The ultimate symbol of extreme wealth isn’t a flashy supercar. It’s spending $30,000 on a watch precisely because everyone else will assume it cost $50.

True wealth operates under a strict code of invisibility, because being visibly rich carries an enormous and exhausting social tax.

The moment a person’s net worth becomes obvious, they transition from a normal human being into a walking ATM. Relationships warp. Casual acquaintances suddenly have “can’t-miss” business propositions, distant relatives need emergency loans, and normal social interactions carry an undercurrent of financial expectation. Beyond the awkwardness, visible wealth attracts frivolous lawsuits, targeted scams, and physical security risks. The simplest way to avoid this friction is to hide in plain sight.

This necessitates a shift from loud luxury to “stealth wealth.” Loud luxury—oversized logos, flashy sports cars, and instantly recognizable designer prints—is designed to signal financial success to strangers. It is favored by those with high incomes but relatively low net worth, who still feel the need to prove their status.

The ultra-wealthy, who are securely post-economic, have nothing to prove. They trade recognizable branding for absolute material quality. A stealth wealth wardrobe might consist of a $2,000 Loro Piana cashmere sweater or a bespoke suit from Savile Row—items that look ordinary to the average person but are instantly recognizable to the few people who matter in their social stratum.

There is a distinct “if you know, you know” signaling mechanism at play. Consider the Patek Philippe Calatrava, often regarded as the quintessential luxury dress watch.

A Patek Philippe Calatrava features a champagne dial, gold baton hour markers, and a leather strap. - Photo by Clyde94 (Wikimedia Commons) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

To most observers, it looks like a generic $50 watch you could buy at a department store. There are no diamonds, no massive dials, and no obvious branding visible from a distance. Yet, it retails for tens of thousands of dollars. By the time someone amasses enough capital to afford anything they want, they usually realize the most valuable commodity money can buy is the freedom to be ignored.

QUESTIONS:

1. What is the difference in outlook between the wealthy stealthy and those who wear a Rolex?

2. Is it really true that the stealthy wealthy have nothing to prove — “The ultra-wealthy, who are securely post-economic, have nothing to prove." — given that they don’t wear a $50 Timex? It seems that they still want to signal to others that they are part of the “club”?

3. Why not take the next step and wear a $50 watch and really go stealth?

QUESTIONS:

1. Does this 60 minutes interview describing the Israeli Mossad pager attack make “conspiracy theorists” seem reasonable (at least sometimes)?

2. Have you heard theories that Charlie Kirk was killed by an exploding microphone?

3. If Mossad did not want to foster conspiracies about “Jews running the world” or conspiring to kill opponents, would there be a better way to run and publicize their operations?

TRANSCRIPT

“We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way of being traced back to Israel,” Michael said. “Shell companies over shell companies to affect the supply chain to our favour.

“We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”

The operation expanded two years ago to include pagers, CBS said.

Mossad said it found that at the time Hezbollah was buying pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. It set up a fake company which used the Gold Apollo name on pagers rigged with explosives, without the parent company realising.

Source: BBC News

SUMMARY:

Paul Volker is most know for crushing interest rates in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Less well know is Volker’s work to continue US financial dominance while the US maintained deficits. Previously American dominance was made possible by US surpluses. The transcript described how “Wall Street was weaponized to recycle the surpluses of Germany, of Japan and later China.”

TRANSCRIPT:

22:46

Okay. Uh so the dollar was the anchor that um uh held down a system whereby America’s surpluses were recycled to Europe and to Japan in order to maintain them. Okay. Uh and as Rick said, the Vietnam War must not be underestimated because it was two things, the Vietnam War and the Great Society program by LBJ that um which were of course related one to another. there was a a causal uh dialectical relations between the two. But those two things together uh together with the fact that uh the Japanese and the German capitalists boosted productivity well beyond American productivity um American capitalist production productivity. The result was that that by 1968 1969 the United States had slipped from a surplus position to a deficit position. And it was then that Henrik Kissinger who was at the NSE at that at that time the National Security Council before he moved over to the state department put a question to his team. He said how can we maintain our hegemony now that uh we are a deficit country and a young man called Paul Volkar who worked for him at the time 1970 I slipped him a note and said we’ll make the capitalists of the rest of the world pay for our deficits. We have to increase our deficits and have the capitalists of the rest of the world pay for them. And this is the post 1971 period. The period of financialization, neoliberalism, all those words that we use often with good cause describe a system where the recycling mechanism of the postwar period was inverted. We between the 50s and the 197 late 60s, early 1971, American surpluses were being sent over to Germany and to and to um France and to Japan and uh after that once America became a deficit country, Wall Street was weaponized to recycle the surpluses of Germany, of Japan and later China. Now again as Rick said before, petro dollar the Arab states effectively the Arab state the OPEC states uh played a very important role in this because to begin with um from 1946 1947 onwards under the Turman doctrine in particular um essentially Saudi Arabia would not have existed without uh a deal a quit pro between uh the CIA between the the State Department and the Saudi royal family. Uh you do as you’re told and you we will let you keep a substantial part of the oil ends. But of course it will all be part of the dollar system which was of course absolutely straightforward back then because even the French Frank even the dodge mark was part of the dollar system as part of the bread and wood system. um soon after that. Um the problem the problem the the interesting thing however was that remember Breton Woods was predicated on capital controls because Washington wanted to control the um movement of uh dollar funds uh across the borders of the bread and wood system.

26:06

QUESTIONS:

1. Did you ever wonder how the US is able to persist in running deficits for long? US deficits are necessary for the system to function the way that it does. It’s by design. What questions does that raise for you?

2. Would you be surprised if the CIA, Pentagon, an Executive branch offered Saudi Arabia a combination of threats an bribes to engineer a financial system in which oil was sold in dollars, generating demand for dollars, after the US went of the gold standard?

3. I often hear lip service paid to balancing the budget. How often have you heard “mainstream news sources” acknowledge that the US needs to run deficits if it is gong to continue to maintain the world’s reserve currency?

Did you know that in Marx’s day before they had ibuprofen, people used opium to treat their ills?

When Marx was talking about the self-justifying effects of historical religion, he was talking about how system justifying beliefs “actually reduce anxiety, guilt, dissonance, discomfort, and uncertainty.”

Transcript

The palliative function: why believing in inequality feels better

7:19

We do find that um giving people the opportunity to justify the system uh leads them to report uh more positive affect and less negative uh affect and to feel better uh and more satisfied with their own situation and the status quo in general. And so the general idea here is somewhat reminiscent of um Karl Marx’s often understood notion that religious ideology is the opiate of the masses. That is like ibuprofen. Uh it plaates and paliates. A lot of people don’t realize that when he when he wrote that people used opium to when they were sick and tired and things like this and had headaches. Um so they didn’t have ibuprofen so they used opium and that that’s sort of what he was saying. And he found that system justifying beliefs actually reduce anxiety, guilt, dissonance, discomfort, and uncertainty. Because if you think the system is fair, you don’t have to carry the psychological weight of your own disadvantage. You don’t have to be angry, you don’t have to fight. So you can just get on with things, which is absolutely diabolical news, isn’t it? Because essentially the psychological medicine for inequality is believing that society is fair. It turns out gaslighting yourself works. The fact is in the short term believing the system is fair makes you happier than knowing it isn’t. And in some ways it reminds me of this. You know like if you go to a chicken shop and there’s on the logo there’s always a chicken looking absolutely delighted outside. Hey, come in. Eat me. I I used to think that that’s that’s so perverse. Like I don’t want to be reminded of a chicken when I’m going in to eat chicken wings. But I suppose if I do want to be reminded, I want to think that the chicken’s absolutely loving it. Eat me. Eat me. But it turns out the chicken is right. The chicken is right to be happy. Can’t do anything else. May as well be happy. Because it’s not that people are fooled, but it’s that believing in the system, the current system where you’re getting railed in the short term genuinely feels better than not believing in it.

9:30

QUESTIONS:

1. Have you ever thought you would be happier if you adopted an uncritical posture in which you believe the system is generally fair?

2. Why is drug use so common in society? Is their a correlation between systemic injustice and drug use?

3. Do you consciously resist advertising that features unrealistically happy people (or animals or do you prefer to “go with the flow.”

They talked about this as “AI Safety”, “Owning the Means of Production,” and avoiding being “Dominated.” This sounds a lot like the perspective other countries have when dealing with US/Western companies, so it was interesting to see US companies advocate a similar path.

According to the podcast, Anthropic is no longer trusted by its customers to host their businesses without turning on them, leaving Apple the only company seen as respecting their relationship with developers.

TRANSCRIPT:

But let’s go back to the supposed crash out by Karp on CNBC. It was nothing of the sort. It was all these legacy media types making that claim. And that’s the first clue that he’s actually saying something insightful and maybe kind of brilliant. And I think the thing that he said that I hadn’t really thought about in quite those terms is he started talking about AI safety in the enterprise and what that really looks like. And what he said is that what technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha, meaning their proprietary knowledge. They want to know they own the means of production, he said, and it’s not being transferred to someone else. And what he’s referring to there is that these enterprises are at risk of transferring their knowledge, their knowhow, their trade secrets, their customer data to these model providers who might eventually decide to compete with them. Like you said, JCAL and you can see that enterprises are waking up to this threat and they’re not happy about it. And I think KARP is exactly right about that. Now, I think this is a really interesting take on AI safety because what safety means for an enterprise is again that they get to control their own data, their model weights, their compute. So, a frontier lab can’t hoover up their proprietary knowledge, their alpha and turn it into their next product. And if you don’t think that can happen, just look at what happened to Figma. So according to the information, Anthropic quote unquote blindsided its then business partner with the launch of Clawude Design. So this was a new vertical app that Anthropic launched to compete in the design category. And Figma’s founder said that Anthropic had not been completely honest with them. Enthropic chief product officer had actually even served on Figma’s board and didn’t resign until 3 days before the launch of Claude Design. So obviously Figma again felt blindsided by this and you can see the resulting impact on their stock price. Figma’s stock has fallen something like 50% this year while Anthropic’s valuation has surged. This is not an isolated example. Anthropic has also launched Cloud Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, Claude Financial, and of course Claude Code. And every single one of these vertical apps expanded into categories that was previously served by companies building on top of Anthropic’s own models. And really, if you want to go back to when Anthropic’s revenue explosion began, it was with the launch of Claude Code. And how did they know to launch that product? Because they saw that cursor was doing extremely well. Curser was one of their biggest customers. They created the coding assistant first. they created that category and anthropic said oh like why don’t we vertically integrate so in other words they’re watching where the value is being created on top of their models then they’re moving in directly and this is a formula that I think is very Microsoft like you could say it’s very Google like they want to dominate the model layer you could call that the operating system and then use that position that monopolistic position to capture the most lucrative verticals so if you want to think about like the Microsoft example they had the Windows monopoly and then systematically they went and dominated every lucrative category of business software. It started with spreadsheets and word processing and then eventually it went to the browser so forth and so on. If you want to look at Google, they basically had a monopoly or dominant position in search. And if you go back to the early days of Google, the search results picked you off site. And in fact, they really pride themselves on how quickly they could send you off site. But gradually over time, they use that traffic to tell themselves where to build properties. And today, fewer than half of searches kick you off site. You stay on Google properties. And I think something similar is happening with Anthropic here. the pattern is clear, they are going to use their dominant position in the model to then grab more and more territory in any interesting and lucrative vertical. So again, back to Alex Karp’s point, if you’re an enterprise customer or a developer, why in the world would you ever want to share any proprietary data with them? You are mortgaging your future. You are sealing your fate. You are going to lead to disaster for your company. Just one last point then I’ll turn over JCL is that Daario at the same time that they pursue this business strategy has been arguing that open- source models are dangerous and need to be restricted. Well, dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data. It’s dangerous to his business model because his business model requires that customers don’t have a lot of choice at the model layer. And what Karp is pointing out here is that if you want to have true AI safety as an enterprise, you have to retain the ability to choose at the model layer who gets to see and use your alpha. Yeah, this is well said. I think you you picked that carcass to the bone a bit, but Chimath, you’re actually doing specific examples of this uh at 8090. You’ve been testing uh some of the open source models. I saw you share that on Twitter X. So maybe you could give us a little feedback on what you’ve learned as uh the CEO of 8090 and you know your firsthand experience now with using open source for the first time in the last couple weeks for this specific use case in enterprises. When you start a company I mean you guys all know this you’re not starting it for the moment that exists today. you’re almost sort of trying to forecast if such and such a set of things happen then here is the scene that that gets created because it takes time to build something and it takes time to get enough reps to know what you’re doing in your go to market. This for me was the moment that I thought would arrive which is the point where everybody wakes up and realizes wait hold on a second two things are true. The first is that my business is complicated. I want AI to be able to accelerate it, but I want to be able to protect myself in doing so. And then the second is I want the flexibility where there’s an independent third party control plane that I use to get all these benefits so that I don’t leak and seed my advantages away. And I think Alex is an incredible, smart, brilliant guy and he completely nailed it. And I think he called out on its face the huge risk of this. So let me just give you this narrative in three tweets. The first one is I read this really interesting study from BCG and what they looked at was the return on capital employed or ROCE of various businesses. And this is what’s incredible. The cost of capital has now with long-term rates moved back to what its long run average is which is around 8 to 11%. What that means is like that is the actual cost that you would borrow money at effectively. The problem is that half of large US companies now cannot deliver returns that exceed that. That is a really big problem. And then second there’s a further problem which is that persistently low returns. So in the you know 1 2 3 4 5% is about one in seven companies all around the world. Okay. So why is this important to note? It means that being in business is complicated. It’s hard. Not everything works all the time. There’s a bunch of underperforming businesses. There’s a bunch of underperforming segments. So in that lens, when you, you know, think about what Sax said, which is you have this company that comes to you and says, I have a magic box and all you have to do is tell me everything you’re doing, and this magic box will make everything better. But then all of a sudden, from the shadows, the magic box says, you know what, I’ve decided to compete with you. That is a huge risk.

QUESTIONS:

1. Why is it so important to own the “means of production”?

2. What is open source and why does the AI Tsar advocate for “open source” AI?

3. What are the risks of sharing your proprietary information with AI companies like Anthropic or Open AI?

“Imagine how fast this world would fall apart if everyone were allowed to get away with the sh*t that Israeli / US Complex get away with.” (“Impunity” paraphrased )

QUESTIONS:

1. What names could you substitute in place of “Israeli / US Complex”? to describe other groups that exhibit this “impunity” dynamic? Many Americans might substitute elites who are above the law, most recently and notoriously in the Epstein Files. Others might swap out “rouge law enforcement” or “intelligence”. What other groups would you list for those who act with impunity?

2. How many others do you think could agree on your description of “the problem?”

3. Is it possible to get buy-in to a solution to the problem, or is solving “impunity” a structural problem that requires a complex unwinding?

AI Query:

The phrase “Death to Potatoes” (marg bar sibzamini in Farsi) was a satirical protest slogan used during the 2009 Iranian presidential election. It was a parody of the traditional revolutionary chant “Death to America,” repurposed by supporters of reformist candidates to criticize incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for attempting to buy votes by distributing free potatoes to the poor.

Origin of the Slogan

The slogan emerged as a direct response to the Iranian government’s decision to distribute massive quantities of free potatoes to citizens in the months leading up to the June 2009 election.

• Parody of Revolutionary Rhetoric: The phrase mimicked the iconic “Death to America” chant, a staple of hardline rallies since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. By substituting “America” with “potatoes,” protesters highlighted the absurdity of the government’s populist tactics.

• First Appearances: The chant was first reported at rallies for Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister and the leading reformist challenger, particularly in cities like Yasouj and Isfahan. Supporters also carried placards reading “Death to Potatoes!” to mock the administration.

Origin of “Death to Potatoes” slogan Iran 2009

Political Context: The 2009 Election

The slogan was a central element of the campaign against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was seeking re-election amidst significant economic dissatisfaction.

• Accusations of Vote Buying: Reformist rivals, including Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, accused Ahmadinejad of using state resources to bribe voters. The distribution of 400,000 tons of free potatoes, along with other subsidies like cheap oranges and tomatoes, was characterized as a blatant attempt to secure support from rural and low-income demographics.

• Diversion Tactics: Critics argued that the potato giveaways were designed to distract the public from deeper economic issues, such as high inflation, rising unemployment, and the mismanagement of oil wealth. While the government focused on populist handouts, opponents demanded solutions to the “hobbled economy.”

• Government Defense: Officials claimed the distribution was necessary to prevent waste from a bumper crop surplus caused by export tariffs. They denied allegations of electoral bribery, stating the choice was between distributing the food or letting it rot.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 2009 election controversy

Economic Implications

The potato controversy underscored the severe economic pressures facing Iran at the time and the government’s reliance on resource distribution to maintain popularity.

• Subsidy Strategy: Ahmadinejad’s administration expanded a yearlong program of handing out cash checks (up to 1 million rials) and food staples. This approach leveraged Iran’s status as a “rentier state,” using oil revenue to provide direct aid rather than implementing structural economic reforms.

• Cost of Living: Despite the giveaways, the cost of basic food and vegetables had increased significantly during Ahmadinejad’s first term. The irony of receiving free potatoes while struggling with overall food inflation fueled public resentment.

• Critique of Value: Advisors to rival candidates pointed out the limited value of the gesture. Abbas Abdi, an adviser to candidate Mehdi Karroubi, notably quipped, “Why not onions? Onions are far more expensive than potatoes. If they really wanted to help, they would give away free onions.”

Iran economy 2009 potato subsidy debate site:reddit.com

Public Reaction and Legacy

The “Death to Potatoes” movement illustrated a shift in Iranian political discourse, where economic grievances temporarily overshadowed foreign policy issues.

• Shift in Priorities: For the first time in years, domestic economic competence trumped weightier matters like Iran’s nuclear program or relations with the US as primary campaign issues. The slogan signaled that the electorate was more concerned with their dinner tables than geopolitical posturing.

• “We Don’t Want Potato Government”: The sentiment spread beyond a single chant. Supporters of Karroubi in Isfahan expanded the rhetoric to “We don’t want potato government,” rejecting the notion of an administration sustained by temporary handouts rather than sound policy.

• Symbol of Populism: The phrase remains a historical symbol of populist demagogy in Iran. It highlighted the tension between the regime’s attempt to “buy allegiance” through oil-funded subsidies and the public’s desire for sustainable economic governance and political reform.

Questions:

1. Did you notice a theme that is common in politics of political distraction — in this case “temporary handouts rather than sound policy.”

2. How impoverished must Iranians be to be “bribed” by potatoes? How much of this was due to sanctions?

3. Are you surprised with the sophistication of Iranian political parody rhetoric?

ELSEWHERE:

• The Guardian, Spuds of wrath: potatoes-for-votes protest blights Iranian election, 14 May 2009

The following video echos the dark history that led up to the Holocaust. Take this to heart!

Transcript

6:18

Here is the clean text with all the timestamps and time references removed:

It is by Corey Turner and it starts off by saying, “The Justice Department released a memo that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disability and it has stirred fear and anger amongst advocates and families.”

This is put out by the Office of Legal Counsel and most people think that Stephen Miller is the one who is driving this. It argues that the states do not have to provide in home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. It is trying to put disabled people in institutions. That’s the goal. It’s trying to move disabled people out of public life and into for-profit institutions. According to Allison Bararkov, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University, this memo now indicates that it is the position of the US government that people with disabilities do not have a right to be part of their communities. I cannot overstate how significant this change in position is.

She said disabled Americans used to be hidden out of sight in institutions, subjected to pretty awful conditions in this country for a long time. And part of what overturned that was JFK going and visiting people who were institutionalized and seeing the conditions that they lived under.

Providing services that allow for disabled Americans to stay in their homes, in their communities, integrated into society is incredibly cost-effective. It is a good use of resources. It’s not just the moral and ethical thing to do. It is the cost-effective thing to do. Every dollar you spend on a disabled person providing necessary support where they are in their community, you would have to spend $3 providing those same services in an institution. But see, it’s not about being costeffective at all. It’s about eugenics. It’s about pushing disabled people out of sight, out of mind. And it’s also, as everything this regime does, it’s about the grift. Just like Core Civic and Geog Group, private corporations are getting billions of dollars of taxpayer money to run concentration camps full of immigrants, they want to take our taxpayer money that is currently going to community-based inhome services, and they want to funnel all of that money into corporations that will run institutions. It’s all about using people’s suffering, institutionalizing and imprisoning people in concentration camps or in these again like institutions does they’re going to turn into concentration camps. You understand? They will turn them into concentration camps. Taking our taxpayer money to do all of that. They want to warehouse disabled people just like they want to warehouse immigrants because denying people their liberty, trafficking inhuman beings essentially is a big big profitable venture for an awful lot of private corporations in Donald Trump’s America. You see, they’re trying to force this change. They’re trying to force eugenics on the American people, for-profit eugenics, by cutting Medicaid, $500 million, by cutting food stamps, by making the cost of living so high that families can no longer have a dedicated caregiver who is at home.

. Trans folks are at incredibly increased risk for political violence right now. And the regime is stoking it. The Supreme Court is stoking it by scapegoating trans kids in sports in particular. Of 510,000 athletes in the NCAA, only 10 of them are trans.

QUESTIONS:

1. Are you familiar with the history of eugenics, institutionalism, and concentration camps in Nazi Germany?

2. Where is the support for this policy coming from?

3. How much of a role does profiteering play in this?

4. Would the American public oppose these plans if they were widely understood

The danger moves slow, so be aware!

This is how rights usually go aware. Through quiet memos, withdrawn enforcement, and budget math that most people never read.

A state trims home-care hours, and the federal government decides not to step in.

A waiver waitlist gets longer.

A personal-care aide is cut.

A family is told there’s funding for a facility, but not for the support that would let their mother stay in her own home.

Medicare cuts incentivize institutionalization

First, the money. Last year’s reconciliation law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is estimated to cut federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over a decade, roughly 14%. Medicaid covers nearly two-thirds of all home-care spending in the country, and over half of Medicaid spending finances care for people ages 65 and older and people with disabilities, the groups most likely to use home care. The last time the federal government cut Medicaid on this scale, states responded by serving fewer people and trimming benefits and provider pay. Facing these cuts, states will be under pressure to trim again, and this memo could give them legal and political cover to weaken community-based care.

ELSEWHERE:

• Office of Legal Counsel Memo: Application of the Rehabilitation Act and Americans with Disabilities Act to State Institutionalization of Patients with Severe Mental Illness or Disabilities

• DOJ Memo Is Attempting to Turn Back the Clock on Integration and Olmstead’s Promise

• What the New DOJ Disability Memo Really Means for Your Family (and What It Doesn’t)

• ACLU Statement on DOJ Memo Threatening the Right to Community Living for People with Disabilities

• Why Advocates Fear a Return to Disability Institutions, Disabled World

• Why Disability Rights Advocates Are Alarmed by the DOJ’s Olmstead Memo

GEMINI:

Why do some Conservatives say Obama was a Divisive President?

When Conservatives label Barack Obama’s presidency as “divisive,” they are generally pointing to a combination of his administration’s policy decisions, his rhetorical approach, and the shifting social dynamics of his time in office. While he campaigned heavily on a message of national unity (”There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America”), critics argue that his actions once in office led to deeper polarization.

Conservative arguments regarding his divisiveness typically focus on a few key areas:

1. The Passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

For many conservatives, the passage of the 2010 healthcare law is the ultimate example of partisan division.

Pew Research Center

• Unlike other major, sweeping pieces of social legislation in U.S. history (like Social Security or Medicare), which received significant bipartisan support, the Affordable Care Act was passed using a complex legislative maneuver (budget reconciliation) with entirely Democratic votes.

• Conservatives argued that “ramming through” a law that fundamentally reshaped one-sixth of the American economy without Republican buy-in set a hostile, highly partisan tone for the rest of his presidency. (The American Prospect)

2. Identity Politics and Rhetoric on Race

While Obama’s election was seen by many as a historic milestone for racial progress, conservatives argue that his administration’s rhetoric ultimately frayed race relations.

• Critics contend that the administration leaned heavily into “identity politics,” which they believe divides Americans into competing demographic groups rather than uniting them under a shared national identity. (The Heritage Foundation)

• Conservatives frequently point to instances where the President weighed in on local law enforcement incidents before full investigations were complete—such as the 2009 arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. or the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin—arguing that his commentary prematurely inflamed racial tensions and vilified law enforcement.

3. “Class Warfare” and Economic Rhetoric

On economic policy, conservatives felt Obama’s rhetoric pitted different socioeconomic brackets against one another. His frequent calls for the wealthy to pay their “fair share” and comments during his 2012 re-election campaign were viewed by critics as “class warfare.” From the conservative perspective, this demonized job creators, entrepreneurs, and successful Americans to score political points, rather than fostering economic unity.

4. Executive Overreach and the “Pen and Phone” Approach

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, legislative gridlock ensued. In response, President Obama famously stated he would use his “pen and a phone” to enact policy through executive orders and agency regulations when Congress refused to act. (The Heritage Foundation)

• Conservatives viewed this as a blatant bypass of the constitutional legislative process.

• Actions like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and strict new EPA regulations were seen as unilateral edicts that completely ignored the millions of Americans represented by the Republican majority in Congress.

5. Cultural and Social Shifts

The Obama era coincided with rapid shifts in cultural norms, particularly regarding LGBTQ+ rights, culminating in the legalization of same-sex marriage. Conservatives, particularly social conservatives, felt that the administration used the cultural leverage of the federal government to aggressively push progressive social views, leaving traditionalists and religious conservatives feeling sidelined, alienated, and culturally villainized. (Pew Research Center)

In short, while progressives often viewed these same actions as necessary progress in the face of historic congressional obstruction, conservatives saw an administration that they believed consistently chose a progressive ideological agenda over genuine bipartisan consensus, thereby deepening the nation’s political fractures.

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you accept that Obama did not govern as a uniter, as he campaigned?

2. Are there a less divisive policy alternatives to “identity politics”?

3. What lessons should Democrats learn about dealing with police scandal, while minimizing division?

4. How should Democrats address economic stratification, while avoiding polarization? (And knowing that there are wealthy interests that will play victim to avoid the issues)

5. Do executive orders risk divisiveness by functioning as “unilateral edicts?”

COMMENTS

Edwin Knight

Absolutely, 8 years of pushing racial division, pushing get rid of police, bringing in thousands of absolutely worthless Somalians, and then pulls the TREASONOUS move of acting as a shadow president while Biden was in office

Mary Frances

Well he was right I cling to my religion in tough times. Unfortunately he said it with disdain. I say it with pride. So yeah there is that.

Dionysus

It was always their intention to pit the races against each other…divide and conquer…one of the oldest strategies in the world to control the population…keep us from being united as Americans against the evil, corrupt, treasonous, lying Marxist, socialist, and communist DemonRats trying to “fundamentally change” America.

When you’re flying, chances are the only time you’ll hear from the pilots is when they’re making those familiar announcements over the PA system. You know, the ones about flight details or the weather at your destination. And if you’re someone who spends a lot of time in the air, those scripted updates can start to feel a bit... uninspired.

But imagine this: instead of the usual announcements, what if you could tune into the live conversations between your pilots and air traffic control? It’s like a behind-the-scenes soundtrack for your flight, giving you real-time info straight from the cockpit. If that sounds like your kind of in-flight entertainment, then next time you’re flying with United Airlines, grab your headphones and tune into Channel 9. Trust me, your inner aviation nerd will thank you.

What is United Airlines’ Channel 9?

If you’ve never heard of Channel 9, you’re in for a treat. It’s a unique perk offered by United Airlines that lets passengers listen in on live radio chatter between the pilots and air traffic control. Yep, you read that right – you can tune into the real-time conversations happening up front in the cockpit, all while you’re comfortably seated back in the cabin.

Original Article

QUESTIONS:

1. Have you listened to Channel 9 on a United Airlines Channel?

2. Do you know of other airlines who have adopted a similar openness?

3. Have you heard of young people learning from exposure through a medium that provides the type of openness as Channel 9?

I think its healthy when professionals discuss the dynamics and risks of their profession. Seeing online discussions of these issues inspires confidence.

• I like seeing professionals use their voice.

Gemini Summary: Pilot Refuses to Land

• The Setup: At JFK Airport, a busy and complex airspace, air traffic control (ATC) attempted to sequence a small corporate Citation jet, a departing Air India Boeing 777, and a landing Delta Air Lines Boeing 767 on Runway 31 Left.

• The Strategy: The controller instructed the landing Citation jet to exit the runway quickly and ordered the Delta flight to slow down to its final approach speed to create a gap. The goal was to squeeze in the departing Air India 777 before Delta landed.

• The Problem: Heavy aircraft like the Air India 777 require a significant amount of runway (roughly a mile and a half) and take longer to spool up their large engines from a dead stop.

• The Go-Around: With Delta closing in on a short 2.5-mile final approach, the Delta crew judged the gap to be too tight and unsafe. Acting on their professional discretion, they initiated a calm and collected go-around.

• The Aftermath: The controller was visibly irritated, asserting the spacing “would have worked”. However, the pilot emphasizes that the controller’s opinion doesn’t matter; safety is ultimately the pilot’s responsibility, and they must be able to justify their choices legally if something goes wrong.

The Speaker’s Personal Experience

• A Similar Close Call: The speaker shares a personal story from a few weeks prior where they were piloting a heavy aircraft at 1:00 AM.

• Nighttime Disadvantage: Unlike the daytime JFK incident, the speaker’s situation happened at night, making it incredibly difficult to visually gauge whether the departing American Airlines plane was safely in the air or still on the runway.

• A Different Judgment Call: Realizing they were heavily compressed, the speaker chose to land rather than go around. They reasoned that because their plane was so heavy and fast, executing a go-around risked overtaking the climbing aircraft from behind, which presented a higher risk.

Broader Insights on Aviation

• The “Squeezing” Trend: The speaker highlights a scary recent trend of US air traffic controllers trying to aggressively slide departing traffic into tight gaps ahead of landing traffic.

• The Two Extremes: While US controllers frequently push efficiency boundaries to manage heavy traffic, other countries (like China) represent the opposite extreme—holding aircraft short of the runway for multiple minutes even when incoming traffic is miles away.

• The Pilot’s Core Rule: At the end of the day, a pilot must do what they feel is safe in their gut. If an incident occurs, the extra paperwork and reporting fall on ATC, not the pilots.

In Summary: Pilots are rarely fully satisfied—they get frustrated if made to wait for minutes, but they will prioritize safety and reject a landing or takeoff if a controller tries to squeeze them into an uncomfortable 30-second window.

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you often hear people openly share about the issues of their job like the pilot did?

2. If you listened to the described interaction, what was your impression of the pilot and the air traffic controller? Were you impressed or scared?

3. How do employers feel about open communication, like occurs on United Airlines’ Channel 9 or Online podcasts like this pilot’s? Are there concerns over regulation, lawsuits, or reputation risk that make them resistant to openness?

DETAIL: Transcript

This is a really scary Trend that I’ve noticed that started in the last couple years and I never noticed it before something very similar to this happened to me just a few weeks ago check out this audio Tower Delta 45 heavy is that uh Z Delta 45 heavy Kennedy Tower you’re following a citation there’ll be a heavy boing Triple 7 departure between you and that traffic caution wake turbulence wind 280 at 17 Gus 21 Runway 31 left cleared the land 31 left clear land up 4 5 Delta 45 heavy reduced to Final Approach Speed final Air India one Z2 heavy Kennedy Tower Runway 31 left line up and weight traffic’s on a 5 mile final Runway 31 left line up and weight Air India one Z2 heavy I’m guessing with all of that you should know where I’m going to go with this so we have a Delta 767 here on a 5 mile final for Runway 31 left and at the end of all of that they got told to slow down to the Final Approach speed Delta heavy reduced the Final Approach speed what that means is that when we’re coming in on an approach we might be going in this case let’s say 200 knots and you’re coming at 200 knots but your landing speed is going to be 150 knots just making up numbers here I don’t fly the 767 but those might be the rough numbers that you’re working with when air traffic control says slow to your Final Approach speed or slow down to your slowest practical or some version of that what they’re trying to do is create some separation between you and the plane in front of you and so you might be at 200 knots and then you know okay hey we need to really slow this up so then you’ll slow down and let’s say in this particular case again I don’t know but his ref speed for landing was going to be 150 knots they’ll slow it down to 150 knots so that way they can give the amount of space or the most amount of space possible for air traffic control what’s happening is a controller here is actually trying to get the space in order to allow this Triple 7 to take off before this Delta 767 comes into land the problem is is that there are some variables when you’re dealing with Landing traffic and departing traffic and trying to squeeze those things in you saw that video I talked about with FedEx and uh Southwest and that happened in Austin what you have is when you have Landing traffic coming in behind each other everybody knows hey you need to get off the Runway pretty quickly or air traffic control can tell you hey expedite Off The Runway you have somebody on a Four Mile final and Pilots will try to help each other out by getting off the Runway quickly however when you have a landing traffic that’s Landing you can’t obviously line up the other guy to take off until the other plane is landed so you have a little bit more juggling that you have to do Watch What Happens next jet share 869 you have uh Mike Charlie jet share 869 right Mike Charlie no delay off please and then uh taxi November and left Quebec now when the controllers asking that do you have Mike Charlie he’s trying to get that pilot to get off the Runway as soon as possible he’s hoping that they were going to get off sooner but he’s encouraging them in a way by subtly hinting Get Off The Runway by do you have Mike Charlie that’s the way that controllers will tend to do that now all of this is happening here in JFK which is a very dense and complicated airspace and before we get more into this video I just want to tell you that I have the utmost respect for these controllers because JFK newk LaGuardia that airspace is got a lot of traffic coming into it and they are honestly some of the best controllers that I’ve dealt with anywhere in the world so this is in no means to bash all of these controllers and I’ve dealt with a lot of controllers all over the world they are very fast and very efficient but in this case it doesn’t really work out well in my opinion so the plane that controller wants to get off the runways a citation which is a small Business Jet and he’s asking him to exit the runway here at Mike Charlie now this is a pretty long Runway but it’s important to know that 31 left has a displaced threshold which means this area is not allowed for Pilots to land on it and when I pulled it up on my chart I can see here that to get off the Runway at Mike Charlie is actually only 5,439 ft which is a very reasonable distance for a plane to land in that’s not like he’s rolling it out all the way to the end and when you’re flying in corporate cuz I used to do that a lot of times you want to make that landing and that roll out as smooth as possible if you’re flying other things let’s say Freight you don’t really care how aggressive the break is if it’s more efficient or or better you might have a higher break setting but when you’re flying corporate and you have people that paid a lot of money you’ll usually want to roll it out but 55500 feet that’s not an excessive roll out that’s plenty of time for a jet of this size to get off the Runway quickly 5,000 for me would would be pretty tight but for them that’s that’s a reasonable amount of time but what you have to keep in mind is all this is happening while Delta is barreling in on them and they’re on a fem final now when I hear five miles I think roughly 2 minutes because they’re going to be doing roughly 3 miles a minute at 180 knots so they’re going to be there in about 2 minutes so in order for this to all work out this Air India plane has to get off the Runway and be safely away from the runway before these Delta Pilots come in and land they can’t be one lifting off and one touching down because something could go wrong and most Pilots aren’t going to feel comfortable getting themselves pinned into that corner because the plane that’s Landing is going to have a lot more speed and momentum than the one that’s just getting off the ground in some cases you don’t want to be a pilot in this situation where you’re roughly 50 ft from the ground and all of a sudden you see the plane in front of you have a engine explode and now there’s Parts all over the runway and it’s not going to be a safe place for you to land now you have to do a go round they’re in the air maybe they’re on fire because what’s going to happen is when you do a go round your nose is going to go up and you’re going to have a hard time seeing in front of you so now you have your nose going up you’re very close to another plane that’s going up in the air it’s just going to be an uncomfortable situations so you you don’t want to be that close and at the end of the day you have to go with what you’re comfortable with that’s the number one rule if you’re feeling in your gut this doesn’t feel right or hey I I don’t feel like this is going to be safe then you as a pilot have to say hey no this is no good we we got to get out of here so Watch What Happens bar India one Z2 heavy win 270 at 17 Runway 31 left clear for takeoff traffic two and a half mile final left check J 869 left on the back monitor ground Point ner you want Delta 45 to go around Delta 45 heavy you said you’re going around hey affirmative Delta 45 heavy Roger go around turn left heading 220 and climb and maintain 2000 turn left heading 220 climb maintain 2,000 to 458 American 45 heavy you have a reason for the Miss approach out the 45 heavy area there was no way that was going to work with in front of us there first I want to talk about the difference of this situation and the one I talked about earlier that I did the video on with FedEx and Southwest that happened in Austin that Austin video it sounded like to me that Southwest got on the runway and they just took forever to get on the roll I’ve talked about in the past when you hear people start talking at a faster rate usually they’re moving at a faster rate sometimes that can be stress related sometimes it could be hey they’re trying to move quickly they know that Delta’s right behind them ARA India knows that Delta is coming up to land and they want to get out of the way for them that just a courtesy that all Pilots are they’re trying to be efficient with what they’re doing they want the efficiency from Air Traffic Control and so that guy’s talking quickly I think because he’s trying to move quickly to get everything done and get off the Runway that’s what I hear as I’m listening to the audio off now here’s the problem this Triple 7 is going to India that’s a long flight and so a Triple 7 that’s full of jet fuel like that is going to need a lot of Runway let’s say a mile and a half half a Runway and they’re at a dead stop and then you have a plane behind them that is moving it let’s say 3 mil a minute or maybe they’ve slowed down so it’s 2 and a half miles a minute they are going to be there very quickly and that Air India plane has to go from a dead stop because they can’t get clear for takeoff until that citation gets off the Runway so they’re going to need a mile and a half roughly of Runway and then this other plane that’s coming in Delta is going to be there in roughly a minute that is a very tight thing to do and this is all happening in the daytime so what that allows is for the pilots that are in in the Delta Pilots they can see the plane that’s down there and they can see where they’re at in the relation to their takeoff most Pilots are going to know when they’re coming in like hey he’s at the very beginning of the runway or he’s at the very end of the runway he’s at the middle of the runway wherever it’s at and they know kind of where that would put them as far as for their stage of takeoff if they’re towards the middle of the runway and you’re still 100 200 ft back you know they’re going to be Off The Runway before you get down there but if they’re at the middle of the runway and you’re at 50 ft you’re thinking oh this is going to be very tight and that can be a problem so that’s why this Delta crew decided it was too tight and it was time to do this go round Del the 45 heav area there’s no way that was going to work with their front us there now my story was a little different that happened a few weeks ago mine was at night and I’ll get to that in a minute but these Delta Pilots making the decision to do the go run I’m sure made a lot of the passengers nervous because they maybe have never experienced a go run before but this this pilot uh that’s flying for Delta sounds very cool calm collected saying hey that wasn’t going to work for us so we decided to do a go around so if the passengers could hear how calm he was they would probably relax a little bit assuming that they didn’t know there was another plane on the runway but they would relax a little bit because he’s just making what he thinks is the smartest safest decision which is 100% the right decision here if he doesn’t feel that it’s safe there’s no reason to try to force it there’s nothing to prove unless he’s running out of gas he’s on fire there’s no reason to get on the ground right away so he made the decision to do that go around now listen to the response from Air Traffic Control to that Delta 45 heavy I do this every day sir it would have worked it would have been tight but it would have worked you can contact New York on 127 28.12 2812 and that’s 4 we needed to go around now giving credit where credit is due that pilot isn’t being upset he’s not being rude he’s being being a professional which is what you’re supposed to be if you’re an airline pilot he’s not saying he’s not arguing and doing all that other stuff that you see little kids do when they get on the radio he’s just saying hey that was too tight I wasn’t comfortable with it and it’s my plane it’s my safety and I chose to do a go round the controller saying well it would have been tight but it would have worked his opinion I’m sorry doesn’t matter because the pilots have to feel comfortable that they can safely get in there and land the aircraft and because that controller saying oh it would have worked because I can see it would have worked it being really really tight and him feeling comfortable with it in this case doesn’t matter because the pilot has to see this is going to work for me and my airplane and my safety and my crew and you have to be able to justify in a court of law if something does go wrong if a India does blow the engine and aborts or takeoff or whatever and now you’re committed or who knows all the parameters but if something happens and somebody dies or somebody gets hurt those pilots in the court of law have to go and defend what they decided to do so the controller clearing you to land doesn’t mean that you have to do that and he made the decision I’m not comfortable with this let’s bug out and do this again now what I think happened is the controller thought the citation would probably be moving quicker and get off the Runway quicker he would have allowed Air India to get onto the runway quicker and out of the way but for whatever reason that didn’t happen and he could have slowed down Delta a lot earlier in the communication but he decided to give all these other instructions before telling Delta to slow down Delta 45 heavy Kennedy Tower you’re following a citation there’ll be a heavy FL Triple 7 departure between you and that traffic caution wake turbulence wind 280 at 17 Gus 21 Runway 31 left cleared the land now if this had been a Regional Jet let’s say a crj700 like I used to fly it it would have been a totally different scenario as soon as that guy rolled off or we were in position he could have said hey clear for takeoff that little jet is going to need less time to spool up the engines and go our engines were smaller they are able to spool up faster it’s a lighter plane you can get off the ground quicker all of those things can happen faster on a Triple 7 they’re big enormous engines and those engines take a while to spool up so even though they gives them the clearance it takes a while even if you put the engines all the way up it takes a while before they start motoring up and getting this plane moving and this plane is going to need a lot more Runway than let’s say A crj you can take that crj and fly it like a race car a trip 7 is not going to fly like that now you can tell this controller is a bit irritated by the way he’s saying that it would have fit I do this every day sir it would have worked it would have been tight but it would have worked but at the end of the day it’s a judgment call and so this pilot made their call Air Traffic Control made their call of what they thought that it was going to work and the pilot said no and this trend of trying to slide PL traffic in to make it all work I’ve seen it happen a lot with Landing traffic that’s really different because you can tell them hey you got somebody 4 miles behind you please expedite Off The Runway and it’s a little bit easier to gauge speed with the takeoff that’s something that I noticed more recently than before where they’re trying to fit stuff in where it’s not going to work and then this go round happened so here’s my story that happened a few weeks ago that’s very similar to this but I was flying a-8 at night and we were coming in very heavy and it had been a long night but we are coming in and we hear Air Traffic Control tell American to get up on the runway and that they had traffic on a 3M final the problem is at night it’s a lot harder to tell if the plane in front of you is moving because all you have is a few little lights and it’s hard to tell where they’re at in relation to the runway have they taken off are they in the air it’s a lot harder to tell everything so as we continue our approach in we’re realizing like oh man we’re coming in fast that guy’s on the runway this is getting kind of tight but we couldn’t quite tell if they were off the ground or were they at the end of the rway or they in the air because we’re still coming down towards the runway by the time we started to realize like oh wow we’re all pinched up basically like what was happening with this this plane it was it was it was a decision call I was the one flying actually and I just said hey’re we’re just going to land they just got off the Runway and the reason why is that in my mind it was going to be safer because we were a very heavy one we were going a lot faster than that plane was going so what would have happened is we would have overtaken them as they’re climbing up we’re going up they may be climbing up faster because they’re a lot lighter than we are it would have just been a higher risk situation so I have to make this Split Second call of like okay uh we’re just going to land and it was very uncomfortable and way more uncomfortable than it needed to be it was like 1: in the morning they could have waited 30 seconds or they could have told us hurry up or they could have had him wait one more minute and take off after us especially in the middle of the night now the other side of that is you’ll see sometimes when I go to a let’s say China China will be holding short of the runway there’s not a plane in sight they’re like 15 miles from the runway and we’re like Hey we’re we’re ready to go and they’re like Landing traffic and we can see on our radar screen like they are forever away so we sit there for minutes not not seconds minutes as they come in and land and we’re thinking dude that was completely unnecessary so you have two sides of it you’ll have some airports in the US where they are just have so much experience they feel comfortable filling in that gap for the takeoff and the landing which in some cases I appreciate because there’s 50 planes waiting but at 1: in the morning that was the only plane there so it seemed like unreasonable we were following another guy so we thought that’s who we were following and then they decid they were going to slide somebody in well they slid two people in and they fit them out and we’re coming in at I want to say like 170 knots we we were pretty heavy so it’s like we’re going faster than normal and they’re trying to slide in another plane and I think they went a little bit slow even though the controller did tell them to hurry up because we were coming in it was just not a good situation so they’re they’re risking potentially us having to do a go around like exactly like what Delta did by trying to save them one or two minutes it’s going to cost us 15 or maybe 20 plus some reports because then with the go around we’re saying hey you snacked Us in too tight now that guy has to do a report and explain what happened and we don’t have to as a Pilots it’s it’s our discretion our Airlines is not going to be upset with us if we’re making a judgment call in my situation my judgment call was it’s going to be safer to land then potentially overtake this guy with our weight and speed so that was the decision that that I made this guy at the daytime had a much better gauge of the distance of what was going on so they made the decision called to do the go round so it creates an extra paperwork for for air traffic control so the moral the story is if you make me wait multiple minutes I’m not happy and if you make me wait 30 seconds I’m also not happy so basically Pilots are never happy unless we get exactly what we want every single time I look forward to hearing from you until then keep the blue side up

Host: Establishment Democrats are freaking out about these progressive winners, including Congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier who sparked controversy with a now-deleted tweet saying “F-ck Kamala Harris.” What’s your response to this?

Liza Featherstone: I would just like [these establishment Democrats] to actually spend a day gathering petition signatures for a candidate. When I did that for Zohran Mamdani in Bed-Stuy, a Democratic stronghold, the biggest obstacle was people saying, ‘f-ck the democrats.’

I would lead with ‘are you a registered democrat?’ and even normie, middle-aged ladies, white ladies, black ladies, you know, who are normally the base of the Democratic Party, would be like, ‘no, f-ck them.’ Everyone’s fed up. Everyone’s fed up.

Source: Useful Idiots, June 27, 2026

QUESTIONS:

1. I assume Liza Featherstone is speaking about voters in New York. How prevalent is this mentality in other parts of the country?

2. Do establishment Democrats understand how unpopular they are after constantly running as the “Lesser of Two Evils”?

3. Are establishment leadership open to changing leadership? Are they open to new leadership if that means more populous messages and accepting fewer “bribes” from corporations, billionaires, and other interest groups?

Transcript

And AI doesn’t need to do the programmer’s job. It just needs to

allow them to uh discipline the labor force so that you don’t get Google walkouts saying we’re not going to make

tech for um uh drones. so that you don’t get uh mouthy workers who demand higher wages, who hop from employer to

employer. You remember that the Silicon Valley firms about 10 years ago uh were settled a big criminal case where they

had uh gotten together and done a no poaching agreement saying they wouldn’t give raises to each other’s talent to bring them over because their wages were

very high and they had a lot of worker power. And so, you know, an AI that is controlled by a skilled worker doesn’t

solve that problem for bosses and the AI that that is being used in ways that um are really impressive for software

development. That AI is the AI that doesn’t fulfill that goal. the AI that uh you know poops out code faster than

any human being could possibly review it that is then you know has its homework marked by coders who are terrified they’re going to lose their job and are

working as Sergey Brin says a six-year week uh which he says is the target that everyone working with an AI should be uh

shooting for um those workers do fulfill the destiny but those are the workers saying you know I’m a software developer

in aerospace we’re using AI to write code never get on an airplane again because we’re producing the most ghastly tech debt at scale. So, you know, until

you can like cleave apart these subtle issues, you can’t know where AI is affecting the labor market, how it’s affecting the labor market, and how that relates to the investor story.

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you anticipate that greater adoption of AI will discipline the workforce?

2. Should we use this opportunity to renegotiate the social contract? If so, how would you like to change the social contract?

3. How do concerns over AI code affect your view of airplanes and other critical systems?

TRANSCRIPT CONTINUED:

on the on the on the question of hype and it correct me if I’m wrong but you seem to view this you know what’s coming

from the AI companies and the CEOs you know as at at least primarily hype that it would that it’ll the popping of the

bubble will leave based behind something but it’s mostly hype and then if you have a salesman who can go to a company

and say hey this will allow you to replace your mouthy workers that that’s pushing on an open door but that is that

isn’t of course a long-term business plan like that. It has to actually it has to actually work like and so it’s at

some point if if it’s not you’re going to start to see some dialing back which you’re you’re starting to see a a little bit of that from companies now which are

finding that actually uh you know they’re not able to completely replace people at this point. So much of this though seems to be organized around kind

of people’s thoughts and motivations and ideas rather than what’s actually happening. Um we put up F8.

What this is kind of a counter um argument being made by one of the uh one of the AI folks is I think this is an

open AI person. I can’t remember. He says so he says uh so many intelligent people still cling to the idea that everything the AI labs do is downstream

of IPO hope or whatever. Some kinds of intelligensia are uniquely unsuited for the moment because their lens is quote strategic skepticism where normal people

can employ magical thinking. And the latter part of that what he means by the magical thinking is like is observing uh

the AI mechanistically and saying okay we have we have some ideas about how this is working and why it’s working but

we don’t we don’t actually completely understand it and there is something going on here that is currently beyond

our understanding of it. Uh yet it is doing a lot of these very interesting things. is solving math problems that you know humanity has not been able to

to solve which puts it beyond just kind of a a guessing game robot like a a very significant thing.

So while we’re in the realm of just ideas and motivations and everything, what do you think of this challenge to kind of people like yourself people

like me in some respects that we are uniquely unsuited for this moment because our constitutions are constantly

skeptical? But at some point you’re going to run up against something that is real. And how how are we going to tell the difference if we’re constantly

looking for the fakeness behind the the frauds that run these companies? What if actually underneath it there are these

computer scientists who actually have developed something?

Well, I I think it’s a very weird argument that um being discerning makes it hard for you to find the truth. Um you know, approaching things and saying,

“Well, that’s an extraordinary claim. I don’t need any extraordinary evidence because the claim itself is so interesting, I think is a very weird way

to do truth seeking. And I think if you want to talk about magical thinking, the idea that shoveling words into the word guessing program makes it wake up and

turn into God is is extremely magical thinking. I I always say it’s like believing that if you keep breading horses to run faster, eventually one of them gives birth to a locomotive, right?

The the thing that we don’t know what consciousness is. Uh we have people who make AI who say things like this is 51%

of the way to consciousness. And when you challenge them and you say you don’t know what consciousness is, they say, “Well, how do you know this isn’t consciousness if you don’t know what

consciousness is?” Which is again a very strange little rhetorical slight. Uh you know, the last time someone said that to me, I said, “I don’t know what the weather in Paris is and I don’t know

what the weather in Lisbon is. That doesn’t mean they have the same weather.” The fact that two things that we don’t understand exist doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing. uh and

while we don’t know exactly how AI works and why while AI does exceed many of the technical uh uh guesses that we’ve made

about how making small changes in the techniques that we apply to machine learning would produce uh outputs that

would be commensurately small and in fact and instead they’re larger which is always exciting you know the formal term for that is a breakthrough breakthroughs

are cool and interesting um that uh even though that’s true the world is full of systems we don’t fully understand and

whose inputs and outputs we don’t um control uh precisely that are instead in a kind of brittle equilibrium that that

makes all kinds of sways and and changes all the time including just you know firms and uh even small relatively well

understood markets do things that are chaotic and hard to anticipate so I think saying oh well you know you’re uniquely unsuited because you’ve never dealt with a thing we don’t fully

understand means that you failed to grasp ask how many things we don’t fully understand which is most of them.

So uh go ahead Ryan.

Uh the one I guess two counterarguments that you hear from um defenders of of the virtues of the or the power of the

technology are that calling it calling it like a word guessing game is you know minimizes it to a to a a degree that

just misunderstands what’s going on here. And one and the two two examples they often give are, you know, a a couple that has been together for

decades that is able to complete each other’s sentences. It’s not just a kind of random mathematical guessing game that they’re doing. It’s like they actually deeply understand each other.

And it’s not they’re not just predicting from the past. There’s there’s something there’s reasoning and understanding behind that. And then the other example

they give is let’s say you you’ve you’ve [clears throat] read a mystery novel or sci-fi novel but a let’s say it’s a mystery novel and in the last page they

say uh and the detective says I understand I figured out who the killer is and the killer is and then it stops

and then the reader if you ask the reader what’s the word that’s going to come after this the reader who can

accurately guess the next word can do so because of reasoning and understanding like They they understood the book. They understood the story.

And so it’s not just mathematical computations and guessing. And so that’s true when people I’m sorry. Go ahead. I I cut you off.

No. So that so so they’ll say so there is some level of reasoning and understanding going on here that we

don’t quite understand ourselves yet how it mechanistically comes together, but it’s there’s something there. So it is

true that when people do it, it’s because we’re doing a thing called understanding and reasoning, which we only uh have a a

a cursory understanding of our are what’s going on both mechanically within the brain and then you know uh uh sort

of chemically and and so on cognitively what’s going on is not perfectly understood. But we actually have a much better idea of what the computer is doing. And if we’re discovering

something about what computers are doing, it’s that we are discovering that word guessing is actually very very powerful. Uh which does not make it

reasoning. So it turns out that there are like linguistic corelates latent in the structure of a mystery novel that

make it possible to if you count all the words, which is like so the idea that um counting words and then guessing based on the count is not what they’re doing

is just technically wrong. That is in fact what they’re doing. You that’s what model training is, right? You’re measuring the frequency distribution of

words in their relationship to other words and phrases. That’s what it is.

Now, saying that’s all it is doesn’t mean that it’s trivial. It means that there’s a lot of stuff that you can figure out by making those kinds of

guesses. But those guesses are not the same as comprehension, which is where we get this funny term that we use when we describe the defects in AI products,

which is hallucination. It’s not a hallucination. It’s just a a limit to statistical guessing. M now one of the

things that AI did for us this current generation of AI is it showed us that statistical guessing is more powerful than we thought it would be when you

scale it up that uh you the returns to scale from adding more training data and measuring more and more subtle

relationships are are larger than we thought they’d be. That is a legitimately really interesting thing to

discover about computer science and about frankly the nature of reality. And it’s not the same thing as reasoning.

Otherwise, these models wouldn’t make the the the characteristic errors that you get when you’re not reasoning, but just guessing uh guessing words,

right? So, I guess some of what I would say to that is is there any limit though to the that power of scale? Because

there have been a lot of predictions of, oh, they’re going to hit a wall, they’re not going to get better, they’re not going to improve much from here. And that hasn’t been the case. They’ve continued to improve, you know, an open

AI model solved this 80-year-old mathematics problem that humans had been stumped on. There was a situation that unfolded. We could put F7 up on the

screen. I’m sure you probably followed this. There’s a whole controversy over whether a chatbot wrote the this prize-winning story. Um, you know, for

this this famous Commonwealth short story prize. There were a lot of people who looked at this and oh, this is AI writing. They dispute that it was. You

know, it seems like the analysis at this point is that it wasn’t actually AI writing, but I think it indicates how advanced the uh AI even on in

creative endeavors that require, you know, the sorts of things that you would want to imagine humans were sort of uniquely good at that AI has gotten to that place where it’s indistinguishable.

I’ve seen other analyses where experts are judging short stories and they’re rating the, you know, the AI stories just as highly or if not higher than

some of the the human um creative product. So uh you know if if these laws of scale that just adding more and more

and more genuinely do produce these sorts of profound improvements what is ultimately the limit to that?

So the scale is breaking in the sense that they it it is it used to be that linear inputs to scale produce linear outputs to scale or even better than

linear. So you spend an extra dollar, you got an extra units worth of of goodness out the other side, whatever you’re using to benchmark that that number is going down. The amount that

you get out, which means that we’re having to put much more in. That’s why each model, you know, each new foundation model is is less profitable than the previous ones is that they they

are hitting limits to scale. You know, they I I I have heard people say that they have seen AI art that uh they can’t

distinguish from uh um human art of of quality. And [clears throat] I read that short story and it was ghastly. I mean,

it’s a it’s a bad short story. I think that one of the re, you know, and it’s not the first time that there’s been a

literary prize awarded to uh a piece of fiction that I looked at and was like, “This is unreadable, terrible stuff.”

And maybe that’s my bias because I’m a science fiction writer. We write pulp literature. Uh, and you know, within the science fiction field, which is one of

the last fields that actually pays for short fiction, um, science fiction editors are being drowned in AI stories and they don’t have any trouble discerning them because

they are each of them less publishable publishable than the last. They are dreadful, dreadful work. Um, you know, I

I’m not a mathematician. I’m the son of a mathematician. I don’t know enough about math to assess the problems that have been solved. It seems really

impressive. And you know the fact that um mathematicians have figured out how to use computers to solve problems that they couldn’t solve before is both

wonderful and normal. Uh mathematicians have solved new problems using computers for a really long time. And you know a mathematician and my acquaintance was

talking about iterating through uh several different ways of of um uh approaching a proof uh which would be

labor intensive to do personally and which you can automate through a computer. That’s great. Uh, you know, look, there’s a lot of things that that this software does that I think in the

absence of a bubble, we would just call a plug-in. And there have been some really important plugins for the tools I use over my life. I I word processors have really made some leaps and bounds.

My first word processor was a program printed in a magazine I bought at a newsstand and typed into an Apple 2 Plus. And in in the years since, word

processors have gotten all kinds of features, some of which are very valuable to me. Some of which I think are very frivolous, some of which I think when other people use them, it makes their work worse. I’ve never been

in a circumstance where I said, “Well, this plugin is so interesting. Let’s bet the economy on it.” And also, it’s probably time to feed the writers into a wood chip.

Yeah. Corey, my last question for you is do you worry at all that if you’re wrong

that if the technology is maybe not as you know we’re going to replace all human beings but if it is significantly you know more powerful and continues to

improve and there is some large chunk of the labor force that is displaced. Do you worry that if you’re wrong and downplaying its capabilities now that

you’ll suck some of the energy out of the the capability of people to to organize in ways that are are needed to deal with that you know very scary potential future?

I actually think that uh you know organizing about AI is a useful endeavor and that we should be organizing about it. I think the local movements that are

talking about data center justice, you know, no city council ever said, “Oh, we approved this planning permission and exercised eminent domain on your farm

without talking to you about it because we knew that you’d be really pleasantly surprised and we didn’t want to wreck it.” And so, the fact that we’re getting these local movements that are building

up this capacity to demand equitable treatment and to demand co-determination with technology, I think, is great. I I

I I mean, if it were the case that tomorrow AI could do a lot of human jobs that uh currently are being done by

humans, a I a functional economy would find work for those people because we have full employment for the next 300 years. We’re going to have to move like coastal cities 10 kilometers inland.

We’re going to have to deal with hundreds of millions of climate refugees. We’re going to have more zoonotic plagues as we get more habitat loss. like you, me, and everyone we know

and everyone who will live for the next three centuries is going to have their hands full. Like we don’t have a technological unemployment problem on our hands. If if we have an unemployment

problem, it’s because we have a social and economic problem uh that is exacerbating our environmental problem.

Well, that sounds like a grim future, just not one where the central problem is unemployment. [laughter] [gasps] Um Corey, thank you so much. I really appreciate um you know, your time

this morning and I think your ideas are really fascinating. I appreciate you spending the time to engage with us on them. Um, the book is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and I recommend everybody pick it up.

And if you want to get involved on these issues, visit eff.org. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing this work for 35 years, and I’ve been doing it with them for 25 years.

Amazing. Thank you for that plug.

[snorts] That was an interesting conversation, Ryan. I like that one.

Yeah, I think your question is an important one. What if he’s wrong? Uh, and sort to me, there’s sort of a Pascal’s wager element to it. Um, maybe

it’s all hype. If it is, then it’s another bubble that comes and goes. Yeah.

But if it’s not, you got to be planning for it now. Yeah.

You got to be we have to be thinking and organizing about what the world looks like in the event that it’s not hype.

And I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s hype. So, and I I’m in the minority. You and I think we’re both in the minority on this on the left. Um,

but it’s something that, you know, it’s we’re going to hopefully live long enough to find out. Yeah. Well, the other thing is, let’s say it is hype.

The very fact that you have all of these oligarchs who are like, “We need to change the social contract.” That also seems like an opening because I would like to change the social I don’t like

the social contract that we have now. It leaves many millions of people needlessly immiserated. So, if they’re giving us that opening, even if it is to

hype their, you know, shitty products, um, which I agree with you, I I don’t think that that is I do think that there’s a lot of there there for the technology. I do think it’s going to be

genuinely transformational. I also think it’s a bubble. I think it’s both of those things. Um, but in any case, if they’re giving us the opening to uh

restart negotiations over the social contract, I think we should take them up on that. Yes, indeed.

All right, guys, that does it for us. We got a great Friday show planned for you tomorrow. Um, I think Roana is joining to talk about his fight with Elon and

reflect on the week’s activities with regard to the the DSA wins. He endorsed, I think, Claire and Brad Lander, but not Daria Lisa, which I’m also interested to

to ask him about his endorsement process. So, should be a good one. Um, Ryan, thank you. Great to have you. Great to see you. Good to see you, too.

Yep. Safe travels and I will see you guys tomorrow.

Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

And if you’d like to get the full show ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

That’s right. Get the full show. Help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.

Meanwhile, a gaffe, it has been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down. - Michael Kinsley

Trump’s Iran Ballistic Weapons Gaffe

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (June 17) that it would be unfair for Iran not to have ballistic missiles if other countries have them.

"I'm saying that if other countries have them, it's a little bit unfair for them not to have some," Trump told reporters in Paris.

"If Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they all have some, I would say in relative proportion, I think it's okay."

QUESTIONS:

1. Can you think of other examples of (truthful) gaffes?

2. Do you think that Trump was influenced to say this gaffee by someone he spoke to immediately prior, like an Iranian source? If so, how great do you think the influencer feels to hear Trump say this?

3. Imagine if Trump applied the same logic to US and Israeli nuclear policy?

ELSEWHERE:

President Donald Trump appeared to equate US actions with the authoritarian regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, saying, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

Are you like Angela, at ParkRose Permaculture, who has a lot of videos on your YouTube Channel, but doesn’t have your own copies of the videos? Under pressure, you might rightly fear that if something happens to your channel, you may lose all your videos!

Here are instructions to download backups of all the videos on your YouTube Channel:

How to Backup a YouTube Channel:

1. Get List of All Video URLs: Example: ParkRose Permaculture: 5,315 URLs

2. Download the Video URLs using an App like Downie (for Mac)1

DETAIL:

Mac YouTube Download: Downie

If you want to download YouTube videos, and have a Mac, check out “Downie” by Charlie Monroe Software2 (no relation). In addition to supporting YouTube videos, Downie also downloads videos from other sites, such as Vimeo, Twitch, TED, Rumble, X, Facebook, and Instagram.

One important thing about Downie is that it accepts a list of video URLs, so that you can download multiple URLs in one batch.

How to Generate a List of Videos

WARNING: This next section is more technical. I ran this process manually for Parkrose Permaculture so they don’t have to bother with this step.3

Here’s a series of Gemini prompts I used to generate a list of “Parkrose Permaculture” videos:

Command-line Tool: yt-dlp

If you need a complete, structured dataset of all her video URLs for a project, your best bet is to use a free command-line tool like yt-dlp to extract the metadata yourself. Running a simple command like this in your terminal will output a text file of every URL in just a couple of minutes:

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print url https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture > videos.txt

# Slow down request using “sleep” to avoid YouTube limiting how many videos can be retrieved:

yt-dlp --flat-playlist --sleep-requests 1 --print url https://www.youtube.com/@ParkrosePermaculture > all_parkrose_videos.txt

Result: all_parkrose_videos.txt

How To Download Videos

Once you have that text file listing all video URLs, you can easily split it into batches of 100 using any basic text editor or spreadsheet tool.

• Download list of 5,315 URLS from Parkrose Permacultre

• Use Downie to download the list of URLS4

Video Credit: Spencer Vance

About Me:

I’m Tim Langeman. I live in Lancaster County, PA. As part of my work on a passion project called CiteIt, I learned how to handle YouTube videos programmatically using the python yt-dlp library featured in this article. My CiteIt app enables writers to build trust and educate readers by automatically looking up the context of writers’ quotations on websites, in YouTub transcripts, and PDF5 quotations (Demo). I hope to pitch the App to Substack so that every Substack writer can easily show their readers the context of their citations.

If you’re interested in getting a personal demo of the WordPress version of the App, feel free to send me an email: contact@citeit.net

P.S. I also run a Substack site: writing.openpolitics.com

FOOTNOTES:

Censorship & Disruption

Sometimes, people who ask questions have their questions suppressed. Ray McGovern tells about his experience asking Defense Secretary Donald Trump about the missing Iraq weapons of mass destruction and how Rumsfeld attempted to deflect.

1. I’ve noted before that Media Outlets like CNN censor their stories by submitting their Israel stories to the Israel censor.

2. I’ve also shown how the Q&A feedback at events is sometimes rigged, as shown by this video about the Turning Points USA questions to JD Vance.

3. I’ve also shown how real reform can be prevented by “Bluff Reform”.

REAL ACCOUNTABILITY: Iraq

Here’s a story about what happens when a serious and credential person tries to hold a powerful person accountable for lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

• Event Staff try to shut him down.

• “Security” is ready to evict him, but there were too many cameras that it would look bad

• Sec Defense Donald Rumsfield lies about his lie

• Ray McGovern catches his lie - Zarkowi was in Northern Iraq

• Ray McGovern catches his lie again - Zarkowi was only in Bagdad for medical treatment

Anderson Cooper calls Ray McGovern to ask him “were you scared”, rather than following up about the substance of Donald Rumsfied’s WMD lies.

In the future: Note whether questions address the root of the issue or distract away from it.

CNN Cuts Off Interview if he says the wrong thing:

Oh no! The interviewee is saying the wrong thing. The signal is breaking up!

QUESTIONS:

1. Have you observed event staff or speakers suppressing valid questions that they wanted to avoid?

2. Is there something the audience can do to support the questioner when this happens? How should audiences be educated about how thy can oppose manipulation?

3. Do you have any recommendations for suppressed questioners, such as how to route around the interference by posting their message online?

ELSEWHERE:

• How the CIA and Corporate Media Disrupt Truth

• Ex-CIA analyst: Rumsfeld ‘should have owned up’

• 20 Years Later: Ray McGovern : Ray Rips Rumsfeld; Israel Fears Gaza Flotilla

• Max Blumenthal EXPOSES False Flag “Antisemitic” Stabbing in U.K.

Gemini

That quote—popularized by libertarian podcaster and author Tom Woods—is a classic, cynical take on American foreign policy and the political establishment.

It plays on a well-known variation of an old anarchist slogan (”No matter who you vote for, the government always wins”), but adds a specific, hawkish twist.

Here is the breakdown of what that phrase actually means:

1. The “Forever War” Critique

The late Senator John McCain was famously a foreign policy hawk. He rarely met a military intervention, troop deployment, or international alliance he didn’t support. When people use this quote, they are arguing that whether a Democrat or a Republican wins the White House, the United States’ massive military budget and interventionist foreign policy will remain exactly the same.

2. The Illusion of Choice

It expresses deep frustration with the “bipartisan consensus” in Washington. The argument is that behind all the dramatic campaign speeches, debate stage arguments, and cultural fights, both major political parties are ultimately run by an establishment that agrees on the big things:

• Keeping government spending high.

• Maintaining global military dominance.

• Protecting the status quo.

3. The Maverick Reality

The irony of the quote is that John McCain himself was known as a political “maverick” who frequently broke ranks with his own party to vote with Democrats on major issues (like campaign finance reform or saving the Affordable Care Act with his famous thumbs-down vote).

So while the phrase uses his name to symbolize a rigid, unchanging establishment, the man himself was often anything but predictable.

QUESTIONS:

1. If there is a window, similar to the Overton window, that encapsulates the range of foreign military policy under republicans and democrats, how much difference is there in foreign policy between presidents of the two parties?

2. How do the positions of those two parties compare to the electorate?

3. Do younger voters have different views than older voters? How much is that influenced by more independent media?

4. Do you think this critique still holds true for modern elections, or do you think the parties have genuinely split on foreign policy lately?

DETAIL: ALTERNATE AI:

Brave AI

The phrase “No matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain“ is a political axiom coined by libertarian podcaster Tom Woods, formally designated as “Woods’ Law #3.” It asserts that despite campaign rhetoric or party labels, U.S. election outcomes consistently yield establishment foreign policy and militarism akin to that of the late Senator John McCain.

Core Argument. The statement argues that the U.S. political system functions as a “beauty pageant” where candidates may differ on domestic margins like tax rates or healthcare tweaks, but remain unified in maintaining the war machine and global interventionism. Proponents cite the presidency of Barack Obama as proof; despite being voted in as a “peace” candidate in 2008, he continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and initiated conflicts in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, effectively acting as a figurehead with limited control over the state’s drive for power.

Modern Application. The quote remains popular among libertarian and anti-war communities to describe the perceived futility of voting for systemic change. Recent commentary extends the concept to Donald Trump, noting that despite promises to avoid “stupid wars,” his administration also became embroiled in Middle East conflicts, reinforcing the idea that the electorate’s will on war and peace is systematically ignored.

The Declaration of Independence changed the world.

But behind the language of freedom stood enslaved Black valets listening to the conversations unfolding inside Independence Hall.

In The Valet’s Witness, author Rohn Hein explores the paradox at the center of America’s founding — liberty for some, exclusion for others.

This isn’t just about the men history remembered.

Rutledge worked to avoid “slavery” being mentioned in the document.

Almost all delegates had a stake in slavery of some kind.

It’s also about the people history pushed to the edge of the room.

QUESTIONS:

1. If personnel is policy, what does the group of representatives at the Continental Congress and the appointment of John Rutledge Jr as the second Supreme Court Chief Justice suggest about the institution of early American slavery?

2. The existing pledge of allegiance is long and has grown longer. Would it clarify things if we changed the pledge to:
   ”I pledge allegiance to ‘Liberty and Justice for All’” (period.)

3. What do you think of Rutledge’s argument that if the Constitution forbade slavery, the southern states never would have agreed to it?

ELSEWHERE

Wikipedia: John Rutledge Jr.

John Rutledge Jr. (September 17, 1739 – June 21, 1800) was an American Founding Father, politician, and jurist who served as one of the original associate justices of the Supreme Court and the second chief justice of the United States. Additionally, he served as the first president of South Carolina and later as its first governor after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Rutledge established a legal career after studying at Middle Temple in the City of London. He was the elder brother of Edward Rutledge, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Rutledge served as a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress, which protested taxes imposed on the Thirteen Colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain. He also served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, where he signed the Continental Association, before being elected as governor of South Carolina. He served as governor during much of the American Revolutionary War.

After briefly returning to Congress, Rutledge was appointed to the South Carolina Court of Chancery. He was a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which wrote the United States Constitution. During the convention, he served as chairman of the Committee of Detail, which produced the first full draft of the Constitution. The following year he also participated in the South Carolina convention to ratify the Constitution.

In 1789, President George Washington appointed Rutledge as one of the inaugural associate justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Rutledge left the Supreme Court in 1791 to become chief justice of the South Carolina Court of Common Pleas and Sessions. He returned to the Supreme Court, this time as chief justice, following the resignation of John Jay in June 1795. As the vacancy came during a long Senate recess, Washington named Rutledge as the new chief justice by a recess appointment. When the Senate reconvened in December 1795, it rejected Rutledge’s nomination by a 10–14 vote. Rutledge resigned his commission shortly thereafter and withdrew from public life until his death in 1800. He holds the record for the shortest tenure of any chief justice. His was the first Supreme Court nomination to be rejected by the Senate, and he remains the only “recess appointed” justice not to be subsequently confirmed by the Senate.

When the proposal was made that only landowners should have the right to vote, Rutledge opposed it perhaps more strongly than any other motion in the entire convention. He stated that making such a rule would divide the people into “haves” and “have nots,” would create an undying resentment against landowners and could do nothing but cause discord. He was supported by Benjamin Franklin, and the rule was not adopted.^[34]

In the debate on slavery in the new country, Rutledge took the side of the slaveholders since he was a Southerner and a slaveholder. Rutledge said that if the Constitution forbade slavery, the Southern states would never agree to the Constitution.^[35]

QUESTIONS:

1. Why do you think parliament’s actions were conflated with the King’s?

2. Would the logic of the “grievances” have been different if the American rebels had acknowledge that the cause of their grievances originated with the British parliament, rather than the King?

3. What do you expect American’s response will be after they update their historical understanding?

Transcript

0:02 Hey folks, as the folks come in for our event tomorrow at the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to talk about the uses of the 250th anniversary of

0:09 the Declaration of Independence, one of the things that we want to get into tomorrow on the live stream or that we might get into tomorrow on the live stream that Helena and I are doing with

0:16 guests to delve into these issues is one of the more thorny problems presented by a huge gap in what we know about the

0:25 Declaration of Independence and what most people think about the Declaration of Independence. There is the scholarship of the Declaration and then there is the popular beliefs about it.

0:34 There’s what historians know and think and have studied and what most other people believe that the Declaration of Independence is and does. One of the

0:42 biggest problems with that is the list of grievances. It’s probably the most problematic. The king did this, the king did that, the king did some other damn thing. But most historians acknowledge that those are not historical claims.

0:53 George III didn’t do any of those things. And the evidence is clear that no one in the Continental Congress believed that he did. I mean, they knew that the blame rested with Parliament

1:02 and with the ministry. Why Jefferson did it anyway has a few explanations. Steve Sarsson, who’s going to be there tomorrow, lays out his generous one in a new book. I have a less generous one,

1:12 but maybe we can put that to him tomorrow. But I want to actually raise all of this with you, too, because it’s something that we can talk about. The explanation matters less than the consequence of it. And here’s the issue.

1:24 Two centuries of public history have left most Americans with a model of the revolution in which a king was personally to blame for a list of things he had neither the power nor the

1:32 practical capacity to actually do. The Continental Congress, the senior patriots, all knew that the American public by and large today does

1:40 not. And that gap has shaped how Americans read political dysfunction ever since as a story about one bad man at the top rather than the structures

1:48 that give any executives the room to act. That’s a historical problem. And that’s not only the popular story of the revolution being wrong. It’s that that

1:56 being wrong about it in this particular way has trained Americans to look for George III every time the system fails them. Stripped the personalization away

2:04 from the founding the present looks different. And it’s a point worth unpacking. The whole point of the revolution from resistance through independence to the constitution looks

2:13 different which is why there is a huge disconnect between the scholarship our popular belief but it’s our popular belief that shapes our political culture and informs behavior today. So, I think it’s a point worth unpacking tomorrow.

2:24 Maybe Steve can weigh in. I mostly want you to. How was he?

Molly Crabapple learned Yiddish and spent 7 years researching this book on the Jewish Labor Bund, which was a movement that opposed Zionism before Israel was formed. Video

• The Bund was a model of strength, but without oppressing others

Summary:

1. The Jewish Labor Bund and the Philosophy of “Hereness”

• Definition and Origins: The General Jewish Labour Bund was a secular, socialist, and revolutionary Jewish party founded in 1897 within the Tsarist Empire. It arose during a period of severe anti-Semitic oppression, pogroms, and state-sanctioned discrimination (such as the Pale of Settlement restrictions and extreme military conscription).

• Core Mission: Rather than seeking to escape oppression by moving elsewhere, the Bundists aimed to overthrow the Tsar to build a democratic socialist state that embraced all ethnic groups equally. Simultaneously, they wanted to live full, proud lives as Jewish people—fostering Yiddish language, theater, and literature.

• “Here Where We Live Is Our Country”: This central Bundist slogan encapsulated their rejection of Zionism. They believed that fleeing anti-Semitism normalized racism, and they argued that their fight for safety and liberation belonged exactly where they were born and where their ancestors had lived for a millennium.

2. Historical Clash Between the Bund and Zionism

• Mutual Hostility: From their shared inception year of 1897, the Bund and the Zionist movement intensely opposed each other. The Bund explicitly labeled Zionism as an “enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat” because it viewed emigration as a capitulation to oppressors.

• Opposing Tactics: The transcript highlights a stark historical contrast: while the Bund focused on local resistance, early Zionist leaders like Theodore Herzl attempted to make deals with anti-Semitic government figures (such as Russian Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve) to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine in exchange for suppressing socialist/Bundist activities.

• Early Critique of Colonization: The Bundists immediately recognized that establishing a separate state would inherently require the colonization of land and the oppression of the indigenous population already living in Palestine.

3. Analysis of Modern Zionism and State Ideology

• Ethnonational Purity: Jamjum connects early 19th-century European concepts of ethnonationalism to Zionist doctrine, arguing that the movement did not set out to create a pluralistic democracy, but rather an ethnically pure state where non-dominant ethnicities are treated as “impurities” to be cleansed.

• The “Iron Wall” and Expansionism: The speakers touch upon the historical precedent of Revisionist Zionism (via Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” doctrine), asserting that the modern expansionist policies, land acquisition, and systemic displacement of Palestinians are not temporary aberrations but foundational, century-old doctrines of conquest.

• Christian Zionism: The conversation critiques modern Western political rhetoric (citing a clip of a US Ambassador) by tracing it back to 18th-century British Christian Zionism. They argue that Christian Zionism weaponizes Jewish identity to fulfill biblical end-times prophecies, which inherently strips away the local, humanistic agency of diasporic Jewish populations.

4. The Shift Toward Overt Fascism and Silencing Dissent

• Erosion of Liberal Discourse: Jamjum posits that Israeli political discourse has shed its historical “liberal mask” of multiculturalism and tolerance. Instead, internal political competition has shifted toward overt fascism, where politicians openly vie for popularity based on who promises harsher military measures, more land theft, and greater destruction.

• Western Complicity and Censorship: Crabapple reflects on what she views as a resurgence of Western fascism, referencing the actions of the US Trump administration, the Biden administration’s full-throated support of military actions in Gaza, and the UK Labor government’s ban on leftist commentators who criticize Israel.

• The Weaponization of Anti-Semitism: The speakers critique the severe modern conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Crabapple shares her own experiences of severe online harassment from Zionists who weaponize the Holocaust against her book—mocking the fact that historical Bundists were killed by the Nazis—simply because the Bund represents an alternate, liberatory model of Jewish history and strength.

5. Revolutionary Resistance and Social Frameworks

• Beyond Armed Struggle: In detailing the height of the Bund’s influence in interwar Poland, Crabapple emphasizes that their model of revolutionary resistance was deeply tied to building progressive social infrastructure. They didn’t just advocate for armed self-defense; they revolutionized daily life by creating self-managed mutual aid institutions, progressive schools for children, shelters for women, and networks for people with mental illnesses.

• A Common Human Demand: Ultimately, the transcript concludes that the fundamental desire of Palestinians is not unique to their ethnicity, but a basic human demand shared with historical movements like the Bund: the refusal to be killed, colonized, or stripped of their dignity, and the assertion of their right to build beautiful lives where they live.

QUESTIONS:

1. Had you heard of the Bund before? Is that surprising?

2. Are you surprised that the Bundists recognized that Zionism could not involve “a land without a people for a people without a land” and would require oppressing other people somewhere else.

3. Why do you think Zionists hate/d the Bund?

4. What did you think of the comment that many European countries, such as France, were not able to stop the Nazis, so it should not be surprising that the Jews in Poland and Ukraine were not able to stop the Nazis?

DETAIL: Transcript

00:00 Introduction
03:09 Who was the General Jewish Labour Bund?
08:38 Zionism’s solution to anti-Semitism
10:25 The Bund’s political philosophy: Fight oppression, not run away from it
11:58 Zionists and the Bund ‘hated each other’
15:00 Christian Zionism
17:52 European anti-Semitism
21:21 Israel is an expansionist ethno–nationalist project
28:09 Fascism shifts liberal discourse
32:35 Conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
45:00 How do New York Jews feel about Israel?
47:25 It’s not Netanyahu. It’s always been Zionism, now we’re just seeing it.
53:05 The unspoken crime of Zionism, destroying Arab-Jewish relations
58:22 There is a hatred in Jewish history of anything seen as weak
01:03:15 Pretence of indignity
01:09:46 Zionism hijacked Jewish identity and turned it into a genocidal project
01:13:00 Genocide continues as 33 killed during Eid in Gaza

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Bund really hated Zionism because they felt that it was submission to their oppressors. And the Bund says that Zionism is the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.

I mean, we we’re talking about the world’s first anti-zionist. Exactly.

Yes. The the Bund was had a trajectory of an entirely different future of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe, right?

I do not have to justify myself to the world when I say that I am anti-Zionist because Zionism killed my family. It killed the people in Palestine.

Very fundamental level. Palestinians like anyone else just don’t want to be killed. There’s nothing particularly Palestinians about what Palestinians want. I think what’s particular is that Palestinians have had to live for the last 80 years under this kind of fascist genocidal regime that gets to parade itself as a liberal democracy. and whenever it needs to take off the liberal democratic mask and go full genocide, the whole world teams up together and puts sanctions on the people it’s killing. But when you read Molly’s book, the first thing that the Bundists are saying uh is they immediately recognize that this is going to involve oppressing people somewhere else.

There are so many reasons that Zionists hated the Bund and that they still try to erase their memory. But one of those reasons I believe is because the bund was an alternate model of Jewish strength. He wrote that it was ironic that Jews who are the primary victims of totalitarianism should be adopting those methods. And he said it is as if the slaughterer has infected the victim with his germs during the slaughter.

Today on Palestine Deep Dive, we’re asking one of the biggest questions in modern political history. Was Zionism inevitable? And what other Jewish futures once existed before the creation of Israel?

For decades, we’ve been told a very simple story that Zionism was the natural answer to anti-semitism, that nationalism and separation are the only possible answers to fear, that Jewish safety required a Jewish state, and that Palestine was simply the place where history arrived.

But history is messier than that. Our guests tonight will help us recover histories that are being deliberately buried.

We’re joined by Molly Crabapple, artist, writer, and author of Here, Where We Live Is Our Country, a remarkable exploration of the Jewish Bund, a secular socialist anti-Zionist movement that once represented a completely different Jewish political future. And we are also joined by Hezem Jamjum, historian, translator, editor, and one of the most important Palestinian thinkers working in our archives, political memory, and anti-colonial history today.

Today we’ll talk about Zionism, anti-Zionism, how colonial powers reshaped relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Bundest idea of hereness, and what happens when entire political traditions are erased from public memory. And we begin with simple phrase from the Jewish Bund. Here where we live is our country.

So thank you so much for joining us here in the studio. It’s uh very lovely to have you both. Um to start with uh this phrase um Molly many people are told that Zionism was the inevitable political uh reaction and expression of Jewish safety.

Chapter 2: Who was the General Jewish Labour Bund?

But your book recovers a major Jewish movement that rejected that idea. Who were the Bund and what did the phrase mean to to them and for you?

The Jewish Labor bound was a secular socialist and defiantly Jewish revolutionary party that was born in 1897 in the Tsarist Empire. And to understand who they were, I need to say a little bit about what it was like to be a Jew in the Tzarist Empire. Yes, it was probably the most miserable place in the world to be a Jew at that time. Jews were not just a religious group. They were a racialized minority who were subject to all sorts of laws that were meant to constrain their futures, to destroy their possibilities. Jews were confined to a swath of land called the Pale of Settlement, a western strip of provinces. There were quotas to limit them being in university. They were subject to a 25-year term in military conscription as opposed to five years if you were Christian. They were forbidden from a number of jobs. They were blamed for the revolutionary ferment that was starting to rise against the Tsar. It was actually the Tsarist autocracy that printed and distributed the protocols of elders of Zion. And many historians believe that it was that government that created it in the first place to deflect the uh anger of the poor people of the empire onto a scapegoat. And also as we know whenever a government targets a minority this gives license to all sorts of freelance bigotry and violence and racism. And it’s not a coincidence that the word pogram is a Russian word. Yeah.

So the Jewish labor bund was founded by young Jewish Marxists who and we have the election. Yeah. I love I love this from 1918 from Kev. They wanted two things. They wanted to overthrow The tsar and create a democratic socialist state in Russia that would be for everyone, all of the many, many different groups that lived in the empire. But also, they wanted to live full and beautiful lives as Jews. They wanted to speak their own language, Yiddish, that’s the language of the Eastern European Jewish working class. They wanted theaters and schools and literature and not just to be tolerated like you tolerate uncomfortable shoes but to to live as equals in the land where they were born in the land where their ancestors had lived for a thousand years. Yeah.

And then you wrote this book. It’s a wonderful book, a New York Times bestseller book about the history of the Bond in um in Eastern Europe which is really amazing. I recommend people to buy it and read it. you went there uh to cave and Eastern Europe and you studied the Bund and their history, but more importantly, I think you have a personal connection to the Bund. Your great-grandfather was one of them. So, can you tell me more about your personal connection to um the Bund?

Well, I grew up obsessed with my great-grandfather. He um he was a painter. He taught my mother how to paint. My mother taught me how to paint. And so I always viewed the very fact that I was a painter as a gift from him. I was surrounded by his paintings, by his sculptures. I um knew all these amazing stories about him. He was what you’d call a character. He he took his paintings back from the Brooklyn Museum because he didn’t like where they hung it. Yes, exactly. And then he made a what he called the Rothbour Home Museum of Direct Art on his lawn in Brooklyn and he said it was competing with the Museum of Modern Art. And I um knew about how he was someone who was a humanist. He was someone who detested violence so much that he was a vegetarian for moral reasons. He was someone who at a time of a lot of racism in America. He accepted my Puerto Rican father. And he was someone who even though he had left the Tsarist Empire in 1904 for New York City, he had created a body of work that immortalized it over 600 paintings that he called memory paintings. And there was one that I always loved so much. It was a a young woman and she had like a long skirt and her hair was all done up like, you know, a woman would be at the end of the 19th century. And she’s standing on a miserable dirt road at twilight and she was throwing a rock through a window.

Whoa.

And her boyfriend was next to her offering more rocks. Whoa. You know, a lady, she should not carry her own rocks. And it was called Ita the Bundist, Breaking Windows. And for me, it was so different than how I ever imagined a young woman in, you know, a little town in the Tsarist Empire would be at that time that I thought the secret to why she was different had to be in that name, in the Bund.

Cool. Nice. Yeah. So, Hezem, when you hear the the Bundist phrase, here we live is our country. As a Palestinian thinker and historian and someone who’s witnessing the genocide and the force displacement and the think cleansing of Palestinians, what do you think of this phrase?

I think it’s incredibly powerful uh even as a kind of entryway into a much bigger political philosophy, right? the the there’s something very um non-typical

Chapter 3: Zionism’s solution to anti-Semitism

about Zionism, right? That’s it’s one of really less than a handful of mo movements historically globally where a group of people say we’re experiencing oppression. Uh the solution to this is to go somewhere else uh on mass um and in and in the case of Zionism to go and become the oppressor somewhere else. Yeah. Right. Um and you know maybe this sort of land with a people for a people without a land maybe we can say oh well maybe um European Jews didn’t know that Palestine was inhabited etc. But when you read Molly’s book the first thing that the Bundists are saying uh is they immediately recognize that this is going to involve oppressing people somewhere else. the things that they’re writing and saying from the very beginning and only increasingly so after the Zionist movement begins to have its Aliyah and and uh start to move people to become settler colonists in Palestine is the Buddhists are saying a um my fight is right here why should I go anywhere else to fight it exactly I’m I’m just normalizing anti-semitism if I’m just saying oh no you can be anti-semitic here I’m going to go somewhere else the solution is to fight this and end anti-semitism. Um, but also within the same breath, everywhere you see it, uh, these these passages that you quote in the book, they’re saying, I’m I’m not going to kind of come from this history of fighting oppression so that I can go and be an oppressor somewhere else, right? And I think there’s a lot to learn from this like even for today um in the sense that the the Bundists create

Chapter 4: The Bund’s political philosophy: Fight oppression, not run away from it

um or kind of like establish a a political philosophy of resistance which is don’t run away from oppression, fight oppression. Exactly. And and I think like that really is a very solid internationalist standing starting point for a very ethical political practice for uh a coherent and consistent moral philosophy. Um and so in a way it’s kind of not surprising that the bun’s been written out of the history because that’s a very dangerous idea, right? To say when you see oppression face it head on. Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. You know, the Bundists are also coming in a moment where a lot of European Jews um have developed a kind of conservative position which is well, we’re almost white. Maybe if we change our names and the way we dress themselves, they’ll, you know, we’ll blend in and assimilate, right? Or um kind of hide the fact that you’re Jewish and maybe you’ll be okay. Um which becomes a swear word, right? They become called assimilationists. And this not these young Jewish people growing up in the 1880s and ‘90s are saying, “Wait, we’re going to allow the racism to continue to exist and just pretend we’re part of the racist society?” Like, is that really a solution to anything? So, um, you know, and this is one of the starting points of Zionism as well. And it’s no coincidence, I think, that that Zionism and the Bund are kind of come about in the same moment, the same year. Literally, literally the same year. So how was that received by the the Zionist in East

Chapter 5: Zionists and the Bund ‘hated each other’

Europe who were starting this movement to make the the Jewish people migrate to Palestine? How the Buddhist rece how the Zionist received the the ideas of the Buddhists?

I mean the two groups just hated each other from the start. There are quotes from Whitesman, you know, who later will become the first president of Israel, where he says in I want to say 1901, everywhere our hardest battle is fought against the Jewish labor Bund. And at the same time, the boon says that Zionism is the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat. And they debated each other on lecture stages, in pamphlets, um sometimes occasionally with their fists in the street. And particularly in the early years before Balfour because Balfour declaration changed everything. The Bund really hated Zionism because they felt that it was submission to their oppressors. There’s a moment I talk about in the book where Vladimir metam who is a major Bundist theorist. He goes to observe one of the Zionist congresses just to kind of like report about what’s going on. And at that congress, uh, Theodore Herzl brags about meeting with this notoriously, uh, racist Russian government minister. His name was Vicheslav von Plev. This is a man who Jews at the time held responsible for some of the most savage pograms. And not only did Herzl meet with him, he tried to work out a deal where in exchange for von Plev uh helping him, you know, acquire land from the Ottoman Sultan to colonize, Herzl would somehow suppress the activities of the Jewish labor Bond. Not that he had that power, but he he tried to make that deal. And it just shows the contrast between the people who thought the solution was to go elsewhere and colonize land and the people who thought the solution was to stay and fight.

And this isn’t the only or first occasion where Zionist leaders and thinkers will say we will accept harm to Jews outside of Palestine so long as it contributes to more Jews coming to Palestine. Exactly. Right. And this is I think more than almost anything else shows what Zionism is about. Exactly. And to be honest, as a Palestinian person who was raised in all of my life and um and and knowing about the phrase uh the Christian Zionist phrase of um land without people, for people without land, I’ve always reflected it as operation for Palestinians. But in newly with everything that’s happening and more understanding and awareness, I understood that it’s actually also oppression for the Jews. Why would all the Jews be uprooted from their countries because of racism and be pushed and forced to live in Israeli colony to oppress other people so they can actually claim that they might have safety? It’s very very oppressive. It’s very ugly. It’s very it’s it’s very weird that the world is still allowing such thing. And on that on that remark

Chapter 6: Christian Zionism

we have the US uh ambassador at Israel saying something on those lines. We can watch this video together.

I want you to know I’m not a Zionist because I’m Jewish. I’m a Zionist and an unapologetic one because I believe the Bible and because I recognize that Jews around the world representing only 0.2% of the world’s population have created outsized impact on the world. And unfortunately, there are people who hate you for that. But I’ve determined that they really more than they hate you, they hate the God who chose you 3,800 years ago as his people and gave you a place called Israel and gave you a purpose which was to present the law and the light to all the world. You being faithful to that task is not simply something that you should do. It is something that you must do for there’s no one else to whom the creator of the universe has given such a mission.

Listening to Oh my [ __ ] god. I’m so sorry. I’m not supposed to curse. I’m Forgive me. I’m from New York. Can you not curse when you hear that? Yeah. So, what do you think about the V? What do you think about what he says? What’s he smoking? Oh my god. I I mean I no I I you know when you hear when you see something that’s like so stupid and so incoherent and also so simultaneously like condescending and also so out of step with the actual genocide that’s being committed that you don’t even form you can’t even form words for it like you can’t even do it the respect of deconstructing the argument because it’s just the blatherings of a lunatic. I don’t know how else to describe it.

It’s the US ambassador. It’s not anyone else. It’s Huckabee. Yeah. Yeah. So I think to really understand this video we need to understand Christian Zionism. Yeah. Um which I don’t think is really part of the No, not not at all. Um the the thing is that Christian Zionism predates political Zionism that we know. Right. So Christian Zionism is from the late uh 1700s early 1800s Christian movement. It started in the UK. Very strong in the UK. Yeah. It’s very strong in the UK. It doesn’t necessarily start here. Um but definitely part the the Britain is part of its beginnings. Um and there’s no such thing as the UK at the time. Uh okay the uh the basically I mean the the Kafani in on Zionist literature is one of the first people to really tell this story. um you have a situation where we have that kind of classic anti-semitism, you know, the Shillock anti-semitism, the like all of the tropes that we think of when we

Chapter 7: European anti-Semitism

Think of the anti-semitic tropes around uh Jewish Europeans. Um but there’s this shift. there’s this beginning of a shift which is that um okay Jews are humans too and they are virtuous as well but they can’t be fully human and fully virtuous in Europe here with us Christians they need to go somewhere else go and be virtuous there and it’s not anywhere else it comes out of that very strange part of the Bible which is the book of revelations which talks about this prophecy and the the return of the Messiah or the coming of the Messiah or whatever. Um, and so the idea is, uh, Jews are here to fulfill that prophecy by moving to Palestine and and kind of, um, creating that situation that’s going to lead to the end of days and so on.

So, if we kind of take a step back from that, what a Christian Zionist is saying is that if you’re Jewish, your only like divine purpose on this planet, and this is Huckabee as well, right? I mean it doesn’t sound like it cuz he’s like I love you guys. I love the Jews et but the and he’s saying you must Yes. Exactly. He’s not even being subtle about it. He’s very clearly talking about Christian Zionism which is the purpose your purpose as a Jewish person is to move to Palestine to fulfill prophecy. Prophecy which involves um the Messiah coming and all of you Jews will either convert to Christianity or we’re gonna kill you all.

Yeah.

I I I really wonder how do you respond to that as a Jewish person? How do you feel when someone tells you that you’re not fully a human being? You’re not virtuous human being unless you move to another land. Isn’t that belittling of your humanity as a as a Jewish person?

Well, it’s I mean it’s obviously it’s disgusting. I mean it’s classic. It’s classic European racism. Europe has always had a problem with Jews that you know I think it’s probably based in Christian Catholic theology. Um and then when Jews are um you know emancipated in the 1700s that a new sort of racial conception of Jews comes in and also you know Europe has always had a problem not just with Jews but with diasporic people. I mean look at how Romani people are treated as well. It’s this idea that for people to be normal and for people to be legitimate, they each have to have like their little bordered ethnic state where everyone in that state speaks the same language and has the same religion and builds, you know, their buildings the same way. It’s this deadly dull idea that has led to constant murder and bloodshed inside Europe. And I think Jews as a diasporic people, just like Romani people, as a diasporic people, they rub up against that idea. And first, you know, Christian Zionism, which is like a theological argument, but also European ethnic cleansing, all sought to expel Jews from Europe because they just could not deal with the fact that there are some people that are diasporic people.

Yeah. And this Huckabee is the same man who responded to Tucker Carlson saying that it’s okay if they take it to one and he meant if the Israelis can take all the land between the river the Nile River and the uh Euphrates in in in Syria and Iraq. Now Netanyahu said a few days ago that he is going to take 70% of Gaza to start with. Let’s let’s watch this video together.

Chapter 8: Israel is an expansionist ethno–nationalist project

You see how disgusting is that so they will start with 70% of Gaza. They will take more of Gaza and they will take more of the West Bank and then actually they might expand to take all the lands as promised by the Americans by Mike Huckabee. What do you think Kazm is the future of the region and of the region and what is Israeli plans? Um there’s nothing new here. Yeah.

Uh this is Zionism. This is this has always been Zionism, right? I mean, if the starting point is a people without a land and then you realize there’s people on the land and your response is, well, let’s just make it a people without a land, uh, or a land without a people, right? Um, Zionism, I mean, what what more do we need than the Nakba of 1948? What more do we need than the massacres that have followed year after year after year? What more do we need then? All of the body of policy and practice that the Zionist state has created which is maximum land minimum Palestinians. Every single one of Israel’s policies concerning land and demographics since 1948 until today has been this right and it’s just a matter of pace.

And they will use something like the World Cup to go and ethnically cleanse land. They’ll use something like a US election to depopulate an entire territory. The fact that they they began this round of the genocidal war in Gaza. Uh they bombed a hospital. Yeah. In a way that was clear what they were about, right? This wasn’t about a military skirmish. This wasn’t about some battle on the ground. This was about eliminating the health care system’s ability to heal people. Yeah. And killing the largest number of people while doing it. Yeah.

And you know, so so they’ve never hidden who they are. I mean, they’re okay. In the 60s and 70s and 80s, maybe they would like try to play a certain diplomatic game where they would say, “Oh, like Arab leaders issued radio broadcasts and told the Palestinians to leave. That lie was debunked. They came up with another one.” There there’s a game that they play, but fundamentally they’ve never hidden this. I mean, one of the main characters in this book is the Jabotinsky, right? the the father of revisionist Zionism who in the 20s and 30s was already saying to the labor Zionists, “Guys, stop pretending like we can be nice about any of this stuff. No indigenous people leaves because you ask them to or pay them to or even make them uncomfortable to remain. The only way we’re going to make this Zionist dream come true is through conquest. Is through sheer military might where we go and he called this the iron wall doctrine. basically kind of like build an iron wall where the Palestinians will either like bash their heads on it until their skulls crack or go away on their own. Um so and and and that’s been the military uh demographic geographic doctrine of the Zionist state and the Zionist movement even before the state from day one.

And like we still pretend like we’re shocked when we hear this. He’s just restating a century’s worth of Israeli doctrine which is we’re here to establish a Jewish state like what Molly was saying about European Ethnonationalism. These early 1800s philosophers of nationalism uh ficta herder all German but most of them German right and the direct tributary to other European Ethnonationalism movements. um the the idea was always about a certain notion of purity, right? So this isn’t we want to when we say like when Zionism was the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, when we say Jewish state, we’re not talking about a kind of civic state or some kind of pluralistic state. That’s not when a Zionist in 1902 or 1922 or 1932 is saying the word state. They have a very clear idea in mind which is an ethnically pure state. There’s no room for messiness in what ethnicity and race is. Right? This is somehow you can draw a very clean line and a border um around the people and the land.

And so the idea that this kind of modern notion of the nation state emerges not as a notion of kind of pluralistic democracy. It emerges as a notion of um each the world is divided into types of people. Each type of people should have a piece of territory that’s theirs and anybody who’s not from that type of people who’s there is an impurity.

Yeah. Right. And then this border would expand too and then expansionism becomes this other thing right and so like Hitler in the same breath that he’s talking about a kind of Germany for the Germans also talking about Lebanon and we need to expand because there’s a German over there I need to expand the borders of Germany to include it right but also when we have this kind of unite the right marches here and they’re talking about um I mean they talk you know cleaning the country etc we all become impurities right and it’s this notion of human beings and human societies as something that can be dirty and pure and when it’s dirty you can clean it right and to clean in this sense is ethnic cleansing right and mass murder yeah unfortunately if you are enjoying this show please don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe on YouTube and if you want to support our work we warmly welcome you to become a paid subscriber your support help us build independent Palestinian le media in a world which has never needed it more. Find the link in the description below.

And that’s true. But we always have to keep remembering that watching Netanyahu and others talking in this vicious language about ethnically cleansing people and taking their land is something that I don’t know we shouldn’t accept. We never accepted it. But I think I think it’s worse when they pretend to be what they’re not. I think this there’s something relieving in the honesty.

Um yes true it’s increased with the genocide they started to show more well I mean and this is another interesting facet of fascism

Chapter 9: Fascism shifts liberal discourse

right which is that if we watch Israeli so you know in in in western media there’s all of this silencing of what you can and who gets to come and talk and what can be said about Israel and whatnot. Israeli media is moving with Israeli society. The fascinating thing about fascism and Israeli fascism and all fascism is that um it shifts the discourse from the kind of liberal acceptable discourse of we’re being nice and tolerant and pluralistic and multicultural and whatnot, which is what Israel would brand itself as, right? Like the the only place where you can be safely gay in the Middle East. Now that you have this shift to the mask coming off and an overt fascism um and a genocidal fascism, um Israelis are now trying to one up one another and compete on who’s more fascist.

When Netanyahu gives this kind of talk, um this isn’t just kind of like Netanyahu being honest or something. This is also uh political speech. Yeah. He’s selling himself. He’s selling himself. He’s selling himself as I’m the guy you want here. You may hear others saying that they will kill more people than me. They’re lying. I will kill more. You may hear I did. I’m the one who killed all of those people. Others may tell you that they want to have war with Iran and they want to ethnically cleanse South Lebanon and they I’m the one doing that. I’m going to do it even better than I’ll kill more people. I’ll take more land. Vote for me. Keep me in power. Stop protesting again. Insane.

But but I mean this is the kind of like it is it is a um you know on some level like this was the thing with things like the ICJ um deliberations on whether this is genocide on the things that uh something as powerful as the Hind Rajab Foundation and what they’re doing is that now the the internal conversation in Jewish Israeli society is no longer like how do we make ourselves look good? How do we make ourselves look like the liberal west? How a the liberal west is now a fascist west? Um B, the liberal west saw us do what we did at the hospital, let it slide, and we committed massacre after massacre. Our own soldiers filmed themselves doing it, and nobody lifted a finger. Um and uh and and so this is you know and c um it’s no longer popular within Israeli society to talk about liberal democracy and pluralism and peace process and reaching out and compromise and whatever. What sells what gets votes what gets popularity is to say I will kill more than the other guy. Yeah. Right. I will steal more land than the other guy. I will commit more warfare than the other guy.

Are we really are we seeing the end of liberal democracy in the west? I mean recently even the UK here banned two um left uh two leftist uh commentators Shin Kuger and um Hassan [ __ ] from coming to the UK because they criticize Israel. There’s a huge conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. I mean it’s crazy. Even in the UK we’re banning Americans from coming to this country because they criticize Israel. They call them anti-semitic because they are anti-ionist. You are Jewish. You’re anti-zionist. How do you feel about that? And do you think we are um in an era where fascism is coming back to the west?

I mean fascism is actually is absolutely coming back to the west. I I’m from Trump’s America, right? There’s a network of concentration camps for immigrants he has built where people are being murdered by guards every day. There are people who have been yanked off the street for daring to criticize Israel or for daring to criticize Trump as well. US citizens have been shot in the head for protesting against the kidnappings of their neighbors. Every single supposed institutional check and balance on Trump has failed. And the road for this was really paved by the hypocrisies of the Democratic Party, including their full-throated support for the genocide in Gaza. And in terms of the conflation of anti-zionism and anti-semitism, I mean, this is as

Chapter 10: Conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Disgusting as saying that it’s Islamophobic to oppose ISIS in my opinion.

True. It’s it’s it’s something that I I almost I feel I’m sorry that you have to keep repeating over and over again that anti-zionism isn’t anti-semitism. You have so many better things to do, so much more important journalism to do about the the murders, the wars of conquest of ethnic cleansing. And I truly I’m so sick of having to and and that you as well have to repeat this over and over again. And I mean, I don’t think that liberal democracy is dead in the West. And in part, that’s because I live in America and I continue to live in America. And I I fight for something better in America. But I think that there are many people, very powerful people in the west who are utterly willing to stamp out the flickers of liberal democracy in support of a genocidal ethnostate and also in support of sociopathic billionaires at home. But you know, I want to say something about um Hassan [ __ ] and this like disgusting ban against him. Hassan [ __ ] is an extremely strong force for anti-fascism, for anti-racism in America. You know, he has been doing so much work um electoral work to elect Democrats who are fighting against the the senile weakness of the party. I mean, he’s been a I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, you know, like like our mayors are on Mamdani. And Hassan has been tirelessly traveling all over the country trying to elect better democrats so that we can actually save our liberal democracy. And the idea that someone like this is banned from the United Kingdom because he correctly speaks about the genocide in Gaza is disgusting to me.

And banned from the Labor government in the UK. Yeah. That makes it even worse.

Exactly. Exactly. I mean there’s the same re reason right that in in some ways I think it was even more morally disgusting that it was a democratic president that um began the support of the genocide in Gaza. If it had been Trump I think Americans might have been able to tell themselves this is an aberration. This is not you know not our country. But to have a totally ensconced establishment democratic president that was full-throatedly supporting the genocide and then to have the Democratic party not even allow any Palestinian elected official, any Palestinian to speak at the DNC to have DNC staffers cover their ears while people read the names of children who were murdered. It’s I mean this is this is a betrayal of all of the moral values that humans should share. And you know, I think it’s a it’s a long hard road to claw ourselves back from that. The one that we you know, we have to do in America in order to overturn this um suicidal fascism that our country has plunged into.

And before I approach this question differently, if you don’t mind, though, um which is that I think liberal democracy is fascism when it’s comfortable. Um and fascism Yeah. And fascism is liberal democracy when it’s in crisis. So, and this is kind of hasn’t a better socialist than me. Um the I mean a um was it liberal democracy like was what black people and indigenous people in the United States lived under in the ‘ 60s ‘7s 80s the heyday of liberal democracy was that democratic or liberal right the largest prison population in the world the the constant ethnic cleansing ongoing genocide against indigenous people the ongoing legacies of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in the form of one of the most egregious racist regimes just kind of like institutionally and socially racist regimes in the world um where anti-blackness was on TV in the streets in the police stations in the prisons etc and just so obvious and all of the stats around that and the lived experience around that right um but then when it’s in crisis it closes up so I think it was no surprise that it was the Democrats in power that presided over the genocide in Gaza. And it’s no surprise that it’s the so-called Labor Party uh in Britain um that presided over the genocide in Gaza, right? They where are they now, you know? I mean, Starmer is still in power here. Genocide expanding into Lebanon.

Still denies it. Denies it.

Um and what was the big change in terms of Israel policy when it switched from Biden to Trump? Nothing.

Nothing. Right. imperceptible.

Um, you know, it’s just more kind of Trumpian personal business deals for his own personal wealth is the major change, right? This board of peace and the kind of Gaza Riviera turn it into a real estate deal, not just an Israeli military plan. The Israelis knew how to pitch it to him as a real estate deal. So, he’s like, “Oh, okay. I can my family will make money from this.” True. Um so ju just to say like we really should I mean there is something in liberal democracy that is very important and can be very revolutionary which is that a certain kind of political pluralism a constitutional baseline where we have rights a separation of powers that kind of prevents corruption and stuff like this. Yeah. No I mean people will be like oh communism works in theory. liberalism works in theory, right? And there is something but then when you see who are the victims of liberal democracy, whether it’s in the colonized world, right? I mean I um what the United States did through those years of its kind of liberal democracy in the ‘ 60s, ‘7s, and 80s throughout Latin America, even in Europe, I mean the Italian elections were messed up by the CIA when it looked like communists were going to win right after World War II.

In Greece as well, it was the first use of Nate Palm was actually on a Greek communists. Yeah. the usual for them.

Okay, we we will watch two videos very quickly uh for Hassan Biker and uh Shink.

This is precisely the reason why I am terrified of the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. The conflation is dangerous. Valid criticisms against the state, especially as all of the violence is unfolding and everyone can see it. um valid criticisms against the state committing these atrocities and tying it back to Judaism as a cynical ploy to stop all matter of of conversation is truly terrifying. And I think it directly causes anti-semitism to fester. We’re all going to ask ourselves later, what did we do to stop a genocide? And so what people who are Zionists and fervent supporters of Israel do is they hide behind anti-semitism and they use anti-semitism as a weaponized charge to defend the disgusting immoral actions of a foreign government.

For what it’s worth, and I speak to the British public every day for three hours, 5 days a week, nobody in this country thinks you can’t criticize Israel. I want to ask I just got banned for it.

Well, well, we’ll see. We’ll see exactly what the reasons were given and then you may you may be right that that has happened but people but that is the reason they gave they gave it to the press. That’s the government. I’m talking about the people of the country. Can I ask the people of the country are beautiful. They agree with me.

Can I well not all of them do but can I ask is that not the kind of inflammatory language that might have contributed to being banning because most let me let me finish my question. More disgusting than the Holocaust. More disgusting than Cambodia in our lifetime. It’s that’s the kind of inflammatory stuff that does get people fired.

Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s insane. So, wait a minute. You want me to just give a pass to this foreign government? That’s so No. Then how? No, no, no, no, no. These are all tricks. These are all tricks to say, “Don’t criticize this way. Don’t criticize that way.” No. You’re immoral if you’re not deeply criticizing the Israeli government. They are disgusting the the journalist. I I I believe. But I want to say something before I forget. Thank you for saying that we Palestinians, we should not justif yourself and say being anti-zionist is not anti-semitic. I don’t owe anyone an apology. I don’t need to like find a justification for people when I say anti-zionism is not anti-semitism. Israel killed my family. Israel killed committed a genocide in in Palestine. They’ve killed tens of thousands of people. And me as a victim, I do not have to justify myself to the world when I say that I am anti-Zionist because Zionism killed my family. It killed the people in Palestine. But I mean, what do you think of this journalist who is I mean, the thing that’s getting people fired up, I believe that was the word she used is seeing children slaughtered every day for 3 years, right? It’s seeing the most foul and obscene crimes being done against the Palestinian people, against people in Lebanon, by the Israeli government. That’s what’s making people angry. It’s that we’re living at a time where we’re not reading about these horrors in the newspaper 6 months later. We’re watching them as they happen. And we’re watching live. And we’re watching the people in Gaza with profound eloquence. Eloquence that comes from depths that I don’t think certainly someone like me would never have been able to summer to summon in that level of extremity. explaining their own genocides, protesting their own documenting their own genocides, the slaughter of their families, and protesting for their own humanity. That’s what’s getting people fired up. And this demand that people aren’t supposed to f be angry at this genocide that they’re watching every day is a demand that people close their eyes to reality and close their eyes to the basic demands of the human spirit.

Yeah. On that remark, Hezem, what do you think the Palestinians want or that, you know, like some people claim that the Palestinians uh like what’s happening is anti-semitic and the Bian liberation is anti-semitic and all of that, but what do you think the Palestinians actually want?

Well, I think Palestinians are like anybody else. There’s a contradictions and different uh political trajectories and different views. I think at the very fundamental level, Palestinians, like anyone else, just don’t want to be killed. Exactly. And don’t want to be mass incarcerated and don’t want to have their mobility restricted no more than 5 kilometers without hitting a checkpoint. They don’t want to live under apartheid in a genocidal regime. They don’t want to be treated like garbage. I mean there’s not, you know, but in terms of like the bigger picture, what is the goal of Palestine, etc., you know, there is this sort of is it a partition and a Palestinian statehood that denies the rights of all the refugees and 48 Palestinians and whatnot, or is it um a fully liberated from the river to the sea, or is there a kind of deeper understanding that we need class liberation and gender liberation and and all kinds of social liberation and revolution is every day or not at all. Um, and so I think it depends which Palestinian you ask on these bigger questions. But I think at the fundamental level it’s there’s nothing there’s nothing particularly Palestinians about what Palestinians want. I think what’s particular is that Palestinians have had to live for the last 80 years under this kind of fascist genocidal regime that gets to parade itself as a liberal democracy. And whenever it needs to take off the liberal democratic mask and go full genocide, the whole world teams up together and puts sanctions on the people it’s killing, right? Like and when when the Palestinian Authority gave in to Western demands to hold elections in 2005 and like voted in the wrong party, Western didn’t like it. The rest of the world was like, “Oh, that’s not the democracy we had in mind. we’re we’re cutting you off from all aid until you switch to non-democratic and then we love you and then we’ll love you. And then when that didn’t go exactly as planned, Israel imposed this a complete medieval style siege on the Gaza Strip supported by the world and the world was like okay yeah that’s this is something that they love unfortunately I I I want to go back sorry again to you Molly you are you are Jewish and you live in New York and New York is the the the most populate Jewish populated city after Israel. No, it’s No, it’s it’s the largest largest Jewish city in the world. Okay, my bad. More Jews live in New York than in Tel Aviv. But something’s really Oh, really? Yes. Okay. I didn’t know that. I thought it’s second largest city. Okay. But there’s something happening in New York now with the New Yorker Jews. They’re changing their views in Israel. They’re protesting and they show up in the pro Palestine protest in in New York. You elected Zoran Mumani who is a pro Palestine who is a Muslim as a New York mayor. What is really happening with the New Yorker Jews and why are we seeing this shift?

Chapter 11: How do New York Jews feel about Israel?

I mean the New York Jewish it’s even a misnomer to call it a community. There are so many different types of Jewish people who live in New York. There are anti-zionistic Jews, pro-Zionist Hessidic Jews. There are secular Jews who are pro-zionist secular Jews who are anti-zionist. There’s every when you think of a group of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people right this like this it’s impossible to say that there was ever any one view and I would also say that so much of the socialist history of New York which is the tradition that’s overrun Mandami walks in is a history that was built by Eastern European Jewish socialists these were the people who built the garment unions who built public housing who really were the backbone of the socialist social democratic left in New York City and in a larger sense in America. And so I think what’s happening is that for a long time this sort of liberal Zionist delusion, a delusion that could not exist in Israel, that only exists in America where people are able to put reality out of mind. This liberal Zionist delusion is cracking right under the reality of this genocide. It’s cracking both because people are watching these horrific murders live streamed, but also because people are seeing what Israeli officials say. And what Israeli officials say and the way Israeli officials act is repugnant to um not to really the traditions of American liberalism and there are so many things that are wrong with liberalism. Not defending it, but it’s true. It’s there is nothing about even that even an American liberal would see like a smaller Bengavier and find themselves in it. And so I think what’s happening is that at first you had, you know, liberal Zionists that were in this kind of like grief stage where they were like, “Oh, maybe it’s Netanyahu. It’s not Israel.” But after three years that’s becoming increasingly untenable. That’s they’re realizing, “No, this actually this is this is Zionism. This is Israel. This is Zionism. It was always this. Now we’re just seeing it.”

Chapter 12: It’s not Netanyahu. It’s always been Zionism, now we’re just seeing it.

And I think that in New York, many many Jewish people are obeying the demands of basic morality that people all around are and are saying I can this is this is disgusting. This is not in my name. This is not what I want. And they’re also looking at the fact that, you know, in you’re going to laugh at me, but in my view like New York is the greatest Jewish history Jewish city in the history of the world. You know, it’s like I it’s a place where you can be whoever you want and express your religion, express your culture in any way. And I think Jews are also looking at that and being like, why do I need this attachment to this ethnostate that’s doing a genocide whose language maybe I don’t even speak when right here, this is where I actually live. And you know, our Jewish Voices for Peace chapter in New York is huge. I’ve been arrested protesting against the genocide myself. Wow. And search for that. Oh, it’s it’s it’s nothing truly. Um, and I think for many Jewish people, young people, but also older people as well, so many older people, people in their 70s and 80s, they’re just saying like this is this is not who I am. And I I am disgusted. I’m disgusted by this genocide and I want nothing about me to be associated with it. And do you know like this means a lot for the people in Gaza and we have our correspondents in Huda who speak about what Zas mean to them what they understand of uh Judaism and anti-semitism and all of that. So let’s watch this video together and um and see how they react.

Hello everyone I am Aliske and I am Heske and we are both writers from Gaza. When a settler colonial state carries out a genocide under a religious banner, it wants the world to believe this is a religious war. Here in Gaza, we refused to swallow that bait. Growing up under a blockade, our world was shrunk, but uh our vision to things and to the truth was not. The occupier wants us to react with uh blind hatred, conflating oppression with faith uh to show our resistance as a form of anti-semitism. But we believe that our struggle and our suffering is against Zionism which is a colonial ideology and embers always creates uh racist myths to dehumanize the oppressed and to justify uh genocide and for Israel that myth presents colonial violence as Judaism. By keeping this distinction sharp we protect the truth. When Israel um bombs our homes, destroys our universities, and kills our people, uh they are practicing raw imperialism, not faith. Uh we stand in deep solidarity with everyone who refuses to uh let identity be um as as a shield for a colonial uh cage. our resistance through um our words and through our um weekly reports on Palestine deep dive um is a universal demand uh for um for a liberation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us guys. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Very lovely um young journalists from Gaza. They lived through the genocide all of it. They lived their life in Gaza and the blockade, Israeli blockhead backed by the western countries and and they still like they understand they understand everything. They understand that differentiation and they understand that the Palestinians or anyone who’s under oppression will be fighting the oppressive. It doesn’t matter their religion. Doesn’t matter if they are like even if they’re like Muslims or Christians or atheists or it doesn’t matter if they are killing us if they’re ethnically cleansing us will be fighting back and it’s a normal reaction for any human being but at the same time I remember what you said Molly we as Palestinians those as survivors of genocide they don’t have to be involved in such conversations it’s not their business their business is to live actually without genocide without colonialism without occupation so what do you make of this uh remarks from both of Houdan Ali,

I mean, I’m just so moved. I mean, I’m I’m so moved. I mean, most people when they are living beneath bombs and when they’re subjected to torture camps and when they’re subjected to murder, most people do not draw those distinctions. You know, I I reported from Ukraine. Um that’s not a distinction that um many Ukrainians draw, you know, with Russians. And that’s normal. And it’s it’s a normal human thing. But I also think that the fact that they continue to draw it as an act of profound nobility.

Yeah. True. Um Hamm um I heard a rumor that you want to translate Molly’s book into Arabic and that we should bully him until he does it. Good luck with that. 450 pages.

Yeah. It’s very powerful.

Yeah. I mean, we’re we’re talking about the world’s first anti-zionists. Exactly. Yes.

Chapter 13: The unspoken crime of Zionism, destroying Arab-Jewish relations

But tell me tell me uh about life in the Middle East before Zionism. I mean, the the Jews, Arab Jews, lived in Palestine, they lived in in um in Morocco, they lived in Iraq, they lived in Yemen, they lived in Egypt, in Syria, they lived all over the Middle East. And we were getting along well with each other. I mean I remember my grandmother telling us how in Jafah they used to have like their neighbor who was Jewish and they had really good relationship with each other and then Zionism came and everything had changed. Tell me more about that. What how did Zionism destroy our relations with with the Jewish uh the Jewish Arabs?

This is the unspoken Zionist crime, right? the there’s the Z the Zionist colonial settler colonial genocidal crime against um the indigenous people of Palestine. Um but then there’s the crime against part of that indigenous population that’s also a a global population of Jewish people. Um because what Zionism did said we we represent Jewish people, right? And it fought hard against the Bundists for that claim. Um uh but what it did was it kind of recast Jewish people from the south and east Mediterranean from our region as outsiders, right? It created this awkward condition between people who like you said were neighbors and brothers and had married from one another and had all kind the kinds of things you have in a society um between one another. Um, and you know, as Palestinians and I I don’t know which of my friends growing up were Christian, but then I was I was in my twenties like, “Oh, his name was George.” Of course, he was Christian, but like I didn’t would never have thought it growing up, right? And I can imagine my great-grandparents having almost a similar thing with their Jewish and and just like it’s my baker, it’s my neighbor. That’s not that’s their most that’s what I think of them as. It’s my friend. It’s not, oh, this is Jewish, this is Shia, this is Sunni, this is and even we don’t differentiate. You wouldn’t know that they’re like Christians or something at all. They’re just your classmates. They’re your neighbors, the same culture, the same everything. Yeah.

But what Zionism did was it came in as this kind of a it came in on the tanks of the imperialists. Yeah. Right. That’s I mean that the world the 1897 meeting of the world zionist organization that creates or this world zionist organization its strategy for implementation of Zionism is to hitch itself to the wagon of empire right they basically come out of that meeting and write to every emperor and say can you give us a piece of your empire right whether it’s in Argentina or Uganda or in Florida or Madagascar um and for some ideally Palestine that right this is Zionism is we are part we are going to be the people who team up with imperial power in a moment where 86% of the globe is part of an empire uh and hope that one of these empires will say here you can take that little bit right um and what this does is it recasts Arab Jewish people Jewish people in our region as part of this the first people in Palestine to warn against Zionism were Jewish Palestinians for sure right And the reason is a they’re kind of reading the types of press that will have news of something like the Basil Conference of the World Zionist Organization. But more importantly, Zionists want to come in as Jews, right? This isn’t like we’re Zionists. This is kind of like not specific to a particular community. They’re coming in using our identity as Jews. So we’re more interested to know what this is all about. And so then to realize, oh wait, they want to come and take the country and expel my neighbor and my classmate and my barber and my baker and my babysitter and the kid I babysit and make me an enemy and make me an enemy to my cousins and my neighbor. No, this is not acceptable. You want to come, you come like everybody else. Armenians came and chians came and North Africans came and they came and they’re part of the fabric of the society and have been for centuries and centuries and centuries. And now you want to come to one of the most multicultural places in the world using my religious identity and remove 99% of the people that Jabotinsky makes a point about Zionism and Zionism gave Judaism a territorial dimension that accentuated Muslim Jewish differences in the in the Arab world and the Palestinians ultimately had to pay the price for eur European racism. So Molly what is the way out of it? the way the way out of it. Oh my god. Um, in 2 minutes or less, how do you liberate Palestine?

I mean, I uh I think that’s that’s your job to spell that. Spell that out. I I mean, I utterly agree with what Aishlam said and what you were saying, Ham also. I mean, basically what it is is they adopted the ideology of the European ethnostate, right? an ideology that everywhere it’s been imported because it’s been imported all over the world, not just Palestine and white supremacy as well. And also there’s a Zionist concept, it’s called the negation of the diaspora. And this is the idea that even the culture of European Jews, right?

Chapter 14: There is a hatred in Jewish history of anything seen as weak

Like even Yiddish culture is something that’s an enemy. It’s something to be ashamed of. It’s something to be um to be destroyed. that everything that Jews had from all of the many places that they lived right from you know they lived from Kolkata to Samarand to Vienna to New York all of that it’s nothing that the only thing that matters is this creation of this sort of new man this new Israeli Israeli man in Palestine and you know those those cultures those relationships those bonds they were wiped out violently and while of course you know Yemeni Jews Iraqi Jews Jews, Palestinian Jews were the primary recipients of this violence. I mean, even Yiddish was violently suppressed in Palestine. Um, Yiddish new stands were firebombed. Um, events were people beat up the speakers. And it’s because, yeah, it’s the create it’s the imposition of European ethnism on one of the most diverse places in the world. And no one talk about them or talk about the Zionism

Chapter 15: Pretence of indignity

Let’s watch this video where um Israeli soldiers are pushing a child to um So a Palestinian child is carrying a flag is for them the crime that that child have done and they are forcing him to hold it and videotaping him to capture the evidence of the crime. So that was the the crime of the Palestinian flag of the child. Yeah. So like this Zionist ideology, this Zionist policies are are going so far to the level of criminalizing a holding of a flag. So what do you make of this video? I mean, Zionism has always been built on the eraser of Palestinians, on the murder of Palestinians, the destruction of Palestinian villages, the planting of pine trees over the ruined villages, the eraser of of names of parts of the landscape like, you know, filling in wetlands, of cemeteries, of architecture, and even the flag is viewed as a threat. And it’s a fundamentally insecure ideology, right? It’s trying to create this pure ethnostate on a place whose original inhabitants defiantly insist on their continued existence where even the landscape itself defiantly exist insists on its existence before this you know colonial imposition. No, it it comes out of a profound insecurity. I would say 100%. It’s fragility. Yeah, it’s fragility. No, nobody who is sure in themselves behaves like this. This is a very deep and fundamental recognition that it’s uh an imposition. Um also an imposition that is 1 million% um requires billions of dollars of external support and immense diplomatic and political efforts to keep going.

Yeah. And you know, I mean, like there’s these shocking things about there’s sort of two moments in US history where the US kind of said no to Israel. And and the way that the US said no was in in the 1970s, Nixon threatened to remove the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund. No. And that was enough to change Israeli policy. And then again to get the Israelis to go to the Madrid Madrid conference. Um the Israelis had asked for like $10 billion uh kind of like guarantee on a loan um to build settlements for the new Russian uh settlers coming in from the kind of collapsing Soviet Union. Um and the and the US said like you know we might consider not guaranteeing the the 10 billion uh the loan you know like really kind of minuscule on the larger scale of US support for Israel but even just a wrinkle in that creates this panic in the Israeli state. just to say like it’s it recognizes that I mean there’s this sort of like um um abundance of energy put into pretending like Israel is somehow indigenous and organically part of the place um but a very deep and fundamental recognition that everybody’s parents came from Poland and Ukraine and uh Ethiopia lot of their their parents came from all over the world but but this feeling that like any any crack can end this project, right? Make them very Yeah. And that the claim to indigenity like this like oh hummus is our food, olive oil is our crop on the l air hostess flights, right? And and now there you know like in this genocide many people are using the watermelon as simple for Palestine and like Palestinian liberation and all of that. And Germany like I don’t know when I saw the news I was shocked but also I was laughing. Germany have banned the use of watermelon. We’re months away from somebody banning the watermelon as a fruit because it’s anti-semitic. It’s insane. It’s It’s literally It’s insane. I remember I I mean, so in, you know, my my book, right? My book, it’s a Jewish history book that’s about a Jewish movement. Um, a proud Jewish movement, right, that fought for Yiddish, that fought for Jewish safety and freedom. And the comments that I get for Zionists from Zionists, my social media is basically unusable because of the stream of comments that I of rage from Zionists that um write things like, “LOL, the Bundists were all gassed. Objectively hilarious. They failed. They got themselves killed.” You know, deflecting the blame from the holoca for the Holocaust from the Nazis onto their victims. But it’s like, you think about this, the Boon has not been a politically active organization for 80 years, right? It was an organization of the Jewish masses of the Eastern Europe that no longer exist. And yet there’s such anger, such rage that it is even mentioned, right? Such anger that my book was written, you know, on on Barry Weiss’s free press on their weak and anti-semitism. The main banner thing was my book. Can you imagine? And it’s because it’s not funny. It is funny. It’s I would I would laugh. I would laugh. It’s It’s actually extremely funny. It’s extremely funny because it’s so lunatic. And this is because any any little thing, whether a watermelon, whether a Jewish history that was liberatory and solidaristic, whether a reality, any little thing is it’s too it’s too much. And you know it’s like there are obviously there are many you know Jews from Arab lands in Israel there who you know ate humus who um you know who had shakshuka cuz they’re from Morocco or whatever. It’s not that it’s the insistence not that you know our families ate this too but that only our families did it. It’s only ours. It’s our exclusive property. No one else. This is what I said wasn’t about kind of like a migrant history. It’s about the claim to indigenous. So it’s it’s it’s that the Moroccan or or Amaz kind of country Jewish person comes to Palestine becomes an Israeli but then doesn’t talk about Shakshuka as my food because it came with us from Exactly. It’s because I’m Jewish and Indigenous to this place that I eat hummus and shakure of the Tunisia and Morocco. It’s the pretense of an indigenity here. Exactly. And I just want to add, you know, the fact that they’re so freaked out by your book, it’s they’re not it’s not some kind of overreaction. It’s what

Chapter 16: Zionism hijacked Jewish identity and turned it into a genocidal project

you guys were saying in the introduction of the the Bund was had a trajectory of an entirely different future of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe, right? And that is profoundly threatening to Zionism because like you were saying, it talks about the Jewish European as a strong person, right? We didn’t need Zionism to be strong. We were fine. I mean, we were strong. We produced not fine, but strong. We were strong. We were fighting the racism. We were building bridges with other socialist and communist movements. We were fighting for a different a world that wasn’t just safe for Jews, but a better world for everyone. Yes. And you guys came and hijacked it and turned it into a genocidal project and destroyed Jewish identity or attempted to. hopefully we’re going to make you fail, but you and destroyed kind of hijacked Jewish identity and latched it on to a colonial settler colonial imperialist genocidal project. How dare you? Exactly. If that is the, you know, and that’s a profound sentiment. Yeah. Exactly. Because it destroys Zionism. No, absolutely. I mean, so the Boon, you know, this is a Polish Jewish organization. 90% of the Jews in Poland were murdered by the Nazis. um Poland after the war there were over a thousand Jews are murdered after the war by nationalists. You know this is you know a these these are lands of profound violence that Jews were living in profound racism against them that you know ended in a genocide and yet the Bund still believed in human solidarity even after this genocide. I mean, I found newspapers that the Bund wrote in 1947 um during the first days of the Nakba where they were demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees and they kept up that demand for many years and they opposed the creation of a Jewish state. They always opposed it. They saw that it would lead to ethnic supremacy, eternal war against neighboring countries, eternal war against the Palestinian Arab minority, whatever remained, and an eternal war of extermination against other Jewish cultures as well. And there’s a line from Schlomma Mendelson. Heen was a Buddhist pedagogue. was in 1948 um before the announcement of the state of Israel, the first the first months of 1948 that he wrote when talking about how Zionists imposed their hegemony on the Jewish community. He wrote that it was ironic that Jews who are the primary victims of totalitarianism should be adopting those methods. And he said it is as if the slaughterer has infected the victim with his germs during the slaughter. And when I launched this book, this book debuted at number four on the New York Times bestseller list. I’ve toured it all over America. Hundreds of people come to my events, you know, Jewish and not Jewish, all ages. But so many Jewish people, what they tell me is they say like, you know, I’ve rejected Zionism because I’m because I’m a moral person, right? But I didn’t learn anything about any other Jewish history. And so I have like a hole in me. It’s like I don’t It’s not something in you to be anti-zionist, too. Thank you very much. Um, we will have to wrap up in a minute, but I want to ask a question to you Hezem. Last week and actually to you as well. Last week when we recorded our chat show, it was on a Wednesday on

Chapter 17: Genocide continues as 33 killed during Eid in Gaza

and is one of the major holidays in Palestine and the Muslim world as well. Two billion Muslims around the world celebrate. It’s a day of celebration, joy, charity, and all of it. On that day, Israel killed 33 Palestinians in Gaza on the we did not report on that yet, but we need to talk about it. And also, the Palestinians in Gaza have been banned from doing Hajj for the for the past three years right now. So, what is the responsibility of Muslims around the world toward the Palestinians right now? And what is the responsibility of people of other faiths and religions towards the Muslims in Gaza who are banned from their practicing their rituals whether it was an aid or in Hajj? Let’s start with your Yeah, I don’t think you need to be Muslim to to think about it this way, you know. I think just fundamentally um pe people wanting to practice normal people things you know like breathing, eating, celebrating important days, going to school, traveling, seeking medical treatment. Everyone should have that water, food, right? The basic means of survival, but also you need that it’s it’s not even just about like basic and fundamental rights. I know we we always kind of fall back on this. People have a right to kind of flourish. People have a right to excel. People have a right to be their full humanity. Um and um and you know Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, Israel, global empire etc. is making that impossible for the majority of the people in this world. And in Gaza is this kind of almost like highest concentration of all of these contradictions which is kind of shocking. It’s such a small place. such a right like I mean it’s been an open air prison for 20 years and this um and so I think you the the the fact of it being on you know makes it somehow more egregious than if it was done the day before or the month before if when it was done the day before and the month before but I think the I think there’s something there’s something here though which is that this is what Palestinian political prisoner the kind of like molding of consciousness. There’s an Israel didn’t invent this, but they’ve kind of come close to almost like trying to perfect it or they’ve made it their mission to, which is to make it so that if you ask for dignity, right? If you demand dignity, if you say no to kind of this level of oppression that we will make the cost so great for you, so nobody will do it again. Yeah. Right. And so from for the past 80 years, it’s it’s become such a standard part of the Israeli playbook and now they’ve really let loose in the last 3 years in Gaza, which is that um oh, you’re going to resist, you’re going to say no, we’ll wipe out a village, we’ll wipe out a family, we’ll stop as we’ve done inification. Yeah. I mean, this is disgusting. Horrific, right? But and I think this is the point. is like, “Oh, you think you’re going to celebrate your religious festivity? We’re going to kill 30 people.” Um, and the idea here is that somehow this is supposed to make Palestinians so afraid of everything, right? That they’ll somehow like make them own their own selves disappear. But that’s not what humans do. That’s not what the Bundist did when Hitler came for them. That’s not what indigenous people in North in Turtle Island are doing to fight the genocide with arms, right? The Bundist. Um, they fought the Bundist. They fought. Yes. They they fought with fists and arms. Also with arms struggle. With arms with arms struggle. They fought culturally. They fought politically. And they fought with arms when they needed to. And by the way, the the near the end of the book, there’s an incredible section about also the mutual aid institutions that they built, right, as part of their resistance. This wasn’t just about producing a political line and getting arms training and whatnot. It’s also building things for children, for people with mental illness, for for women etc. shelters and also to do it in a revolutionary way. Please tell us more because like again it’s not like oh we should open up a school so that people will like us more or let’s do some service provision. It’s like let’s revolutionize the whole idea of education as we do it. Exactly. So, in in inter war Poland, which is really when they were at their height, all of the organs of Polish power in the late 1930s were about um deporting Jews from Poland. Um the Polish government literally paid terrorist youth militias to go through Jewish neighborhoods throwing bombs into shops and beating people while screaming Jews to Palestine. the whole the the government literally wanted to push their 3.3 million Jewish citizens to to Palestine to force them to leave to steal all of their things and to force them to leave. And in response to this intense racism and violence, the Bund built a beautiful alternate world. It did not just comprise of elected officials nor of their militias. There were amazing Yiddish schools. There were newspapers that told bund that told working-class Jews in Warsaw about socialism in China, about a vanguard literature. There was a woman’s movement that fought for free child care. There were hikes and summer camps, youth programs. There was a a sanatorium for tubercular slum kids that was a jewel of the world. And you know, even when the Nazis invaded and when Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, the Boon continued these underground schools, these underground newspapers, these underground poetry readings. And you know, when I would look at what people did in Kaza under the genocide, that commitment not just to have bare life as a human body, right? But to also assert yourself as a thinking being, a thinking artistic being who can who can analyze and who can live. It is so similar to what the boons did in the ghetto. And you know, I I visited Gaza in 2015. Um I reported from there for advice. Um and I I know people who are still in Gaza. And one of the things that struck me was the fierce commitment that Palestinians in Gaza had to making things beautiful. I remember like there were these little cars that they made for kids to ride around on the park that had like bright lights and flowers. And it was like despite everything that the Israeli state would steal from people in Gaza, they insisted that no, we are human and we are alive and we’ll make our lives beautiful for ourselves and each other. They do it very powerfully and very like in a very strong way. But this chapter and everything in this book is very important and worthy of not just being read by everyone but also being translated to Arabic because also in the rebuilding of we need to learn of how the Bundist and others have gone through those massacres and those crimes. So it’s very important to be connected. Uh but on that note, we have to finish. I’m so sorry for that. It’s a very powerful and insightful conversation. Thank you so much for uh coming and being part of it. And uh for everyone who’s watching until now, thank you so much for joining us. We see you next Wednesday on 700 p.m. Thank you so much. Have a good evening.