Our latest X Space with our friend Eiynah Muhammed Smith. (@nicemangos (2) Eiynah (@nicemangos.bsky.social) — Bluesky ) Discussing the dystopian propaganda around Israel's ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza, from racist Twitter 'hasbara' to IDF TikTok / Insta, to Israeli influencers' skits about Palestinians faking their suffering. Also featuring Dr Caitlin Greene the linguist and tracker of Steven Pinker, etc. Links: Israeli military’s TikTok attempt to make propaganda cool | Israel War on Gaza News | Al Jazeera The Israeli army is on TikTok. It's as bad as you'd expect (newarab.com) Israeli Defense Forces Soldiers Embrace Thirst Traps on TikTok (rollingstone.com) Natalia Fadeev: Israeli Influencer's Gaza Instagram Draws Outrage (dailydot.com) Israeli Influencers Are Mocking Palestinians Suffering in Gaza (newsweek.com) Propaganda images/memes we discussed in the beginning https://x.com/nicemangos/status/1760143208766456133?s=61&t=w7q_ejvwZ_gCFj9WV50Lqw T-Rex Costume, bombs and techno, dancing on a tank https://x.com/rachael_swindon/status/1748398198358507960?s=61&t=w7q_ejvwZ_gCFj9WV50Lqw Bill Maher’s poorly aged Burqa bit https://x.com/billmaher/status/1740866573655810131?s=61&t=w7q_ejvwZ_gCFj9WV50Lqw Contrasts: Fine dining scene vs. Starving population https://x.com/brandyljensen/status/1754145731466723520?s=61&t=w7q_ejvwZ_gCFj9WV50Lqw Lifestyle piece on IDF soldiers cooking in the kitchens of Gazans https://x.com/gawanmac/status/1757500107912556767?s=61&t=w7q_ejvwZ_gCFj9WV50Lqw IDF using Human Shields: https://www.btselem.org/human_shields
Yeah, well thank you everyone for joining us for this extremely light-hearted topic of dystopian propaganda and TikTok war crimes.
Like, how horrendously 2024.
Fuck.
There is some, like, just horrific, horrific stuff floating around.
Like, I just I could not have imagined how blatant it would be, like, after, you know, the world has gone through these types of things before.
There's been study of, like, genocides, and people have commented, there's been academic research on what kind of rhetoric, and, like, we've done this, and we're doing this again, and we're now live-streaming it right into people's handheld devices.
Extremely messed up.
What do you say, Jack?
Yes, indeed.
Genocide and social media.
Genocide on social media.
As you say, what could be more 2024?
Right.
And yeah, so I just have a few things that I thought we could talk about.
Maybe we can start with some, like, Zionist influencer stuff.
There's this guy called Dr. Eli David, and he posts the most horrific, like, Nazi-esque cartoons that I've ever seen.
There was one in specific that I wanted to discuss with you, Jack.
It was the one where there's a Palestinian depicted as a rat.
Here it is.
Okay, yeah.
I'm sad to say that I know the one.
Yeah, so standing on top of the rubble with this, like, sign that says, we are winning is this, like, keffiyeh-wearing rat.
Like, words fail me.
Yeah, I mean, it says it all.
You know, I feel like commentary isn't even necessary.
It says it all.
One of the ironies of that image is that it depicts the devastation that has been inflicted on Gaza in a way that, you know, a different kind of propaganda would try to avoid that or hide it or sanitise it, whereas this just… Right.
It shows you Gaza in ruins and it shows you in the background, it shows you dead bodies, which I think are human bodies, so I'm wondering how things work in this particular fantasy world, but never mind.
That's me getting all nerd and worrying about the world building when I should be thinking about the politics.
So yeah, this is the kind of propaganda that isn't denying the atrocity.
What it's saying is, yeah, we did the atrocity and the atrocity is justified because these people are not human.
Right, and they think they're winning, but actually we're winning, because look at all this destruction that we inflicted.
And I will link this tweet in the thread of tweets under this space, and I'll link it in the show notes, so if anyone wants to know what we're talking about, you can have a look at this horrendous image.
The implication of the image, as you say, is that the Palestinians want the devastation, they want to be attacked on some level.
Which is something that I've heard time and time again from our favorite intellectual, Sam Harris, who claims that, you know, this is what they want.
This is what Hamas wants.
This is all Hamas propaganda.
They want more violence.
They want more death.
I mean, like, Hamas is a terrorist group, for sure.
But, like, the extent of this devastation, I don't know if anybody would want, like, And we've seen how Hamas is used interchangeably with Palestinian, right?
So, like, literally anyone is Hamas.
UN is Hamas, so hospitals are Hamas.
Yeah.
It's exactly like Nazi propaganda films from the 30s that specifically likened Jews to rats, that, you know, just said that.
I mean, they get so upset when you make the comparison, and yet There it is!
I mean, it's right there!
They're doing it deliberately!
Yeah, and then it's like, well, how dare you?
How dare you make that comparison?
And then there's that graphic novel, right, that you and Daniel did a bonus episode on, I believe?
We did a mainline episode about the attempt to take it out of schools.
And then we did a bonus episode about the graphic novel itself, so we covered it in both the public and the bonus.
Right, so tell me a bit more about how Mouse compares with images like this, or what the message is, because I haven't fully read it, I've skimmed through it.
Well, Arch Beagleman's Mouse is a masterpiece.
It's justifiably recognized as a masterpiece of that form.
And it's about the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, from the perspective of the victims.
And the conceit of the comic is that it makes the Nazis The Germans, into cats, and the Jews of Europe into mice, within the graphic novel, that's how it depicts it.
And there's all sorts of interesting, you know, it does that knowing what it's doing, it does that knowing full well that it's playing around with the form of comics and all sorts of, you know, like Tom and Jerry and all this stuff, that's all baked into it, it knows what it's doing.
So it's a complicated piece of work that, you know, there are some criticisms to be made of it, sure.
It's also, as I say, justifiably a masterpiece.
And it's a very questioning, thoughtful piece of work about the Holocaust and the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, etc., etc.
Nothing like this whatsoever.
Right, so like the opposite message, right?
But also kind of playing, I imagine, with that image of dehumanising, right?
Yeah, I think mouse is part of what it is, it's a rumination on dehumanization of people, representation of people as animals, because that's a big part of how the Holocaust happened, and also a rumination upon the idea of groups of people as being sort of inherently separated by different natures and things.
It's not just repeating that idea, it's subjecting it to a kind of ironic interrogation.
Whereas what we have in that picture that Dr. Eli David shared is just straightforwardly The Palestinians are rats, and they need to be treated the way rats are treated.
That's what it says.
It's not a complex or ambiguous image.
Right, right.
Yeah, and I mean, this is what I'm trying to understand, like, when this theme has been discussed and talked about for decades, and if you're of Jewish background, you certainly understand How a group can be dehumanized in very dangerous and horrific ways.
How can it be that you make these comparisons yourself?
And put out propaganda images like this.
Like, I remember during the Syrian migrant crisis, like, I think 2015, 2016, that's when I was really beginning to wake up to the just, like, plain fucking awfulness of the new atheist scene, right?
Because it switched from, like, oh, you know, let's discuss this Problematic verse, and why are we still legitimizing scripture like this in our day and age today?
But then it switched to look at these hordes of Insects coming.
They're like, you know, they're infecting our countries and coming to rape our women.
And it was like a magazine that sprung up after Charlie Hebdo, like a very new atheist supported by Dawkins and all of these people.
I forget what it's called.
Maybe Vive Charlie.
I think it was called Vive Charlie.
And they had these horrendous covers where, like, migrants were depicted as insects, and they even had, like, racist drawings of Obama on the inside.
And, like, very quickly you can see that this is not about secularism or humanism.
And during that time, Gadsad, I think you might be familiar with Gadsad, the D-list IDW-er.
Yeah, I am, yeah.
Not even good enough to be in the IDW, is how it really is.
Rejected from the IDW for being just too stupid, and that tells you everything.
I was just about to make a similar crack, actually, about that magazine you were talking about.
When Charlie Hebdo isn't racist enough for you, you need to do an even more racist version of Charlie Hebdo.
During that time, Gad Saad put out, like, some comparisons of Muslims being like mosquitoes and the West not having, like, adequate insecticide to prevent malaria.
And I thought, like, fuck, man, what kind of group of people am I surrounded by?
Like, how are these atheists and humanists?
Like, and Gad is of Jewish background.
So, Around that time, I was like, well, he should really, of all people, understand how this is extremely not appropriate as criticism of a religion or of a group of people.
And yeah, here we are today.
We've got propaganda like this being pumped out by dozens and hundreds of Zionist influencers.
And also, like, the state of Israel itself, it's such a mindfuck.
Well, it's not, you know, for me, your ethnicity or your religion or whatever, these are not fundamentally where your Your view, particularly in particular circumstances, is going to come from, your view is more likely to come, it's going to shape it, obviously, because we're all shaped by our background and our families and our culture, etc.
But it's more likely to come, particularly in directly political things like this, it's more likely to come from your class position, which if you're part of an imperial culture, that's going to be, that's going to, you know, this sort of stuff comes very naturally to people who are operating within And for imperialist cultures.
To be very basic about it, it's racism, and racism has always been the fundamental ideology that makes imperial cultures function, because they're all based upon oppressing populations, and the day-to-day functioning of that, getting people to actually do that, is based upon propagating and internalizing ideologies that dehumanize them.
Yeah, I don't think that's ever been more apparent in my lifetime than it is today.
Like, I have not seen this blatant disregard for an entire group of people ever to this extent in my life, yeah.
I just, yeah, I've never seen it before.
Palestinians are at the, they're sadly at the confluence of being people who are The victims of a very widespread form of racism, and also at the same time people whose very existence is sort of, you know, historically and in an ongoing way, their very existence is very inconvenient for the culture of Western imperialism.
So they have the bad fortune to be directly at the confluence of that.
Right, yeah.
And so many intersections of racism as well, like anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and specifically anti-Palestinian.
And yeah, there's another Eli David image.
I mean, he obviously, I don't think he's made these images, but he certainly shares them with great pride.
This was around when they were doing the five-day ceasefire and the hostage kind of release deal that they had an exchange deal that they had so he's got An angelic looking figure in all white-ish and then like Satan.
Very fucking massively built Satan with like a 16 pack or something.
I don't think that's intentional but uh and then behind this angelic figure is like a bunch of cages which has little demon
little demon children in it or little demons in it and behind the devil figure are these cages that has little angels in it complete with halos and everything and then on top of the demon on top of the big devil you've got the palestinian flag and on top of the angelic jesus god-like figure you've got the israeli flag so basically the implication is that the devil has captured all these little baby angels and
This angelic god-like figure has trapped all these little demons, so that's what they will be exchanging in the hostage exchange deal.
I think that's an adapted meme.
I think the angelic figure might actually be originally intended by whoever originally created this.
It might actually be intended to be Jesus, which is ironic, but I think someone's adapted it by putting the flags there, you know, adding them to the image.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me.
This is as much a meme war as it is a real war, unfortunately.
It's not a war, but really it's a genocide, one-sided, but the meme war is definitely ongoing as well.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
But yeah, somebody's adapted this to make it into hostages are not morally equivalent.
Yeah, little devil children and little angel children, which is basically the same rhetoric as Netanyahu, as Sam Harris, children of darkness versus children of light, civilization versus barbarism, you know?
Yeah, it's the imputation of inherent nature again, isn't it?
The Palestinians are just demonic, diabolical, inhuman by definition.
It's relevantly the same idea.
I know you said you hadn't seen this kind of thing before in your life, and I agree.
But that's because social media is a thing now, right?
Yeah.
I grew up, you know, I was a child of the 80s and 90s, right?
And I remember when the first Iraq War happened, I grew up in the American South, and there were definitely what we now call memes spread around certain groups that were You know, just as just as genocidal towards, you know, Iraqi citizens, you know, it's like, it's not it's not focused on Saddam.
It's like, well, Iraq should just be glassed over sort of thing.
You know, I mean, this is what wartime propaganda does and like more to the point in the run up to the second war in Iraq after 9-11.
And even Afghanistan, there was certainly, like, I mean, just rhetoric that it's just, like, people are just programmed by, you know, by media to accept, like, you know, just outright on wanting destruction against ordinary people for the crimes of their leaders, like, and however we want to structure that is, you know, like... And somehow that never applies to the West.
Oh, of course!
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, and we could talk about Sam Harris.
I'm happy to talk about Sam Harris, but I think we should save that for a minute, at least, you know.
Yeah, that's a whole other can of worms.
We can discuss that some other time.
Like, yeah, I don't want to spend the space talking about him.
We don't need to spend any more time on Sam Harris, believe me.
Ina and I have discussed this ad nauseam in private DMs.
Not to spoil it for the audience here, but I find that this kind of dehumanization comes along with war and war propaganda, and a certain figure who speaks very softly, who is definitely not It will be my stand-in for other people, right?
I think that people differentiate between state violence and terrorist violence, right?
And so, Hamas using paragliders to come and murder civilians, well, that's terrorism.
But the Israeli military machine You know, carpet bombing Gaza.
Well, that's just a response.
That's just, of course, because we have cluster bombs, and we have an advanced military, and of course we're not looking people in the eye and shooting them, then of course those murders don't count in the same way.
And I think this is just a fundamentally misguided way of viewing it.
I don't know, this seems very basic to me, but it does seem like this is the way that these people think of it.
It's like, well, if Hamas had... if they had a proper military and were going to do things in response to... I don't know, it's such a stupid kind of analysis, in my opinion, that state violence just doesn't count, and this is how also More to my kind of expertise, how they justify police and harsh policing and all that sort of thing in the car serial state.
This is how this gets justified, because they're not barbarians.
There's paperwork.
People get paid.
There are logistics involved.
People have to buy water.
And suddenly, it's not barbaric behavior.
And of course, barbaric is a complicated word with complicated histories.
But It's only barbarism when it's done by the weaker force responding to their oppression, and not the oppressive force killing ten times as many, a hundred times as many, a thousand times as many, in retaliation, right?
And I don't think I have to say this to this crowd, this is not me justifying the events of October 7th or anything that has ever been done, it's me pointing out the way the language is used to compare these things, just to be clear.
Yeah, the trouble is that, you know, nothing the Palestinians, you know, and God, it's always invidious to do that, to just talk about the Palestinians or the Israelis, you know, whenever I use any sort of term like that, it has to come with all sorts of Built in caveats, I hope everybody knows that, but nothing the Palestinians could ever do could ever be official or respectable enough, could it?
Nothing they do is ever acceptable.
No matter how many, you know, they have elections and those elections, well, those elections are invalid because the people that we don't like won.
Well forget that even!
Even like BDS is unacceptable.
It's criminalized.
You can't even like boycott purchasing products.
Like even peaceful actions like that are, you know, called anti-semitic and criminalized and people lose their jobs because of it.
Whereas supporting This level of state violence will get you applause, will get you maybe a promotion.
It's like in fucking upside down world right now.
Like as you were saying, Daniel, I'm sure this kind of rhetoric and all of this stuff has existed in other wars, but it, it feels very, uh, firsthand and personal because it is streamed into our handheld devices directly, like every single day.
Before, you would have had to maybe watch CNN, which is very editorialized and curated.
And now, you're getting to see all sorts of things, first-hand accounts, that maybe CNN wouldn't want you to see.
I'll admit that I took some time off Twitter starting in mid-October.
No, I get that, but even you can't escape it if you're off of Twitter.
If you're on Blue Sky, you're gonna see it.
If you're on Instagram, you're gonna see it.
I literally went onto Reddit when I follow communities about cast iron skillets and shit.
That's my safe space where I just don't see a bunch of this stuff.
I've been a little bit disconnected from it.
During that period, I was also listening to full-on Nazis cheer on the murders of Hamas and belittle any sense of
Israeli or Jewish suffering so like I got it, but I got it from the other direction It was just it was hard for me to both do the work that I need to do and like be on social media during During the last few months, but I'm back so I am now looking at the Eli David Twitter account and oh god.
This is pretty fucking awful so anyway Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I completely hear you on it being hard to see these things.
Like, I feel like it's definitely been difficult for me to see and also then talk about and respond to horrendous talking points.
Like, it just, it feels nauseating to a whole new level.
Yeah.
So I hear you.
But, um, let's continue on with some of the images that we have here.
Jack, there was also one that is probably also a recycled meme.
There's, like, an image of two kind of soldier-looking people aiming guns at each other.
The one with the Palestinian flag has the stroller in front of him, and the one with the Israeli flag has the stroller behind him.
And underneath says a soldier of Palestine and a soldier of Israel.
So we've got like, you know, the heroic Israeli who would never ever hurt a child.
The stroller is behind him.
He's risking his own life to protect the child.
And we have the cowardly, barbaric Palestinian who's basically putting the kid ahead of him and using the kid as a human shield.
And this, in contrast to what we're seeing in the news, like, I don't know if you read, like, this recent piece by this doctor who just returned from Gaza.
He said, like, there were times where parents were carrying in, like, children ages five to eight, each with a single sniper shot to the head.
And there's like this, I think Israeli, I forget if it was a politician or maybe like a newscaster, but someone that is a public figure was saying that children over four are all culpable.
Under four, fine, they're innocent.
But over four, so like five-year-olds are no longer innocent.
Yeah, I saw that.
Yeah.
Apparently four is now the age of response, but at least for Palestinians.
Yeah.
I just want to interject.
I want to hear Jack's response.
I just want to say, this was also something that happened very much during the run-up to the war in Iraq, the propaganda around the Afghanis and the Iraqis were using human shields to protect themselves and the all-good American soldiers would not shoot onto children, of course, or bomb children or bomb weddings, etc, etc, etc.
Right, right, right.
Sorry, sorry.
I just think it's important to draw that connection, you know?
And to say, like, I grew up in this shit.
I grew up with it.
I have seen this happen before.
This is not unique to Israel, in particular.
This is what warmongering societies do.
This is what Western imperialism is.
And, um, you know, I feel like I'm old enough to, like, I feel like I need to just keep pointing that out.
So, apologies for interrupting, but, like, I think it's important to just emphasize that.
Like, you know, because we're gonna get accused of anti-Semitism, and it's like, no, no, no, no, this is imperialist warmongering.
This is not- Yeah, but I also want to stress that Even though these are repeated themes, I feel like this is unprecedented in some ways, and that's why it's being tried in court as a plausible genocide.
So, like, I don't want to back down from pointing out the uniqueness of that.
Like, not that genocides haven't happened before.
Of course they've happened.
I agree with you 100%.
I agree with you 100%.
We're not in disagreement there.
And if I'm coming across as too confrontational, that's not my goal.
I just... No, no, no.
I know you're not.
I just want to clarify for the listeners that, yes, these are repeated themes.
This is war.
This is war propaganda.
And this is imperialism, but there is also something very unique and horrendous about this specific situation.
100% agreed.
So, Jack, please, I'm sorry I interrupted you because you were probably going to say something very intelligent.
He takes the piss out of me by complimenting me.
I don't know.
He's very good at it.
I don't quite know how he pulls it off.
Yeah, I was going to say something similar actually, which is that this is the human shield's canard, which is very familiar to anybody that's paid any attention to what Israel says.
For any length of time, they always do this.
The State of Israel, the IDF, they always trot out the... Well, they use human shields.
It's official IDF policy.
Yes, that's what I was getting to.
I mean, the reality is backwards.
As always with this sort of propaganda, it's an exact inversion of reality.
Time and time again, when you have these outbreaks of outright military violence by Israel upon Gaza.
They trot out this same propaganda, and then you get the investigations after it from the human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, etc., all the others.
And they pretty much always say the same thing.
They pretty much always say, no evidence that Hamas are ever using human shields.
Whereas, of course, we know that that is, as you say, it's IDF policy.
IDF policy is to target Children.
As indeed they have in this.
I mean, that meme, it would be more accurate, you know, if firstly the flags were transposed, and then the soldier representing the IDF was directly aiming the machine gun into the crib.
You know, that would be a more accurate reflection of what it's actually like.
Right, like, I mean, we are getting reports of sniper shots to the heads of multiple babies.
Like, five to eight.
I mean, five!
That's, like, barely leaving toddlerhood.
Who, what kind of person can look through the viewfinder and aim at the head of a child?
Well, a person who has been thoroughly indoctrinated into the belief that the people they're killing are not actually people.
Right, just future terrorists.
They're a lesser form of life.
Yeah, nits make lice.
I mean, that's what Himmler said, that's what they always say.
And the same people who will decry, you know, rightly decry the horror of what was done at Uvalde, for instance, in the course of making sort of liberal centrist points about gun control and the terrible Republicans and so on, rightly making that sort of critique, They will be supporting this.
Not specifically, of course, because they won't be talking about it, but they will be implicitly supporting this.
And the difference is implicitly that these children, the particular children whose heads are being blown off in this instance, implicitly they don't count.
They're not human.
And this is why, I mean, Daniel is absolutely correct to point out that this sort of thing always goes on in war propaganda in war after war, going right back.
I mean, I've heard it said, you know, to slightly push back against something you said earlier, I know that it's never done towards Western countries.
I remember hearing stuff like this said about Irish people and Irish children.
Right, right, right.
Ireland is treated not the same.
But are the Irish really white, Jack?
Come on, seriously.
This was a question that had to be debated, you know, when Irish people started turning up in the racial melting pot in In America, when the racial order was being constructed, there was a lot of discussion about this.
Are they white?
You know, when you look at the cartoons of Irish people and they're depicted as Simian and stuff like that.
This is what imperial cultures do.
They construct the racial underlings, the racial subalterns, as inhuman.
And particularly when they're at war with them.
And Daniel's absolutely right about it happening in all these previous wars.
Because these previous wars that we're talking about, Iraq for instance, these are imperialist wars.
I just meant to say in the current, in the present day.
Sorry, sorry.
I think I spoke over you.
What we're dealing with here fundamentally is white supremacist imperialism.
Yeah, and I just meant to say that, you know, in the present day or, like, in recent memory.
I forget how old I am, that's the problem.
Yeah, um, but, right, the images like this, like the blatant, like, do you remember the images coming out from Abu Ghraib and the controversy that they caused?
Well, that's a point I wanted to raise, because one of the interesting things about the Israeli propaganda that's coming out...
I mean this has been going on for a while, that's another point I wanted to get to.
It's crowdsourced, it's coming from below, it's coming from like boots on the ground.
The IDF soldiers themselves who are committing the atrocities are creating propaganda themselves and a lot of the propaganda is not to hide or deny the atrocities but to essentially show them to you and say that they're funny.
This is one of the interesting things that we're in.
We're in a completely It's a two-faced barrage of propaganda, because it's on different levels.
What they're saying is, well, there's no atrocities going on.
We're a moral army, we're not committing war crimes, etc.
On the other level of the propaganda, what you could call the lower level, the boots-on-the-ground level, what they're doing is saying, well, we are, and it's funny, and they deserve it.
This is the content of loads of stuff that IDF soldiers themselves are putting on TikTok and Instagram.
Right.
And, like, when the images came out from Abu Ghraib, they caused, rightfully, a lot of backlash.
And they were horrendous, horrendous images.
But we are seeing, like, 50 images comparable to that.
A day.
It's hard to even keep them individually in your mind because there's so many.
So it's like flooding social media with so many of these images that they kind of like lose the individually horrific nature of each instance of it because it all blends into one.
Right?
Whether they're, like, posing at the beach, or, like, doing, like, thirst trap photos, and saying, like, oh, what a beautiful beach!
Like, this beach could have been so great if only Hamas didn't, like, you know, loot all the aid, and they put it to good... if they put the money to good use, then this could have been, like, a resort.
They don't deserve this beach, or...
I don't know if you're thinking... Yeah, that's it.
That's what I was going to say.
If you're thinking about the same specific instance that I'm thinking about, what that particular person says is, it's a beautiful beach, they don't deserve it.
Yeah.
Which is, yeah, that's kind of the essence of the... that's why I sort of semi-prepared something about her to talk about, if necessary, which is that remark is really the essence of the racist imperial attitude, isn't it?
Because it's all based upon the ideology that, you know, they might be here, it might be their land, it might be their home, but we deserve it more than they do because we will make better use of it.
I mean, that goes back to the original justifications for colonization That were come up with by people like John Locke, you know, the original imperialist ideologues.
It's still exactly the same idea, except now that it's being posted, as you say, by thirst traps, IDF thirst trap soldiers on Instagram.
Right, like these are just savages.
They don't know what to do with all this beauty and splendor and They're just not making good use of it, and they're building tunnels and doing terrorism instead.
And someone even said, like, imagine what a great place this would be to go surfing.
Like, what a waste, right?
And there's, like, this famous movie about how surfboards were essentially, like, through the restrictions of things Coming in and out of Gaza, essentially banned.
There's a lot of really ridiculous things that are banned through that method, right?
Like chocolate, cilantro, coriander, as you would call it.
You know, I read about wedding dresses, like just different little things, like even now they're making the case that The humanitarian aid truck shouldn't be delivering, I forget if it's like flour or sugar, but they're saying that can be used to make bombs.
So we cannot let them have that.
And like, yeah, you know why they aren't surfing more?
It's because surfboards are not allowed.
It's because surfboards are banned through these restrictions.
And there's like a movie about it, I forget what it's called.
surfing in Gaza or I mean I'll look it up and link it in the in the show notes when I post this but yeah I don't I don't know very bleak yeah I mean I remember when it was um uh lead pencils you couldn't import lead pencils because yeah lead could be used in making poems or something like that yeah yeah like the propaganda is so blatant and this is why I want to Just kind of stress the uniqueness.
Part of it is because we have social media.
Like, obviously, we did not have social media in the way that we do today during the Iraq War, during, obviously, you know, World War II.
If they had it, I'm sure they would be doing evil TikTok raves as well.
There's nothing inherently evil about any group of people, but it's just like, The circumstances that are making this very uniquely horrendous and Black Mirror-esque, you know?
Like, there's that video of, like, a zany dinosaur costume soldier, like, dancing on top of a tank after, like, throwing bombs out or missiles out, like, with, like, really bad techno.
And there's, like, raves.
They're organizing raves.
Where they're blocking the humanitarian aid trucks.
Yeah, and there's one I saw where an IDF soldier is celebrating his birthday in the field, and he's got a load of balloons, and behind him, trussed up on the floor, there's a Palestinian prisoner.
Yep.
And there's lots of those kinds.
Like there's like this TikTok trend where there's like a specific song, a children's song that they thought was funny.
And they've got like a bunch of like Palestinian detainees in the back gagged and blindfolded.
And they're playing this children's song really loud and laughing.
Like TikTok genocide is just such an extremely fucked up thing to watch.
Did you see the videos that were posted?
I think it was October last year.
Several people started posting on TikTok skits about Palestinians.
These were Israelis.
Firstly, the representation of race is interesting.
It's disgusting, but it's also interesting the way they've constructed it.
Yeah.
Arab face?
Yeah, Arab face, exactly.
They've dressed up as Palestinians, which seems to involve, I mean, they put on the keffiyeh and things like that, but they also, to denote the Palestinian people, they thicken their eyebrows, and there's this repeated emphasis on blackening teeth as well.
Yeah, you imagine.
Is it because their teeth have, like, been falling out because they don't have medical care, hygiene, or is it that they're blown off?
I don't know, but, like, extremely fucked up depiction.
Yeah.
But yeah, the series of allegedly humorous videos where you have these people, as I say, playing Palestinians, and there's one where a woman has, like, a grapefruit in a blanket or something, And it has, like, drawn onto it, like, crossed eyes and a downward-turned mouth, obviously indicating, you know, death, a dead face.
So the grapefruit is, like, her dead baby, and she's a Palestinian, and she's sort of performing grief for the camera, and then somebody yells, cut, and she just casually throws the grapefruit away.
Wow.
The implication being, these people don't even care about their own children.
Which is another thing that we've heard from IDW intellectuals, whom we shall not name because they're nauseating.
It's for another episode.
That's what this means.
It's like, we'll do it later.
It's fine.
Yeah, exactly.
We'll do it later.
I mean, I've done it enough, but we'll also do it later.
Yeah, like the Pollywood, you'd think that these are like unsophisticated, everyday people, maybe dumb teenagers or something.
But we're hearing that from so-called intellectuals.
This is coming from somewhere.
Yeah.
Even with just the teenagers or the young people doing these quote-unquote humorous videos, that's coming from somewhere.
These cultural assumptions are coming from somewhere and they're being performed for the enjoyment of other people in the same culture.
And yeah, it is like that crowd-sourced genocide propaganda from below thing again.
Yeah.
And it shows a certain kind of mindset that you are willing to put that out in public without even thinking for a second that it makes you look bad.
Like it shows something like there's been never any scrutiny on this kind of behavior.
It's definitely indicative of some kind of like, uh, impunity that this country has enjoyed.
Because why would you put that stuff out yourself?
Well, they use the atrocity propaganda in order to justify that, right?
It's like they focus on the crimes or alleged crimes of Hamas.
And I'm not, again, I'm not in any way suggesting that there were not No, there are crimes.
There's definitely crimes.
But there were crimes and then there are crimes that probably did not exist.
And I'm not gonna... Sure, like... But, like, but they, but they use like the most blurred examples.
They use violence against all of Palestine because of a handful of individuals who did terrible things, right?
It's just textbook, right?
Everything I've seen is horrifying, of course, but it is just like, I mean, This is exactly, as you guys were saying, this is exactly how Nazi Germany justified their oppression of Jews in the 1930s.
It's like, well, a handful of people did some terrible thing and therefore all Jews have to be confined to a certain area.
And then eventually that turns into the final solution.
And I think what we're seeing in Gaza right now is You know, working towards their first and the final solution, frankly, and that's horrifying.
It's just horrifying for me to think about or to say, but like that's kind of clearly what's going on is they're just saying like, well, we're just gonna.
Use this as a way of eliminating these people one way or the other whether forcing them into Egypt or you know, I don't know like it's it's just it's disgusting and it's horrible to see it in real life and My stomach turns even talking about it.
So I apologize and it's horrible to see how normalized it is to justify this in polite society like I Cannot believe that we can hear People saying, oh, well, you know, it's not a genocide.
It's just an ethnic cleansing.
That's cool.
Certain people who shall not be named in this episode.
But yeah.
Like how how do you fucking say that with such calmness and then be accepted as Someone that is a reasonable intellectual.
Someone that is framed as a reasonable liberal.
Even someone as unhinged as Douglas fucking Murray, who is masked off all the time.
He's been talking about how there are no innocents, right?
We didn't worry about that when we were bombing Dresden.
Inside the sphere of pro-Israeli apartheid ideology, this is kind of This is just kind of regular stuff.
It's kind of old news.
The Israeli historian, the right-wing Israeli historian, Benny Morris, he's written about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and he says, yes, it was an ethnic cleansing, but it was good.
Alan Dershowitz is an example of somebody who said essentially the same thing.
They've kind of been saying this since forever.
Yeah, and they've been getting away with saying it.
There's been no criticism.
And if you criticize, you are called anti-Semitic.
And to me, that is so bizarre, especially coming from the new atheist scene, because it was made such a big deal of, like the word Islamophobia in itself.
And I can agree and understand that Islamic conservatives do Use that term, misuse that term, or hide behind that term when there is some very legitimate criticism being made.
They're like, no, no, no, it's Islamophobia, don't look at, don't look over here.
But like, to see the same people that made a big deal out of the term Islamophobia just buy into the idea that criticizing the state of Israel and its violent actions is anti-Semitism.
Just beyond absurd to me.
It is absurd, objectively, yeah.
But it's that War on Terror apologia mindset is just baked into the IDW and its roots in the New Atheist thing, because that's kind of what the New Atheist thing always was.
It was kind of always an ideological apologia for the War on Terror.
Some of them were clearer about that than others.
Yeah, it comes very naturally to them.
It comes very naturally to them.
This is a way of looking at things that is very based on being white, or at least part of the white power structure within the imperial centre.
And when that's you, this sort of double think comes very naturally to you, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
Shameless hypocrisy and not even trying to hide it.
Let's see, what else?
What else do we have here in this absurd list of things?
Speaking of new atheists, we had Bill Maher tweeting out this decade-old recycled bit about this burqa fashion show, this Islamic fashion show that he thought was so funny and it's aged just so, so badly that I can't believe he willingly tweeted it out because it's so unfunny.
I think one of his lines was, like, dress it up for morning prayers or dress it down for midnight stonings!
Like, ha ha ha, Bill, yeah, yeah, those savage muslimics, they're doing the stonings all day long.
And imagine tweeting this decade-old bit out.
In the middle of a, even if you don't acknowledge it's a genocide, in the middle of a mass slaughter of mostly civilians that are Muslim and being dehumanized, this is what you think is appropriate?
Just like to pile on?
Well, he's so slimy though, isn't he?
He wants to say it without saying it.
Always with him, he wants to say it without saying it.
So he finds a way of He finds a way of saying it without saying it, by just using his eternal cover, which is comedy and, oh, I'm sorry if I offended you with my comedy, all that sort of thing.
But it's so fucking stale, as you say, this decade-old bit from his high point in the New Atheist thing.
Yeah, stale is like the perfect, perfect word.
I don't even understand anybody like cares about Bill Maher anymore.
He's just so behind the times.
Like even when he does his bigotry, I'm just like, dude, you're still like 10 years behind.
I don't know.
Like, you know, every time I listen to him, it's like, I don't know, like, it just tells me that, you know, those of us like talking and listening to this Twitter space are like, Much further ahead, and sometimes you just have to turn your brain down and go, like, what was accurate ten years ago?
And anytime I listen to Bill Maher, I just have to think, like, what was life like in, like, 2014 or, like, 2008?
And I think that's how I even interpret Bill Maher at this point.
Like he hasn't even caught up to current present-day bigotry trends.
Yeah, he sucks, but you know what?
You know who does really care about him?
It's PragerU.
So at least he's got them.
But let's see, what else do we have here?
Oh yeah, we have some wonderful headlines from the wonderful country of America.
Let's see, we had Thomas Friedman do a... That's exactly where I was going to go.
Do you want to talk about it?
You can read the headline and some of the wonderful quotes.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah, no, I was going to segue in with like a bit about, you know, going from Bill Maher to somebody on a totally different intellectual level.
We have good old Tom Freeman earlier this month, understanding the Middle East through the animal kingdom.
The breathtaking inanity, honestly.
The opening sentence is, is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today?
A better description of what?
That's your first paragraph!
This is your job!
Jesus Christ.
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today?
I suppose he's talking about the animal kingdom.
That's a description now.
They are the caterpillars, he says.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp.
The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and eat it from the inside out.
We have no counter-strategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
Indescribably confused in a nonsense that just basically leads to, yeah, we're probably just going to have to kill them all.
Yep.
I mean, that is super fucked.
Super fucked to put in a mainstream publication.
Yeah.
And how the fuck did that get published?
Don't ask me.
I mean, how has Tom Friedman ever been published?
I mean, we were talking about comparisons to insects and animals and vermin and wasps and things like just earlier.
Like, you think that an educated journalist would know better, maybe?
He doesn't have to do that, does he?
Because it's common currency in the media culture that he's in.
Speaking about People in that part of the world, in terms of dehumanizing animal metaphors as if they're not human, it's common currency.
It's normal.
Yep, and praised, even.
I mean, really, all you have to know about Thomas Friedman, you can learn from listening to the If Books Could Kill episode about The World is Flat.
Which I knew was a terrible book when it was published, because I was 20-something years old and had a brain.
I never read it, but they absolutely demolished it.
And also, Thomas Friedman is a New York Times columnist, and once you're a New York Times opinion writer, you basically get paid to write 800 words once a week about anything that justifies the status quo.
Regardless of how warlike it is.
And that's, you know, that's Thomas Friedman in a nutshell.
So, none of this surprised me.
None of the terrible things that he does ever surprises me.
Ultimately, you're just going to justify the American war machine, or the war machine in general.
It's just what he does.
Right.
And then we had a Wall Street Journal piece by one Steven Stelinski?
Titled, Welcome to Dearborn, America's Jihad Capital.
I mean, I just, I don't, I don't have the words.
I don't know what year we're in, sometimes, because, like, how is this, how is this being published?
Would, would they tolerate that about any other group?
I don't know.
Maybe trans people, but... Yeah, trans people for sure, but, like, I live in Michigan.
Dearborn is within easy driving distance of me.
I can assure you it is not like a haven for terrorists.
We can talk about the political realities of having a large number of very conservative Muslim people in terms of their assumptions of gay rights.
Fairly conversation to have because there have been like issues around that in that area of the state But also like they're not creating bombs in there like the basis of their mosques or whatever Which is what all these people imply, right?
Well, the jihad capital would imply.
Yeah, there's like a fuckload of jihad happening everywhere There's another one Wall Street Journal from the editorial board Chicago votes for Hamas Mayor Brandon Johnson supports a ceasefire, dot, dot, dot.
Dramatic ellipsis there.
Dot, dot, dot.
In Gaza, not Chicago.
Which, my... Unreal.
The racism packed into that one sentence.
The sheer industrial levels of racism on multiple fronts just crammed into that one sentence.
Yeah, man.
Credit where it's due.
They sure packed a lot of it in there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the smearing of anyone pro-Palestinian right now is pro-Hamas.
Like, when you see that there's like, I don't know, 300,000 people out in London?
Well, guess what?
That's an entirely pro-Hamas march.
Every single person came out to support Hamas and their actions.
I mean, it's insane!
How are they making these claims?
We have people on British television routinely talking about the outrageous, terrifying anti-Semitism of people having Palestinian flags.
You know, just publicly flying a Palestinian flag is apparently equivalent to genocidal anti-Semitism.
I think I shared with you the thing where the former politics editor of the Sun newspaper was on television and he's talking about He was talking about the fact that the Labour Party in Britain dropped a candidate.
I think it was the Rochdale by-election candidate.
They dropped the guy because somebody released a recording of him making statements that actually are legitimately anti-Semitic.
So, okay, fair enough, drop the guy, because that's bad.
What he said was bad.
I'm fine with them dropping him for that.
But then you have Kavanaugh, that's the guy's name, coming on the television and he says, Well, I've got it here actually.
Most of the measures taken by Keir Starmer to keep the lid on the anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, because we're still dealing with the given that the Labour Party is just riddled with anti-Semitism, you know, to an unusual degree in British politics, which it's not.
That's a holdover from the whole anti-Corbyn smear thing.
Measures taken, Keir Starmer keep the lid, mostly cosmetic Simply because a 30% vote in constituencies like Rochdale are anti-semitic.
There's a lot of Muslims in places like that, that's what he means.
He added, by the very definition of Islam, by the very definition of being a Muslim voter, you're going to be anti-Jewish.
That was said on the television.
And the hosts didn't push back at all, they just nodded.
It's so dangerous to and just wild to have that assumption that just by being Muslim that makes you anti-Semitic as if Muslims are not diverse people that live in the modern world that don't like function like other theists in the world.
It's just, it's so gross.
It's so gross.
It's a way to justify racism against Muslims.
You put your ritual reasons into code and say, well, it's because they're all anti-Semitic, unlike us enlightened Westerners.
Well, I don't want to bring it back to Douglas Murray, but I am reminded of him calling Humza Yousaf... Yes!
Bring it to Douglas Murray!
Please, yes, let's do this!
When he called Humza Yousaf the first minister of Gaza, right?
Yes!
And said he's infiltrated...
Yeah, infiltrated our system.
Well, I know you and I were talking about the Rwandan genocide and the propaganda there, right?
The same tactic of talking about infiltration and anybody who has any sympathy towards the massacred population is gonna be treated as if not only are their affiliations in question, but also like their racial status is in question, like everything.
It doesn't matter who you are, if you have the wrong, the, you know, too much sympathy towards the people who are being Yeah, and also the similar tactic of inverting the narrative, right?
Like, just like, projecting everything that you're doing, you're causing the terror, you're slaughtering innocent people, but you're gonna claim that they're the ones doing it.
Right, their playbook was these mirror accusations.
And like some people in Rwanda would actually listen to the radio broadcast to hear what they were being accused of to understand what was about to be done to them.
Oh my god, it's so horrifying.
I know.
And then the other thing was about the women and children, right?
The infiltration.
They talked about women and children as snakes that would come in to attack the minds of the good, upstanding people of Rwanda.
They talked about degeneration as well.
It's the same stuff.
Yeah, this stuff always gets recycled and used again and again and again.
The people in power just let it happen again and again and again and we just never learn.
Fucking humans.
Aside from those headlines, I also wanted to talk about some of the very stark contrasts that we're seeing.
Like, we're seeing a headline about Palestinians saying that they're dying slowly and having to eat grass and drink, like, dirty, polluted water just to try and survive.
Then, in contrast, we see this Haaretz piece about like how the Israeli fine dining scene is suffering after the attacks of October 7th because the Michelin star people aren't coming around or something like that.
Then we see like a Haaretz piece about how difficult it must be for the soldiers who have to kind of make do with the ingredient or like they're they're being creative and using ingredients that they find
in the houses that they've like forced people out of and bombed and they're like cheering themselves up by doing these little like cooking things and then you know plating things nicely to uplift their moods and then we have the Super Bowl slash bombing in Rafa juxtaposition.
And it's just so incredible.
So many incredibly, unbelievably fucked up contrasts that we're seeing.
I've really been sicker than immediately after that when people were just ecstatic about that stupid tweet from Biden where he does the dark Brandon thing about, you know, just like we planned.
Right.
It's like, oh wow, oh wow, he's totally owned the MAGA conspiracy theorists who were talking, you know, all that incredibly significant stuff about their conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl and everything.
Oh wow, President Biden.
This is at the exact moment, the Rafa bombing, that he's more than complicit in it.
People say the Biden administration's complicit in genocide.
They're not complicit.
They're involved.
They're doing it.
Yeah, yeah.
Directly, yeah.
Just to put a point in this, the Biden administration is also tweeting about how great they are in terms of they're going to actually control the border, the southern U.S.
border, as opposed to the Trump administration, which only pretended to build the wall, etc.
In which case, even the Democrats are openly embracing a fascist impulse at this point.
And whenever you see that a more centrist party is trying to go for the same talking points as right-wing or far-right parties to win voters, it never works out for them because people who are interested in those things will gravitate towards the original, more fashy version.
Do you want the real fascists or the fake fascists?
She always wants real fascists!
You don't want the diet fascism!
Well I watched this happen in real time in Britain with the UK Independence Party and Nigel Farage relentlessly promoted by the BBC and the British media generally, but most shamefully by the BBC.
And this right-wing xenophobic sort of hyper-Toryism, and both the mainstream parties started chasing it.
Labour and Conservative both started trying to take over and make their own UKIP talking points, and the effect was not to neutralise UKIP.
The effect was to empower UKIP, and we all know where that went, and to ratchet the attitudes of the entire culture rightward.
That's what happens when you do that.
When you chase right-wing policies, you don't neutralize them by absorbing them.
They absorb you.
Yeah.
Incredibly fucked up times.
Like, I don't know if I felt like this hopeless in 2016.
I don't think I did, but like, yeah, it's only gotten worse.
It's only gotten worse.
And, uh, you know, our centrist, uh, people are out of here, it looks like.
And the extremely fashy ones are going to be in their places if they don't change what they're doing.
So, and it doesn't look like they will.
And, uh, yeah, very depressing, depressing times.
And, uh, I mean, can you imagine we had a fucking MAGA beheading?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was very new.
Yeah, how is that?
I had to, like, check again and again and again, like, was it real?
Like, did it happen?
Yes, it did, but it didn't really capture people's attention for too long.
There's a great episode of It Could Happen Here with Garrison Davis, or Garrett Davis, and Robert Evans covering that, by the way, if people are interested in the nitty-gritty details.
Highly recommended.
All right.
I will check it out.
But from my surface level glancing at the stories, it seems like the guy was talking about woke mobs, gender ideology, illegal immigrants, and beheaded his dad, who was a federal worker, and then held up his dad's head in a plastic bag on a livestream.
That's right.
Being a civil servant, basically.
That meant he was part of the government.
Right.
And I think people briefly circulated some fake screenshots about him being anti-Trump, but then it turned out that he actually was pro-Trump.
Like the mass shooter recently that the entire right have just decided to believe was trans, based on one lie that somebody told in the initial aftermath that has since been completely debunked, but it's just a fact now as far as I'm concerned.
It's yet another trans shooter, you know, in the constant avalanche that we have of those.
Right, right, right.
In the constant avalanche of lies that they keep making up.
And then there was, like, a non-binary person who was, like, beaten to death in school.
And, I mean, this rhetoric has serious consequences.
Oh yeah.
I think that was in the Oklahoma School District as well, wasn't it?
Or at least it was in a district that Chaya Raychick had targeted.
Yes, I believe so.
Directly, you know, traceable.
To her stochastic terrorism.
That's right, that was in Oklahoma.
Their district had been spoken about a few months prior by Raychick, and they had also recently adopted a bathroom restriction in the school district.
So incredibly fucked up, the times that we're living in.
I know I keep saying it, I keep saying it, but I don't know what else to say, like, it's terrifying.
A very similar case in this country of a A young trans person who was murdered.
The case recently ended with conviction of the murderers.
And the entire stinking, despicable, bigoted British news media, which It bears so much responsibility for this, for just peddling, constantly peddling just filth about trans people, which is inevitably going to lead to this sort of thing.
They all, you know, after the verdict, they all immediately went into own-arse covering mode with the ones that covered it at all were explaining to you about how it was caused by basically anything other than the relentless Waves after wave after wave of anti-trans propaganda that they pump out.
Right, and the Oklahoma one, their name was Next Benedict, and we've had to look at all these headlines.
It's like, you know, school district reeling after unexpected death of student.
It's like, well, let's talk about what happened.
What happened is they got attacked by their classmates.
And they also are, you know, giving their dead name in these articles and it's next.
It's not anything else.
Their name is next.
And what about the person in the UK?
Is it Brianna something?
That's right.
Yeah.
Brianna Gay, I believe.
Yeah.
G-H-E-Y.
Gay?
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
But it's Brianna.
Yeah.
Very sad.
And then we have our beloved Prime Minister making anti-trans jokes on the floor of the House of Commons while Brianna's parents are present in the house.
I saw that!
Despicable!
Yeah.
And her killer got a big old picture on the newspaper and was bragging about that.
Like, people need to realise that this rhetoric has real world effects.
Whether it's in headlines, whether it's in, you know, bigoted caricatures, or just dehumanizing on the news, talking about an entire group, being anti-semitic inherently, or being predatory, which is what they do with trans people, right?
Like, it's the same kind of bigotry that they have against Muslims.
Absolutely, yeah, a different form of the same thing.
Yeah.
That's right.
And both of them involve a lot of, like, sex-based and assault-based fear.
Yes.
You know, we're looking at all these people talking about, like, our lovely white girls are in danger from both Muslims and trans people.
Right.
Which is exactly what the Nazis did, by the way.
Exactly.
Well, you know, Nazi propaganda, half of it is insulting stereotypes of Jewish people, and the other half is stereotypes of the perfect, blonde, young Aryan maiden, and how the two should never meet.
That's right.
It was the same deal, you know, this fearmongering about rape of our young women.
Yeah, and I mean, We had that in America, where people used to fearmonger about black people in the same way and about Chinese people around the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
I think there was a time that Chinese restaurants, like, it was actually forbidden for white women or something to go into Chinese restaurants.
They had to have, like, a chaperone because they were afraid that, like, Chinese men would seduce their women in these, like, crazed opium dens.
Well, I think we're actually speaking on the anniversary of the infamous order to force Japanese Americans into camps.
I believe it's the anniversary today.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Racialized sexual and reproductive control.
It's all in the same kind of bucket.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, the point of talking about it is so that people recognize it when they see it.
Out in the wild which you're going to see a lot of in different situations and like whether you're in the new atheist scene and you're seeing Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about how black and brown men are migrating to Europe to rape white women or whether you're consuming like Israeli media and you're hearing them talk about Palestinians in that way or
Whether you're consuming British media and you're hearing about them fearmonger about trans people in that way.
And not that they don't do it in North America as well, but I mean, you know, like you, you have to recognize that it's the same, same hatred.
And unless we like kind of deal with that problem, not as an individual instance, but as the, the nature of the thing itself.
You'll keep getting fooled into...
being carried along with different forms of bigotry, you know?
Like, some people can be very against anti-Semitism, but be very okay with anti-Muslim bigotry, or very against anti-Muslim bigotry, but very okay with homophobia.
Unless you recognize that it's all the same thing, and it can turn around and come for you and your loved ones, like, you can always be participating in something horrific.
So, Yeah, that's a good place to end, I think, unless anyone has any closing remarks.
I just want to thank you for doing this space.
It's important to keep talking about the tricks that are being played on us.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, and thank you guys for coming.
It's always so good to talk to you, even when the subjects are difficult, you make it easier.
So I'm glad we can Get through this together, and yeah, I think it's very important to keep talking about it, and keep calling it out, and don't be fooled by centrist ass covering.
Because that tends to happen.
Like, as it gets worse and worse and more blatant, more people will start to get into this ass covering mode that Jack was talking about.
And they'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's bad, it's bad, but they'll make these horrendous comments along the way that will tell you that actually they're still holding a lot of bigotry.
So learn to recognize that, because that is something that fools a lot of people.
Like, oh, look!
They're saying that it's bad, but, but, you know, you've got to look at the buts.
And, oh God, that doesn't sound very nice, but you've got to examine how people are.
Don't look at buts.
I did not tell you to do that.
I will tell you to do that.
Please, please.
If you take only one thing away from this.
With respect, look at butts.
It's great.
Just do it privately in your own head.
It's fine.
Just enjoy the butts that are in your life, and if you want to explore those, do it with consent.
That's what all that is.
More seriously I would say I said in like 2020 that all this shit is gonna get really complicated and we're just gonna have to learn to explore that and then I got sick and
was out of this thing and for like a year and a half basically but we're back and if anything I think we're back stronger than ever and I'm hoping to keep exploring these details but Ultimately, the only thing I have to say is, uh, bash the fash.
Just... just... Don't you mean politely debate them and gently?
No, no, I do not.
I do not mean that.
That's right, invite them to your podcast and let them speak uninterrupted.
Yeah, no, no, that is not what I mean.
Why do you need free speech, Daniel?
I actually love free speech.
I am a very big fan of the government not being in favor of suppressing free speech because I would be suppressed in that regime.
But also, confront your local fascists, make them own the thing that they own, and your centrist normie bullshit from The person that we have not named in particular.
No, that person should be challenged at every opportunity.
Whatever he or they or she or whatever, but his name is Shmam Shmaris.
That person should be challenged constantly.
Or at the very least, framed responsibly.
Like, I just want to shout out Matt Lex.
Show Left Reckoning they just did they just did a little bit covering Sam Harris and the even down to the thumbnail.
It's like a picture of Sam from the IDW stupid photo shoot in the bushes with the giant word fanatic right all over him.
Because that is the responsible way to frame someone who denies and apologizes for and pushes propaganda for like severe, severe atrocities.
It's not right to frame him like a reasonable intellectual.
You wouldn't do it for a Holocaust denier and you shouldn't do it for uh genocide denier of palestinians and uh you certainly shouldn't do it for someone who's as openly fine with ethnic cleansing as he is and yeah i think responsible framing is everything like when talking about these kinds of people like sam has been pushing great replacement rhetoric for
What, maybe a decade or more now?
And he has never been treated as like the insanely Alex Jones-ian freak that he is, that uses Eurabia far-right conspiracy theory books as sources, as legitimate sources of information.
And without that framing, people keep walking away with the impression that he's a reasonable intellectual, that you can have just some like
Little disagreements with and that's not that's not correct I think the key thing is always to to try to see past the aesthetics because so much of politics is Aesthetics and the further right you go the more of it just consists entirely of aesthetics and I think that they do is to always try to see past the the picture that somebody's trying to paint for you, you know, whether it's
Whether it's the Biden administration performing humanitarian concern about the Gazan people in the midst of a genocide that they are actively funding, or whether it's the IDF, or whether it's Sam Harris, or whoever, don't, you know, just, I mean, I presume to give anybody advice, but this is the way I try to do it, always try to look beyond the aesthetics that you've been presented with.
Don't just ever take aesthetics for granted.
I mean, look at the material conditions and analyze it on that context.
That's something that Jack taught to me ten years ago.
Jack has been an enormous influence on my personal politics in terms of, I was probably a democratic socialist or something.
You know, when we met, I was a very good liberal.
I was very in favor of the Democratic Party and whatever the Democratic Party said.
And he taught me better, without even meaning to.
He just produced content and gave me the tools that I needed to do the analysis.
And I Don't Speak Currently would not exist in its current form without Jack giving me those tools.
Yeah, ultimately what you have to do is look at the material conditions, always, and what is actually being provided to people by the rhetoric.
And once you understand that, I think you're 90% of the way of having good politics.
And remember that we're always talking about people, you know, that so much of it is an attempt to just elide that, or hide it, or escape it, or whatever.
No.
Everybody involved is a person.
You know, you can depict them as a rat, if you like.
They're still a person.
Right.
Yeah, all right.
Well, thank you everyone, and... Shout out to Celine, who I see is listening.
Go and read Celine's book, Who's Afraid of Degrowth.
It's really good.
There are two people I know personally who are listening right now, and shout out to them.
Awesome, and shout out to I Don't Speak German, which is back.
We're back, and better than ever is what I consider.
Everybody give their episode a listen, and shout out to Polite Conversations, also a show that you might know.
