As we ride out the aftershocks of the election and prepare for Trump 2.0, it’s as if nothing is bolted down. Trump’s cabinet appointments signal a disregard for competence or temperament as he seems to prioritize fervent deep state conspiracism and anti-woke aggression in his choices. The chattering classes (both legacy and new media) are on the front lines of having to adapt in real time.
What to do? Double down on anti-fascist resistance, turn the disinformation detection devices up to 11, chart a course for sanguine neutrality, normalize the chaos as the world burns, or maybe give this rag-tag group of billionaire outsiders a chance to move fast and break things—in the hope that some of it was not working anyway?
We look at three different modes of damage control currently ripping through American discourse.
Show Notes
There’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented the term ‘conspiracy theory’ – here’s why
87: The Aubrey Marcus Spectacle
107: An Open Letter to Aubrey Marcus
214: Aubrey Marcus is Totally Not a Cult Leader
Winning the Fight for Reproductive Rights in Mexico - Open Society Foundations
Madres de Plaza de Mayo | Learning for Justice
Adweek article on Rogan and MeidasTouch
Kash Patel QAnon Appearances
Kash Patel Seal Team 6 Endangerment
So Marianne Williamson Really is the Peace Candidate—Patreon
“You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza | Amnesty International USA
NLG and Other Legal Groups Send Letter to ICC Urging an Investigation into Potential War Crimes Committed by Israel and US in Gaza under “Operation Protective Edge”
Russell Tribunal on Palestine, 2014
Friday 17 November: Twenty thousand Palestinians believed to be killed in Israel’s genocide of Gaza
Campus Protests Led to More Than 3,100 Arrests, but Many Charges Have Been Dropped
Harris campaign rejects claim vice president thinks there is a genocide in Gaza
A Study Reveals CNN and MSNBC’s Glaring Gaza Double Standard | The Nation
Morning Joe: Dems’ Favorite Show, Blatant Pro-Israel Propaganda
The Intercept: Israel-Palestine Coverage
US MSM downplays Amnesty report
TIME on Iranian Foreign Influence Methods
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster Comedy fans, listen up.
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your cue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thalber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
hey everyone welcome to conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
You can also find us all independently on Blue Sky.
I know I've been spending a lot more time there.
And if you enjoy what we do, you can access all of our episodes ad-free plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspiracy.
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As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Also, if you are a Patreon already, you might have a friend or family member who appreciates your support in the form of gifting them with our bonus content because Patreon has rolled out gift memberships for the holidays where you can choose the tier, you can choose the amount, you can bombard them with fantastic bonus content for up to a year.
And so, yeah, I think that's a great idea.
And I'm sure you have people in your life that would appreciate that.
Conspirituality 236, Damage Control.
As we ride out the aftershocks of the election and prepare for Trump 2.0, it's as if nothing is bolted down.
Trump's cabinet appointments signal a disregard for competence or temperament as he seems to prioritize fervent deep state conspiracism and anti-woke aggression in his choices.
The chattering classes, both legacy and new media, are on the front lines of having to adapt in real time what to do.
Double down on anti-fascist resistance?
Turn the disinformation detection devices up to 11?
Or chart a course for sanguine neutrality?
Normalize the chaos as the world burns?
Or maybe give this ragtag group of billionaire outsiders a chance to move fast and break things in the hope that some of it was not really working anyway?
We look at three different modes of damage control this week, currently ripping through American discourse.
One of the questions we've been asking on this podcast since July is how many RFK Jr. fans would head over to Trump's camp when Tucker Carlson and Kaylee Means conspired to pull Bobby in the MAGA direction?
The ways we've witnessed this occur are varied.
Some Bobby fans dropped their support as they couldn't stomach voting for Trump.
A number just went radio silent.
Yet the Bobby rebrands who make America healthy again, MAHA, allowed for many of them to just disabuse themselves of any issues with Trump and really vote for a healthier America.
Now, we've covered the problems with Maha for months now, as well as discussed the things the movement gets right.
And I've expressed a lot of skepticism about Bobby and crew actually implementing those things, like ending the pharma lobby in D.C. and direct-to-consumer pharma advertising.
I've also looked on in dismay as the topic of universal healthcare is never even mentioned by the Maha Acolytes.
You know, I have to say, guys, we were on NPR, on San Francisco NPR, like a week or two before the election.
And I just hear my own words echoing in my head when I answered one of the questions by saying, yeah, I don't think this whole Maha thing is going to make much of a difference in terms of the election.
We don't actually have good data on this.
But I get the sense more and more that a lot more people are on board with this nonsense than I thought.
And that the impulse, like even on NPR, to normalize what's going on and to be relativistic about it, as we see these appointments, Bhattacharya, RFK Jr., Marty Macri, the impulse to just kind of normalize it and interview people as if they're legitimate bureaucrats seems to be strong.
We truly are in this time when the broken clock of RFK Jr. or Alex Jones or Joe Rogan's awful pseudoscience takes and dangerous disinformation can produce something reasonable sounding like being right once or twice a day, right?
Like we should all eat healthy and exercise and not consume toxic chemicals.
If they just say something like that every now and again, they're magically sane-washed.
I want to ask, Julian, I remember that NPR show.
I don't remember exactly what I said, but I remember being in agreement with you that we don't actually know where this was going to go.
And wasn't that a lot about we didn't have a clear sense of how strong Bobby's sort of constituency was that had joined Trump?
Was that it?
Because I think the lesson here is that you just don't know what it is going to be within a populist movement that really catches the wind.
Yes, like how many...
Ardent Bobby supporters will vote Trump because he's thrown his lot in with him.
Yeah, and I was thinking in terms of numbers, not in terms of messaging so much.
Well, right before recording, I saw that the New York Times has done a story about Bobby's war on corn syrup and how that will play in Trump countries.
So a lot of this is to be decided in the coming months and those sorts of battles will remain to be seen.
I'll remain skeptical, and I'll also eat my words if I'm wrong about topics like Bobby ending pharma lobbying.
But for this mode of damage control that I want to look at, I want to look at one of Bobby's friends.
We've covered him extensively.
I'm a little tired of him, to be honest, but I think this really fits the mold, and that is Onnit and Fit for Service podcast.
founder, Aubrey Marcus.
And he recently posted a 15-minute video on YouTube about why he voted for Trump in the last election.
We covered when he talked about it on Instagram, at least on social media, he had never voted before and he threw his lot in with Trump because of Bobby.
But now he went into a very long explanation.
He did go radio silent because he was a little confused by Bobby's choice.
But then when he came back, he rebranded.
He's got a new supplement coming out that he says is the best supplement ever.
I'm really looking forward to that.
And he threw his full weight behind his friend Bobby, which he talks about in this video.
But I want to clip a few moments of it because I really think it encapsulates one form of response to Maha.
And I think it also represents some of the cognitive dissonance.
So I'm going to play some clips.
We'll talk about them and I'll see what you guys think.
So let's start at the beginning.
I believe we are entering a new era of honesty.
Which means having both the freedom and the courage to express your own personal truth while maintaining the humility to acknowledge that you might be wrong.
I might be wrong.
Wouldn't be the first time.
And actually, no matter what, we're always a little bit wrong.
We can only ever see partial truths because we only have one singular perspective.
God is the only one that is omniperspectival, meaning God sees through all of our eyes.
I kept that in for you, Julian, that scrabble word there.
Well, listen, listen.
God is the only one.
Who has true objectivity.
And the good thing is, he communicates with me.
There's something about...
Maybe I've got my monitor turned way up too loud, but hearing his voice boom like that, it reminds me of...
I'm watching the Vince McMahon documentary on Netflix for an upcoming episode, but...
Really, really deep voice, and I'm noticing that there's a lot of deep, deep voices in this landscape, especially amongst the most primary influencers.
Well, and Matthew, too, I immediately thought of, I don't know if you coined it, I think you did, this idea of the selfie sermon.
Like, this is not just Aubrey Marcus giving his thoughts about the election.
This is...
He's receiving us.
He's gazing into our eyes.
That music in the background is so soft and so soothing.
He's going to now tell us the higher truths about how nobody really knows anything for sure, but I think Trump is a good guy.
Well, that's why I think the three of us have to breathe deeply.
We have to release and relax into the deep natural plant wisdom reality that he will just never shut the fuck up.
Because he doesn't have to.
Like, I just keep coming back to this is a guy with way too much money and zero shame.
I think he actually really enjoys pissing people off, playing people against each other, and then pretending that he's the bigger guy, that he can rise above the battleground, he can be a listener and a uniter and a spiritual presence for all.
I think he wants to have the omni-perspectival view of God, but that actually amounts in a business sense to this hamster wheel of social engagement, right?
Yeah.
So I just want to point out, listeners, I'm sure you caught the faux humility there.
I am wrong sometimes.
He does this often.
It's sort of his cover that he could say, oh no, I am one of you as well.
And then the idea that we can finally speak our truth when we know from recent Pew polling that conservative media dominates the media landscape.
So everyone he associates with, you could put his own podcast, given its guests, in this bucket as well, come In the majority of media right now.
So the idea that we are finally free to be who we always were is just utter bullshit, but it really plays well in these circles.
From there, he goes on to say that he read all the comments on his recent open letter to the Republicans on Instagram, what I flagged earlier.
And he said he could summate the disparities in the comments as being fear versus faith.
And he lands on the side of faith.
The fear side is afraid that Trump will become a fascist dictator.
So negative.
Affirms that he is not part of the MAGA movement, but he does feel confident commenting as an outsider.
Now, what he has faith in is what we should unpack here, because it very much reminds me of those lightworkers we covered in the first year of this podcast who claimed Trump was going to bravely lead us through the pandemic.
The beauty I can see about Trump leading us into this era of truth Is that he has his shadow on display.
He shows his crass, his ego, his pride, his judgment, all on the outside, for better or worse.
This display of shadow, which is another way to say unclaimed truth, makes him the ultimate projection screen for anyone who has similar characteristics in their own shadow.
He literally invites that by his very existence.
I haven't met him, but what I sense from actually listening to what he says, not just listening to what the media and other people say about what he has said, Is that the inner core of that man is good.
Not pure, but good.
I haven't met him, but did I mention I'm good friends with Bobby?
So soon I will no doubt meet him.
This wins the prize for me for the most banal dumbing down and misapplication of Jungian psychology.
There's a big competition for that, though.
There is a big competition.
But in this case, it's super consequential, combined with vibes-based stupidity.
By this logic, let me just stretch...
The example Ted Bundy was even more beautifully transparent in his shadow, and we can all learn from how openly he expressed The kinds of aggression that we suppress and disown.
And then, perhaps like George W. Bush, looking deep into Putin's mocking eyes, we can tune in on our hearts knowing that in his core, he's good.
Not pure, by the way, but good.
This whole idea that the rest of us are projecting shadow onto Trump rather than actually reacting to the disgusting, ignorant, and false things he says and the things he threatens to do.
It's like chef's kiss, New Age gaslighting.
You know, there's also a reversal in there that's quite sneaky that I want to point out, that he's diverting the obvious function of permission structure.
Like, if Trump's shadow is on display, then mine can be too.
Like, that's what Trump does for Pete Hegseth or for anybody who wants to follow him and be the libertine who never gets in trouble.
But Marcus sort of frames this with a turnaround.
He's saying that if I, Matthew, discern that Trump is an adjudicated rapist because, let's say, I read it in the New York Times, then I must be projecting my own guilt and shame onto him.
Like, he's actually making it about us.
He's not saying that Trump is a blank screen for his own permissiveness.
He's saying that we are now able to see our own corruption.
So this is right out of the logic of, you know, liberals are the real perverts, didn't you know?
I shared that part of the video on Instagram last week when I first found this video and just got to say to our followers, comments for the win.
One of my favorite things to do is posting something like that and seeing the different ways and the Jungian analysis part really struck a chord so that was nice to see.
Aubrey follows all this by saying that RFK Jr. is driven by love and service and he too is inherently good.
he fully believes Bobby will transform the corruption of big pharma, the corruption of our food supply, heal the chronic disease epidemic, and open up psychedelic medicine to everyone.
Aubrey also says Bobby will be given full access to investigating what really happened to his father and uncle.
Finally.
And then he goes on to repeat the common trope that the term conspiracy theorist was created by the CIA to discredit people just asking questions.
which is completely fallow.
I'm including a link to the show notes for anyone interested because you've probably heard this too.
The term was first used in 1863 in the New York Times in a letter to the editor by a journalist named, or a writer named Charles Astor Bristead.
And he was discussing how British aristocrats were trying to weaken Civil War America's influence on the global stage.
Karl Popper famously used the term in his 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
And he was referencing a growing mindset that he saw being employed to combat societal conventions.
So Marcus is actually citing a conspiracy theorist definition of the term conspiracy theory, which arose in 1967 to those just asking questions around JFK's death.
Let me just add as some interesting color here, Karl Popper, who you just referenced using it in his 1945 book, It's actually the mentor of George Soros.
So I don't know if we're doing ourselves any favors.
Seriously.
So I want to point out that this is happening right now with the term misinformation as well.
Danielle Shine recently posted a great roundup on Instagram, and she was featuring Maha adjacent influencers saying not to trust anyone who uses the term misinformation because it's really a suppression of free speech.
And she featured posts by Jordan Peterson, Max Lugavere, Abby Kramer, Will Cole, and Courtney Swan doing just this.
By pretending that pointing out misinformation is the real problem, these people can continue to promote and monetize junk science and make it seem like they're the silenced voices, which is effectively what Aubrey is also doing in this video.
So back to Aubrey.
He then states that Trump is actually protecting the most important aspects of democracy, the freedom of speech.
Then he launches into college freshman level philosophizing over gun rights and immigration.
It was like, I only read the Epoch Times headlines level shit.
It's really painful.
I'm going to spare you guys those moments.
He also notes that Trump supports homeschooling, which is amazing because he never bothered to look into the fact that Trump is actually talking about the longstanding Christian nationalist goal of school choice and funneling taxpayer dollars to Christian schooling.
But next clip, I have to include his thoughts on abortion.
Oh, man.
Now, here we go.
Aubrey says he's an advocate for the power of the feminine, but he feels that abortion is actually quite complex.
He's a spiritual man, he tells us, who feels that all human life is connected to a soul, and by murdering a soul, you are wrong, except when it comes to self-defense.
So maybe a little MMA coming in there.
He then launches into his confusion about states' rights, though he says all states allow for life-saving abortions, because, again, he's not actually reading reports of women being denied care and dying in states like his own, Texas.
So now let's listen to where he lands on this issue.
It depends on how close or how far away that state is from deciding when the moment of ensoulment occurs.
And there is a differentiation between mother and child.
Is it at conception?
Does the soul come into the body on the 30th day?
Is it when the fetus has eyes?
Is it at the moment of the first breath?
Different spiritual traditions have different opinions.
This issue is not as simple as, yay, choice women, or yay, life, God.
I think the conditions and timing by which abortion should be allowed needs to be determined by a council of spiritual elders, particularly female spiritual elders.
Female spiritual elders.
Thank you, Aubrey, for providing an authoritative set of arbitrary mystical choices for adjudicating when a non-existing event happens, namely the ensolment of the fetus.
Like, that's what we're talking about.
We don't need trans channels and religious prophets sitting in a meditation chamber built a little closer to God, just above the Supreme Court, intuitively deciding who specifically does and doesn't get access to reproductive care.
Okay, so this is a completely cursed argument, but the reason that it's effective is that what everybody is fighting over across the spectrum here is the problem that the fetus at some point crosses over into a human subject with human rights.
Right.
So notions of viability are, you know, at stake and everyone...
Those are scientific questions.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, not entirely because as most feminist philosophers who deal with this honestly point out is that the metaphysical view gets it wrong when it tells people that that subjectivity comes from God or somewhere mysterious.
You know, and that our job is to magically locate the week of pregnancy in which it happens like a light switch turning on.
But really, like that subjectivity is socially constructed.
So not only is subjectivity established through relationships, especially with the mother, but it's that we actually together as a society decide not just through morality, but through our medicine, our technology, our economics, when that fetus can have human rights and is therefore a subject.
So Marcus's argument is like this religious bait and switch that is as old as anybody else's.
It pulls on this real phenomenon, but then it assigns it to an order that humans can't access.
And so then you can hear in his voice like this abdication of agency, the shrug, right?
Like, well, we don't know when the fetus is ensouled, so we should hand it off to the wise people or Ron DeSantis, right?
But on what basis?
Let the states and the mystics decide.
Exactly, exactly.
When actually we are already deciding based upon what we can actually do.
He has no interest in like the power of the feminine.
Like any sisterhood of the elders in his world, in the new age world, in religious worlds, they're always already under male control in general.
That's the story of Mark Goffney and his long trail of assistants, who Aubrey Marcus is now touting as his guru.
But there are sisterhoods already.
They're called feminists.
And in Mexico, they bond together in groups like, you know, Las Libras or in Argentina, I think it's called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
They have like green scarves and, you know, they come out with a vengeance to seek reproductive autonomy and justice.
And in a lot of cases, that's how they get it.
From my perspective, one of my favorite comments, because I also shared this, were women saying, how about it's the women's choice?
How about it's the mother's choice?
And that's where I land.
I don't feel a need to try to decide when an abortion should be viable.
But not just any women.
It should be real spiritual.
Yeah, counsel.
Counsel women.
Well, they've been through the FFS trainings, right?
They've been through all of the levels.
They've been to five camps.
They've been to five camps.
They've done all of the breath work.
It's not a council.
It's a mastermind.
Throughout the video, Aubrey plays clips of Trump speaking on topics that fit into his conception of the incoming president as a truth teller.
And this fits if you decry the lamestream media at every term and don't track how often this man has lied, which many media organizations have done.
It's why Aubrey and so many in this world rail against terms like conspiracy theorists and misinformation because they can build their own narrative and media ecosystem with which to pump out whatever information they want.
And if they can convince you that facts are really open to interpretation, then it becomes a matter of whose charisma you're more enchanted by.
Which might be why, unlike many of the Maha crew yelling into microphones, Aubrey chooses as you flag, Julian, the soft lighting, the hand over the heart, the soft voice, to remind you that, hey, I'm with you on this fight for ultimate freedom.
Let's ride together.
But the reason for his conversion, Aubrey concludes, it's not actually Trump at all.
No, no, it's...
As for the idea that somehow I have been captured, I say, yes, I have.
I've been captured by God.
Not the God from some book somewhere, but the God that I know to be real from countless experiential explorations.
This God is a God of value.
If you want to know more about what value really means to me and what the field of value stands for, check the book First Principles and First Values by David J. Temple.
I know you're going to break this down a little, Matthew.
David J. Temple, I just want to point out, is a pseudonym that's used by Mark Gaffney and Zach Stein to publish books.
Yeah, and that was really amazing that he said, I've been captured by God, not the God of some book somewhere, and two sentences later, go and read this book if you want to know more.
And it's the God of value.
The God of value.
I was just waiting for that to be a lead-in to some new course on how to provide divine value.
Oh, it's coming.
It's coming, man.
Yeah.
But it was just a plug for the bad ideas that underlie these odd pronouncements, which I don't know if anyone really asked for them.
You know, I didn't have that much time to look into why Goffney might be using a pseudonym along with this other guy, Zach Stein, but it makes sense because, you know, he's a new age ex-rabbi who brings with him a trainload of sexual misconduct allegations like Mark Goffney, as a Google search, turns up an incredible rap sheet.
He's currently being sued by two women under the New York Child Victims Act for allegedly abusing them in the 1980s when they were 13 and 14 years old.
He was stripped of his orthodox rabbinical status over the abuse allegations.
You know, Marcus hitching his star to Goffny as a guru, I've said before on the show, it's a pretty good indicator that he isn't entirely self-conscious as a grifter because Goffny is really bad for business.
He's been publicly called out by petitions.
He's barred from presenting at Esalen Institute, of all places.
He's been deplatformed by Tammy Simon of the New Age publishing platform Sounds True.
He's been denounced by leading New Age influencers, including Deepak Chopra.
And that's kind of funny, right?
It takes a lot to be denounced as a charismatic asshole by Deepak Chopra.
Yeah, so even with his...
Endorsement of Trump.
Like in a way you see that he is to some extent being led by his own sincere bad intuitions.
Hey everybody, it's Matthew here.
The Aura Frames company sent us these really beautiful digital photo displays, and I thought I was a little too Gen X for this type of thing, even though it does have a little bit of Star Trek appeal.
But to be honest, the old prints I love and cherish are a little too secreted away in boxes and drawers to be part of my living memory, my sense that I'm part of this flow of time.
And the phone is good for taking the pictures, but I'm not so cool with sinking into my feels using the same device that brings me the doom scroll.
And I think that's what this thing is.
It pulls the opposite of a doom scroll out of your phone through the Aura app.
And it shows you your works and days or those of loved ones far away who can beam their photos to the crystal screen through the clouds.
Auraframes.com is offering $35 off their best-selling Carver Matte Frames if you use the promo code CONSPIRITUALITY at checkout.
So that's A-U-R-A-FRAMES.com promo code CONSPIRITUALITY.
And this deal is exclusive for you so you can get yours in time for the holidays.
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I don't know about you guys, but for me, this is a period of alternating between managing traumatic shock, and that may sound dramatic, but it does feel that way to me, and then dealing with anticipatory dread.
Like A, how the fuck did it happen that in spite of indictments, convictions, coup attempts, incompetence, and overall despicability, half my neighbors got up off the couch and stood in line to vote for this monster, or just stayed home with the stakes this high and said, eh, and then B, being terrified about the or just stayed home with the stakes this high and said, eh, and then B, being terrified about the implications of what feels like the start of an historically extremely I interviewed the journalist Talia Lavin yesterday, Julian, and
It's going to be out this Saturday on our brief about her new book, Wild Faith, and it's about the Christian right and their influence on America.
But one thing she said jumped out at me.
Trump or Harris did not win the election, but apathy did.
And That's certainly something to consider in this equation as well and to unpack in the coming months.
And unfortunately, it could be generations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Matthew, I know you'll have a particular angle on what may be driving some of that apathy in what's to come.
In addition to dissection of the Democrats' dead-on-arrival body politic and nonstop news coverage of Trump's cabinet picks, like it or not, the media itself is now part of the story.
And this dovetails with our theme of damage control.
As a new administration congeals around authoritarian promises of retribution against the enemies within, news organizations that were vigorously raising the alarm on the unprecedented dangers of MAGA Are now scrambling to find their feet in its ascendancy.
Like we've seen the morning Joe hosts famously from MSNBC openly calling Trump's campaign rhetoric fascist and then after he wins traveling to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and bend the knee.
No, to be journalists, Julian, to be journalists.
They're trying something new.
And then, like, even NPR appearing to now be covering the transition with this more measured and perhaps normalizing tone.
They're really good at that.
They're really good at that.
They can sell gift bags along with interviewing Leonard Leo.
Yeah, and they've got that particular calming tone of voice.
Now, certainly, the lawsuits filed against the New York Times, Penguin Random House, The Daily Beast, and CBS News right before the election by Trump for bias and defamation are creating an anxious environment.
News organizations are now confronting the fear of retribution by the about-to-be most powerful man in the world who's preemptively already undermined a lot of the institutional checks and balances that protect democracy and rule of law.
And then there are the corporate ownership concerns about falling ratings and how to pivot in response to the election result and keep their business models afloat somehow.
I think, too, that journalists who were all in on trying to save democracy— Are likely in the same kind of free fall that I described personally at the top.
I mean, we go now from educating and warning about the dangers of what could be about to happen to now potentially covering it as it does.
A big story over the last month has been the impact on the election of Trump having visited the Joe Rogan experience and then other bro podcasts like Theo Vaughn and flagrant and how this illustrates the outsized reach and relevance that digital new media platforms have.
But one data point, a somewhat pleasing data point, that has not been covered as much in this regard is that on one metric, an upstart progressive media company called Midas Touch Network actually outperformed Rogan in the run-up to the election.
Now that factoid is drawn from a November 27th article in Adweek, which reported on audience ratings across YouTube and Facebook and showed that the Joe Rogan experience led both Fox News and MSNBC, but Midas Touch beat out Rogan by about 100 million views during the month of October, meaning Rogan was at 1.2 billion audience minutes watched.
Midas Touch Network was at $1.3 billion.
And just this week, Kylie Kelsey has surpassed Joe Rogan with her new podcast in the number one slot on both Spotify and Apple.
So we might be seeing the downfall right now.
But I want to point out who Midas is because not everyone might know about them.
I follow them.
I follow them for a while.
They do some good work.
They do some clickbaity work.
But The site was founded by the Misales brothers, Ben, Brett, and Jordan, and it was founded as a liberal political action committee in 2020. And in 2023, they changed their name to Democracy Defense Action, which is related to but separate from the Midas Touch Network.
And while the network is left leaning, its most vocal proponent is the editor-in-chief, Ron Filipkowski, who is a former Republican.
I mean, his first son is named Ronald Reagan Filipkowski.
And he became a never-Trumper after the January 6th insurrection.
And one of the most prolific posters on X.
And Threads, which is where I follow him.
Yeah, he's all over the place.
And this follows Filipkowski resigning from a judicial nominating committee appointment in Florida after Ron DeSantis completely bungled COVID-19 in that state.
And he now considers himself a conservative Democrat, but he's mostly tracking far-right extremists and running the content at Midas now.
And he's also one of the few Trump critics as brash and brazen as Trump himself when it comes to media, which might explain the site's rise in popularity.
Yes.
So in all the talk that's been happening about the left needing to identify their version of Rogan in this new landscape, perhaps the team at Midas Touch have something to teach us.
I don't know.
Prejudicial trial publicity by, specifically, Midas Touch for his supposedly unfair conviction.
They singled out Trump's former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, who in a Midas Touch podcast on March 2nd referred to our incoming president as a monarch and a furher who would use SEAL Team 6 to go after anyone who didn't do his bidding, saying he would behave like Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Now, besides being obviously speculative and colorful, the filing nonetheless describes these statements as false and defamatory.
So further legal action against Midas Touch may be forthcoming.
But what caught my attention about this was that it happened around the same time that Kash Patel's nomination to lead the FBI was being discussed in the news.
As recently as September, Patel said on a podcast that FBI headquarters should be shut down Super reasonable.
In a 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, Patel said that the Department of Justice under Trump would come after members of the media.
And per CNN, the exact quote is, Adding that the department under Trump will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media.
We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We're going to come after you.
And then, at the end of last week, Patel actually filed a lawsuit against his former White House colleague, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Olivia Troy, who on the previous Monday called him a delusional liar who would lie about intelligence.
She said this on MSNBC. And Troy pointed out that Patel has a public hit list of people he wants to take down in the FBI and the DOJ. And she referred to a 2020 SEAL Team 6 mission to rescue an American farmer in Nigeria during which Patel lied about having gotten Nigerian government approval for entering their airspace.
And then he said, if nobody got hurt, who fucking cares when he was confronted by his irate bosses?
Listeners may remember that Patel was very involved in trying to shut down the Russia probe during Trump's first term while working as an aide to Congressman Devin Nunes, who interfered with the investigation by writing a memo alleging political bias at the FBI.
Meanwhile, despite Russian interference being widely retconned as a hoax or a Democrat conspiracy theory, eight Trump allies were found guilty due to Robert Mueller's investigation, including Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, all of whom were pardoned by Trump.
So now this aide to an advisor on the House Intelligence Committee who tried to undermine that legitimate investigation is up for the job of leading the FBI.
And there's more.
He's positively referenced QAnon in social media posts and appeared on podcasts dedicated to that baseless and insane conspiracy theory.
Yeah, that's at his spine.
That's his sort of core juice, right?
But also, he's not exactly a true believer.
He's also on record in several places saying, yeah, well, you know, it's useful.
And I'm really glad that we were able to rally the base that way.
Yeah.
But then he'll make a bunch of noncommittal statements about the truth claims.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he'll go actually on podcasts who are dedicated exclusively to QAnon and say, you guys are doing great work and I'm happy to be here with you.
And, you know, I agree with some things.
I disagree with others.
Yeah.
Right.
He published a book last year titled Government Gangsters, The Deep State, The Truth, and the Battle for Democracy.
And that calls for a purge of civil servants and alleges DOJ weaponization against Trump.
He's also obsessed with the supposed injustice of punishing the Capitol insurrectionists, which was a point underlined just this past week by Trump in his Meet the Press interview saying that the January 6th committee members should be put in jail.
Julian, how could you overlook Cash's children's book, The Plot Against the King, and its two sequels?
Oh, the shame.
It's published by the same house as J.P. Sears' classic children's book.
Good company.
It's also described as a fantastical retelling of Hillary's horrible plot against Trump to the whole family, full of fake heralds and keepers, Comey spying slugs.
This is a story of daring and danger, but never fear.
Cash, the distinguished discoverer, will win the day.
Oh, is he the hero?
Yes.
Is he the hero in the book?
Okay.
Yeah.
You didn't buy it for your sons for Christmas?
I didn't.
I have no idea.
This is the real shit here.
And if you're wondering, yes, it is reportedly Trump's favorite children's book and probably his reading level as well.
All right, guys, so that is all really great work on The Right Wind.
I'm going to come at the damage control theme from a different angle.
You know, the core feeling of the conspiracy theorist is that something horrible is happening and that it's being covered up from the mainstream population.
The conspiracy theorist feels they have special insight into it.
They're going to be punished for speaking it aloud.
And also, what they think they are looking at, or what they are actually looking at, is so obvious that it feels like the perpetrator is rubbing everyone's face in the violence and criminality.
Yeah, I'm interested in this conspiracy theme that'll be weaving through what we're about to talk about.
And so not to put too fine a point on it, but the person who uncovers actual conspiracies like Robert Miller, who indicted 34 people in the Russia probe, or like Peter Buxton, who was the Tuskegee whistleblower, or others like Woodward and Bernstein and Cassidy Hutchinson, they feel the way that you're describing too.
But where they differ from what we sort of technically call a conspiracy theorist is their approach to facts and evidence, right?
Yeah.
Well, what I'm going to get at is how messy that process is and how the capacity for certainty and access to information is very contingent.
I'm thinking about, like, how on Decoding the Gurus, they have that stinger where they run Brett Weinstein saying, you know, we are not conspiracy theorists, we are conspiracy hypothesizers.
Yeah, and Matt and Chris have a good laugh at that, not just because he's bullshitting, but because he's plausibly describing that transition, right?
That you have an intuition, you You gather some breadcrumbs and then maybe your theory reflects reality.
Maybe it doesn't, but that's often a matter of access.
And I think what Matt and Chris are really pulling out about that being funny is that Brett and Heather actually have those academic privileges and they're going to fuck it up nonetheless.
Woodward and Bernstein had the entire fifth state behind them.
But when I think of Me Too victims or regular Catholic citizens who, for decades, think about the guy who is abused as a child and winds up...
in a bar in his 50s or 60s saying the entire Catholic church is a trafficking organization, right?
He couldn't prove it journalistically, legally.
He might be too, you know, it's just ruined actually in his function to be able to pursue anything.
And he might be stigmatized as a conspiracy theorist to the extent that he hangs on to that story, but he can't prove it, right?
But then we have the Boston Globe that actually proved it out, right?
Exactly.
But what I'm talking about is the difference between the spotlight guys and the guy in the bar, right?
Yeah, the resources.
Yeah.
The guy in the bar, he had the truth as well.
But he's going to be off to the side.
He's probably going to be stigmatized for who knows how long.
He might not be right about everything, but he might be right about the main things.
Yeah.
And so I hear two distinctions there, right?
Who has the resources to actually track down what the facts actually are?
And then also that the person who has been harmed by immensely powerful institutions inevitably is going to find the deck stacked against them.
Yes, exactly.
So, the theory remains a theory when the feelings and the suspicions are real, but the hard evidence never materializes for whatever reason.
But this week, I want to bring an example of how a real event...
At times denied or minimized, continues to slowly break into consensus reality because the evidence is becoming undeniable.
So this is about how on December 4th, Amnesty International releases a 296-page report called You Feel Like You Are Subhuman, Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.
So that's Amnesty International using the G word, which is a big deal because of the legacy of the organization, which is not spotless.
It has faced criticisms of bias and criticisms about its methodology in the past.
But it's also responsible for doing things like normalizing the use of the term apartheid in relation to Israel in 2022. And of course, Israel is saying the report is based on lies, so there's going to be controversy over that.
But as I go into this, I just want to say two things off the top.
My thoughts here are part of a long game critique of liberal institutions, governments, universities, legacy media platforms that fumbled the Gaza genocide ball, in my opinion.
And it goes without saying that every single bit of US foreign policy in Israel-Palestine is going to be worse under Trump and his toady generals and Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel.
None of what I'm going to argue detracts from any of that.
I'm doing this because if we want to be confident that the institutions of the liberal order are credible—governments, universities, public health agencies, scientific experts, legacy media platforms—I think we have to examine how they perform under heavy political and moral stress.
And given how hard it has been, and still is, for people to name genocide as genocide, to name a red line as a red line, my question is, where else are they going to cave?
Now, in the current report, Amnesty International applied Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention to their field research of interviewing 212 people on the ground in Palestine.
And, you know, they scanned against the four or five criteria.
They found ample evidence.
The report is harrowing to read.
And the results I don't think would be any surprise to a long line of genocide historians and international law experts – Back in 1998, Edward Said talked about the endless calvary of the Palestinian people.
The new historian, Ilan Pape, Israeli new historian, has since 2007 been saying things like, Israel has been undertaking, quote, an incremental genocide of the people in Gaza.
And, you know, even the Nakba itself and whether it constituted genocide has been the subject of scholarly debate from at least 2010, if not before.
Yeah, I think it's helpful too for anyone who doesn't know when you reference a new historian.
You're talking about historians who in 2007 were granted access for the first time.
Exactly.
To the archive of everything that happened going back at least to 47, right?
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And so this is such awful stuff.
I mean, I personally see the Nakba, which is what Palestinians call and what the Arab world calls 700,000 people being driven off their land, right, in 1947, as ethnic cleansing.
Personally, I see the Zionist project itself as a kind of settler colonialism right from the start.
Even though, as people will say, it was born on the Jewish side out of pogroms and then the Holocaust, and even though it can be argued that the Jews did in fact inhabit that land going back 3,000 or more years, which is when Solomon's temple was built, all of this has been extremely messy and a bloody disaster from the start.
At the same time, I think that the sheer number of attempted peace processes, the two-state solution proposals that have been on the table, The hijackings, the attacking of the Olympic Village, and then the reactive and awful aspects of Israeli security and military policies that result from suicide bombings and being attacked by multiple neighboring countries and then living with the constant threat of openly anti-Semitic militant religious extremists.
It shouldn't be left out of the conversation if we're going to be faithful to the complexities here.
Yeah.
I mean, it depends what conversation we're having.
If we're having a technical conversation about the usage of the term genocide and how it's permitted, then that's one thing.
Like, I'm not a Middle East historian.
I don't speak any of those languages.
I don't know how to parse or litigate the layers of intergenerational trauma there.
And I have to say that I'm hesitant and slightly suspicious of the complexity argument when it comes up because...
I don't know of any complexity that justifies genocide.
No, there's no complexity that justifies genocide.
I'm with you on that 100%.
Right.
So I often hear that 3,000 years of a bloody mess can be a way of infantilizing people who are making choices or suffering impacts in the present moment, like choices like signing orders to ship.
bombs.
So I'm not saying you're doing this, but when the State Department does this, it's a form of Kafkaesque disavowal.
You know it's very complicated and we're not really in control of anything and it's a moving situation.
So yeah, I feel like we have to understand history and not slide into a kind of bureaucratic disavowal.
Yeah, I mean I bring those things up because I feel like sometimes when I hear people who are more left-leaning than I am on this particular topic, these things tend to not be part of the conversation.
It is so difficult because there's the historical piece of it.
There are all of the logistical and geopolitical details.
And then there's just the brute fact of what's going on right now and how incredibly difficult.
Wrong it is.
There's also this frequent comparison to apartheid South Africa, where I grew up, and I resonate with it.
I can see how in certain ways it's a very powerful and damning symmetry, and I absolutely feel for the people who are living under that.
But I was reminded recently of something that happened after apartheid ended, during the period of the Desmond Tutu-led Peace and Reconciliation Commission, where people would come forward, they would confess the atrocities they committed, and the structure was such that they could ask forgiveness of the actual victims' families.
Very, very powerful, moving, but also controversial stuff.
And it's controversial because the commission would then decide whether or not to send those people who had confessed on to actually facing court trials.
My point here is that because Nelson Mandela's ANC, the resistance movement, the main resistance movement in South Africa, opposed the killing of civilians on principle, not only during this period of the new South Africa were the white secret police and death squad units punished by the legal system, but so too were blacks who, as part of their anti-apartheid struggle, had unjustly killed civilians according to what the ANC deemed acceptable.
It's there that I think the comparison breaks down because if Hamas or Hezbollah, or as we're going to see in Syria, where we're closing in on 700,000 people having been killed so far, Tahrir al-Sham, which is the group who just deposed Assad, when they succeed, I don't think we're going to see instantiating of expanded civil rights and justice and freedoms for all people, which was the mission of Mandela and King and Gandhi.
And for me, that's a really powerful difference.
You know, as I listen to you, I also think the comparison breaks down as well, but maybe for different reasons.
I mean, first of all, it sounds like you're talking about a post-talk event, like there's enough restoration in South Africa of the administrative state.
It's a single state with both peoples.
There can be a commission.
There can be hearings and a lot of complex adjudications.
But your comment seems to foreclose the possibility that this could happen in the future in Palestine, even though there is a decades-long history of Jewish-Arab ecumenical collaboration in peacemaking in the region.
But nevertheless, they're not there yet.
And they're not there yet because they're getting their tent cities vaporized from above.
Yeah.
I also wonder if the comparison breaks down because it can't really help but imply that nonviolent blacks in South Africa did it correctly, while militant brown people in Palestine are not as good victims nor activists for their cause.
One can be militant without blowing up buses of commuter civilians.
Sure, sure.
But in general, I don't feel moral standing in taking positions in that space.
I'm not familiar with the wording.
I don't think that's true.
And that should always be resisted and avoided and condemned.
Okay.
But there are ongoing historical debates on how Martin Luther King Jr. needed the militancy of Malcolm X and Gandhi needed militants blowing up British train lines.
And there also have been decades of nonviolent resistance to occupation from Palestinians.
Like, you know about the Great March of Return protests?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So March of 2018, protesters walk towards the barriers.
They're unarmed.
Israeli snipers shoot them, but also bystanders, journalists, medical staff.
They're like hundreds of yards away from the fence where they pose no security threat.
And now 1,200 people require long-term disability care, which of course they're not going to get right now, right?
So yeah, I just...
I just personally can't judge what occupied and oppressed people wind up doing.
But more importantly, I don't want to spend time on that while bombs are falling.
I think part of the reason that I don't comment on this topic in general is because what I've heard is that there are certain areas of it where you don't feel like you have the moral standing to comment, but then there are other areas where you do, and I don't understand that distinction.
Yeah, genocide, bad.
What oppressed people do in response to occupation, I'm not sure.
That's the distinction.
It's pretty simple, actually.
Genocide, bad.
Well, I think if you ask the families of people who have been murdered on those buses, I think there's more complexity there that would mess with that equation.
Sure, if you ask them, but you were asking me to render judgment on people, right?
Well, I mean, I imagine you draw a line somewhere.
So you probably don't think that the attacking of the Olympic Village in the 70s was...
A valid form of resistance to oppression.
Yeah, no, I don't...
You think the hijacking of planes and killing civilians on planes is...
No, I think that that should never happen.
The killing of civilians should never happen.
Yes, either way.
Yes, and I suppose let's underline it by saying I condemn Hamas' actions on October the 7th, because my point is what comes after, right?
So back to the genealogy of genocide and how it's being used.
2014, following the IDF's protective edge offensive, the National Lawyers Guild sends a letter to the ICC petitioning for an investigation of potential Israeli war crimes, including genocide.
That same year, I'd never heard of this before, but the Russell Tribunal, it accused Israel of the same.
So this is a tribunal formed by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1966 to evaluate American military intervention in Vietnam.
It's like 12 intelligentsia types who gather in Brussels when something horrible comes up and then they write a report.
It's...
It's kind of amazing.
And Sartre's quote about it is, our authority comes from our absolute powerlessness.
Okay, now in relation to the present war...
Eight days after October the 7th, 800 scholars of genocide, international law, and conflict studies warned that Israel was showing signs of genocidal intent.
and intent happens to be the most crucial and difficult standard to establish unless you're listening to the prime minister of Israel and his toadies for five minutes because on October the 28th Netanyahu goes on national tv and bloviates about a holy mission and says you must remember what Amalek has done to you says our holy bible the biblical story of Amalek involves God commanding the Israelites to destroy the Amalekites including women children and livestock this has been a far right
Zionist battle cry for ages and Netanyahu is echoed here by his far right flank yeah I mean this is the thing that that I think is is so complicated and and difficult so complicating and difficult about the situation is that you basically have right-wing religious extremists on all side with very loud voices and big guns yeah Yeah, and they have the support of the West, right?
And it's not just the West in general, but it's like, you know, liberal, democratic West, the rational West, the secular West.
Well, and wait and see what's going to happen in Syria now because you have even more factions and even more weird combinations of like, my enemy is my friend until they turn out to be the new Taliban.
Right.
Right, and then we also have regular Syrians who are going to make their way.
Yeah, and who gets stuck in Syria is the Kurds.
And the Kurds are the ones we really should be supporting.
Yes, I'm above my head now.
Okay, so in November, the Geneva-based Euromed Human Rights Monitor estimates 200,000 deaths and rising and also uses the G word.
Then fast forward to the spring when 3,100 college students are arrested around the country for protesting Israel's war and the Biden administration's complicity in it.
They used a lot of rhetorical tools to do that, and decrying genocide was one of them.
And a common conspiracy theory was that they had been indoctrinated by Iran.
Yeah, I don't think they were indoctrinated by Iran into using the term genocide or into protesting, but I will include a Time magazine article on what disinformation and propaganda researchers have found regarding Iranian foreign influence campaigns.
And, you know, as part of that propaganda, they themselves have claimed that they helped organize the protests.
Well, of course they would.
Of course they would operationalize that conspiracy theory and take credit for it.
They probably also claimed responsibility for buying matching tents from Costco for the campers, right?
It's kind of like the guys on RT saying, oh, of course, Tulsi is our plant.
Tulsi Gabbard is our plant, right?
Yeah.
I just want to say, this particular part of it drives me nuts because as someone who protested and got arrested years ago, anyone who believed that an anti-Zionist Jewish college student, for instance, handing out challah bread and doing a teach-in on Franz Fanon and willing to get their head cracked by the cops was there because of Iranian influence is totally out to lunch.
You don't do stuff like that because some shady spy dude hands you a pamphlet and a $100 bill.
You do it for two reasons, basically.
You believe in it, and also you have friends who are doing it with you because you're part of something.
Well, I think that's all true.
true.
And I think the argument in today's world might be that you might see a lot of social media based on your algorithmic choices that end up giving you a particular ideological point of view in the same way that we're very comfortable saying that people get radicalized into white supremacy on YouTube.
Sure.
In July, there's a report out from the University Network for Human Rights involving researchers from Boston University School of Law concluding that Israel has committed genocidal acts.
Then, you know, we're speaking about South Africa.
October 8th of this year, South Africa accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, files a case with the UN's International Court of Justice.
That's going to take so long, it'll probably be decided after a Trump-Saudi consortium opens the first high-end resorts on the beautiful and oddly unpopulated coastline of Gaza.
And then three weeks ago, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant alleging war crimes.
Now, the amnesty report is out.
And so all of this should be obvious now, right?
Israel's committing genocide with U.S. tax dollars.
Everyone agrees.
Of course they don't.
But before we get there, I looked back through our archive to see that I started using the term genocide in a Patreon episode in November, in an episode about how Marianne Williamson had condemned U.S. complicity in the war, and I thought that was notable.
She was deflecting, actually, left-wing criticism for not denouncing the IDF's action as specifically genocidal.
But wait, this is November of 23, right?
Yes.
Yeah, early.
So the bombing you're characterizing as genocidal.
Well, no, this is within three weeks.
I wasn't characterizing it.
I was commenting that she was deflecting criticism from the left wing.
I don't know how I felt about it then, but scholars had already come out with their statements, 800 of them.
So in passing, I mentioned that I agreed with that criticism, that the omission amounted to a form of laundering, but I noted the pragmatism of her not wanting to use the word.
So...
I noted the pragmatism because there were consequences for calling the thing for what it was.
Because as I used the term in episodes and on social media going forward, I was told that, oh, it's really only Hamas that's genocidal.
Or Muslims in general have genocidal tendencies.
Or from the river to the sea is only and always a call for genocide against Israel, even when diaspora Jews are yelling it.
Or that I was delusional or anti-Semitic or I was funded by Iran.
And then I had this long-term source, somebody I talked to almost every week.
We talked about a number of things related to this podcast and our various news interests.
And they wound up saying that I was being sucked into anti-Israel conspiracy theories fomented by self-hating Jews.
Yeah, I mean, that's awful.
That's really unfair to you.
We've tangled on this once before, so maybe we can get better clarity this time.
Regarding the slogan you reference, we know that pro-Palestinian protesters are not chanting it in support of Israel's genocide or ethnic cleansing of Arabs, right?
That's correct.
Yeah, yeah.
And I have also not seen pro-Israeli protesters chanting it, but maybe it's just not on my feed over the past year.
Even though I know some right-wing politicians in Israel have cynically reclaimed it, like very publicly, right?
I don't know about reclaim because it was a verbatim phrase in the 1977 Likud party platform.
That's exactly what I mean by reclaiming.
They're now saying, no, this is our phrase.
Netanyahu himself quotes it recently on television, standing in front of the map of a future Israel where there's no Gaza depicted.
Exactly.
I also just want to be clear on something here because we've gone in a lot of directions.
This started off as a sort of criticism of government agencies and media and how they're covering this, right?
Yeah.
Okay, because now we're turning into what single people say on social media, which if I look at my own feed, I've been called everything possibly ever and I don't know where it comes from.
So I want to distinguish those things because they can get a little convoluted at this point.
point.
I'll tie it together.
Okay.
So to finish that up, are you saying that U.S. campus protesters who chant from the river to the sea, that that's sometimes not a call for abolishing Israel, but rather for a two-state solution that runs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea?
And if indeed that was the case, if Palestine was free from the river to the sea, what do we think would happen to the 7 million Israeli Jews who currently live there?
So from my reading and from talking with anti-Zionist Jews and pro-Palestinian freedom protesters, it is almost never a call for abolishing Israel, except in the technical sense of dismantling the colonial state.
It's not a call for a two-state solution either, but for a single integrated and decolonized nation shared by all residents of all ethnicities and religions.
Call them dreamers.
But when Ariel Angel or Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky utter that phrase, they're not calling for the destruction of Israel, but rather the dismantling of the apartheid state.
So I feel like it's a bit of a hypothetical, maybe even leading question to ask what do we think would happen to the 7 million Israeli Jews who currently live there?
Because I think it points to the assumption that the entire Arab world would just annihilate Israel if like people just chanted the chant too much.
They've tried a couple times.
Well, all of the actual military evidence going back to 1948 pretty much goes the other way at this point.
And what have we seen so far of the Arab capacity for armed resistance?
Like in the last segment, they might develop nuclear weapons.
Yes, Israel already has them, most likely.
So what does the preponderance of evidence show about responsibility for aggression in the region right now?
And to speak to your point, Derek, I'm not recounting this, these anecdotes about being called personal things out of resentment or, you know, as though they're sort of statistically, they give an accurate picture.
I want to put a personal frame on how naming this thing in the early days shows how easy it is for the lines between critic, protester, and conspiracy theorist to be blurred.
And I think that that blurring is super important to understand when we think about how people like RFK Jr. position themselves, because they are drawing on a real experience that a lot of people can identify with, and it goes in all different directions.
Well, I just wanted to be clear that we're not talking about legacy media there because that's where you started.
Yes, but now I'm going to get to that.
The backlash that I'm describing, where was it coming from?
Was it coming from the right wing?
Yes, absolutely.
And of course, you know, now MAGA media is not going to report out consensus reality.
They're not going to touch this, the Amnesty International report.
I think Fox News did one thing about it, but basically they just interviewed Israeli diplomats on it.
That's not what they're there for.
They've said as much.
They're not there to report the news.
But this is where I come to liberal legacy media and other institutions.
But I'll start with colleges.
Democratic governors and democratic states in New York and California and other places sent militarized police to crack the heads of protesters at liberal colleges while Dana Bash compared them to brown shirts on CNN. Now, several of those colleges have instituted hate speech policies that make Zionists a protected class, and that could mean that if you describe IDF actions as colonial or genocidal, you could run afoul of hate speech guidelines.
Turning to the media, a statistical analysis in The Nation magazine showed egregious bias against Palestinians in reporting of CNN and MSNBC, featuring, for example, a clear tendency to avoid the G-word in that context while using it in bucket loads to describe Ukrainians killed by Russia.
Then there was an analysis in Jacobin that showed that, quote, in the six months worth of Morning Joe segments posted on the MSNBC website that covered the Gaza war, not a single Palestinian guest appeared.
Now, reportedly, I did not know this, but this is one of Biden's favorite news sources.
Apparently, it's watched by a lot of the administration.
It's just a favorite source.
And then The Intercept reported back in April on internal New York Times style guides that showed its policies to forbid use of the word genocide.
And when it came to New York Times covering the amnesty report, they buried the story on the eighth page, and then they devoted half of their coverage to Israel's denial of the allegation.
Okay, so then now, turning to leadership, Kamala Harris didn't or couldn't use the term genocide at all in 2024. There was one campaign moment in Milwaukee in October in which Harris appeared to agree with a protester accusing Israel of genocide, stating, what he's talking about, it's real.
But then her people immediately walked all of that all the way back as fast as they could.
So...
Do you have, like, a good faith interpretation of why she and they might have approached it that way, specifically during the campaign?
The approach hasn't changed either before or after the campaign either, so that's one thing.
I do have impressions about what the intentions and calculations were, but what do you mean by good faith?
That's what I want to start with.
Well, in terms of, like, what...
What understandable motivations or calculations might they be making on that high stakes stage?
I want to pull this apart because I don't think it's a neutral question.
I think you're asking me to imagine that she had good reasons.
You're asking me to step into the shoes of how complicated it actually was.
But essentially, this asks me to imagine a world in which it makes sense Yeah.
Yeah.
So I want to be clear also that Harris using the word genocide on the campaign trail is not the point here.
The point is whether she is complicit in the history going on.
And I think this question of like, well, you know, did she have any option makes it sound like it's something that she's not doing.
It's something that she's observing, something beyond her control, or she should have messaging about it, but she doesn't really have any agency over.
So this is the kind of disavowal that I was talking about before.
Yeah.
I heard Julian's question slightly differently.
What I heard was, can you imagine being in a situation where you have to appease 330 million people and try to get a majority of the votes and trying to understand the consciousness of those people and operating within a pluralistic society that has many views on many topics?
That was the question.
That's how I would have approached the question were it asked to me.
You're asking, what would I have done as a politician?
No, no.
Can you imagine what it must be like being a politician?
First of all, I want to be clear, because I haven't said I agree with all of this talk about this being a genocide.
I've felt that way a long time.
We have differences of opinion in certain things, but not on that broader point.
So I'm not arguing against that point.
But when it comes to these sorts of decisions of, Basically, what we're really talking about is how do the Democrats or how does the left win power to actually implement policies.
That was how I was imagining that particular question because obviously the result, as you flagged in the very beginning, Matthew, is that Israel's kind of fucked under a Trump administration.
We have to look at that.
So what we're really doing here is a postmortem.
And if you want to look at the fact of how a Democratic politician or another third party that might emerge at some point, although that's going to be tough in America...
then what sort of messaging do they have to do to win back power?
I guess my answer is the same as before.
I cannot imagine a world in which it makes sense to stand for office and have power and control in relation to an ongoing genocide and not change direction.
That's my answer.
And all of the statistical analyses, all of the, you know, pod save guys who are around me and telling to be more pragmatic are going to, that's not going to sort of move me off this fundamental assessment of reality.
That's what it is.
It's like you're staring at a virus in a Petri dish and you're like, you know, am I going to try to find a cure to that or am I going to let it fester?
And so, you know, you ask, like, why did she do this?
We know that there was no will to differentiate herself from Biden's historical Zionism.
We also know that the DNC itself is a majority Zionist in terms of its disposition.
We know how influential the ADL and AIPAC is.
That's nothing to say.
That's nothing to speak of GOP commitments to Israel.
The calculation they made was that it didn't matter, that the votes could be sacrificed.
I also believe that that's the wrong calculation electorally, but more importantly, in terms of moral credibility going forward, that's what this segment is ultimately about.
It torches credibility.
But I was thinking, as you were talking, I think you're right, Derek, that his question is more rounded, but there's something about the good faith that sticks in me.
And so I want to flip it for a moment, Julian.
Yeah, go ahead.
What is your good faith interpretation of why Hamas militants got up in the morning of October 7th and followed through on their plans to murder Israelis on military bases, kibbutzim, and the music festival?
Well, my good faith interpretation of that is that they are probably second, third, maybe even fourth generation victims of a horrifically oppressive, hopeless country.
Tragic situation where they see getting involved with the guys who have the power and the swagger and the weaponry to try to make a change in their situation as being their only way out.
So that's the totally good faith version of it.
And they've witnessed atrocities and they've lost family members and friends and they're just stuck in an absolutely awful position.
I think we find common ground there, and I'm flipping it because asking the question about Harris is asking about why the hands of one of the most powerful people in the world are simply tied, right?
And I think if we're interested— But hold on, but hold on, because there's— If we're interested in the complexity of things, we have to ask the same question about people who have virtually no power at all, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're blending two things together there, which is how much power you think she has as vice president over that policy.
when you're facing the electorate who have whatever opinions and level of understanding and education on a topic and having been propagandized, et cetera, to try and get them to vote for you so that you can be in a position where maybe you could start to make positive change.
Like those are two different questions, right?
There are two different questions, but she answered both of them for you because she didn't make any movement either before or after the campaign in any other direction.
Well, but if the perception is that coming out really strongly against Israel would potentially lose the election, then that's the good faith answer.
Like she's trying to walk a very difficult tightrope.
So this can be litigated forever and I'm sure it will be.
I'm glad to talk about it.
The reason that I'm obsessed with it is that democratic leaders, institutions and media outlets have been seen, but more importantly, have seen themselves as a main bulwark against the fascism that we're all so worried about.
And if that's true, there is no room in my mind to sacrifice moral, intellectual, scientific high ground, especially in support of a state conducting ethnic cleansing, which is kind of what fascists always do.
If it's pretty clear that the New York Times or MSNBC or The Washington Post is so afraid of...
Going the other way, if they're so beholden to the donor classes or so dependent upon advertising dollars that need the status quo in the Middle East to stay as it is, on what basis can I, Matthew, like even me, how can I be confident that their integrity in smaller matters, like the safety of pharmaceuticals or the seriousness of a pandemic or the nature of economic crises or whether wokeness costs Democrats the election?
