News Brief: The Springfield Pogroms, Trump Assassination Attempt 2
We talk about the second apparent attempt on trump's life, and why the Right's discourse about it is hypocritical bullshit. Then our main topic: the racist pogroms incited in Springfield, OH, by Trump and Vance's racist blood libels (via Blood Tribe and Chris Rufo), featuring the KKK and the Proud Boys. Features a surprise clip from Mike Enoch over at TDS. Then a couple of other stories. Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, accidentally forgets to not say the hard-R on Megyn Kelly's show; Bret Weinstein clever theory about Kamala's earrings and what They want him to think about them, Tim Pool and Ukraine (again). IDSGs on the NJP, Mike Enoch, etc: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=NJP https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/news-brief-blood-tribe-march-in-nashville https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/anatomy-of-a-pogrom/ https://newrepublic.com/article/185909/trump-hatred-history-haitian-americans https://dayton247now.com/news/local/kkk-flyers-distributed-in-springfield-ohio-police-and-naacp-working-on-path-forward-clark-county-racism-hate-group? https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/16/springfield-bomb-threats-ohio-republican.html? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/17/political-violence-trump-assassination-attempt? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opinion/trump-vance-springfield-charlottesville-haitians.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk4.D1wu.auHbudDO7wLi&smid=url-share https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/09/trumps-campaign-immigrants-springfield-ohio-haiti/679913/ https://www.forever-wars.com/the-dogs-of-the-oligarchs-snarl-at-springfields-haitians/ https://extremismterms.adl.org/glossary/blood-tribe Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Here, we talk about the Far Right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
Hold on to your pets, everybody.
The Haitians are coming.
It's a Newsbrief episode about all the, I mean, the sort of decades worth of stuff that has happened in the five minutes since we last talked.
I think we are going to have a bit of a joke about this, because obviously on one level, the stuff that they're coming out with about the Haitian migrants is ridiculous, and it deserves to be ridiculed and laughed at.
But on another level, it is... I mean, I can't speak for Daniel.
Hello, Daniel, by the way.
Hello, Jack.
I'm here, as always.
I figure the audience knows I'm here regardless, so it's fine.
On another level, it's fundamentally really not funny at all.
It is absolutely horrifying, what's going on.
And what's going on, of course, is the ongoing pogrom, I would say, or blood libel, about Haitian immigrants, Haitian people, I should say, in Springfield, Ohio, and the various terrible things that they're alleged, completely baselessly, to be getting up to.
By America's domestic fascist movement, which is now in with a very good shot of winning the election.
It's like 48 days or something at this point as a day of recording.
So we're, we're getting there.
Yeah.
But before we talk about that, we are going to do, we're going to talk a little bit about one of the other major, well, major events.
It's once again, it's, it's simultaneously a huge event and a complete damn squib, nothing burger.
I think.
The second attempt on Donald Trump's life.
The second assassination attempt in which he has not been hit by a bullet.
I'm joking.
Daniel.
It's the meme of, like, you know, if I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd only have two nickels, but still, it's weird that it happened twice.
You know, this is this.
Donald Trump is the only president for which you can say both impeached twice and attempted assassinated twice.
So these were close.
Like this was this was a guy with a rifle like a few hundred yards away in both cases.
So this is not like, you know, they caught him like three weeks ahead of the attempt or something like that.
This was people were seriously out to get this guy.
You know, I think I texted you.
I sent you I sent you a message on a messaging app and said, Well, I guess we need to do a news brief about the Trump thing.
And you were like, what?
Because I think you just hadn't heard it yet.
I had literally just woken up.
You wake up, you immediately reach for your phone.
Right, right.
Man in the second decade of the 21st century.
Homo smartphonus.
That's just what you do.
You wake up, you reach for your phone.
And I was literally staring at my phone through eyes still half-glued down with sleep dust.
only just dragging myself back into consciousness and awareness.
And I look at it, and there's Daniel on WhatsApp saying, I guess we'd better talk about this assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
I'm lying there thinking, have I gone back in time?
Did I hallucinate the entire last few weeks?
So, again, peek behind the curtain, we're in a group chat with a number of people who live in the UK, where Jack does, and I do not live in the UK, and so I pretty regularly wake up at five in the morning to these guys sending a hundred messages back and forth about whatever's on their minds, and by the time I'm even awake enough to respond, I'm like, well, I completely missed this conversation, so I completely empathise with this.
And you know, people do message me about stuff and it's like, Oh, you didn't see that last time.
I was like, no, I went to bed early.
And it's like, yeah, there's about a whole like 12 hours of stuff that's happened.
And now you need to be the one to respond.
I'm like, all right, well, I guess it's time for an episode, but yeah.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
I mean, just kind of pro forma, really.
There's not really much to say, except this guy, see, I mean, you know, he was a Trump supporter in 2016.
He kind of was disappointed with Trump and then, you know, fell out of favor as many people in this, in this kind of like heterodox right wing sphere did, you know.
Trump certainly still has his, like, his diehard supporters, but, you know, a lot of people who supported him in 2016 or even 2020 are now, like, kinda... I mean, they consider him better than the alternative, but they don't, like, really think of him as a particular, like, great choice anymore.
And some of them are actively campaigning against him.
And, uh, in terms of the first Trump shooter...
That guy, so none of his diaries or profiles or anything have surfaced from him.
I did see some reporting that they did find some anti-Semitic rantings.
And when you look at the time frame of when this stuff was happening and when...
This guy could very easily have been a siege pillar, you know, that that could very easily be like that.
He could, he could have been in that sort of Adam Waffen-esque, base-esque kind of like, you know, social media sphere of that era.
And obviously I have no like concrete evidence of that.
And I'm just, I'm just suggesting is like, that makes sense to me because those guys were absolutely that angry at Trump by that point, you know, and.
We're talking about the first one.
We're talking about the first one.
He was excruciatingly young, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was, he was, he was, I mean, think maybe 20.
Yeah.
So he would have been, you know, like a teenager, you know, when 19.
So, you know, but that's exactly the age.
I mean, it just, it just like, it fits for me.
And so I'm not claiming to like know anything cause I haven't seen it, you know, but that makes a lot of sense.
This new guy, the new shooter.
Seems to be even more politically incoherent.
His Twitter did stay up for a little while.
It has since been removed.
So I did get to read some of his tweets and he's mostly like yelling into the void at like trying to get trying to get people to pay attention to him and trying to get like celebrities in on his cause and shit.
Apparently he was briefly a Bernie supporter in 2020, but I think that was more of a, you know, just anti-establishment thing is like, you know, not not Biden, not Hillary, not Trump, not, you know, and just sort of just sort of more a fuck you to the system kind of kind of thing.
He's also significantly older.
He was in his early 50s.
I love the idea that supporting Senator Bernie Sanders is some kind of fuck you to the system.
Obviously, if you support Bernie, you're some sort of raving radical socialist, like Joe Rogan, for instance, and Russell Brand, who both supported Bernie at one time or another.
I think Rogan just kind of briefly like he met with Bernie and he said like he like Bernie went on the show and he said like that guy is honest that guy is you know you know he liked him personally just because it's like this isn't a guy who's gonna like fuck with you in terms of like lying to you and so I think that's as much as Rogan had to say about Bernie and I think they like some somebody disingenuously or kind of cut a clip together and then the Twitter went nuts because like oh Rogan is such a terrible person it's like he's got a big audience I mean you know come on it's a thing Rogan's an incoherent idiot.
He is one of these guys.
He is the same sort of guy as this guy that was recently arrested lurking around outside the perimeter of the golf club, apparently stalking Trump with a gun.
Except that Joe Rogan doesn't, as far as we know, Commit or attempt to commit acts of violence, but in terms of his understanding of the world and his understanding of ideology and politics, he's exactly the same kind of guy.
He's all over the place.
Yeah, he just has a big microphone, and so he has other ways of getting his point across.
But no, as I understand the latest shooter, he was actually Secret Service, and trust the cops as far as you can throw them, right?
Secret service said like, no, we saw a rifle, like we saw a rifle and we fired upon it.
And then the guy, like they missed.
And so the guy fled and then they caught him, you know, a mile down the road or whatever.
And they found his, like his stash where he had like a couple of, a couple of, I think it was a couple of AR-15s and some other paraphernalia.
It was AR-15 style rifles or something, wasn't it?
AR-15 is not like a type of rifle.
It's a, it's a platform on which other rifles.
And so, you know, it's sort of.
I saw one report that he had a load of ceramic tiles or something in one of his bags.
Apparently, so those that's plate, it's body armor.
So he was carrying, honestly you can buy actual body armor or you can be cheap and get ceramic plates and just, from my understanding he was trying to print out his body armor.
Right, I didn't know what that was about, I thought maybe while I'm here I'll redo the grouting in the bathroom or something, I don't know.
I saw some people joking he was going to throw the plate at Trump or something, you know?
Discus style, you know?
Okay, well that answers that mystifying conundrum, thank you.
Yes.
I follow the right people on Twitter sometimes, that's all it takes.
But yeah, no, I feel like with these kind of things we'll just kind of keep, as it comes up and as more stuff comes out, we can keep commenting on it.
We don't have any more information at this point, so.
I think it's worth sort of stating the bold fact here, which is that this guy, he was arrested apparently lurking in the bushes, having lain in wait for a few... This is the cops again, this is the cops.
Having lain in wait for several hours, but he was arrested sort of lurking in the bushes with a gun, at least one gun, and apparently he was never...
Donald Trump was never sort of in his line of sight.
Donald Trump was never in danger of actually being shot, apparently.
Donald Trump was a couple of, was like a hole back.
So, like, he was on, like, the third hole, and the guy's stalking the fifth hole, and then the Secret Service is always, like, kind of looking a hole ahead to, you know, to kind of clear the area, and they caught him during that process.
That's sort of, like, my mental picture of kind of what I read from the reporting, yeah, is that So Donald Trump was never actually in danger of being shot by this guy.
He didn't get that far.
Shots were fired, but apparently it was the Secret Service shooting at this guy, or towards this guy, to whatever.
Yeah, from the reporting I've seen, the guy didn't get a shot off at all.
No.
And they arrested him in his car, a little way down the road, attempting to flee the scene.
The right, of course, have instantly gone into, oh, it's the Democrats' fault, you know, with just staggering hypocrisy.
It shouldn't be the slightest bit surprising, because of who we're talking about.
They're saying, this inflammatory rhetoric, you know, J.D.
Vance, who we're probably gonna be talking about a bit more in the course of this episode, gave a speech where he said, You can't call one of the candidates for president a fascist and say he's a danger to democracy this is on you you're gonna cause stuff like this to happen.
And it's really i mean firstly the characterization of this guy this is a parent would be assassin.
Left-wing or a Democrat or whatever is completely spurious.
He seems, I mean, as you say, he seems to have supported Donald Trump and then later supported Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy as a ticket, which, I mean, that by itself tells you how incredibly incoherent this guy is politically.
He wanted to go and fight in Ukraine.
He's obsessed with Ukraine's cause.
I believe he actually went to Ukraine and tried to join, and then they were like, no, no, no, you're too crazy, you know?
Which tells you something, Yeah.
I saw something that said he's got a Biden-Harris or Harris-Waltz or whatever, but a current Democrat sort of sticker on his van or whatever.
But this is a guy whose primary trait politically is his confusion, his lack of coherence.
What he seems to be above all else is a gun nut.
He's been obsessive about guns and ordnance and stuff.
He's got a huge criminal record of gun misdemeanors and stuff like this.
Gun charges going back to 2002 or something.
He's had all kinds of issues in that regard.
And really, the only thing I have to say about any of that is really what you and I said in the episode, the news brief, where we talked about the first Trump assassination attempt, which is... We got two more months.
We could get another couple of these in.
We can get some more in, guys.
Come on.
Even if it's true...
that this guy was motivated to do this or try to do this by Democrats or the left or liberals or whoever, saying, Trump is a fascist, he's a danger to democracy.
Even if that is true, if that is directly what activated him, Those things that we say about Donald Trump are true.
They are true.
He is a fascist, and he is a danger to democracy.
So this is not... Firstly, you can't generalize.
I mean, they always do this.
They generalize... We talked about this last time.
We talked about how they generalize from the fact that one school shooter was a trans man, and they don't generalize about the loads and loads and loads of other school shooters who are not.
They will try to generalize.
They've got the slightest sliver of an excuse for calling this guy a Democrat or whatever.
They're going to generalize away from that.
They're not going to generalize about anything from Peyton Gendron or the He was buffalo was made all the el paso shooter or any of the obvious obvious if i say right and you can't let the fact that.
It's possible that somebody might act in the wrong way as a result of what you say stop you pointing out when somebody is.
a democracy when somebody is what Trump is, as opposed to what J.D. Vance, for instance, is causing to happen or, you know, Trump and J.D. Vance are causing to happen in Springfield, Ohio, based on outright cynical lies.
Absolutely.
The Democrats, you know, they're saying that Jodie Foster is a beautiful young woman.
And therefore, John Hinckley, he was just trying to he was just egged on by the Democrats to to take the spot shot at Reagan.
That's really what happened.
It's always the Democrats' fault.
Anything bad that happens, you can just always find a way to blame the Democrats.
And to be honest, the Democrats are pretty shit these days, but You know, they're not responsible for this.
I think that's a very long reach, is to say that.
Like, you know, the New York Times or the Washington Post, you know, Democracy Dies in Darkness is like the main source of this guy's ire.
He could have had a very, just a personal motive.
I mean, I joked about John Hinckley earlier, but you know, I mean, we just don't know.
We don't know what's going on in this guy's head, you know.
The fact that he's alive and will presumably stand trial for this, or at least we'll get a plea deal out of him or something, he will be prosecuted.
He will not breathe free air shortly, or he's not breathing free air now, but he will be prosecuted for this.
And presumably we'll get at least some kind of something out of it, like, you know, something will come out of the reporting for this, but... He's on weapons charges, not attempted murder charges, because I suppose, to be as charitable as possible, you know, they intercepted him before he could get that far, so... No, no, no, and, you know, obviously, you're probably gonna get him on, like...
Conspiracy to attempt or something and they'll, they'll find some, you know, there'll be some legal loophole where they can, they can get him on more than it's just the gun charges, but he's definitely guilty of the gun charges.
And so, I mean, that's it.
And, and this is, I mean, God, I hate to, I hate to give one to, you know, this is the thing that like civil libertarians and, you know, constitutional scholars and like guns rights activists and, you know, people who don't often like kind of agree on much of everything.
We'll kind of argue that, like, look, the restrictive gun laws in the United States are not meant to mean that Bubba can't take his sporting rifle to the range and fire off one, two, and put a clip in it, or put a magazine, sorry, wrong, put a magazine in with too many rounds.
You've immediately discredited yourself.
You got one bit of terminology wrong.
It's over, Daniel.
What the gun guy says, absolutely, it is 100% of the time.
You said bullets, not rounds.
I never have to listen to anything you say ever again.
Yeah, if you're carrying a gun, you're probably doing something slightly illegal with it.
is more complicated than this, but ultimately the recent cop selective is it's a pretext.
Yeah.
If you're carrying a gun, you're probably doing something slightly illegal with it.
You know, it is very easy to do, especially if you're like crossing state lines or crossing, you know, whatever there is a, like this patchwork set of things means it's almost always, if you've got a gun on you, they can bring you in for something.
Even if they have to let you go, they can bring you in for something.
And that's exactly, I mean, this is, this is how these, sorry, we're going to talk about systemic factors later, but this is how these laws work.
This is why they exist.
Like as the system feeding itself, it makes it easy for the system, makes it easy for cops to do their jobs.
That's what being living in a police state means.
And like, that's just, that's just the reality of it.
I mean, I know a hot take, but you know, at the risk of seeming to be defensive of Kamala Harris, you know, which is not something I'm interested in being or doing.
The point I wanted to hit was, like, people are saying, was it what Kamala Harris said in the debate about Donald Trump abandoning Ukraine that triggered him?
And it might have been.
Like, this guy does seem to have been very passionate about Ukraine.
And he might have come to the conclusion that he needed to kill Donald Trump because Donald Trump, if he's the president, he will abandon Ukraine to Russia.
And it might, for all I know, it might even have been that exchange in the ABC debate that caused him to turn the corner and think, I must kill Donald Trump.
Maybe that's true.
The fact remains, Donald Trump, if he gets back in, will abandon Ukraine and feed it to Putin.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Are we not supposed to talk about this in case somebody like this, you know, come on.
And he'll take all that military hardware and just route it right to Israel as well.
So, you know, let's do both bad things.
Okay, so moving on to an actual case of somebody inciting violence and the threat of violence through irresponsible speech and irresponsible rhetoric.
We're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in Springfield, Ohio.
Now, this seems to have a complex genesis.
The immediate trigger of what's going on is very clearly Donald Trump at that same debate, the ABC debate I was just talking about, being, I mean, Kamala Harris, Lucy and the football him, you know, she did this several times.
She completely got him to walk into the traps she laid for him.
And one of them was that she baits him with the crowd sizes at his rallies.
Just on a sheer political instinct thing.
I am no great fan of Kamala Harris.
Never have been.
That was a masterful debate performance.
That was just 100% genius.
As you say, she did exactly this.
She just got him.
She goaded him on all of his sensitive points, and he just cannot, cannot not respond.
He has to bring out the inner crazy.
And his response to that narcissistic injury, his response to that was to go straight to his comfort zone and what he thinks of as his strongest area, which is racist fearmongering and scaremongering about immigrants.
So he immediately, despite the fact that probably loads of his advisors, if they could fight their way to him past Laura Loomer, probably told him, do not Do the, they're eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, Mr. Trump thing.
He did.
He, he shouted, he stood there on a, on a presidential debate platform on ABC news on a debate watched by 60 odd, 67 million people, whatever it was, and screamed, they're eating the dogs and they're eating the cats in Springfield, Ohio, into the, into the microphone and into the bemused ears of millions of Americans who don't know what the fuck he's talking about because they're not terminally online.
And he just sounds like a crazy person.
But that is the immediate proximate cause, with some preparatory stuff, of essentially an outbreak of racist, threatened violence, racist menaces in Springfield, Ohio, of just the community generally, but obviously particularly the Haitian community there.
There was some way prepared for it in advance by JD Vance, because this was kind of started by him because he did tweets and Facebook posts, I think, about this.
There was a Facebook, there was like a random person who had like a Facebook account.
This is where he gets it from.
He gets it from Facebook rumors.
Completely unsourced, just some person on Facebook claimed this, right?
I think a couple of people sort of did Facebook rumors about it, but I think they've both now said, well, I don't know.
It's just something I heard.
I'm sorry.
I don't know.
Exactly.
There's no sources here.
There was one woman who did a social media post where she said, Haitians have stolen eaten my cat.
The cat turned up in her own basement the next day, you know?
Right.
It tells you where people are coming from when you look around and you can't see your cat.
I haven't seen Miss Sassy, which is actually the cat's name, by the way.
I haven't seen Miss Sassy in about 20 minutes, half an hour.
I know!
It's the Haitians!
I must immediately go to social media.
She's on a barbecue.
Yeah.
Sorry, I'm not laughing at the racism against Haitians here, I am laughing at the absurdity of it.
No, we're not laughing at that.
And that combined with a horrible news story, also in Ohio, not in Springfield, a different town, about a woman who seems to have been having some sort of mental episode, whether it was drugs or mental illness or whatever, and she was apprehended by police having killed a cat.
And the cops apparently at the scene suspected her of having eaten part of its body.
I don't know.
By the way, not an immigrant.
Not a Haitian immigrant.
A woman who had lived in that town her entire life, one woman who seems to have been having some sort of mental episode.
This seems to be the entirety of where this comes from.
There seems to be no other basis for it whatsoever.
An unrelated single event and Facebook rumours which were cynically pounced upon and repeated and amplified by J.D.
Vance in his attempt to engage in racist fearmongering and scaremongering about Haitian immigrants.
No, absolutely.
100%.
And one of the other things that he did, and I think you want to talk about this, one of the other things that he did was talk in one of those, but he did the first one, and then he got a lot of pushback, and he said, well, I don't know if it's actually true or not, but what is true is that a young boy in Springfield, Ohio was murdered by a Haitian immigrant.
And of course, it turns out, what actually happened was the boy was killed, tragically, this young boy, 11 years old, killed in a car crash, which does seem to have been caused by inattentive driving on the part of a man who does happen to have been a Haitian immigrant, and who has been to prison for it.
And absolutely heartbreakingly, the family of this boy made a public statement where they said, stop using our son's death for racist scaremongering against Haitian immigrants.
Which, I mean, Matt, we've talked about this a little bit in some other episodes, right?
And because this is not like the first time this happened.
This is like, you know, this jumping on immigrant crime or black crime or, you know, whatever.
The right wing just wants to use this as a cudgel, especially in the, you know, in the parts of the internet I hang out in.
Like, this is just, it's just like, you know, you use this, you use this specific example as the test case, and then you just use it to justify the, you know, stripping civil rights, deporting, you know, Up to killing all of the people who fit that basic phenotype or that basic set of facts, right?
And I can't... I'm not a father, alright?
But I can't imagine losing someone close to me.
Losing my wife, losing my girlfriend, losing whatever.
Losing my pet.
I can't imagine Losing something near to me because of a Haitian immigrant ran, you know, hit my wife's car or something like that, and now she's gone.
And then, obviously, I'm going to have an emotional trauma response.
I'm not going to, like, handle this well.
This is going to be, like, you know, a lot of emotional processing to get through.
And then to find, well, and now her death is being used as a way of, like, beating up on You know, just creating this, like, racist invective against people who look like that guy, right?
To come out and then to, like, say, no, however I may feel about this one guy, this is being used to attack the whole group, like, that takes, that takes courage and that takes, like, a strength of character.
That takes something nobody would expect a grieving father to have to do that.
And the fact that he did, I mean, I think that does, that does say something about, about him and about like just how interpretive this like bullshit through about Haitians became during that period.
But what JD Vance is doing is saying, well, look, I know that the cat eating thing was a lie, but it reflects a, like a larger pattern.
What's going on within this community that's going on within these things.
And so, and so maybe they're not literally eating cats.
That was a meme.
It's like, there's always a thing.
Oh, it was just a joke.
It was just a joke.
We're just joking.
Yeah, he's been doing loads of interviews and he's constantly shifting the goalposts all over the place.
And then when he's called on it by whoever's interviewing them, he then denies that he's done it.
It's like, look, we were joking around, but like, let's let's let's talk about the real concerns that people in this community have about the migrant community, et cetera.
And then just uses it as like, oh, well, I was lying.
But like, you know, you know, I was lying.
Of course I was lying.
But, you know, it just shifts it to like, well, I care.
I care more about the people of Springfield, Ohio than you do.
I care more about these people.
Care more about the white people.
You know, but because like the migrants, the Haitian migrants are also people who live in this town.
But the story about this family that was bereaved in that accident, the fact that he's just completely steamrollered over what they're specific, the father of the boy is saying specifically, you know, don't talk about my, you know, wasn't a murder.
Don't use it as this hate mongering.
Just, they just steamroller over all that.
It just goes to show how little they actually do.
I mean, not only do they obviously not care about the well-being of the Haitian-Americans or Haitian people living in Springfield, they don't care about the people they claim to care about.
They don't care about the white residents.
Yeah.
They don't care about the father.
They don't care about the mother.
They don't care about the possible siblings.
And they don't care about – they ultimately don't even care about the dead kid.
Aidan Clark was the kid's name, you know?
Yes.
They're not concerned.
It's a tool to gain political power, and in particular, it's a tool to gain partisan political power.
And that connects back to what we were talking about before.
You just blame the Democrats.
It's the Democratic policies.
It's the Democrats.
They're up in their elite Harvard, New York Times, and they're not paying attention to the working class people of Springfield, Ohio, who have to deal with this Haitian infestation because they don't see it, because they are wealthy and elite and above it all.
And the idea that The people in Harvard and Yale are elite above it all, heading the cloud types much of the time.
The fact that that's true does not also mean that we're not also using this cynically in an attempt at gaining political power.
And I promise you, whatever the Republicans are going to do if they gain federal-level power in the executive branch in two months, I assure you that whatever policies they enact will be bad for the residents of Springfield, Ohio.
I'm going to lighten it up a little bit here.
But as a Michigander, I've lived in Michigan for more than a decade and a half now.
It's required of home living here that you have a just an unholy level of hate for everything Ohio that comes out of Ohio, that everything in Ohio.
And so the fact that I am defending the dignity of Ohioan citizens here, I think speaks to my moral Certitude, my moral, my moral heights.
So I'm, I'm really holding my nose on this one to, to say anything nice about fucking Ohio.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's a heroic effort.
Reminds me of Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently standing up in public and boasting about how humble she is.
She's just so humble.
Yes.
I'm just so much more humble than anybody else, especially Kamala Harris.
She's not, I'm, I'm, you know, masterpiece.
The old Sarah.
I want to direct people towards what Talia Levin wrote about this.
Again, friend of the show, former guest.
She wrote an excellent blog post, I suppose, or article about this called Anatomy of a Pogrom.
She doesn't go into detail about what's going on in Springfield, Ohio.
If you want that, there's plenty of reporting about it.
There's been an avalanche of bomb threats, intimidation, You know, schools have had to shut down, universities, colleges, community centers, government offices have had to shut down because of bomb threats.
The local community are being terrorized.
And of course, none more so than the Haitian community there in Springfield, who are being terrorized specifically.
For the most part, people in Springfield are reacting with great solidarity towards their Haitian neighbours.
But they are under siege.
We have the Klan, whatever that amounts to, down there, distributing leaflets and flyers.
We have Blood Tribe down there.
Blood Tribe is actually part of how this whole thing got started as well.
Yep.
We did a news brief about Bloodtribe when they marched in Nashville.
We talked in that about how they go all over the place to different places.
One of the things that started this off was a member of Bloodtribe talking about this exact same racist conspiracy theory stroke urban legend at a, I think it was a town council meeting or something in Springfield?
Nathaniel Higgers of Bloodtribe.
Nathaniel Higgers, aka Nate Higgers.
You get it.
I was at the head of the anti-Haitian immigration march earlier this month.
I've come to bring a word of warning.
Stop what you're doing before it's too late.
Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.
And with it, public frustration and anger.
You sound threatening to me.
Based on the comments tonight, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that.
These people didn't ask for this.
And they deserve better than to have to put up with violent, unruly outsiders.
Thank you so much.
You're done.
Thank you.
That's all.
Thank you so much.
Not really.
Thank you.
These are the types that we're talking about.
And again, this is very deliberate, like provocation there.
You know, when you're talking about maybe J.D. Vance has like a little bit of plausible deniability.
I'm not going to give it to him, but maybe, you know, like Blood Tribe, they're explicit white nationalists.
They are calling for like the violent overthrow of the state in favor of setting up a death of state.
There's no gray area here.
Like, you know, and we want to be clear that we're not like directly conflating these two things, but they rhyme and they feed off of each other.
Yeah.
And.
And I think one of the things that is heartening to me about having done this podcast for as long as we have is that I think we started it, at least my kind of idea when we started was like, well, we're trying to Like, draw out these connections.
We're trying to make these, like, between this kind of, like, tiny, you know, kind of far-right rhetoric and the stuff that's happening just in our, like, national and international politics.
We're trying to, like, draw out these threads and find these connections and show how they are feeding off of each other.
And now, like, that's just...
That's just the news now.
You don't have to work that hard to uncover these things.
It's funny to see NBC News doing a segment that could have been on I Don't Speak German in 2019.
Yeah.
What I was saying was that they are essentially in the grip of a pogrom down there in Springfield High now.
We have the Klan down there, we have Blood Tribe down there.
Blood Tribe, as we were just saying, part of how this got started, part of what Vance is recycling, cynically recycling in his posts, is propaganda from Blood Tribe, a literal neo-Nazi group that marches through streets flying swastika flags.
And we have the Proud Boys down there.
The news reports keep on saying, oh, there's 12 Proud Boys down there.
Yeah, I'll bet there's more than 12, yeah.
It's like rats, for every rat you see, there's a hundred that you don't see.
And Talia's blog post, Anatomy of a Pogrom, as I say, it's not a news report, you can get that elsewhere, but she goes into why this is.
I mean, I would have been, personally, I would have been, because I'm me, I'm a gentile, I would have been hesitant to apply the term blood libel.
Talia applies the term blood libel, she applies the term pogrom, and that article goes through the history of these things with examples, you know, right the way through the Tsarist pogroms and Jim Crow lynchings and stuff like this.
Really good article, gonna put it in the links, go and read that.
But what's going on down there really is, you know, it's kind of Charlottesville again.
They're down there like flies on roadkill in exactly the same way that they swarmed down to Charlottesville around the excuse, the pretext of the Robert E. Lee statue being taken down.
Yeah, I mean, it's not as organized as that.
I mean, and it's and it's more like it reminds me of, you know, the stuff that was going on in Texas a couple of years ago with the like the drag kids shows.
Yes.
And that was, of course, targeting trans people and drag performers and queer people more generally.
This is it has a different target, but ultimately it's all it's all about, like.
People who are not straight, white, middle class, or higher Americans with Midwestern accents.
It's all part of the same ultimate struggle, I think.
But yeah, it reminds me of that, and it reminds me of the... Well, I mean, frankly, I think we're kind of transitioning into this, so I might as well drop the name.
The National Justice Party, the way they went after Daryl Brooks, who... We did an episode all about that.
I think we did a couple episodes, at least one, yeah.
We did a couple on the NJP.
Well, we did more than two on the NJP, but we did a series of two specifically.
And one of the ones we did about the NJP was focused quite heavily on the way they were using the Dowell Brooks story.
Yeah.
And the NJP isn't going, well, the NJP doesn't exist anymore.
Enoch and Carew are not going to Springfield.
They live in Pennsylvania.
Springfield, Ohio, that's a few hours drive.
That is not a crazy distance to go, but they no longer have an organizing project to justify it, so they're not going that way.
But they don't need to, because the whole of the right-wing media is pushing against this stuff.
And, uh, well, I think we're going to play a clip from them here in a minute.
But I think before, before we get there, I found some like new stories that were kind of about like the background here and the bank around, you know, the thing that's sort of like underlying these stories is that I think we look.
At least I do.
I don't know.
I don't know how you, you know, I look at like claims of like the Haitians are taking over, the migrants are coming in and taking all the jobs.
And, you know, it was like this sort of, it's like, okay, so there's a community of like a couple of hundred people who speak, you know, French accent or black and speak and speak English with a French accent or therefore, you know, violent criminals.
And no, there has been a, there's like a significant, like they have imported Haitian migrants into Springfield, Ohio specifically.
It's worth emphasizing that they're there legally.
Not that, for me, that makes any moral difference at all.
I don't think a human being can be illegal.
But contrary to the lies being put around in the literal words of people like Vance and so on, we are not talking about illegal immigrants.
Again, he's the master of moving goalposts.
In interviews, people call him on that.
He moves the goalpost.
Well, okay, it's legal, but it's only legal because it's a loophole and that's Kamala Harris's fault, blah blah blah.
These are not people who are, quote-unquote, committing crimes just by being there.
They are people who were invited there.
They are there legally, to the extent that that's, you know, that's not a meaningful difference for me, but it is a true fact.
Exactly.
And it does matter in terms of, like, how we think about this, like, the Great Replacement kind of means, I mean, we've talked a lot about the Great Replacement, and I think it's worth kind of talking through this a little bit more just in this context, because if Ben Shapiro— That's what this all is, isn't it?
That's what this is all about.
This is the thing that underlies all of these stories and why it's a powder keg.
When your mainstream or mainstreamish pundits like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson starts talking about Great Replacement, what they mean is Democrats stuffing ballots To remove Republicans from power and, like, importing black people and brown people who are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans and, like, changing the demographics of the country for partisan advantage, right?
That's the idea.
That's how, like, Republican pundits and, like, those kind of right-wing figures, that's how they use the term.
They don't use it in this explicitly, like, white genocide.
You know, they are bringing in black people to a place to outbreed the white people and eventually just replace the population of white people with black people.
That's a more hardcore version of the same.
Again, it rhymes, but it is distinct.
It is a distinct, you know, like... Great replacement starts, you know, call it a theory is to artificially dignify.
It's not a theory.
It's a racist conspiracy theory.
But it starts with this French guy called Camus.
Who, uh, he, his original, not the, not the other canoe.
Yeah.
Not the good camo, good-ish camo.
Yeah.
The, the, okay.
We're not going to get into a discussion about the merits of camo at this point.
He wrote some really great stuff, and he did some really shitty stuff, so we'll just leave it there.
We'll let Behind the Bastards get into that.
Robert, this is on you.
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, over to you, Robert Evans.
No, the guy I'm talking about, the French guy who started the so-called Great Replacement Theory, heavily touted by Lauren Southern, a victim of Russian money back in the day.
The thing that he calls the Great Replacement Theory is actually much more like the White Genocide Theory of the Nazis.
You're absolutely correct to say that the Great Replacement Theory, as it is in common currency on the right in America, is that sort of watered-down domestic politics version, where it's about the Democrats using immigration to try to rig the electoral system.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's the point I was trying to make.
And yes, of course, I didn't highlight the kind of the source of the Great Replacement and it's sometimes just called like Eurabia and you know, there's some other like kind of concept story that is like, oh yeah, deliberate replacement of white people living in Europe and North America and elsewhere with non-white, you know, like a new population is coming in and there are all kinds of reasons.
Maybe we need to recover some of this and do like a whole episode about the Great Replacement sometime.
I mean, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea if people want to hear it.
I mean, let us know in the comments, you know?
Well, I think that'd be interesting, sort of tracing the different versions of it, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
Raynald Camus' version of Great Replacement versus Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro's version versus White Genocide as the Nazis understand it versus, like, Arabia and Londonistan and all that stuff.
I think that'd be really interesting, yeah.
Man, that takes you back to- that's Memory Lane, Londonestan.
I haven't heard that one in a while.
But yeah, no.
In this case, I think what I was trying to get at is, obviously we're not going to get Mike Enoch in here, or Ben Shapiro in here, or J.D.
Vance in here to justify themselves, but if we talked about just, okay, factually, what happened is, there's a Rust Belt city, it was failing, There isn't all the young people left for, for better, for better environments.
Like, you know, living in a Rust Belt city, it sucks.
It's, it's not, it's not, these are not great places.
The infrastructure is going to shit.
We'll talk about this here shortly.
And so young people who have the ability to leave will leave for, for better work, for just a better living condition.
They want to live closer into the city.
This is something that happens.
It's not a 100% thing, but like people leave.
And when people leave a lot of work, a lot of the there's just not a lot of work that can be done.
You know, by older people, by people who are tired, who either can't afford to or just don't want to leave.
And so you have to attract, you know, under the mode of capitalist production, you have to attract people who are able to work into this environment in order to create some kind of economic sustainability and profitability.
And you can do that either by, you know, enticing You know, enticing those young people to stay, in which case you're going to have to offer them a shitload of money because they can make more money outside, or you import an outside labor force and give them the ability to enter the country legally under the auspices of a paper-thin legal agreement.
In which case you know if you lose in many cases if you lose your job if you're not able to perform to your job you get yanked right back to right back to where you came from like that's how a lot of the shit works and so you are now beholden essentially exploited by the employer at the hands of the state.
Importing a black working class to do the labor that the white population don't want to do, and giving them a precarious leave.
Surely nothing like this has ever happened in America.
No, certainly not in the entire course of American history.
And to do it from Haiti!
Yeah, you know, like, yeah, icing on the cake, man.
And I mean, look, I'm not like, let's not pretend that things are great in Haiti.
There are reasons that things are not great in Haiti.
Yeah, I wonder why that is.
Yeah, well, it's just because Haitians are just unable to produce to be economically productive because they're just their brains are too small.
That's how that's that's how it works.
You know, they're just a violent, poor poverty people.
Haiti is- Or it could be the entire history of Western imperialism and colonialism shitting on Haiti and using its people as- I've been listening to the Nazis try to debunk that for like the last four days, and believe me, they cannot.
They just- We're gonna get into this, but- I would not want to live in Haiti.
Conor O'Brien went down to Haiti and he saw the most touristy spots and was like, oh no, this is fine.
Of course, Haiti isn't a shithole country because that was the whole impetus of that.
Trump called Haiti a shithole country.
I believe this is still true.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and it's not close.
It is very, very, very oppressively poor.
For, again, the entire history of imperialism, that does not mean that Haitians are, like, bad people, or that Haitians are – it means that they are poor people.
And, you know, getting back to the, like, eating cats thing… Yeah, it's because they've been relentlessly exploited by white imperialism since forever, you know.
Exactly, exactly.
The idea that these companies are importing people under the auspices of some NGOs and the State Department, presumably, or at least immigration services, they're importing people into this town to do basically menial wage labor.
And what I can only presume are horrifying conditions.
Now, these kinds of conditions of poverty are the kinds of conditions that would send people to killing and eating rodents and rabbits.
This is something that happens in poor communities.
This is something that happens in poor white communities all the time.
It is a fact in life.
And sometimes people in that state, particularly in the state of poverty, They often have systems of abuse in which they will abuse animals.
It would not surprise me to find out that one Haitian immigrant in this town had burned a cat alive or something.
It would not surprise me to find that.
And it wouldn't reflect on the rest of the people from Haiti, or certainly people Yeah, Haitian immigrants who are going through this process.
It's not, it's just not how this works.
There's just no, the racism has to be baked in.
The racism has to come first in order to even draw that conclusion.
These factors, these material factors are the things that are driving This racism, to begin with, it's the field, it's the dead brush that allows the forest flame of this ethno-nationalism and this right-wing ideology to burn.
That's how it works.
If there wasn't centuries of colonialism in Haiti, and there was not this process by which these people from Haiti, if they wanted to come work in that town, Would just come and live there the way like an Englishman might or a Frenchman might or a Belgian or whatever, you know, it's not, there's no, there's no question there.
And you wouldn't, you know, if there was a large percentage of like, you know, French people who suddenly moved into that and one of them under poverty conditions, you know, committed some horrible act against an animal.
It just wouldn't be a thing.
It wouldn't be a stereotype.
Certainly not in this country.
Maybe, as with the Michigan-Ohio thing, maybe in your country, a bunch of French-speaking immigrants would be treated very badly.
I don't know.
I only hear stereotypes of how you Englishmen treat the French.
No comment.
You don't see the camera, but he was straight-faced through that entire thing.
No, no, I have to be careful, you know, because I'm very woke and socialist and internationalist and everything.
Except when it comes to the French.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Fuck France.
Fuck France.
I am still an Englishman.
Yeah, no, agreed.
Go King!
I love French people.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I was trying to kind of, like, give a little bit of the history here and kind of give a little bit of the background, and I guess, I mean, we do have a clip, and I don't know if you want to try to set it up first or kind of play it and then go, or if you have commentary on what I just said, maybe we can kind of figure it out as we go.
Well, I would maybe not disagree, but nuance some of that, because I agree with what you say about, obviously, socioeconomic conditions lead people to not be at their best.
It leads their relationships and their behaviour and their emotional state.
Yeah, absolutely.
There is a link between that sort of oppression and that sort of impoverishment, and very crucially, according to lots of very good sociological research from the last few years, it is the state of inequality itself which seems to be a huge thing.
It's the consciousness of injustice and inequality which seems to have a devastating effect on people at the bottom.
in very much a sort of similar way that it kind of has an inverse but equal devastating psychological effect upon people at the top as well.
There's social psychology on this, on the devastating effects that wealth for instance, can have upon people.
And, you know, we need look no further than the guy that currently owns and runs X to see just the catastrophic psychological impact of extreme wealth and power can have on some people.
And it's injustice and inequality on that level.
There's actual sort of sound social science on this, that in itself.
It's not just the deprivation or the lack of education or poverty.
It's the consciousness of living at the sharp end of injustice, which has So yeah, I agree with that.
And that's also the seed of racist prejudice, as indeed is all the ideology that goes with those hundreds of years of racist oppression and exploitation of Haitian-Haitians and African-Americans and people of colour in terms of the global imperialist system, etc, etc.
I agree with that.
In terms of places like Springfield itself, I might want to nuance that a little bit.
I have to be careful, because I don't actually know anything about Springfield, Ohio.
But to just speak in very general terms, part of the problem with a lot of places like that — I mean, you refer to it as a Rust Belt town — part of the huge problem with places like that, in many parts of the world, but particularly in those parts of America, is the devastating effect that decades of what we call neoliberalism have had on places like that.
And by neoliberalism, I'm talking specifically about a particular kind of restructuring of Western capitalist societies conduct their economies.
And one of the things there, of course, has been the destruction of domestic manufacturing industry, the destruction of domestic working class jobs in things like traditional manufacturing industries, and also, you know, relatedly other industries that stem from those production jobs, and the outsourcing of all that elsewhere.
And this is where, this is not Where the right have a point, because they don't have a point, they're wrong.
But it's one of the true things and real things that they use and exploit to make bullshit arguments.
And I think this is relevant to the clip we're going to play.
Yeah, I was going to get into some of that.
Here, like, actually play the clip alone.
You've set it up perfectly, I think.
Yeah.
So if we then go straight into the other part of what I was saying was, of course, a lot of these jobs have gone abroad, where domestic capitalists can get them done by people who are, you know, in places where there's less regulation and they can get away with paying less.
They can essentially farm out hyper-exploitation of workers to places that are not in the imperial centre, to places that are, for one reason or another, neo-imperialism, particularly economic imperialism, they are kind of forced and blackmailed by the more prosperous Countries that the capitalist imperial center, they're forced to have these, you know, very exploitative conditions, which of course.
Capitalists producers and capitalist firms in the developed countries can take advantage of through, you know, lower wages and less regulations.
That's the, I can't speak specifically about Springfield, obviously, because I don't know, but that is the background to a lot of what economically and socially ails a lot of these sorts of places.
And as I say, it's one of the true things that the far right do latch onto and take advantage of in order to make their own bullshit arguments, which they base on these true problems.
So I think that does lead us into the clip we're going to play.
And perhaps if you can tell us what it is and who it is.
You know, this is, this is Mikey knock and a couple of his pals over at the daily show.
You know, it's going to be a good episode when I've got a daily show.
I almost delayed us recording this.
Once I heard this clip, I almost delayed us recording this and like, let's do this as a real episode.
But if I, I never would've like gotten it done.
So I'm just not in the head space to do real episodes right now, but.
This is a real episode.
This is, well, I mean, this is a, this is a 2024 real episode.
I do love doing these news briefs.
I do, I do really enjoy recording them, but I don't prep as heavily for them.
So like, if I prepped as heavily for this as I would for, you know, a numbered episode, I would have an outline.
I would have five clips.
I would have, you know, everything like set up to, to go.
And so I just don't have the, but yeah, no, I agree.
This is important and these are real episodes.
So this is the daily show.
This is the daily show.
I can look up the number for you.
Because I didn't write it down, but it is episode 1236.
It is from just a few days ago.
It's from about a week ago.
And I was listening today while I was thinking about this, in this episode that we're recording.
And I heard this clip and this is something that Enoch has said on many occasions, but never quite this succinctly.
And so, and I, and I think it gets to some of the core.
Of like, why these people are dangerous and what is in their brains when they, you know, kind of talk about this stuff.
And so I did want to play this clip and then we'll kind of get back into it.
If a leftist even brings it up, I'll tell you what they'll say.
If they're even going to bring it up, is they will say that the answer to this, this is the problem with Marxism.
Okay, you want the fucking problem with it?
This is the biggest issue.
The argument that they will make, should they bring this up, will be like, yes, these Haitians that are being brought in were exploited at home.
So they could now be brought in and exploited here.
But the answer is not for the citizens here, who had previously expected and experienced a higher standard of living, to exclude them.
The answer is solidarity amongst all of them.
Which just never happens, right?
And this is specifically why this kind of argumentation is why Bakunin and Proudhon and others called Marx like a Jew in the pocket of capital when he would make these kinds of arguments.
Because that is utter fucking bullshit.
That the erasing of national borders for labor as well as capital is now how we fight back.
It's like, no, the national border is the fight against capital.
That's why you gotta be a Stalinist.
You gotta do communism in one country.
So, thank you, Mike Enoch, for proving me right about everything that I've ever said about you, and your conception of these things.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
And then they go on to talk about how socialism in one country is really another way of saying national socialism, although you can't.
And of course, we can disagree with both, and say they're not quite the same thing.
Their level of political insight into this is not great.
Yeah, then they go on, and this is all in context of this same story, and I just, again, I find it interesting that, like, these guys are not dumb.
Like, Mike Enoch, he has a lot of things.
He has a lot of things, and we have talked a lot about him, and I'm not gonna go through the list of things that he has done in his life that are terrible, but, you know, we have a back catalog for a reason.
But he is not stupid.
And one thing that he loves to do is to argue with people on the internet about these like that's how he that's how he got his way into this job was they were arguing with people on at the time it was Facebook groups they had a the right stuff Facebook group and they were arguing with people and they he so it's not that he has not heard the argument that I mean because he expresses it basically the way I would express it and you know like and do using different terms using and obviously I'm coming at it from a different place
But it's like, yeah, no, the thing is that the white people of Springfield, Ohio and the Haitian immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio should have solidarity with each other and want the best for everyone against the figures in, A, the capitalist exploiters, and in the government at large that are oppressing them.
I mean, that's how we all have to work together.
And the idea that like, well, we're just going to use an arm of the state to enforce are our living standards because these people are dirty and grimy and nasty and commit crimes and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And the problem is that we just don't have the arm of the state in our control right now.
And that's really what we have to do.
That is fundamental to how, well, certainly how I see the world.
I won't speak for you, but how I see the world versus how Nazi sees the world.
It's like, we can look at the same thing and just see it differently.
And now the idea that, well, people just don't work that way.
Well, that's not true.
People do show solidarity for another in these kinds of environments, and there are long histories of that.
I am not as well-versed in that as other people are in terms of union history and working-class history and community history, but I know for a fact that it's true.
I've read several books on the topic.
I just don't have the examples at hand.
It's just empirically true that people will do this.
Sometimes it's difficult.
Sometimes it takes time.
Sometimes it's, you know, there are all kinds of issues, really awful nitty gritty issues that you get into.
And unions have certainly not been 100% on the right side of history in every situation, in every circumstance, in every, you know, it's just not true.
But The nature of solidarity is, it is your only defense against the Nazis, and against the state, and against the capitalists.
Solidarity is the key to the whole thing.
And to just say, for him, to say, well, this is what a leftist would tell you, but that's bullshit, and give no logic behind it, and just point to, well, look at the filthy Haitians.
That's the answer the Nazis are giving you.
That's kind of the answer J.D.
Vance is giving you.
That's the answer the Republican Party is giving you, is like, we just can't do this.
This is just not going to work.
The system is what it is, and we just got to lay it as it lays.
And I mean, frankly, it's kind of what the Democrats are telling you too.
They want to give you slightly more... They want a tax credit for buying your first home of $25,000.
That's the big policy proposal that Kamala Harris was touting last week.
That's how we solve these problems.
And I mean, it is, it's just endemic in the system itself.
When I heard him say, this is the real problem with Marks, I was like, oh, I got to play this for Jack.
And originally, I was just like, I'm just going to show it to Jack.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
This is going to the episode.
This is what we're doing.
It's fascinating how much of that I agree with, actually.
The risk of being horribly misunderstood.
I agree with the Nazi, Jack Graham.
I don't speak German podcast.
Quote that, everybody.
Use that clip.
I mean, he's right.
That is what a Marxist would say.
That's what I think a Marxist should say.
Yes, the answer is the solidarity of the working class international.
Working men of all nations unite.
You have nothing to lose but your chains.
I mean, it's the last fucking line of the manifesto.
Yes, because you have a shared interest with fellow members of the working class.
You are both exploited in the same way.
Your interests are identical, regardless of skin color, etc.
And because of your common position at the point of production within The reproduction of society, you have the power if you unify and take the productive power of society into your hands to completely remake that society along different lines.
Yeah, I mean, that is what a Marxist would say.
The answer is solidarity across racial division on the part of the working class.
Yes, absolutely.
That's why Marxists talk about the working class.
That's why Marxists are anti-racists.
That's the whole fucking point.
The reason Bakunin and Proudhon said things like that about Marx, and he's right, they did, is because they were anti-Semitic bastards, and they had a decidedly less radically democratic revolutionary ideal and idea than Marx and Engels.
It's absolutely true that it's difficult.
If it wasn't difficult, we'd be there already.
We'd have socialism.
It's difficult precisely because capitalism builds itself upon these divisions between people, because it's built on imperialism, that's why it has to be built on racism, etc., etc., yeah.
Mark said the English working class will never liberate themselves in a revolution until they have gotten rid of the problem of Ireland, by which he meant, of course, that there was an entire other people, an entire other working class, upon which the British imperialist state was preying.
And that problem that the English workers or the British workers' feeling of being both in competition with and superior to because of the imperial relationship to the Irish worker, that was one of the things holding back the British working class from realizing their power and their potential and their revolutionary capabilities.
Marx said that.
And that was a huge problem.
He devoted himself to combating that.
He also said, on one occasion, that the British working class's finest hour was their reaction to the attempt by British textile manufacturers and the British state to do business with the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War.
This is a debated topic.
Read Eric Foner's book about this.
The British working class, it wasn't perfect, obviously.
It wasn't completely exactly what we would want from a modern, woke perspective.
But generally speaking, the British working class rejected the idea of a compromise with the Confederacy, despite the fact that British Textile manufacturing, which was huge swathes of the country at the time, was the basis of the British working class's livelihood, the basis of its existence, relied, at least at the opening of the conflict, on southern cotton.
And it rejected that.
The British working class in Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere, they put up a statue of Lincoln!
Wow!
I did not know that!
This does happen.
This is the basis of every revolution and every scintilla of progress throughout history is this ability of people to see their common interests as workers across lines of gender and sex and race and nationality and religion and all this stuff.
It does happen.
And the fact that Mike Enoch is so fucking cynical and so fucking bigoted that he just rejects that.
The only kind of socialism you can have is socialism in one country.
I agree, it's not the same thing as national socialism, but it is an authoritarian, bureaucratic, nationalistic form of state capitalism rather than socialism.
They're both forms of that.
Nazism and Stalinism were both forms of that.
And that is what these people want.
I mean, they definitely admire, you know, Hitler more than they admire Stalin, you know, they definitely see themselves just if for nothing else that because Hitler was like explicitly anti-semitic, more explicitly anti-semitic, you know, than Stalin.
Well, you pick your little niche in the ecosystem, don't you?
They want the Hitler version, people like Caleb Maupin, they want the Stalin version, but it's the same thing.
Not the same thing, but it's similar enough.
I think the audience understands.
I think we're going to go in a very strong, a very controversial position on this podcast, that Hitler and Stalin, both bad.
Both bad.
You heard it here first, folks.
Yeah, never heard that before.
Breaking taboos, slaughtering sacred cows.
We don't care who we offend.
I guess I would sum up and say, when you, I mean, and this kind of goes into some of the ideology of the assassination attempt as well, and sort of the way it's cynically used as a partisan tool.
When you see that kind of stuff, when you see this, you know, these Haitians are eating your cats.
It's like, that's just bare racism.
That is like the most And that's coming from, like, high up people in our society.
That's coming from, like, influencers.
That's coming from someone who may be the next vice president of the United States.
Like, you know, the second highest person, arguably, in the world is, you know, is spouting this stuff and gaining, you know, electoral success and gaining political success from it.
But when you see that, like, this isn't, oh, let's hash out the details of, like, what he really meant.
And like, yeah, I got an email from Chris Rufo.
I am on Chris Rufo's mailing list, believe it or not.
And I have a forensic analyst who's going to tell you exactly why it can't be.
It can't be a chicken because like the the legs are.
And it's like it's a it's a featureless piece of something that looks vaguely like meat on a grill from 50 feet away.
Even if it was a cat, it doesn't prove that it's like widespread.
It doesn't prove that it was somebody's pet.
It doesn't prove anything.
But yeah, the fact that people are still doubling down on it, the fact that it's still a thing, and that Rufo, he is a learned intellectual type.
Vance ran with that as well.
I don't think he named Rufo specifically, but he did run with that supposed story.
Because Rufo did this thing where he said, oh, I'll pay you if you can come up with a verifiable account.
Have a Haitian immigrant in Springfield eating a cow, I will pay you.
And the best he came up with was this, on Twitter, he's being mocked by people because he posts this fuzzy video of a grill, a barbecue, with something... I know cats, that's not a cat, that's not how their legs work, I don't know what that... I think it's a chicken.
Yeah, I think it's a chicken, yeah.
Who the hell knows, and who the hell cares?
I've roasted many chickens in my life, it looks like a chicken to me, but you know.
Yeah.
He's being roundly mocked on twitter for this stupid video and he's saying, oh read the article, do your homework, read the article, don't just mock me and assume I'm wrong, read the article.
So I went and read the article, there's fuck all in there, it's just, oh I heard a rumour, that's basically all it is.
And it's sad isn't it, this is the guy that once seeded the CRT moral panic across the entire American political mainstream.
The media and the political establishment reduced to this.
And the stuff against trans kids and queer kids in school.
I mean, it has enormous power, certainly in the state of Florida, under who gets academic appointments and such, and kind of controlling some of that curriculum in high schools in Florida.
So, I mean, this is a person who is not powerless in this country, who certainly has more power than you or I do, for certain, who is not only spreading, but doubling down and intensifying their support for these kinds of, I mean, I would call it lies.
It is a lie.
But even more than that.
Just openly paying people to come up with stories as well.
That's what got me.
Just, yeah, I'll pay you if you come up with something.
Like, it's barely, not even the pretense of anything remotely resembling objectivity, whether it's academic or journalistic or anything.
Just, yeah, get me something I can claim is a cat being eaten and I'll pay you for it.
I'll give an aside for the listener, just for the long-term fan.
It's like, I have been trying, I tried to do a Chris Rufo episode.
I tried, like, five or six times to really, like, dig in.
I watched all of his, like, previous documentary work.
You know, I subscribe to his to his newsletter because the way to get access to his latest well then latest film was to give him your email address and then you could you could go and you can watch the documentary so I watched I made myself like a little teapot.
Expert on Christopher Rufo over the course of a couple of months.
And every time I started trying to prep the episode to write out the episode, it's just like, all I have is like, I have Christopher Rufo saying something, and then I have a clip of Christopher Rufo saying that he was lying about that thing.
And it just happens over and over and over again.
And he's saying it to appreciative audiences.
It's like, yeah, but if you don't Like, really believe this, then why are you saying it?
It's like, well, this is about maintaining political power.
I could make an interesting episode about Khrushchev, but ultimately, you wouldn't learn anything from it.
I mean, not you, Jack, but the audience.
Like, it wouldn't be worthwhile content in the sense of, he says it himself.
He's very happy to tell on himself, like, how he's lying.
And so, ultimately, it would just be an exercise in documenting some of those lies.
And, you know, I know there's a value in that.
It's so one note.
It does feel a bit futile when they do it.
So it's like, why, why should I put the effort in when there are other shitheads I can beat up on now?
You can just Google Rufo and find him saying this kind of stuff.
It is not, it's not difficult.
So anyway, that was a maybe future episode that we'll do.
I mean, you know, let me know, like, I mean, you know, tag me on Twitter, tag me on blue sky, you know, we're always up for like topics and stuff that people want to cover.
I did, it's just some odds and ends I could mention.
There was, did you see the Rich Lowry thing?
He was talking to Megyn Kelly about this, this whole thing.
Rich Lowry, I believe the editor of National Review.
And he just, obviously, you know, his mouth ran on out of control of his brain.
Oh, oh yes.
And he just, he used the N word.
Yeah, no, I was meaning to go and, because I do occasionally listen to Megyn Kelly's Once every few weeks I'll listen to an episode she's got an interesting guest on, and so I meant to go listen to that full episode, I have not gotten around to it yet, but I did see the clip, and this was not going to be the soft R with an A, he was going right out there.
He's tried to deny it, he's tried to say, oh, I was trying to say migrant or something.
No, no, no, no, that's not- It's very obvious.
Crystal clear.
Dana Bash says, you know, the police have gone through 11 months of recordings of calls, and they've only found two Springfield residents calling to complain about Haitian migrants taking geese from ponds.
Only two calls.
And this is very obviously because this is a word that you and other people in your life, maybe even Megyn Kelly, are very comfortable and accustomed to saying back and forth to each other when the mics aren't on.
You know, I sit and listen to genocidal racists, like, use that word.
I have listened to genocidal racists use that word for about eight years now, for like hours a day.
I have said before that I get intrusive thoughts about, you know, and so like certain words, certain ideas are just, I'm just trying to be honest here, right?
You know, but like, I am not with the amount of exposure that I have to these concepts.
I am not sitting here and like using that word casually.
Certainly not in a live interview.
There's never been a time in which I have just had the, like, we'll just call him the N-word.
Like, that's just not, like, it's not in my head.
And so the only way, the only way you get in that situation is that you are very comfortable using that word elsewhere in your life.
You know, I just don't see a way around that.
You know, if I can avoid saying it, and I have no desire to say it, then Rich Lowry, like, man, what a disgusting human being.
And also, I have to admit, very funny.
Like, very funny that he goes there.
Yeah, it was very funny.
Just the way they just move on and pretend it never happened.
Yeah, no, I hear you.
Yeah.
No, that didn't happen, did it?
No, it didn't.
Okay, good.
We can carry on.
And, you know, like the editor of the National Review is a racist who says the N-word.
News story?
Not really.
Except that it wasn't too long ago, this guy was given a very high-profile opinion column To talk about Biden and the election and Trump and so on.
Was it the New York Times?
I can't remember.
I think it's the New York Times, but I don't follow Rick Lowry's career closely, so.
And the other things that made me laugh recently were, did you see Bret Weinstein's conspiracy theory about Kamala's earrings?
I did, I did.
I just thought, this was the most Bret Weinstein thing that ever Bret Weinstein, because he's too, you know, he's clever, that Bret.
He's too clever to fall for the old, her earrings are...
Headphones and she's being fed the answers but he thinks they made them look like they might be headphones in order to trick me and my internet friends like Joe Rogan and so on into thinking that they were headphones.
They did that.
Wow Brett.
I've gotta admit, when you said, did you hear the recent thing with Brett Weinstein, I was like, is there any one of like, five things this could be?
Like, it is, it is, he is... There is that conference he's going to, isn't there?
The Empire Rebellion or something?
Maybe we do a news brief on just what Brett Weinstein has been up to lately.
That could be a, yeah, I have clips for that.
Oh my god.
Previews for future episodes.
I've done it now, isn't it?
Previews for future episodes.
I really want to share with this audience what Brett and Heather had to say after the Dobbs decision that overturned the right to abortion in the United States.
God.
It's one that's been widely shared, but it is everything you think it is.
I think we'll put that one on the to-do-soon pile.
I think that's going to be necessary, but yeah.
One more thing that tickled my funny bone was Tim Pool, another victim of Russian money, another victim of huge amounts of Russian money, his response to the second assassination attempt on Trump and the news that the guy that was responsible had been to Ukraine and tried to join the Ukrainian army and so on was to, of course, immediately heavily imply that Ukraine is trying to rub out former President Trump, which I just thought that was so Tim in the midst of all this.
I didn't hear this one until you told it to me now.
If you'd made me guess, I would not necessarily have gotten there.
But having heard it, it's like, no, that is, that is so Temple.
That is like 100% Temple.
Just these stories.
They're just, they're really, they're really on brand at the moment, aren't they?
These people, they're really being themselves.
Again, it's actually heartening in a way is that like all of these people are exactly what we told you they were two or three years ago.
They just continue to be the same person.
So it's just, it is what it is.
OK, well that was another News Brief, listeners, and thank you for joining us for it.
And we will be back probably in the next couple of days to cover another avalanche of catastrophic and bizarre and horrifying news that we're all buried under.
But in the meantime, bye-bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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