm
crops like it is.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
Well, I think there's there's I think there's a lot
a lot of participants in that crowd who I maybe
wouldn't even consider fascists. But they are a crop of
conservatives that are that have the financial and social resources
to be able to go across the country to this,
to this big event, to watch the soon to be
(24:21):
ex president speak like they they have enough capital and
sport to be able to do this, which is very
different than a whole bunch of like broke punks riding
on trains to go protests like halfwaycross the country. Like
these these are two very different social factions.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
But yeah, it is. It is.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
It is a grouping of conservatives who are able to
financially support going across the country to hear President Trump
speak and then in the moment you realize, oh wow,
we're breaking into Congress.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Yeah, well, I think the thing I would say about
that too is like like part of the process of
what fascism is is turning those people from regular conservatives
into into ground troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, and that's and
that's what's happening here. But but there's a bunch of
the left who like absolutely insist that this was really
the working class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing
(25:19):
between a large group of white people and the working class.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
And these are the people.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Okay, it's not good they keep doing this like they
were doing this with like a bunch of like like
French anti vaxxers. Yeah, there's like a bunch of people
who were convinced like and this is this is one
of the everythings we talked about in this last episode,
Like these people support the Canadian Trucker's convoy, even though
they're just right wingers. The other big example of this
is the Belgian farmers protests. This is huge farm protests
(25:49):
in Belgium that are like a very big car caused
the left on the right, and literally the thing they
are protesting about is that they're incredibly pissed off that
there's environmental regulation to try to get them to not
like dump fertilizer in the fucking rivers. It's like like
that's the kind of thing that they're mad about, Like
they're mad about environmental regulation. They're mad about like like
(26:10):
not being allowed to completely destroy the environment completely. But
because it's like a large, massive people, there's all these
people who are like, ah, it's the revolution. It's like no,
these guys are like they're small business owners on farms.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Yeah, ooh woo, small bean blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
One of the products of this is this thing that
becomes now as patriotic socialism. But first, do you know
what else is a product all.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
Of the wonderful little snippets of important messages that it
is about to flow right into your brain as you
listen to these ads.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
We're back with patriotic socialism. So patriarchic socialism is this
thing that emerges in like I think like late. I
think it's like early twenty twenty. I was too obviously,
I was just gonna admit I was too lazy to
go back and find the first time someone used the term.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Socialist.
Speaker 5 (27:17):
You mean yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean it's I mean,
I'm sure those two words have been combined many times.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Yeah, I mean, like in the modern context. Yeah, there's
a thing from like very like like twenty twenty basically
is when.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
It like, yes, this specific ideological strain that we'll be
talking about emerges around twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I think that's fair. Yeah, And it's so patriarchic socialism.
It combines all of the elements that we've talked about already, right,
It takes the nationalism in the homophobia, support for capitalist economies.
But then it makes one crucial move, which is it
flips the direction of the nationalisms. So instead of being
like hardline anti Americans, you're now like hard line pro
(28:01):
American nationalist. Instead of being an anti imperialist who ignores
the war crimes of China and Syria and blah blah blah,
blah Blahia and r Yeah, obviously Russia instead.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
Now America is the best.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
Yeah, like you know, and I mean their line basically
they've adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line that
the American Communist Party took in like the thirties, which
was like, ah, the way we get a revolution in
America is through American nationalism. So we're gonna like post
pictures of us next to Abe Lincoln, and this is
going to make people not hate us, you know. And
(28:40):
you can tell how well this worked by tracking the
number of people in the Communist Party as they adopt
the strategy in the late thirties and seeing how it plummets.
So you know, winning ideas great, great great moves here.
But okay, so the thing about patriotic socialism is that
it never did that well because it sucks because you
(29:04):
can't There was originally an attempt to pull in people
from the left right, but everyone who looked at this
was like this is lame and sucks, Like why would
I want to get why would I want it? Like
did these people suck? I don't like that, they're weird
American nationalists? Why would anyone be interested in this? And
so what they were in, so that didn't work very well.
(29:26):
The thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core
of like LaRue Shites and these like very weird third
positionist people. But there's just not that many of them.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
I mean, like they definitely the people that were there
were pushing this as like an it's almost like a
memetic ideology in twenty twenty. There was there was some
of them who were more kind of typical like Marxist Latinists,
people who kind of orbited around the writers at Grey Zone.
Like we mentioned in the last episode, we had this
one YouTuber named Peter Coffin who was like like a
(29:59):
Marxist YouTuber.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Yeah, the guy guy is mostly as for kicking himself
in the balls on live TV.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
Yeah, well I think he was really one of the
guys to kind of uh popularized patriotic socialism as as
a term, even before people like Kinkle came onto the scene,
which I assume will be getting.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
To show get to that.
Speaker 5 (30:16):
Yeah, but but yeah, it kind of it kind of
circled around this like Caleb Moppin, Peter Coffin circle of
these sorts of like content creators and writers who were
really into like a classical Marxist theory.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, but like not but I I yeah, it's like,
but they were.
Speaker 5 (30:32):
From from very like statist yeah, American imial aspective, right.
The thing is like they suck as theorists, right like
and this is this is like a one of the
trends of these people is that they're And this is
why it doesn't take off because like one of the
other guys, he's going to become like a maga communism guy.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Later is this guy named Hawes or Infrared who he's
like the big theory guy is unreader essentially, but yeah,
he's like a twist streamer. I think he's He's stuff
is completely unreadable, like it's it's nonsense, like to the
point where even when this politics gets big and Hinkle
tries to get people to read it, no one will
fucking read it. His own followers won't read it because
(31:09):
it's awful.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
I think between like, I don't think that this at
least in my observations of this political subculture. The point
is not to convert people to your politics, because there
really isn't any core political essence of this thing. It's
mostly a visual meme to get eyes on you, because
all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators,
Like it's all a way just to boost your personal
(31:32):
brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal
brand like that. All the guys who are pushing this
really hard. None of them were serious about any kind
of political theory tied to this notion. They were all
plugging their Twitch stream, plugging their YouTube, their new book
that's coming out, like all of it was just to
sell content. That I read on a lot of the
(31:52):
guys that at least initially started pushing this thing as
a as like a meme.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
But I think the thing that's important about this too, though,
is the original guys were fucking losers, Like this is
why this didn't work. Sten like Coffin starts doing this
because his his a richest previous seventeen grifts have all
fallowed apart.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
He was, He's been through, He's taken.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
Every conceivable leftist position and tried to make a brand
around it, and it was just failing.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Right, he just turn into this.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
He doesn't work and like him and Moppin and like
the other people in the space like are so unbelievably
uncharismatic and so it just doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
The thing about this too right is like the.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Reason it doesn't work partially because these people aren't charismatic,
and partially it's because they really are obsessed with writing
theory bullshit, like like yeah, like the theory betiety is
completely incoherent, but they're like reading their theory on streams
and shit, and like nobody likes that they need to
produce some theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but
(32:50):
like Cos spends all this time fancy about Hegel.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And it's like, does anyone want to list Like no, Like.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
I mean, I I do like hearing about Hegel, but
not from Cos.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, but you know, like he's like he's also yelling about.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
How like there isn't a real left anymore because I'm
like the far right people want to align with Putin.
But into this gap comes Jackson Hinkle. So Hinkle was
just like a nobody. He was some random left Twitter
person with like ten k followers. He like lost a
(33:22):
city council race in ten like he was like he
was a joke. But in twenty twenty he starts to
crack the formula, which is he figures out the same
thing the gray zone people do, which is that you
can't pull from the left right. If you want to
actually build a large scale brand, you have to pull.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
From the right.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
And so he's one of the people who first gets
really big into this thing called maga communism, which is
like kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideologies,
like mostly a troll ideology, Like it's.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is meme based. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
Basically, what they've done is, like they've pulled together is
an attempt to build an ideology based on pure authoritarianism,
Like it's based on like liking both Trump and Xijianping
and Putin at the same time, because all of them
are powerful leaders.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Who like want to restore their nation or whatever.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
And you know, but like the actual content of it
is kind of nothing. But but what Hinkle does, and
this is the thing he does that's very smart, is
that he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way
less smart than Hawes. But because he's not smart, he
kind of half stumbles and half figures out into how
you make content for the right, which is just incredibly
(34:40):
simple propaganda.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
You reach tweet right wing social media people, you make
posts with very very simple slogans and like sentences with
like words that don't go above two syllables and get
you get in every single time or right wing grievance
thing happens, you just get in and you just keep
cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day. He
does this on his YouTube channel. He does this on
(35:03):
his Twitter. He now has two point three million Twitter followers,
most of which he has made in the past two months.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, And he was on you know, and he's not.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
He's now taken like he's done one of these right
wing media tours, like he's been on Carlson, He's been
on fucking Info Wars, He's been on OEMs, the One
American Network. And part of the reason this works is
because right wingers love to find like a nominal leftists
who agrees with them. And Hinkel, you know, he gets
into argument with people sometimes, like when he was on
Alex Jones there, Alex Jones is like, what do you
(35:36):
mean you're a communists?
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Like what the fuck?
Speaker 4 (35:38):
And Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why are like
communism is when no globalists He's just.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
He's like, in effect, they are doing a form of
national socialism, which which relies on anti Semitism and this
notion of casting globalists as Jewish Zionists who are secretly
controlling all of industry and we're gonna give the real.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Power back to the average regular.
Speaker 5 (36:08):
Working man, which is it's it's he can frame it
as communism, but like it is, it is. It is
just a form of Nazi theory. Like that is what
he fundamentally operates on.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
And he's he's interesting because his she is he has gone,
you know, as as bad as the like transphobia stuff
in last episode is right like that that is like
an average like COVID grifter thing he has.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
He has he has his own own share of transphobia
as well.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, well.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
He is way further right than anyone who's ever come
out of the left to like do this kind of
thing has ever gone. He is, like so there's a
video of him arguing with a guy named sneak.
Speaker 5 (36:47):
O and who is just a twitch line is just
as it is, a twitch streamer who aligns himself with
a whole bunch of kind of influencers for young usually
white men, Like yeah, he's like close, He's like Andrew
Tate it's it's it's just, yeah, he's a fucking twitch
influencer who courts unbelievable misogynist young man.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
That's the basic of it, you know.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
I mean, he's he's kind of he's gone to the
point where he's he's not quite in the same circles
as Nick Flentes, but that's largely because Flentes is like
a hardline Christian fascist and Sneko's like, is like a
Muslim fascist in the same.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Wow like fat he's like he's like a far far
right wing Muslim in the same vein is like, I don't,
I don't.
Speaker 5 (37:30):
I don't think Sneko is really id politically driven, like
like like consciously so he's he's he's just a he's
just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you
say certain things, you can get a yeah, twelve year
employees to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's
that's it's really, it's really I think that the core
of of of his of him, I hate politics.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
He sucks so much.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
But like so he go goes on his show and
he spends the entire show trying to convey Sneko that
Hitler was gay and that the reason and and snek
Go's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the the Mangis Herochelt
Institute for Sexual Research, And sneak Go's like, well that
was a good thing. And Hinkel's response is no, no, no,
all the Nazis were gay in trans so they had
(38:15):
to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover up
the fact, like to hide the evidence that they were
all gay in trans Like this is a level of
like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so far
beyond the like normal shit that like and you know,
(38:35):
and and and this, and like even Sneko is like,
why are you talking about?
Speaker 5 (38:40):
But I just can't take anything. Hinkel says as like
a literal thing he believes.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
He doesn't believe. He believes that everything is. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
He is the pure distillation of a man who believes
in nothing. Yeah, Like like he is. She's not even
a purse, he's not even a human being. He is
just a content mill. Yeah, that's that's all. He He's
just a brand. But what he's discovered, the way he's
he's decided to build his brand is by basically out
trying to he's doing. Okay, there was a there was
(39:09):
a weird maga communism thing.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
He does that.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Less now because it's it's outlived usefulness and a lot
of this is now it's now it's easier to be
a U a Palestine. Uh yeah, like and quote unquote
anti's Zionist influencer. In reality, he just is extremely anti Semitic.
Like this is that is his actual politics. Yeah, let's
(39:32):
talk about Well, okay, she's like it's genuinely unclear to
me whether he personally is really anti Semitic, Like I
don't know, he might be. I mean, like it doesn't matter.
Like that's the thing, Like he's.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
The way that he talks about it, the way he
talks about how how how Zionists.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Like rule the world.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
It's it's, it's it's you can just like about that
until Protocols of the Elders.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Yeah, Like so this is the thing, like like Hinkle
Hink is not really at this point, like they're like
there there is no person behind it, right, He's just
purely a right wing mill that regurgitates.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Stuff and the stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
And the way that he figured out you could do
this is by trying to outflank the traditional hard right
on anti Semitism. So let's let's let's let's take a
look at like exactly the kind of anti Semitic shit
that he's on, because he is just straight up in
anti Semite, right. This is not a like think I'm
saying because of this palsized stuff, so grant the Like last
(40:31):
week the trailer for Grand Theft Auto six came out, Yeah,
and there's like a bunch of women tworking in it
and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis
and stuff, and there's like this enormous, like really weird,
incredibly pathetic right wing like thing about it, saying that
it's like anti Christian and it's like spreading poorn to
(40:52):
children and teaching people to do crimes, and that like
shooting cops is bad and that no one should ever
play it, and because this is like the current right
wing media panic, Inkle starts tweeting about it. And his
tweet is, so this starts with an Israeli flag, and
it starts with like that like siren thing that people
post when they're about to do an alert quote, why
are the Zionists all capitalized at Rockstar Games releasing this
(41:15):
all caps sexualized video game for children in America? Get
hashtag ban GTA six.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
This is also in all caps.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Trending right now. So this is straight up neo Nazi ship, right,
this is neo Nazis shit about the Jews conspiracy right,
Like that's yeah, yeah, it's like, this is a right
of neo Nazi shit. And he's been trying to use
the fact that he is more anti Semitic than openly
anti Semitic, even than so even than someone like Elon Musk,
(41:44):
right sure, and he's been trying to use this as
a way to basically steal their bases.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
So like two days ago when this goes up, three.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
Really recently, there was this giant like call like there's
this giant like Twitter space thing. They had Alex Jones,
Elon Musk, Andrew Trey and Vivik Ramaswami in it, and
Kink just like keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's
gonna turn on the starlink like internet stuff or Palestine,
and these people basically tell him to shut up and
like kick him off.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
But then he does that.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
He starts doing this like giant like I've been censored
like media thing about it, and what he's doing here
this is thing he does constantly he's trying to take
the basis from people like Alex Jones, people like Elon
Musk and people from Edu Tate who wants more open
anti Semitism. Right, Like, these people are anti.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
St He's trying to flank them, you can say, quote
unquote from the right. But like at this point the
right less spectrum kind of resolves into meaningless uh mambo jumbo.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
But yeah, he's trying to He's I mean, he's just
a fascist, right, He's he's trying to he's trying to
play like the anti.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Semite flame from the anti Semitics thing.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
Yes, yeah, and you know, and but but he's he's
figured out this is the thing that actually pushed him
really into the mainstream. Is he figured out a way
to do cover for this that also lets him get
a bunch of like attention and clicks and stuff from
the left, which is and also like a lot of
support from Palestinians. And we're going to talk about that
(43:09):
in a second.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
People who don't.
Speaker 5 (43:10):
Understand who he actually is, or maybe if they do,
they just don't really care because because it doesn't affect them,
because he is currently possibly the most influential person talking
about this conflict right now, like like at least on
the Internet, like his his his impressions is larger than
anyone else. His tweets get read aloud in newsrooms across
(43:34):
across the country, like he is. He has succeeded in
grifting off of off of this conflict to promote his
personal brand in almost an almost unparalleled way, Like there's
never been someone who's done this as successfully as Hinkled
as for any other conflict. It is, it is, it
is quite quite quite surprising that there's just this one
(43:55):
guy sitting sitting on his phone in America has has
been this successful by essentially just tweeting NonStop.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
Yeah, Like to put this in perspective, so like he
has Alex Jones got banned and that kind of like
limited his coverage, but he has more followers on Twitter
of Alex Jones. Alex Jones has just been on band
form Twitter, like he has more followers at Alex Jones.
Like that's that's how And it's not even just followers too,
it's it's how much his posts are seen and circulated
like he Yeah, there was he was for almost I
(44:26):
think the most of the month of October he was
person with the highest digital impressions on the platform, like
he yea, his stuff was being seen by more people
than anyone else, like he yeah, So let's talk about
what that stuff actually is. It's large. It's like it's
a combination of him just retweeting other people, stealing other
people's like videos of like press conferences from the Camas.
(44:49):
Most of it is dead babies, like it's a bunch,
it's a bunch of dead babies. It's a bunch of
dead Palestinians, just over and over and over and over again.
And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire, like how cand
Zionists do this.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
One of the things about misinformation, mischaracterizing attacks events, like
a lot of others basic stuff like.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
It's yeah, and one of one of his tricks and
that this is this has been a thing for these
kind of like these margialonist people for a long time,
is spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the Syrians
of a war features from Palestine, which they do constantly,
and this, you know, and like one of the things
that we haven't sort of hushed on yet is like
yet he so one of the things that's happened with
him is because he's the biggest person tweeting about Palestine.
(45:31):
His like a lot of his tweets about Palestine are
translated into Arabic and they're posted all over like Arabic
Instagram of Arabic Twitter, Like it's like they're they're spent
fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either like don't
know who he is, right, because they're only seeing his
Palestine stuff, right, They're not seeing his like raving about
(45:53):
how GTA six is anti Christian, right, They're only seeing
that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more
popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is
one of the really grim parts about this, which is
that you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting
(46:16):
fucking killed all the time, Like every single day, another
Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed, Like more and more Palestinian
intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle
exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of
people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks
and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill
the void left by the fact that the Israelis have
(46:38):
been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own
fucking drifting brands. And he's able to do this because
you know, Hinkel is incredibly safe, just fucking living it
up in the US, while the people who's suffering he's
exploiting are getting fucking murdered in the streets. And he's
(46:59):
making tons of money doing this.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Enormous amounts of money.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
Yeah, and I don't know, I don't I don't really
have I don't have a fucking solution to this. Like
he's he's effectively just figured out how to completely game this.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
System in a way that hasn't been done before.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
I think part of this is, like with the way
Twitter's content moderation is working now, Gore can we spread
around in ways that it didn't used to, which is
a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people.
So he's able to to do a whole Buntu quote
tea quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images which
draw draw more people to his platform. He's he's he's
(47:39):
just like figured out a specific thing, like he's he's
been trying to do this for a few years with
very with various types of like you know, conflicts or
like little little like bits that he like tries to
tries to do this media strategy thing on and this
this one has happened to work. There there was there
was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to
(48:00):
to get get platformed by many, many, many unwitting people.
And at this point, deplatforming is not even an option,
Like it's it's like, you can't you can't deplatform someone
with three million followers. Really, that just isn't. Yeah that
he's ship too, Like yeah, yeah, it just it just it.
That's why he just doesn't even follow anymore.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, I guess, I guess.
Speaker 4 (48:24):
One last thing I want to say about this is like,
and he's he's been incredibly successful at leveraging, like at
leveraging the fact that he posts not not even good
pro palisine content, right sucks, ass right, it's but he's
been incredibly successful leveraging that to use his defense against
any claims of anti Semitism. And this sucks because he's,
(48:48):
you know, he's he's effectively using he's using Palestinians as
a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses
in order to build a brand. While that also complaining
about the degeneracy of seeing a whole bunch of non
white people having a beach party in GTA five, right, Like,
it's like, it's it's not like he actually cares about
the lives of Palestinians being killed because he's complaining about
(49:10):
black people in GTA five. Like it's not like, come on, like,
it's it's he is He's just an anti Semitic fascist.
This is yeah, this is very very clear. I think
I think the thing that can be done is we
like we need to like these people can't be allowed
to fucking get their start here, Like we can't be
(49:31):
having a bunch of fucking transphobes and anti semis. We
can't be having all of these fucking homophobic right wing
nationalists like in leftist basis. They just like they can't
be here because if if there had actually been, you know,
a kind of sustained effort to get these people fucking
out before before they pulled all of this shit, we
wouldn't be here right now. But that wasn't done. People
(49:53):
were people were just completely okay with having all of
these right wingers just being there because are the same
states that they do, and because of that, we're here.
Speaker 5 (50:04):
I mean, yeah, I really only see that on like
the heavily communist and statist contingent of the left right,
Like these types of people aren't super popular among most
like social democrats. At least recently, there's been kind of
a harder divide, at least from my observation between like
SoC dems, between like socialists libertarian socialists, and the people
(50:29):
who are like hardlined. I am a Marxist Leninist. I
am affiliated with these Marxi Leninist organizations, and those are
the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind
of almost like prey on to like gain followers and
gain some.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Poy well, and I would say this, like, this is
like those groups like like the PSL for examples. PSL
is one example, ses right, and like they also have
a there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them
chasing down abusers. Like I know people who they liked
a tweet that was talking about how the ps CELL
had had fucked up a a sexual assault investigation and
(51:04):
they were dragged because they had liked to tweet about this.
They were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee
where Gloria Rivera, They're fucking like eternal presidential candidates started
doing a bunch of fucking transphobia shit and then covering
it with the exact same gray zone like I'm a
woman of color thing, you know. But these groups were
like on they were on the edge of Collie like
basically becoming an non relevant because they've been supporting Russia
(51:27):
during the war and Ukraine for this whole time. But
then Palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like,
is the one issue that their stance is like, you know,
tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all
all of these people have been using Palestine. All these
people who've been.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Fucking pivoting harder, harder and harder.
Speaker 4 (51:45):
Right for years and years and years now have been
have like have been exploiting the exploiting the fucking genocide
and Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftist
clicks back.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
And it's utterly grotesque.
Speaker 4 (52:00):
Yeah, that's that's That's what I've got about this.
Speaker 3 (52:02):
It is.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
It is certainly upsetting. Yeah, Free Palestine, Fuck the grifters.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's an introduction to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
I'm your host Bia Wong with these Garrison. Hello, Hello,
welcome to Part three of This Nightmare. Yeah, so okay,
all the way back in episode one, I said that
Marxist Leninism was based on a series of arguments about
the state, the nature of socialism, and the left relation
to nationalism. And today we're going to go through some
(00:36):
of those arguments because they're key to understanding the rise
of a new kind of nationalist socialism, one that's focused
on taking back your country from nebulous global elites and
from Zionists. They call it baga communism, but you might
almost call it a kind of national socialism.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So how do we.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Get from Marxist Leninism in ideology, who is defining thing
is pure total opposition to the American Empire to maga
communism and think about how great the US is and
how much they like trump patriotic community. On that path,
these are two distant Patriotic socialism and maga communism are
(01:19):
two technically distinct things. Will be getting into that. It's
a it's a long dark road ahead, but there's no
light at the end of it either. It just it
just keeps being long and dark. So I think I
think the place to start if you want to understand
how this sort of like or a borous of shit
(01:41):
emerged from the left is by talking about the left's
discourse on nationalism.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
So one of the things.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
That Marxist Leninism did, and this is one of its
key political achievements on the left, was to rehabilitate nationalism
and talk about it in a way that was very,
very different to what was happening in the left before this.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And you know, because the.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Left around twenty eleven, like around Occupy, but after that,
tend to be very skeptical of nationalism because you know,
they had come out of like the Bush era and
where you know, had had had had first hand experience
with like what American nationalism really looks like and how
much it absolutely sucks.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
And the Marxist Londonists are something to bring this bring
nationalism back into the left, and they're doing this the
arguments that aren't necessarily wrong. Their argument is effectively that
anti colonial nationalism and anti colonial nationalisms, because there's a
bunch of them, and particularly like non white anti colonial nationalism,
like aren't the same thing as American nationalism and that
these anti colonial nationalisms like are revolutionary. And this is
(02:47):
true in a lot of cases, right, Like Palestinian nationalism
is like a completely different thing from Australian nationalism. Yeah,
and you know, I'm pretty opposed to like nationalism on principle,
but I'm not going to like tell some Kurdish kid
that they need to like abandon their desire to speak
Krimuji because it's like insufficiently revolutionary or whatever. Right Like,
(03:11):
But this is where we kind of start running into
problems because you know, okay, so what about like Bathism
For example, Bathism originally is a leftist like nationalist movement
right and they are opposed at least nomin Leagio American imperialism.
But they are one hardline anti communists and two hardcore
Arab nationalists, which may have been vaguely tolerable if you
(03:32):
were Arab, but like, God help you if you are
like Kurdish or Syria Yazdi or like any other national
minority under bath Party rule, where you know, they're going
to ban your flags, they're going to ban your language,
they're going to like keep your keep you from like
naming your kids like your names. This is literally a thing,
like it sounds absolutely nuts, but like yeah, like it
(03:54):
was illegal to give your kid like a Kurdish name
in both in both sort of Bathist Syria and Bathists
or rock and you know, if you try to resist,
they'll kill you. And I'm using Baphism like as an
example for this because like there are people now who
are genuinely Bathists, but it's like it's really hard to
(04:14):
find people who support the Bath Party.
Speaker 5 (04:19):
Yes, for reference, I have never heard of this despite you.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Never heard of the Bath Party Isadasins party?
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Okay, Well, in terms of the it's revelancy to the
modern kind of workings of of of the sort of
political sphere as I operated, this is not something that
has come up in Yeah, I've in my.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Conversations, I've ran into them there. I've ran into a
few neo Bathists who are either like Saddam well so
so the big bastion of kind of.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Like it's not even really Bathhism anymore.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But like like Basharo saw, it technically is like a
bath Okay, although his they're not really Baptists anymore. They
just kind of have this party apparatus still around. But
like you know, most people are like, Okay, this sucks, right,
but but you know, I'm using baptism because it's it's
(05:13):
the easy sample. But like this, this is a question
you have to ask with basically all national liberation movements.
And it's one people don't like asking, which is whose
nation is being liberated? And you know what kind of
class collaboration and ideological collapse do these nationalist movements produce?
And these aren't abstract questions, right. One of the big
(05:34):
examples of this is West Papuo, which is a place
that is ruthlessly and brutally colonized by Indonesia. But you
know Sukarno, who's this great sort of like Sukarno is
this great like anti imperialist hero. He's the guy who
did the Bank Dun Conference, which is the giant assembly
of all of the sort of like Asian and African
(05:55):
states to like join together to resist imperialism. And but
like one of the things that this left wing Indonesian
nationalism is about is their right to colonize Papua. So
the West Papua wins just get absolutely screwed over by
by the Indonesians. And this is this is this place
where you have to ask, like whose nation is being liberated,
(06:15):
and the answer is not the West. Pop wins, right,
They're just getting absolutely screwed because the nation is being
liberated is this new nation of Indonesia.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And not them.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
And you know, I mean I've talked about this on
the show before, Like I'm personally skeptical of left wing
nationalist movements because I'm from China, Like, like, my family
is from China, and we had two left wing national
liberation movements traded back by the USSR, And the first one,
which is the Chinese Nationalist Party, made it about seven
years before they turned on the Chinese working class and
butchered them in the streets with machine guns and then
(06:49):
spent the next seventy years as like a fascist desk
squad party. And then the other one, the Chinese Communist Party,
lasted yeah, maybe like forty years. I mean they they
lasted like how many is in power, Like seventeen years
in power before they get to the Cultural Revolution where
they were also shooting workers in the streets and bulldozing
Moss and ching John, which is the thing that they
continue to do to this day as part of what
(07:10):
is And I shit, you not the name for the
quote unquote counter terrorism operation that China runs in Ching
John is the People's War on Terror. I wish I
was making this up. I'm not right this and this
is a product of Chinese nationalism, right, like like it's
Chinese Islamophobia, Chinese nationalism that sort of do this stuff.
(07:31):
I'm very skeptical of nationalism as like a liberatory framework.
Like it's complicated, right, It's genuinely is sure one of
these things that's you know, like there there are there
are there's lots of nuances to it, and you know,
I think you have to take a kind of middle
ground of like you have to keep it kind of
under control. But also like I'm not going to go
tell a Palestinian care that their nationalism is bad, right,
(07:53):
like it's you know, I should I realized that I've
never explained.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
This the whole time I was doing this.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
So AM is an abbreviation for Marxist Leninist that people
say because saying Marxist Leninists over and over again, like
I've been doing for these past two episodes is wearying. Yeah,
So the MLS decided to take the other extreme, which
is just mainlining every single non Western nationalist and that
can get their hands on because they're trying to hold
(08:19):
nationalist positions that are contradictory at the same time. So
for example, like that they're trying to be both. Okay,
I guess I should explain this a little bit. So
part of it is people being nationalists for countries that
they're not from, which is deeply weird. Part of it also,
and this is part of the reason this stuff spread
is you know, you get like Chinese people becoming Chinese nationalists,
(08:41):
like in response to like COVID and anti Asian violence
are just sort of in general as like a pipeline.
But you know, you get people trying to have both
being both like Chinese nationalists and Vietnamese nationalist at the
same time. And that doesn't make any sense. I mean,
like the whole apparatus that all of these sort of
revolutionary anti imperialist nationalisms would work together with sha like
(09:04):
should have been shattered when China invaded Vietnam. Their solution
to this is just to pretend that it never happened,
you know. And and but but like like Chinese and
Vietnamese nationalisms like don't like each other, like on the
Vietnamese side in like modern Vietnam. So they have like
a basically their own verse. It's not actually their own
(09:25):
version of like it's not actually like a Q and
no branded thing, but they have a conspiracy theory that's
like their version of the like sovereign citizen like Q thing,
and their version of it is that it basically says
that the Vietnamese government sold the country to China in
nineteen ninety and they're like embarking on like a forty
year plan to like fully sell the country to China,
(09:47):
and like the globe, like Western m house just completely
ignore this stuff because it's not convenient for them, and
they just pretend that all these people get along. But
this stuff gets, you know, it gets incredibly bizarre and
like just weird really quickly. Like one of the things
(10:07):
I remember from back in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, I
started I was hearing like leftists talking about how Ukraine
wasn't a real nationality and how they've been invented by
Nazis and that Ukrainians are inherently fascist, and I was like, what,
like why is some random kid from New Jersey suddenly
screaming about how Ukraine is like a fake nationality, and
you know, it turns out, yeah, like it's because these
(10:30):
people were like really getting into Russian nationalism, and like
in like twenty sixteen, it was just deeply weird. And
then you get to like twenty twenty two and all
these people are just straight up supporting like Putin's invasion
of Ukraine on the grounds that like Ukraine isn't a
real place and also is only Nazis and stuff like that.
(10:50):
And this has this has real sort of ideological consequences
for what Marxist Leninism becomes, because it begins to pivot
around owned a collection of nationalism, so the point where
it's not even it's not based on communism anymore. It's
just pure economic nationalism. And this is a product of
these incredibly convoluted justifications they have to put together for
(11:13):
supporting China, which is objectively a market economy and like
very obviously a market economy. Well, you know, so they
have to support China will also nominally being anti capitalist.
I'm not going to go into these arguments because they're
just pseudo Marxist gibberish. It's just just weird intellectual posturing.
I think it's more useful to look at where it
ends up, which is have you ran into the people
(11:35):
advocating bricks. It's like the great anti American thing.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Do you know what bricks is?
Speaker 4 (11:42):
No?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Oh god, Okay, so I don't know. I don't think.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
So bricks is a thing that stands for Brazil, Russia, India.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
China and South Africa. Oh god.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
It was originally a asset class developed by the chairman
of asset management at Goldman Sachs. So this is how
you know it's really anti imperialist, right, Like.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
This it's a golden golden sacks carrier of the red flag.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Yeah, like it's it's it's an investment, It's an outline
of an investment strategy.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Right.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
But a lot of a lot of these people become
convinced that like bricks is like it's like a real alliance,
and these people are like gonna like create the multipolar
world where the US is no longer the only power.
This is anti imperialism, and like.
Speaker 6 (12:24):
Uhhh yeah, this is like on a fundamental level, if
you're pushing bricks as an anti imperialist formation, like what
are we even doing here? Like who is doing the
socialism in Brazil Russia, India and China and South Africa, right, like,
is it the guy who invaded Haiti?
Speaker 4 (12:43):
Is it the butcher a Gujarat? Is it Vladimir quote
we will show Ukraine true decommunization putin is it the
African National Congress of selling your comrades out to Bank
of America? Or is it quote we must combat welfaism shijimping,
Like none of these states are even remotely socialist, but
you know, people are people are holding them up as
like anti imperialist powers because you know, they're they're sort
(13:06):
of faux anti imperialism has completely devoured whatever their anti
capitalism used to be. And you know, you shouldn't look
too close to yet, like India's relations with the US either.
Pay no attention to the fact that Indian and Chinese
truth periodically beat each other the death in the mountains.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
You know, it's a disaster. But this is what happens
when you mix nationalism with your socialism. And because of
where this is going, we should talk about the history
a little bit, about the history of displacing class struggle
with the struggle between states. Because one of the people
who does this is a man that a Garrison. I
(13:48):
bet you have heard of his name is Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Oh yes, I'm I'm slightly familiar with his with his work.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Yeah, and Mussolini's thing, like one of his things in
the beginning is that, you know, okay, So, like the
Marxist line is that there's class struggle between the proletariat
and the borgeoisi rights. So the capitalists and working class
are fighting it out, and that's the you know, the
logic of history is driven by these two classes fighting
it out, and Mussolini goes, no, No, proletarians and bourgeoisie
(14:18):
have been replaced by the struggle between like proletarian nations
and capitalists nations. So this is you know, you can
you can start to see the outlines of how we're
going to get to a national socialism from here. But first,
do you know who else opposes a national socialism? Is
(14:42):
it the product okay this podcast?
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure advertising hates hates the tenants
of national socialism.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
We're back, okay.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
So we have the nationalism parts in national socialism, and
one of the other parts about this nationalism is that
it's the vector by which a bunch of right wing
social values start creeping into these Marxist Leninist spaces because
there are still a lot of like old school Marxistlninist
(15:26):
parties left over from like the sixties, but a lot
of them are just basically right wingers now. Like they're
unbelievably homophobic, they're transphobic, they like scream about cancel culture
all the time, like they're just they're just boomers, right,
but they're boomers who the thing they're boomer for is
Marcis Leninism. And the ML's strategy for dealing with this
(15:49):
was to just ignore it effectively, you know, and they're
they're able. They do a really good job at ignoring.
This is happening right, like the fact that Russia has
passed a series of laws that ban all gender affirming
surgery and changing like all They banned all gender affirming surgery.
They banned like anything that allows would have allowed you
(16:09):
to change your gender on like any any like any
state identification documents. They've banned same sex marriage in the constitution.
They banned anyone like the recent one is. They banned
anyone from saying that same sex relationships are quote normal
or good, And those are their words not mine.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, I have seen this.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
Yeah, And you know, they've also declared the quote global
LGBTQ Movement as an extremist organ immediately started doing raids
on like queer bars and nightclubs. And this has changed
the minds of zero of the MLS who've been supporting,
who've been supporting like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they
just don't care. And because they don't care, because they've
(16:53):
been doing they've been spending an incredibly you know. One
of the things that they do too, is like they've
been trying to they try to make the argument that like, no, no, no,
these places are actually good for group people.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I see this with China a lot, where you're.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Like, no, no, China has one trans person who was
a talk show host, So conditions for trans people there
are really good. Meanwhile, like actually being a transperson and
trying to fucking sucks ass. There's really only like a
tiny number of of gender clinics, like you have to
like you have to like there's like this whole thing
(17:25):
where you have to like get approval from a bunch
of people to get surgery.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You have to like prove you're not a criminal or something.
You have to have like a great it's it's completely nuts.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
The whole system is just nuts, right, but you know
they would either just pretend that it wasn't real or
just completely ignore it. And what this did was leave
a space, like leave room in these Martians Lenin spaces
for people who are not really leftists at all, but
are just like hard line, homophobic, like transphobic, anti American nationalists.
(17:54):
And I started seeing this with because so one of
the problems that Marcis Leninism has is that it's not
a it's not an ideology that exists outside of like
the US, Britain, Australia, a bit of Europe. Right like
it doesn't exist in China. The closest equivalent to this
stuff in China, like people who are pro like very
hardline pro Chinese government and are also like pro Chinese nationalism.
(18:17):
The only people in China who believe this stuff are
hardline right wingers, like people who are people who in
the US would be classified as fascists. And you started
to see these people like moving into like Marxist line
into spaces because you know, nobody gave a shit that
they were like incredibly homophobic and transphobic, and they were
just I mean again just objectively right wingers, right, and
(18:39):
they just start to sort of creep into these spaces. Now,
this may or may not have ever turned into a
real thing, we don't know, but there are two break
points that really like kicked the sort of birth of
the the of like maga communism and patriarch so like
(19:00):
the sort of right trajectory of this stuff like into focus.
There was some stuff that happened in the middle of
the twenty twenty uprisings and then surprise their prize January sixth.
So do you remember you probably yeah, you were probably
busy while this was going on. Do you remember that
the giant outcry over the book in Defensive Looting?
Speaker 5 (19:23):
Uhhh slightly, yeah, I know that liberals were mad about
the title of the book, that's yeah, and conservatives selfiously
oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
So so in the middle of the uprising kind of,
I guess, kind of towards the tail end of the uprising.
Completely by coincidence, my friend Vicky Austin whil had been
writing a book called Indefensive Looting, which people should actually
go read because it's really interesting, and she got an
interview with NPR about it, and people lost their fucking
minds about this book. Like everyone from like everyone from
(19:57):
Tucker Carlson to like sitting members of the us SE.
We're going on record announcing like I think, I think
the Democratic Party like officially denounced it like it was.
I have never seen this kind of like cross partisan
every like hate longering. I'm at a book and like
the entire time I've been on the left, and you know,
(20:17):
and this this didn't just it wasn't just liberals and
conservatives and fascists who are freaking out about this. This
extended to a bunch of the left. There was there's
a lot of like like I mean, the editors of
the New Republic right or like the writing articles denouncing
this stuff like it is. It's and it spreads across
the social democratic left because the social Democrats are mad
that people are louding small businesses. And the other group
(20:41):
that really really comes out against this is like ar
the Marxist London is like as people like the Gray Zone.
People really come out against this, and you know, okay,
so like why am I talking about people not liking
a book. The reason I want to talk about this
is that what emerges from this specific thing. So Vicky,
the author of this book is both trans and Jewish,
(21:04):
and what emerges here is this very specific combination of transphobia,
anti semitism, anti black racism, both explicitly anti black racism
and in the form of crime panics. And if you
look at all of those elements together, that has been
the entire right wing strategy for you know, putting all
of the like uppity minorities back in their place after
(21:26):
the uprising right that was their entire strategy, the defense
of small businesses, you know, and then and then turning
that into crime panic.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
To rebuild support for the police.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
This was, you know, that anti semitism, transphobia, that is
their entire strategy for post twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
And this is like, this is the.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
Place where it was first. All of it was put
together in one spot. And again like a lot of
people who are nominally socialists, like a lot of Marxist
Lennon is like joining on this because even though the
point of socialism is to like end capitalists owning private property,
well that.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Is ostensibly the point, I think, yeah, but.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
In reality, like like the Margin's London is like they
don't actually oppose capitalism. They just think it should be
run by someone else. So they everyone, like everyone falls
in line and joins this sort of like you know,
joins the sort of ritual denunciation of this book. And
this is one of these things that really sort of
cleaves like it really it cleaves the left in between
(22:27):
the people who like actually fully support the uprising and
the people who were like, oh no.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
The small business is oh no, the horror.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
And the second thing that really reshapes the environment, like
the whole sort of ecosystem like of the left is
January sixth. And so I don't know if people how
much people remember the initial reactions to it. I think
the reaction is to January sixth, and the left can
be divided into roughly three different reactions, although people have
mixes of them. Reaction one, this is funny. Two, Oh
(23:00):
my god, the fascists tried to do a coup and
installed Trump as dictator. And reaction three January sixth was
the white working class having its revenge on the liberal politicians. Now, okay, objectively,
we can say that January safe was not the white
working class. It's revenge with the politicians.
Speaker 5 (23:20):
If you are one of the first two opinions. That's fine,
that's normal, that makes sense. If you're the last of one,
you should stop listening to this podcast.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, and you know I want to actually so I
spent a bunch of time after this, and some other
people did this too, like trying to figure out the
actual like who from who was arrested, and who we
know was there, what their actual class backgrounds are. And
it turns out the three most common kinds of people
who were there are troops, cops, the small business owners,
which is it is as pure of an expression of
(23:51):
the social base of fascism as you can possibly.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Get right like it is.
Speaker 4 (23:56):
The world was just like, hey, this is what fashionsm
crops like it is.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
Well, I think there's there's I think there's a lot
a lot of participants in that crowd who I maybe
wouldn't even consider fascists. But they are a crop of
conservatives that are that have the financial and social resources
to be able to go across the country to this,
to this big event, to watch the soon to be
(24:21):
ex president speak like they they have enough capital and
sport to be able to do this, which is very
different than a whole bunch of like broke punks riding
on trains to go protests like halfwaycross the country. Like
these these are two very different social factions.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
But yeah, it is. It is.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
It is a grouping of conservatives who are able to
financially support going across the country to hear President Trump
speak and then in the moment you realize, oh wow,
we're breaking into Congress.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Yeah, well, I think the thing I would say about
that too is like like part of the process of
what fascism is is turning those people from regular conservatives
into into ground troops. Yeah yeah, yeah, and that's and
that's what's happening here. But but there's a bunch of
the left who like absolutely insist that this was really
the working class because they are chronically incapable of distinguishing
(25:19):
between a large group of white people and the working class.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
And these are the people.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Okay, it's not good they keep doing this like they
were doing this with like a bunch of like like
French anti vaxxers. Yeah, there's like a bunch of people
who were convinced like and this is this is one
of the everythings we talked about in this last episode,
Like these people support the Canadian Trucker's convoy, even though
they're just right wingers. The other big example of this
is the Belgian farmers protests. This is huge farm protests
(25:49):
in Belgium that are like a very big car caused
the left on the right, and literally the thing they
are protesting about is that they're incredibly pissed off that
there's environmental regulation to try to get them to not
like dump fertilizer in the fucking rivers. It's like like
that's the kind of thing that they're mad about, Like
they're mad about environmental regulation. They're mad about like like
(26:10):
not being allowed to completely destroy the environment completely. But
because it's like a large, massive people, there's all these
people who are like, ah, it's the revolution. It's like no,
these guys are like they're small business owners on farms.
Speaker 5 (26:23):
Yeah, ooh woo, small bean blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
One of the products of this is this thing that
becomes now as patriotic socialism. But first, do you know
what else is a product all.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
Of the wonderful little snippets of important messages that it
is about to flow right into your brain as you
listen to these ads.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
We're back with patriotic socialism. So patriarchic socialism is this
thing that emerges in like I think like late. I
think it's like early twenty twenty. I was too obviously,
I was just gonna admit I was too lazy to
go back and find the first time someone used the term.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Socialist.
Speaker 5 (27:17):
You mean yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean it's I mean,
I'm sure those two words have been combined many times.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Yeah, I mean, like in the modern context. Yeah, there's
a thing from like very like like twenty twenty basically
is when.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
It like, yes, this specific ideological strain that we'll be
talking about emerges around twenty twenty.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I think that's fair. Yeah, And it's so patriarchic socialism.
It combines all of the elements that we've talked about already, right,
It takes the nationalism in the homophobia, support for capitalist economies.
But then it makes one crucial move, which is it
flips the direction of the nationalisms. So instead of being
like hardline anti Americans, you're now like hard line pro
(28:01):
American nationalist. Instead of being an anti imperialist who ignores
the war crimes of China and Syria and blah blah blah,
blah Blahia and r Yeah, obviously Russia instead.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
Now America is the best.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
Yeah, like you know, and I mean their line basically
they've adopted this from like an incredibly stupid line that
the American Communist Party took in like the thirties, which
was like, ah, the way we get a revolution in
America is through American nationalism. So we're gonna like post
pictures of us next to Abe Lincoln, and this is
going to make people not hate us, you know. And
(28:40):
you can tell how well this worked by tracking the
number of people in the Communist Party as they adopt
the strategy in the late thirties and seeing how it plummets.
So you know, winning ideas great, great great moves here.
But okay, so the thing about patriotic socialism is that
it never did that well because it sucks because you
(29:04):
can't There was originally an attempt to pull in people
from the left right, but everyone who looked at this
was like this is lame and sucks, Like why would
I want to get why would I want it? Like
did these people suck? I don't like that, they're weird
American nationalists? Why would anyone be interested in this? And
so what they were in, so that didn't work very well.
(29:26):
The thing they're mostly pulling from is this weird core
of like LaRue Shites and these like very weird third
positionist people. But there's just not that many of them.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
I mean, like they definitely the people that were there
were pushing this as like an it's almost like a
memetic ideology in twenty twenty. There was there was some
of them who were more kind of typical like Marxist Latinists,
people who kind of orbited around the writers at Grey Zone.
Like we mentioned in the last episode, we had this
one YouTuber named Peter Coffin who was like like a
(29:59):
Marxist YouTuber.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Yeah, the guy guy is mostly as for kicking himself
in the balls on live TV.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
Yeah, well I think he was really one of the
guys to kind of uh popularized patriotic socialism as as
a term, even before people like Kinkle came onto the scene,
which I assume will be getting.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
To show get to that.
Speaker 5 (30:16):
Yeah, but but yeah, it kind of it kind of
circled around this like Caleb Moppin, Peter Coffin circle of
these sorts of like content creators and writers who were
really into like a classical Marxist theory.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, but like not but I I yeah, it's like,
but they were.
Speaker 5 (30:32):
From from very like statist yeah, American imial aspective, right.
The thing is like they suck as theorists, right like
and this is this is like a one of the
trends of these people is that they're And this is
why it doesn't take off because like one of the
other guys, he's going to become like a maga communism guy.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
Later is this guy named Hawes or Infrared who he's
like the big theory guy is unreader essentially, but yeah,
he's like a twist streamer. I think he's He's stuff
is completely unreadable, like it's it's nonsense, like to the
point where even when this politics gets big and Hinkle
tries to get people to read it, no one will
fucking read it. His own followers won't read it because
(31:09):
it's awful.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
I think between like, I don't think that this at
least in my observations of this political subculture. The point
is not to convert people to your politics, because there
really isn't any core political essence of this thing. It's
mostly a visual meme to get eyes on you, because
all these guys that are pushing this are all content creators,
Like it's all a way just to boost your personal
(31:32):
brand and to make people affiliate you with a personal
brand like that. All the guys who are pushing this
really hard. None of them were serious about any kind
of political theory tied to this notion. They were all
plugging their Twitch stream, plugging their YouTube, their new book
that's coming out, like all of it was just to
sell content. That I read on a lot of the
(31:52):
guys that at least initially started pushing this thing as
a as like a meme.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
But I think the thing that's important about this too, though,
is the original guys were fucking losers, Like this is
why this didn't work. Sten like Coffin starts doing this
because his his a richest previous seventeen grifts have all
fallowed apart.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
He was, He's been through, He's taken.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
Every conceivable leftist position and tried to make a brand
around it, and it was just failing.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Right, he just turn into this.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
He doesn't work and like him and Moppin and like
the other people in the space like are so unbelievably
uncharismatic and so it just doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
The thing about this too right is like the.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Reason it doesn't work partially because these people aren't charismatic,
and partially it's because they really are obsessed with writing
theory bullshit, like like yeah, like the theory betiety is
completely incoherent, but they're like reading their theory on streams
and shit, and like nobody likes that they need to
produce some theory to make themselves feel legitimate. Yeah, but
(32:50):
like Cos spends all this time fancy about Hegel.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
And it's like, does anyone want to list Like no, Like.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
I mean, I I do like hearing about Hegel, but
not from Cos.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, but you know, like he's like he's also yelling about.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
How like there isn't a real left anymore because I'm
like the far right people want to align with Putin.
But into this gap comes Jackson Hinkle. So Hinkle was
just like a nobody. He was some random left Twitter
person with like ten k followers. He like lost a
(33:22):
city council race in ten like he was like he
was a joke. But in twenty twenty he starts to
crack the formula, which is he figures out the same
thing the gray zone people do, which is that you
can't pull from the left right. If you want to
actually build a large scale brand, you have to pull.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
From the right.
Speaker 4 (33:41):
And so he's one of the people who first gets
really big into this thing called maga communism, which is
like kind of a it's like kind of a troll ideologies,
like mostly a troll ideology, Like it's.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is meme based. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:58):
Basically, what they've done is, like they've pulled together is
an attempt to build an ideology based on pure authoritarianism,
Like it's based on like liking both Trump and Xijianping
and Putin at the same time, because all of them
are powerful leaders.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Who like want to restore their nation or whatever.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
And you know, but like the actual content of it
is kind of nothing. But but what Hinkle does, and
this is the thing he does that's very smart, is
that he's not an insufferable theory nerd. He's actually way
less smart than Hawes. But because he's not smart, he
kind of half stumbles and half figures out into how
you make content for the right, which is just incredibly
(34:40):
simple propaganda.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
You reach tweet right wing social media people, you make
posts with very very simple slogans and like sentences with
like words that don't go above two syllables and get
you get in every single time or right wing grievance
thing happens, you just get in and you just keep
cranking out indescribable amounts of content every single day. He
does this on his YouTube channel. He does this on
(35:03):
his Twitter. He now has two point three million Twitter followers,
most of which he has made in the past two months.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah, yeah, And he was on you know, and he's not.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
He's now taken like he's done one of these right
wing media tours, like he's been on Carlson, He's been
on fucking Info Wars, He's been on OEMs, the One
American Network. And part of the reason this works is
because right wingers love to find like a nominal leftists
who agrees with them. And Hinkel, you know, he gets
into argument with people sometimes, like when he was on
Alex Jones there, Alex Jones is like, what do you
(35:36):
mean you're a communists?
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Like what the fuck?
Speaker 4 (35:38):
And Hinkle's putting out some bullshit about why are like
communism is when no globalists He's just.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
He's like, in effect, they are doing a form of
national socialism, which which relies on anti Semitism and this
notion of casting globalists as Jewish Zionists who are secretly
controlling all of industry and we're gonna give the real.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Power back to the average regular.
Speaker 5 (36:08):
Working man, which is it's it's he can frame it
as communism, but like it is, it is. It is
just a form of Nazi theory. Like that is what
he fundamentally operates on.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
And he's he's interesting because his she is he has gone,
you know, as as bad as the like transphobia stuff
in last episode is right like that that is like
an average like COVID grifter thing he has.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
He has he has his own own share of transphobia
as well.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, well.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
He is way further right than anyone who's ever come
out of the left to like do this kind of
thing has ever gone. He is, like so there's a
video of him arguing with a guy named sneak.
Speaker 5 (36:47):
O and who is just a twitch line is just
as it is, a twitch streamer who aligns himself with
a whole bunch of kind of influencers for young usually
white men, Like yeah, he's like close, He's like Andrew
Tate it's it's it's just, yeah, he's a fucking twitch
influencer who courts unbelievable misogynist young man.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
That's the basic of it, you know.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
I mean, he's he's kind of he's gone to the
point where he's he's not quite in the same circles
as Nick Flentes, but that's largely because Flentes is like
a hardline Christian fascist and Sneko's like, is like a
Muslim fascist in the same.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Wow like fat he's like he's like a far far
right wing Muslim in the same vein is like, I don't,
I don't.
Speaker 5 (37:30):
I don't think Sneko is really id politically driven, like
like like consciously so he's he's he's just a he's
just an asshole who figured out that, hey, if you
say certain things, you can get a yeah, twelve year
employees to watch your stuff all the time. Like that's
that's it's really, it's really I think that the core
of of of his of him, I hate politics.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
He sucks so much.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
But like so he go goes on his show and
he spends the entire show trying to convey Sneko that
Hitler was gay and that the reason and and snek
Go's like, well, but Hitler destroyed the the Mangis Herochelt
Institute for Sexual Research, And sneak Go's like, well that
was a good thing. And Hinkel's response is no, no, no,
all the Nazis were gay in trans so they had
(38:15):
to destroy the Institute of Sexual Research to cover up
the fact, like to hide the evidence that they were
all gay in trans Like this is a level of
like homophobia and like transphobia that is like so far
beyond the like normal shit that like and you know,
(38:35):
and and and this, and like even Sneko is like,
why are you talking about?
Speaker 5 (38:40):
But I just can't take anything. Hinkel says as like
a literal thing he believes.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
He doesn't believe. He believes that everything is. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
He is the pure distillation of a man who believes
in nothing. Yeah, Like like he is. She's not even
a purse, he's not even a human being. He is
just a content mill. Yeah, that's that's all. He He's
just a brand. But what he's discovered, the way he's
he's decided to build his brand is by basically out
trying to he's doing. Okay, there was a there was
(39:09):
a weird maga communism thing.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
He does that.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Less now because it's it's outlived usefulness and a lot
of this is now it's now it's easier to be
a U a Palestine. Uh yeah, like and quote unquote
anti's Zionist influencer. In reality, he just is extremely anti Semitic.
Like this is that is his actual politics. Yeah, let's
(39:32):
talk about Well, okay, she's like it's genuinely unclear to
me whether he personally is really anti Semitic, Like I
don't know, he might be. I mean, like it doesn't matter.
Like that's the thing, Like he's.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
The way that he talks about it, the way he
talks about how how how Zionists.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Like rule the world.
Speaker 5 (39:51):
It's it's, it's it's you can just like about that
until Protocols of the Elders.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
Yeah, Like so this is the thing, like like Hinkle
Hink is not really at this point, like they're like
there there is no person behind it, right, He's just
purely a right wing mill that regurgitates.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Stuff and the stuff.
Speaker 4 (40:11):
And the way that he figured out you could do
this is by trying to outflank the traditional hard right
on anti Semitism. So let's let's let's let's take a
look at like exactly the kind of anti Semitic shit
that he's on, because he is just straight up in
anti Semite, right. This is not a like think I'm
saying because of this palsized stuff, so grant the Like last
(40:31):
week the trailer for Grand Theft Auto six came out, Yeah,
and there's like a bunch of women tworking in it
and like having a good time and like wearing bikinis
and stuff, and there's like this enormous, like really weird,
incredibly pathetic right wing like thing about it, saying that
it's like anti Christian and it's like spreading poorn to
(40:52):
children and teaching people to do crimes, and that like
shooting cops is bad and that no one should ever
play it, and because this is like the current right
wing media panic, Inkle starts tweeting about it. And his
tweet is, so this starts with an Israeli flag, and
it starts with like that like siren thing that people
post when they're about to do an alert quote, why
are the Zionists all capitalized at Rockstar Games releasing this
(41:15):
all caps sexualized video game for children in America? Get
hashtag ban GTA six.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
This is also in all caps.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
Trending right now. So this is straight up neo Nazi ship, right,
this is neo Nazis shit about the Jews conspiracy right,
Like that's yeah, yeah, it's like, this is a right
of neo Nazi shit. And he's been trying to use
the fact that he is more anti Semitic than openly
anti Semitic, even than so even than someone like Elon Musk,
(41:44):
right sure, and he's been trying to use this as
a way to basically steal their bases.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
So like two days ago when this goes up, three.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
Really recently, there was this giant like call like there's
this giant like Twitter space thing. They had Alex Jones,
Elon Musk, Andrew Trey and Vivik Ramaswami in it, and
Kink just like keeps asking Elon Musk about whether he's
gonna turn on the starlink like internet stuff or Palestine,
and these people basically tell him to shut up and
like kick him off.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
But then he does that.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
He starts doing this like giant like I've been censored
like media thing about it, and what he's doing here
this is thing he does constantly he's trying to take
the basis from people like Alex Jones, people like Elon
Musk and people from Edu Tate who wants more open
anti Semitism. Right, Like, these people are anti.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
St He's trying to flank them, you can say, quote
unquote from the right. But like at this point the
right less spectrum kind of resolves into meaningless uh mambo jumbo.
Speaker 4 (42:39):
But yeah, he's trying to He's I mean, he's just
a fascist, right, He's he's trying to he's trying to
play like the anti.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Semite flame from the anti Semitics thing.
Speaker 4 (42:46):
Yes, yeah, and you know, and but but he's he's
figured out this is the thing that actually pushed him
really into the mainstream. Is he figured out a way
to do cover for this that also lets him get
a bunch of like attention and clicks and stuff from
the left, which is and also like a lot of
support from Palestinians. And we're going to talk about that
(43:09):
in a second.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
People who don't.
Speaker 5 (43:10):
Understand who he actually is, or maybe if they do,
they just don't really care because because it doesn't affect them,
because he is currently possibly the most influential person talking
about this conflict right now, like like at least on
the Internet, like his his his impressions is larger than
anyone else. His tweets get read aloud in newsrooms across
(43:34):
across the country, like he is. He has succeeded in
grifting off of off of this conflict to promote his
personal brand in almost an almost unparalleled way, Like there's
never been someone who's done this as successfully as Hinkled
as for any other conflict. It is, it is, it
is quite quite quite surprising that there's just this one
(43:55):
guy sitting sitting on his phone in America has has
been this successful by essentially just tweeting NonStop.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
Yeah, Like to put this in perspective, so like he
has Alex Jones got banned and that kind of like
limited his coverage, but he has more followers on Twitter
of Alex Jones. Alex Jones has just been on band
form Twitter, like he has more followers at Alex Jones.
Like that's that's how And it's not even just followers too,
it's it's how much his posts are seen and circulated
like he Yeah, there was he was for almost I
(44:26):
think the most of the month of October he was
person with the highest digital impressions on the platform, like
he yea, his stuff was being seen by more people
than anyone else, like he yeah, So let's talk about
what that stuff actually is. It's large. It's like it's
a combination of him just retweeting other people, stealing other
people's like videos of like press conferences from the Camas.
(44:49):
Most of it is dead babies, like it's a bunch,
it's a bunch of dead babies. It's a bunch of
dead Palestinians, just over and over and over and over again.
And then sometimes tweets of like ceasefire, like how cand
Zionists do this.
Speaker 5 (45:02):
One of the things about misinformation, mischaracterizing attacks events, like
a lot of others basic stuff like.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
It's yeah, and one of one of his tricks and
that this is this has been a thing for these
kind of like these margialonist people for a long time,
is spreading spreading pictures that are actually from the Syrians
of a war features from Palestine, which they do constantly,
and this, you know, and like one of the things
that we haven't sort of hushed on yet is like
yet he so one of the things that's happened with
him is because he's the biggest person tweeting about Palestine.
(45:31):
His like a lot of his tweets about Palestine are
translated into Arabic and they're posted all over like Arabic
Instagram of Arabic Twitter, Like it's like they're they're spent
fucking everywhere. And those people, you know, either like don't
know who he is, right, because they're only seeing his
Palestine stuff, right, They're not seeing his like raving about
(45:53):
how GTA six is anti Christian, right, They're only seeing
that stuff. And this has made his work enormously more
popular than actual Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. And this is
one of the really grim parts about this, which is
that you know, those those Palestinian journalists are just getting
(46:16):
fucking killed all the time, Like every single day, another
Palestinian journalist gets fucking killed, Like more and more Palestinian
intellectuals are killed. And as these people die and Hinkle
exploits their deaths for more fucking content, the number of
people talking about this with any kind of platform shrinks
and shrinks and shrinks. And he's been able to fill
the void left by the fact that the Israelis have
(46:38):
been fucking murdering all these journalists with just his own
fucking drifting brands. And he's able to do this because
you know, Hinkel is incredibly safe, just fucking living it
up in the US, while the people who's suffering he's
exploiting are getting fucking murdered in the streets. And he's
(46:59):
making tons of money doing this.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Enormous amounts of money.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
Yeah, and I don't know, I don't I don't really
have I don't have a fucking solution to this. Like
he's he's effectively just figured out how to completely game this.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
System in a way that hasn't been done before.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
I think part of this is, like with the way
Twitter's content moderation is working now, Gore can we spread
around in ways that it didn't used to, which is
a lot more emotionally gripping for a lot of people.
So he's able to to do a whole Buntu quote
tea quote tweets on extremely graphic and upsetting images which
draw draw more people to his platform. He's he's he's
(47:39):
just like figured out a specific thing, like he's he's
been trying to do this for a few years with
very with various types of like you know, conflicts or
like little little like bits that he like tries to
tries to do this media strategy thing on and this
this one has happened to work. There there was there
was a certain confluence of events that allowed him to
(48:00):
to get get platformed by many, many, many unwitting people.
And at this point, deplatforming is not even an option,
Like it's it's like, you can't you can't deplatform someone
with three million followers. Really, that just isn't. Yeah that
he's ship too, Like yeah, yeah, it just it just it.
That's why he just doesn't even follow anymore.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, I guess, I guess.
Speaker 4 (48:24):
One last thing I want to say about this is like,
and he's he's been incredibly successful at leveraging, like at
leveraging the fact that he posts not not even good
pro palisine content, right sucks, ass right, it's but he's
been incredibly successful leveraging that to use his defense against
any claims of anti Semitism. And this sucks because he's,
(48:48):
you know, he's he's effectively using he's using Palestinians as
a human shield and then fucking climbing over their corpses
in order to build a brand. While that also complaining
about the degeneracy of seeing a whole bunch of non
white people having a beach party in GTA five, right, Like,
it's like, it's it's not like he actually cares about
the lives of Palestinians being killed because he's complaining about
(49:10):
black people in GTA five. Like it's not like, come on, like,
it's it's he is He's just an anti Semitic fascist.
This is yeah, this is very very clear. I think
I think the thing that can be done is we
like we need to like these people can't be allowed
to fucking get their start here, Like we can't be
(49:31):
having a bunch of fucking transphobes and anti semis. We
can't be having all of these fucking homophobic right wing
nationalists like in leftist basis. They just like they can't
be here because if if there had actually been, you know,
a kind of sustained effort to get these people fucking
out before before they pulled all of this shit, we
wouldn't be here right now. But that wasn't done. People
(49:53):
were people were just completely okay with having all of
these right wingers just being there because are the same
states that they do, and because of that, we're here.
Speaker 5 (50:04):
I mean, yeah, I really only see that on like
the heavily communist and statist contingent of the left right,
Like these types of people aren't super popular among most
like social democrats. At least recently, there's been kind of
a harder divide, at least from my observation between like
SoC dems, between like socialists libertarian socialists, and the people
(50:29):
who are like hardlined. I am a Marxist Leninist. I
am affiliated with these Marxi Leninist organizations, and those are
the sorts of organizations that these sorts of guys kind
of almost like prey on to like gain followers and
gain some.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Poy well, and I would say this, like, this is
like those groups like like the PSL for examples. PSL
is one example, ses right, and like they also have
a there's a whole bunch of horror stories about them
chasing down abusers. Like I know people who they liked
a tweet that was talking about how the ps CELL
had had fucked up a a sexual assault investigation and
(51:04):
they were dragged because they had liked to tweet about this.
They were dragged in front of the PSL Central Committee
where Gloria Rivera, They're fucking like eternal presidential candidates started
doing a bunch of fucking transphobia shit and then covering
it with the exact same gray zone like I'm a
woman of color thing, you know. But these groups were
like on they were on the edge of Collie like
basically becoming an non relevant because they've been supporting Russia
(51:27):
during the war and Ukraine for this whole time. But
then Palestine exactly is the one issue they're actually like,
is the one issue that their stance is like, you know,
tolerable to the general populace on it. So they've all
all of these people have been using Palestine. All these
people who've been.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Fucking pivoting harder, harder and harder.
Speaker 4 (51:45):
Right for years and years and years now have been
have like have been exploiting the exploiting the fucking genocide
and Palestine in order to fucking get all their leftist
clicks back.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
And it's utterly grotesque.
Speaker 4 (52:00):
Yeah, that's that's That's what I've got about this.
Speaker 3 (52:02):
It is.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
It is certainly upsetting. Yeah, Free Palestine, Fuck the grifters.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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