00:00:26.560My God, I was not expecting Peter Thiel. Yeah, that's pretty upsetting.
00:00:31.820Oh, expect him, baby. So, Caro, when we started this podcast a year ago to have
00:00:39.420silly little conversations about Taylor Swift, injectables, rumors, and ballerina farm,
00:00:46.640I don't think either one of us anticipated that we would be here a year later doing deep dives
00:00:52.740into Israel-Palestine and the militarized surveillance state, but feminist podcasting
00:00:59.260comes at you fast. Ultimately, this is a show about culture and politics, but also in a larger
00:01:05.460sense, it's a show about deconstructing fundamental American mythologies. It is about
00:01:11.440our country's most powerful and entrenched fictions, how they show up in culture and
00:01:17.100politics today, and hopefully how we can learn to see ourselves a little more clearly and
00:01:22.160accurately. And this topic represents one of the most third rail American mythologies. So
00:01:29.340what could go wrong? I do think you and I both see this show as documenting our own journeys
00:01:36.180of deconstruction as we dig into topics that interest us. So for example, you are the one
00:01:41.640who told me in our episode about the TikTok ban and Red Note earlier this year that the American
00:01:46.560perspective on Israel was very different from that in the rest of the world. I did not know
00:01:51.400that at the time, that our state-sanctioned inability to critique Israel is uniquely American.
00:01:57.000And that really stuck with me, and it made me think that it was eventually going to be something
00:02:01.120worth digging into in more depth. And that day has come. God bless. I'm thrilled. So this one's
00:02:09.080going to be a heavy one today, as you could probably guess. We're going to do our best to
00:02:12.660filter jokes throughout. Let's see how they hit. But it's going to be a heavier conversation. So
00:02:17.700we're going to reward paid subscribers for your fortitude with a much lighter, much more bad faith,
00:02:23.400fully shit talky hit piece in about two weeks. So please look forward to that.
00:02:27.960And I also wanted to say something. We've mentioned in the past that this podcast is
00:02:31.800fully subscriber funded. Katie and I believe very strongly in not having any corporate
00:02:36.520sponsorships, not having any oversight beyond, you know, our shared oversight and not owing
00:02:41.680anything to anyone beyond our obligations to you, our audience. I have been thinking about
00:02:46.760that lot in advance of our conversation today because I think you and I have both experienced,
00:02:51.240Katie, professional ramifications for occasionally talking about Gaza and talking about what is
00:02:56.400taking place. And it just feels really meaningful to me today that you and I get to talk about this
00:03:01.100topic how we want to and with the wind at our backs because that is not an option that many
00:03:05.840Americans have. And so I just want to thank the paid subscribers who support this podcast because
00:03:10.940this is because of you guys. Like, I have worked at companies previously where I have been
00:03:15.460explicitly told that I cannot have a conversation like the one we're having today. And so it's very
00:03:20.780meaningful to me. If you care about these conversations, consider becoming a paid
00:03:24.520subscriber. And if you are already a paid subscriber, thank you so fucking much. This
00:03:29.400is for you. Let's fucking go. We redistribute 33% of all revenue from this show. So this year of
00:03:38.820the $66,000 that we have donated so far, $35,000 of it has been sent to Gaza. So all that to say,
00:03:46.680you get to talk shit and also occupy the moral high ground while you do it, which is so fun.
00:03:54.220So if you want to become a supporter, head to diabolicalliespod.com and join the most fun
00:04:00.500private subscriber chat on the internet that only occasionally breaks out into brawls.
00:04:05.060So over the last year, Palestine has been a thread that's been woven throughout a lot of the episodes that we've done. It comes up semi-frequently on this show. But like you with the porn episode that you wanted to do, I have been waiting to find our way into this one. And it was only over the last couple of months, the developments in the United States, that made me realize I think we found it.
00:04:32.040So through the process of researching for this, I came to see what is happening in Gaza as the skeleton key for understanding and analyzing not just the U.S. historically, but what is happening in the United States right now.
00:04:46.360and that without contending with what is happening there, what's happening here will
00:04:51.780continue to be illegible to us. Democrats and liberals in America are very comfortable going
00:04:58.160after MAGA as far-right, but are simultaneously totally comfortable with supporting a far-right
00:05:04.320leadership in Israel that is far to the right of America's far-right leadership in both tactics
00:05:09.720and rhetoric, as Naomi Klein put it recently in an interview with Mehdi Hassan. So Susie Hansen,
00:05:15.740she wrote this amazing cover story for New York Magazine. It helps me pull together one of the
00:05:20.760timelines that we're going to be referencing today. And as she wrote, there are other atrocities that
00:05:25.540are happening elsewhere in the world right now, Ukraine, Congo, Sudan, China. But the difference
00:05:31.140here is that the United States is funding, aiding, and abetting this one as a very sophisticated
00:05:37.320military has been indiscriminately bombing and starving 2 million people without consequence
00:05:42.400for nearly two years. So, for the scope of the conversation today, as well as the lens that I am
00:05:48.700approaching it from, there is one phrase that you are going to hear over and over and over again if
00:05:54.340you engage with this topic in any level of depth. Kara, do you know what that phrase is?
00:06:06.660Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this in The Message, how this phrase operates like a
00:06:11.020conversation-terminating cliche that makes you feel as though you could never know enough
00:06:16.240to have a valid perspective on this subject, if your perspective is sympathetic to the
00:06:21.560Palestinians, that is. So, feeling that very deeply myself, I've read around 1,200 pages
00:06:29.400worth of history to understand what the key points of contention are for this episode.
00:06:33.380And what I walked away with is that while the history itself is long and complex and a lot of things have happened, the basic reality of what is happening here, as defined by international law, is actually not complicated.
00:06:51.060It is just uncomfortable for Americans in particular to confront directly, which is why we two Americans are here right now.
00:06:58.460So, we're going to spend some time on the 100-year history today, wherever it's necessary for parallels that we're drawing to the United States.
00:07:07.000But there is a lot of history about the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, suicide bombing, Yasser Arafat, the intricacies of all the various UN resolutions, the Oslo Accords, Israel's initial support of Hamas in the late 1980s, the way every new agreement subtly rewrote the terms of the old ones, and more.
00:07:25.980There's tons that we are not going to cover in any depth today because a comprehensive and detailed review of the entire historical timeline is not the goal.
00:07:35.380The goal for this episode is to hold up Palestine as a lens to see the United States of America more clearly.
00:07:43.000I just want to pause right now and say nothing more clearly exemplifies the way you approach our podcast and the way I approach our podcast than you coming into this having read thousands of pages of historical textbooks, laying out your thesis statement so clearly at the outset, and me two weeks ago being like, so I watched some porn and I don't know how I feel about it.
00:08:03.880well typically talking about porn doesn't doesn't generate death threats in the dms
00:08:14.220so this is my cover your ass 10 minute entry spiel okay so more recently most of the conversation
00:08:21.340has revolved around what has happened in gaza since october 7th 2023 october 7th is where the
00:08:27.540story that we're hearing commonly begins that 373 members of the israeli security forces
00:08:33.520and 778 Israeli citizens are killed by Hamas,
00:08:39.040making it the worst attack on Israel in the country's history.
00:08:42.660So I think it's really important to provide a timeline of events since then.
00:08:46.680This is what was said at the beginning.
00:08:49.280I'm going to have you clock in as the Israel Defense Minister, Yov Galant.
00:08:58.840We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.
00:09:02.360Uh, and then he went on to declare, quote, a complete siege on Gaza, saying, quote, there will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.
00:09:15.480And then Israel Katz, the current minister of defense, said this.
00:09:20.940Humanitarian aid to Gaza? Not a switch will be flicked on, not a valve will be opened, not a fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages come home.
00:09:30.380Humanitarian for humanitarian, let no one lecture us about morality.
00:09:35.200Okay. So, Israel's retaliatory campaign was declared an attempt at genocide just one week after October 7th.
00:09:43.580That is how early it was evident to groups paying attention that this was an attempt at annihilation of the population of Gaza.
00:09:52.600By November 2023, a third of all hospitals in Gaza had been bombed or closed. That was one month later.
00:09:59.280By December, Israel had killed 20,000 Palestinians, 8,000 of them children.
00:10:06.040When images of a truck emerged with naked Palestinian prisoners tied up in the back,
00:10:11.660South Africa brought its case of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
00:10:17.620The following month, the U.S. stopped funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA,
00:10:24.680which practically served as Gaza's government in providing public services,
00:10:29.480over allegations that 12 of their 30,000 employees were involved in the attack.
00:10:35.860Newborns began dying of malnutrition by no later than March 2024.
00:10:40.760In spring 2024, Israel was issuing evacuation orders and then bombing the places they had told people to evacuate to.
00:10:48.620In May 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the leaders of both Hamas and Israel.
00:10:55.780It is worth noting that neither the U.S. nor Israel is a party to the International Criminal Court.
00:12:09.160That was a year ago. In October, 99 American physicians and nurses who spent a combined 254 weeks in the few remaining Gazan hospitals signed an open letter to President Biden that stated it was likely the death toll was already greater than 118,000 or about 5% of Gaza's population.
00:12:29.160population. Yeah, this is, I mean, you and I are constantly talking about Gaza. And as you
00:12:34.540mentioned, we've been talking about this just as friends, too, like over the last few years. But
00:12:38.840something that I have been really fixated is on the death count. And it's really notable if you
00:12:44.940look through historical records. It's very consistent, not just in the U.S., with most
00:12:48.440countries. The death count is often used as a political tool in order to basically engender
00:12:54.400manufactured consent for population. So people might have noticed that the official death count
00:12:59.600that U.S. mainstream media will reference is around 60,000. You will note that that number
00:13:04.600has not moved much in over 18 months. And the reason for that, I think, I'll just speak as like
00:13:09.920an individual, is so someone like Brett Stevens can reference it in a New York Times op-ed and go,
00:13:14.500how could there possibly be a genocide if only 60,000 people have died? We will not know the
00:13:21.120true impact of how many people have died for many years. And an example I would give of this
00:13:25.480is that a bunch of academics have since estimated that the toll of our war on terror in Iraq in
00:13:31.740terms of economic devastation, structural devastation, the famines, is probably closer
00:13:36.560to 6 million people dead. And you will not hear that number shared on CNN. The same took place
00:13:42.520with the Vietnam War. This is very common. And so I think that that is just something to have
00:13:47.420in the back of your mind throughout this conversation, the death toll for Gaza is
00:13:50.900certainly not 60,000. We don't know what the official number is, but we know that they don't
00:13:55.880count bodies that are never found. They don't count bodies that are maimed beyond recognition.
00:14:01.300They don't count people who have disappeared. And so it's just really, really important to use that
00:14:06.440as a way to ground yourself in like the extent of the atrocities taking place.
00:14:10.580So by the end of 2024, Israel had displaced 1.9 million of the 2.2 million people living in Gaza.
00:14:20.020And it was around this time that the former head of the IDF called what was happening ethnic cleansing.
00:14:26.660In early 2025, Netanyahu and his cabinet minister declared openly that the Israelis and Americans wanted to force all Palestinians to leave Gaza, saying, quote,
00:14:37.560quote, this is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.
00:14:43.860We are disassembling Gaza and leaving it as piles of rubble and the world isn't stopping us. End
00:14:50.440quote. I'm sorry. It's not funny, but it's like straight out of fucking South Park that these
00:14:56.540officials are like, taps Mike, clears throat. This is exactly what we're doing. And then by the time
00:15:02.920it makes its way over to like an American news channel, they're like, yeah, so who's to say?
00:15:08.440Whomst can tell? Not us. Certainly not us. They won't even quote the people's quote.
00:15:14.080As I'm sure most people do. I know Zionists. There are Zionists in my life who talk frequently. Oh,
00:15:21.220it's about the hostages. It's about the hostages. It's like, oh, jump cut to the Israeli government
00:15:26.440who's saying, yeah, the point of this is to ethnically cleanse this population because
00:15:31.280we want to settle this occupied territory. We don't even have to read between the lines,
00:15:36.000they're saying it explicitly. In July, the Israeli parliament quietly voted to formally annex the
00:15:42.120West Bank, which is geographically separate from Gaza and is not run by Hamas. Earlier this year,
00:15:49.12040,000 Palestinians in the West Bank had been forcibly expelled from their homes there.
00:15:55.200After Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire agreement, they cut the electricity,
00:15:59.720they shut down the desalination plants, they prevented all food, fuel, and medical aid from
00:16:04.020entering, and have destroyed 90% of the housing in Gaza, such that everyone now lives in tents
00:16:09.460or collapsed buildings. Notably, the Biden administration willfully ignored the widely
00:16:16.180documented fact that Israel was blocking aid because if a U.S. president recognizes that a
00:16:22.920country is blocking humanitarian assistance, it triggers a law that security assistance to that
00:16:27.980country is cut off. So despite ample evidence, the U.S. government basically covered their eyes,
00:16:33.380plugged their ears, and were like, la la la la la, we can't hear or see you.
00:16:36.180Joe Biden was just like rocking on his heels, staring at a corner of a wall until a White
00:16:42.280House official like gently re-placed him back by the podium and was like, sir, sir,
00:16:47.220we're in the middle of a conference. The former State Department spokesman under Biden admitted
00:16:53.280that Biden officials were all privately aware of Israel's war crimes and did nothing. So to state
00:16:59.980it as plainly as possible, the Biden administration was an active partner with full knowledge of what
00:17:05.680the Israelis were doing. Then this spring, something interesting happened. Netanyahu and
00:17:13.420ex-American military contractors took over aid distribution, replacing the UN's 400 sites
00:17:21.760with four. Caro, you were the one who alerted me to this development when the Financial Times
00:17:28.320issued an expose that showed a Boston consulting group had been hired to manage this. So when
00:17:34.600Gazans went to get food at these sites, IDF soldiers would open fire on them. And if the
00:17:41.460asymmetry in violence here is not already clear, I just want to take this opportunity to note that
00:17:48.420as of a couple weeks ago, more Palestinian civilians have been killed simply attempting
00:17:53.760to get food at these aid sites than Israeli civilians were killed in the October 7th attacks.
00:18:00.000Yeah, we're 21 minutes in. Is anyone still confused?
00:18:36.620This video has been posted everywhere and then wiped.
00:18:39.940I downloaded it on, you know, one Twitter account that I found had shared it
00:18:44.680Because a lot of the times when this Anthony guy is going on these news shows to talk about it, they cut off the clip before they get to that part.
00:18:53.140But you can clearly hear somebody with an American accent.
00:18:57.260They're essentially hunting these people that are trying to get food.
00:19:03.280So there are 100 billion pounds of rubble on the ground in Gaza right now.
00:19:07.360The U.N. estimates it will take two decades to clean up.
00:19:10.600And in her New York Magazine cover story, Susie Hansen writes that the abuse,
00:19:16.900rape, and torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is, quote,
00:19:20.580so systematic that there is no room to doubt an organized declared policy of the Israeli prison
00:19:27.200authorities, end quote. Now, as we can all see on our phones every day, Palestinians are
00:19:32.240nearing the end of the slow and brutal process of starving to death. So that is where we are now.
00:19:39.200It's worth noting here that Gaza was abso-fucking-lutely an influential part of the November 2024 presidential elections. And before anyone comes in here and is like, oh, well, Trump is worse, that's not the fucking point of what I'm saying.
00:19:54.960What I'm saying is that it is very clear that the Democratic administration in power before Trump was completely deaf to the level of concern about Gauzins then.
00:20:05.740And it is very notable to me that the only life we are seeing on the left right now has been with two Democratic socialists who are brown-skinned men.
00:20:16.260Do not tell me that that doesn't mean anything when you think of how many people are sick and fed up with the Democratic Party standing for nothing.
00:22:18.940I am someone who I would say am less comfortable with the idea of banning the use of certain words and that I think it is more evocative of a Trump-style approach to how to lead a country.
00:22:37.640and and i think especially when we've seen sure like does that just make you uncomfortable like
00:22:43.500the phrase globalized intifada from the river to the sea does that make you uncomfortable or do you
00:22:47.860okay those are different those are super not really they're not really different genres i'm
00:22:53.080sorry i'm asking so wrong then they're not really different to me and so some people are not different
00:22:56.700you know i i i know people for whom those things mean very different things um and and to me
00:23:03.700ultimately what i hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in in standing
00:23:12.640up for palestinian human rights and i think what's difficult also is that the very word
00:23:18.960is has been used by the holocaust museum when translating the warsaw ghetto uprising
00:23:25.720into Arabic because it's a word that means struggle. And as a Muslim man who grew up
00:23:35.820post 9-11, I'm all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted,
00:23:41.480can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that's where it leaves me with a sense that
00:23:47.220what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe. And the question of the
00:23:56.280permissibility of language is something that I haven't, I haven't.
00:24:00.020So I also want to note that Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student and organizer who was
00:24:06.700illegally arrested by the Trump administration, taken into custody, recently released,
00:24:11.600recently did an interview with Ezra Klein. I highly recommend everyone listen to it. It's
00:24:15.240really remarkable to me. But at one point, he is also asked by Ezra Klein about that phrase,
00:24:20.260globalize the Intifada. And what he says, quote, is, to us, it means let's globalize the struggle
00:24:25.840to liberate Palestine. It shouldn't feel convenient when Palestinians are being killed
00:24:30.620every day and the world is silent. He rejected outright that that is immediately connected to
00:24:36.040violence. But another thing he said that I want to quote here is, he's speaking to Ezra Klein
00:24:40.820here. He said, I heard someone on your podcast say, I don't like that chant, Globalized Entifade.
00:24:45.560And he said, yes, you don't like it. It's not being chanted for you to like. It's to make you
00:24:50.680uncomfortable. So you have to think about your complicity in what's happening.
00:24:55.000Once again, you have segwayed me perfectly.
00:29:38.480In 2001, Colin Powell went to the Middle East.
00:29:41.260He sent instructions to the U.S. embassies in the region that they were no longer allowed to refer to the territories as occupied, but, quote, disputed.
00:29:53.040Again, intended to suggest this is a mere real estate kerfuffle.
00:29:57.340It's very Orwellian, like, language being used to narrow our understanding of what is happening here.
00:30:03.580Joshua Kushner with his PowerPoint presentation being like, I've got a real estate solution for you.
00:30:08.200have you thought about a high rise and a few pools infinity pools who doesn't like an apparel
00:30:16.820spritz you're also going to notice a huge emphasis on peace and conspicuously little to no interest
00:30:25.360in justice which is decidedly different like in the middle east peace and stability are always
00:30:33.400the cited goals. But like peace, stability does not mean justice. It just means, as Noam Chomsky
00:30:39.120writes in The Fateful Triangle, uninterrupted maintenance of domination, control, and access
00:30:45.320to resources and profits. Wow. He's good. On the note of justice, I think we should just like
00:30:50.960answer this question that this conversation always opens up front so it's clear to everybody that
00:30:55.760we're not like building up to this at the end, which is basically like, well, what are they
00:30:59.920supposed to do? What's the answer? Because it's not the point of the episode. One creator, though,
00:31:04.600that I watched, he made a video that goes through all the historical so-called peace agreements and
00:31:09.840debunks the claim that Palestinians keep rejecting the peace offers. And he basically says,
00:31:16.260one example of a just solution is a single democratic state with equal rights for everybody,
00:31:23.140regardless of your ethnicity or religion, which is an idea that we like and support basically in
00:31:28.180every other context in the West except for this one. Oh, yeah, this is very common. I used to get
00:31:33.980DMs about this. I think I have become so annoying online that people who disagree with me have since
00:31:38.020unfollowed or blocked me. But the DMs that I used to get at the beginning were like, but Caro,
00:31:42.380Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is the only place. L-O-fucking-L. That
00:31:48.680shares our liberal values. And you're just like, our treasured partner, Saudi Arabia. It's like,
00:31:55.920oh, do they share our liberal values? Do we? Do we share our own liberal values? Like,
00:32:01.040are we still all buying them? What you're going to learn today is that they certainly
00:32:05.180share our values. I don't know if you can classify them as democratic, but boy, do they share our
00:32:12.720values. Yeah, quick cutaway to J.D. Vance at his most recent speech being like,
00:32:17.020diversity kills, folks. We need to get back to the good old days.
00:32:21.240as you can tell i'm really working hard to provide humor uh to this conversation so you can let me
00:32:29.140know when it hits and when it doesn't no this is actually uh exactly your role today okay more
00:32:34.920broadly a really critical component to bear in mind is the nature of framing and the cultural
00:32:39.300logic that is being appealed to in these arguments especially when they're presented to americans
00:32:44.420even in 1938 when the british still governed palestine under a league of nations mandate
00:32:50.820A historian named George Antonius wrote this.
00:32:56.840Zionist propaganda is active, highly organized, and widespread.
00:33:01.320The world press, at any rate in the democracies of the West, is largely amenable to it.
00:33:06.760It commands many of the available channels for the dissemination of news, and more particularly, those of the English-speaking world.
00:33:13.060The result is that for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.
00:33:24.780So to put it bluntly, there is an identification with Zionist logic in the West because whether we realize it or not, colonial logic is very legible to us. Colonialism itself has a very different valence in the United States than it does in the former European imperial metropoles because the U.S. began as 13 colonies that then became independent.
00:33:51.100Unlike much of the world, words like settlers and pioneers have positive connotations in the American creation myth.
00:34:01.980So Rashid Khalidi writes in The Hundred Years War on Palestine that, quote,
00:34:05.540comparisons are fraught because the United States has yet to fully acknowledge these dark chapters of its past or to address their toxic effects in the present.
00:39:24.680Yeah. And it was basically like you read a paragraph about like, well, the Native Americans
00:39:28.640were here first, but then we came. And the argument that they encouraged us to make was,
00:39:34.140well, they didn't set down roots. They did not have houses and they did not have buildings.
00:39:38.400and so the land was not actually theirs. And I was, it like gives me children. I was looking at
00:39:44.460my handwriting in like wobbly cursive with me being like, the Native Americans always moved
00:39:49.940around and therefore the land did not belong to them. The pioneers came and made the land theirs
00:39:55.360by creating buildings. And I was just like, wow, it is really drilled into us at the earliest age
00:40:02.540to be like, nothing to see over here. Don't care about those people. We're the ones. We're the
00:40:07.620smart ones. We're the ones who know how to make the land ours. So, again, perfect segue. My
00:40:14.340question was going to be, does this origin story remind you of anything in particular, Caroline?
00:40:20.920Oh, my fucking God. Yeah, the Native Americans. Well, let me say that again. Let me say that
00:40:24.820again. The Native American. Can we all pause for one moment here? I want us to actually think
00:40:33.080about what they were the native americans the natives to america the americans anyways go on
00:40:44.940the native americans genocide the natives say you got to it first that's how it works uh that's how
00:40:54.660the world works folks so uh where people believed that what was arab palestine was actually bequeathed
00:41:00.240to them by divine right, Americans had something called Manifest Destiny. The 19th century
00:41:07.240genocidal impulse that the U.S. was destined to expand its dominion, spread democracy across the
00:41:14.060North American continent. Scariest two words in human history. We're going to spread democracy.
00:41:19.720Hey guys, we just want to come over to your country and spread democracy.
00:41:23.660The U.S. and Israel share a belief that their nation's existence was divinely ordained.
00:41:30.240and therefore exempt, right, from the rules that apply to everybody else, apply to other nations.
00:41:35.040President Andrew Jackson was very open about this in his defense of the Indian Removal Bill of 1830.
00:41:41.700He said that more than three dozen Eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers'
00:41:48.800divinely ordained rights to clear the wilderness, build homes, and grow cotton and other crops.
00:41:55.060So this was not just like random clashes of violence. It was American legislation from the top down. When European settlers arrived in the Americas, there were an estimated 10 million Native Americans who already lived here. And by 1900, their population was below 300,000.
00:42:13.200Cue someone, like, kicking down the door being like,
00:43:24.120Like, I think we also end up fighting so much about what genocide means, and it's like, okay, well, then let's just put that to the side for a moment and say, are they exterminating an entire culture?
00:43:53.940I couldn't help thinking as I was spending a lot of time reading about this stuff and being like, how the fuck did I not know any of this? Was that in eighth grade, we spent an entire semester learning about the Holocaust across pretty much every subject except math. Every class's curriculum for a whole semester was devoted to the Holocaust.
00:45:38.940I was told that multiple times. And again, I received a pretty high-level education. And so, I think it's notable that the United States views itself as a hero in the story of the Holocaust. We really frame ourselves as being the ones who liberated Jews from concentration camps. And we really don't talk about the fact that we were also profoundly anti-Semitic, that a lot of people did not want to do that.
00:46:03.760Britain did not want to accept Jewish refugees. I just think that is interesting, and I think it's
00:46:08.820just because we get to be like, and we were the ones who saved the world with World War II. That's
00:46:13.560really how we frame it. Totally. Team America World Police, for sure. So, I found a few quotes
00:46:19.460of American leaders throughout the 1800s who made it pretty obvious in their own words what the goal
00:46:25.680was. You might notice some, I don't know, funny parallels to modern day. Just extremely forthright
00:46:34.200This is Thomas Jefferson, circa 1813, Caro, if you can clock in.
00:46:59.520President Andrew Jackson, 1833, in his annual address to Congress.
00:47:04.860The natives have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement, which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.
00:47:13.800Established in the midst of another and a superior race, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and before long disappear.
00:47:22.140All right. Finally, Senator John Weller, 1852.
00:47:27.880Wow, this is a real Ted Cruz guy. These guys can enjoy a beer in hell. These Indians will in the end be exterminated. They must soon be crushed. They will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man.
00:47:41.000Can I just say something really quickly? Native Americans, Native, Native, Native Americans were the ones who taught the first French explorers about democracy and freedom, okay? They had conversations and they were like, wait, you guys have a king? We don't do that. We're free. And then French explorers were like, whoa, what is this thing you speak of? Freedom. And then they brought it back and that is where conversations about democracy began.
00:48:07.240So, like, eat shit and die, you stupid idiots.
00:48:10.880They were the ones who taught you about that.
00:48:12.920I'm going to get really aggressive by the end of this conversation.
00:48:17.620Would you classify your language as violent, Caroline?
00:48:22.940In my defense, let the record show for whatever Department of Justice intern who's going to take this to the big guy.
00:48:35.960If you read Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengroh, they talk about how many of these ideas that we've, in the revisionist history, like, claimed as, like, Western ideals actually originated with Indigenous people being like, oh, you pussies have kings? That's gay.
00:48:55.220I gotta say at least one cancelable thing in this episode.
00:48:58.860Yeah, maybe if you say something homophobic, the Anti-Defamation League won't go after you as hard.
00:50:34.900We did a lot for the Airstream trip, and I don't want to diminish the culture that still exists, and I think it's great, but the poverty that exists on these reservations is really heartbreaking because of the way that we legally basically just starve them of resources and finances.
00:50:56.920These were assimilation concentration camps. That's the end quote, and back to reporting that was in the Denver Post. The research comes amid national efforts to reckon with the country's government-sanctioned cultural genocide of the Native population through boarding schools which took root in the late 1870s.
00:51:13.520It just feels like a really critical historical parallel. I didn't learn about those schools until I read Doppelganger. And Naomi Klein talks about those schools in Doppelganger in Canada, because they also had these in Canada. But I learned through this research that I live like 10 minutes from one, which is just like mind-blowing.
00:51:35.000And it's worth noting, I will give like the lightest amount of credit where credit is due, that Canada, I think, has done much more work to recognize what happened with their native population. And I do know that. I don't think that the United States has done jack all, but I do know that Canada has done a little bit more public recognition for this cultural genocide. They still fucking did it, but you know.
00:51:58.040We're going to jump back now to the hundred years of Middle East history. It's important to note that the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is often presented as a tragic national clash between two equal peoples who just so happen to have rights to the same tracts of land.
00:52:17.700But that's really the only context in which Palestinian rights are recognized.
00:52:23.040Throughout this history, you really see a systematic effort to essentially claim that Palestinians do not exist, that Palestine isn't real.
00:52:33.440The land in question was originally part of the Ottoman Empire, and after the outbreak of World War I,
00:52:39.400the British gained control of it and made two conflicting promises about the land because they
00:52:44.800needed the support of both groups to win the war. So to the Arabs, they promised independence and
00:52:51.060return for an Arab alliance against the Turks. And to the Jews in what's known as the 1917 Balfour
00:52:56.700Declaration, they declared Britain support for a Jewish national home in what was predominantly
00:53:02.160Arab Palestine. This was Herzl's Zionist vision, like come to fruition. The population was
00:53:09.14094% Arab at the time, but despite that, the only reference to the people that lived there already
00:53:15.080were called the, quote, existing non-Jewish community. So in other words, they were described
00:53:20.720as what they were not, rather than what they were. Jesus Christ. This is from the Balfour
00:53:26.680Declaration. The British government did not propose even to go through the form of consulting
00:53:32.280the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or
00:53:37.980bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, a far profounder import
00:53:44.020than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
00:53:49.840So kind of just coming out and saying like their wishes don't matter. Much like America would be
00:53:55.24040 years later, Britain is interested in controlling this area for its own geopolitically
00:53:59.780strategic reasons. And within a little more than a decade after World War I, the Turks,
00:54:05.380the Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis had all achieved some measure of independence,
00:54:12.480though it was constrained and limited. But the British operated in Palestine with a different
00:54:17.620set of rules. So by 1922, the British mandate for Palestine does a few things.
00:54:22.420It incorporates the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim. It claims that the Jewish people and
00:54:28.160only the Jewish people had a historical claim to Palestine, ignoring the 2,000 years of
00:54:33.880Palestinian history in the region the people who live there people who just fucking live there
00:54:39.780you guys aren't real uh so the words Arab and Palestinian do not appear in this text
00:54:47.620interestingly I learned that Uganda and Argentina were also considered and discussed as possible
00:54:53.560places to establish a Jewish state wow which I was like oh okay Uganda and Argentina are like
00:55:03.720Ultimately, a journalist who spent his career in the region asked, quote,
00:55:08.260why did the Palestinians have to bear the fate of Britain's first World War promise
00:55:12.680to a people whose ancestors lived on their land 2,000 years before?
00:55:17.780And according to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi,
00:55:20.560Palestinian culture was very hierarchical, it was very conservative,
00:55:24.860And it was very divided, which really undermined their efforts at resisting this state of affairs once this power started being exerted on them.
00:55:33.600I mean, they could have been completely organized and you have a world power deciding that it be so. I think that that's often a way that we frame countless foreign issues around the world is like, well, they're so disorganized or they couldn't come together the way that we could.
00:55:49.780And it's like, Britain was, what, one of the wealthiest countries in the world?
00:56:16.420I think this is where it's really important to come back to this nationalist concept of the modern nation-state as opposed to just being people who exist on some land.
00:56:26.560Like, the concept of nation-building and defending yourself from settler colonialism would have been totally foreign to this population at the time.
00:56:33.920It would have been, like, the European colonizers, to your point, landing on the east coast of North America and being like,
00:56:39.520well, why didn't you guys petition for statehood if you wanted a legitimate claim to this land that you live on?
01:04:04.800this is worth a quick aside. So it sounds like John Steinbeck, who was a Nobel laureate,
01:04:10.360he wrote Grapes of Wrath, he also wrote East of Eden, very famous author, went to Israel in 1940
01:04:16.560and he wrote back to his editor, he was on assignment, he said, this country boils and
01:04:21.200burbles and squirms and gallops with energy. If there is such a thing as a boisterous ferment,
01:04:25.700it is here. In most countries I have seen and lived in, everything that can be done has been.
01:04:30.460in Israel in spite of its 4,000 years of history so like ding ding ding interesting in spite of its
01:04:36.5804,000 years of history everything is to be done and as though for the first time it bears out what
01:04:43.620I have always felt that only those people who have nothing to do and no place to go are tired I see
01:04:48.520no evidence of wariness here and so I guess he was like very moved by their enthusiasm for military
01:04:54.700service, and he saw America's own lost promise within Israel. So anyways, like, I'll just link
01:05:03.440this in the show notes, but that's fucking crazy. So Operation Grapes of Wrath, it's this campaign
01:05:09.940in southern Lebanon, and they lead the September 11th hijacker, Mohammed Atta, to sign his last
01:05:16.860will and testament to symbolize his willingness to die in the fight against those he blamed for
01:05:22.960the war. August 1996, a couple months later, Osama bin Laden releases his first fatwa against
01:05:29.320the United States, and he claims that the images he saw from the Khanna massacre, where Israel
01:05:34.760bombed a UN compound filled with civilians, was the reason why. So those who plotted the 9-11
01:05:40.820attacks agreed it was the Americans who were responsible for what Israel was doing because
01:05:46.300the U.S. government was giving Israel so many billions of dollars in military equipment and
01:05:50.660other financial aid. Wow. I did not know this. Now, this was stunning to me as a person who was
01:05:57.060absolutely fascinated by 9-11 in adolescence. I cannot tell you how many documentaries I have
01:06:02.520watched about these attacks. I don't think Israel's provocations or their role in this region came up
01:06:08.060even once. Wow. So Fisk writes this. As long as they were accused of crimes that had been committed
01:06:16.700because they hated Israel or hated Jews or were brought up as anti-Semites, despite being Semites
01:06:21.800themselves, or paid to carry out, quote, terror, or because they hated, quote, democracy, or
01:06:27.560represented, quote, evil. Most of these explanations would later be adopted by Americans about their
01:06:32.640Arab enemies. Then Palestinians were outside the boundaries of reason. They couldn't be talked to,
01:06:38.680could not be negotiated with, because you cannot, quote, negotiate with terrorists.
01:06:43.320It's insanely interesting to me the way in which the presence or insinuation of, like, quote-unquote religious extremism or fanaticism is always used to undercut Islam or Muslim rulers in Arab countries, whereas the very fucking same thing, religious commitment, is used as a cudgel and a shield for the state of Israel.
01:07:06.860Noam Chomsky in Fateful Triangle pokes fun at the irony of Americans, of all people, throwing metaphoric stones about religious fanaticism because he's like, America is so comparable in religious fundamentalism.
01:07:20.860Like, is that really the approach that you guys want to take here?
01:07:23.620We have a Tennessee law that was recently passed that says that doctors never have to perform any operation against their religious will.
01:07:30.980and a doctor refused to serve a pregnant woman who wanted to carry her child to term and who
01:07:36.040simply wanted to come in for basically a checkup. And he refused to see her because she is not
01:07:41.900married to her partner of 15 years. That is the religious extremism that we are dealing with.
01:07:47.420And the idea that we just, like, we just have no, it's water. Our Islamophobia is the water
01:07:53.880we swim through. We do not have any clarity to see it in any real sense.
01:07:58.980Mm-hmm. Okay, if you're just gonna keep reading for me this excerpt from Fisk's book to really
01:08:28.980a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in
01:08:34.580order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror,
01:08:40.060terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and
01:08:45.980news agency report. The soap opera of the devil served up on primetime or distilled in waryingly
01:08:52.120dull and mendacious form by the right-wing, quote, commentators of the American East Coast or the
01:08:57.700Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against terror. Victory over terror.
01:09:03.740War on terror. Everlasting war on terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and
01:09:10.160presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914,
01:09:16.660the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting forever.
01:09:20.980The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal. His face changing on our screens. Wow. Okay, first of all, that's remarkable. I have two quick thoughts. Number one, boy, is it worth us taking a gander at how war has just become a profit center?
01:09:42.500Yeah, why would it ever end? And second of all, as I was being made to read that word again and again, war on terror, it really feels different when you think about the fact that this war is actually just being waged on civilians and they are terrified.
01:09:58.560Like you are like just having a war on terrified men and women and children. They're just terrified. And there is no adequate army to defend them against these dual or multiple empires. It's just really heartbreaking.
01:10:12.240I think it's really critical to understand and to underline here that the gap between acts that are labeled as terrorism and military strikes on so-called terrorist targets, much like the gap between rhetoric deemed as inciting violence and actual acts of violence itself, establishes this precedent where terrorism is defined less by action and more by identity.
01:10:41.800It becomes not what you do, but who you are.
01:10:45.900The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 specifies that American supplied weapons must be used, quote, for legitimate self-defense.
01:10:58.200And so given that, the line offered by U.S. officials from the president down that describe Israel's operations in Gaza as self-defense and this kind of constant presentation of Palestinians writ large as terrorists is really simply just the product of legal advice to avoid liability and prosecution for war crimes.
01:11:19.240Because if it's self-defense, then you're good, right? And of course, if they're terrorists, then obviously we have the right to defend ourselves. But what we call terrorism, those people would classify as violent resistance movements.
01:11:34.240Yeah, it's also worth noting that Palestinians have been nonviolently protesting for as long as they have been occupied and no one gives a shit. That does not do anything. We talk all the time about how violence is not the answer when in fact violence is and has always been the only answer throughout human history.
01:11:53.120That is the only thing that establishes countries. It's the only thing that rips them apart. And it's really interesting because we use the civil rights movement in America as an example of nonviolent protest. That was an economic movement. And Martin Luther King actually had like a much more complicated relationship to violent resistance as well that we just, surprise, surprise, don't talk about an American education because we use it and neuter it as an example of nonviolent protest.
01:12:19.320Wasn't this the case that the entire point was for there to be videos and pictures of Black people peacefully protesting and getting the shit beat out of them because King knew that Black communities would see that and basically join the fight because they would be so angry?
01:12:39.120Yes. It's the only thing. Look at the American Revolution. Look at the French Revolution. Again, value neutral. I'm not advocating for it. But if you just, as a historian, no historian would be like, yes, these things are always sorted out with a good old conversation where everyone just walks away with what they wanted. Like, that's just not how human history operates.
01:13:00.100You kind of see this pattern over and over again. It would be like if I, Caroline, came into your house, held you at gunpoint, said, this is my house now. And then when you tried to fight me back, I'd be like, oh my God, I have to defend myself.
01:13:15.920I have the right to defend myself. It's self-defense. Why won't you accept my peace
01:13:21.680offering to let me live in your house? So, it becomes, obviously, this ever-expanding
01:13:26.900justification that can morph to fit pretty much anything. It can justify anything. Here is Fisk
01:13:33.880again. Israel's, quote, security, or supposed lack thereof, became the yardstick for all
01:13:39.880negotiations, all military threats, and all wars. The injustice done to the Palestinians,
01:13:44.920the dispossession, the massacres, not only the loss of that part of Palestine which became Israel
01:13:50.600and is internationally recognized as such, but also the occupation of the remainder of
01:13:55.880the Mandate territory and the bloody suppression of any and all manifestations of Palestinian
01:14:00.920resistance. All this had to take second place to Israel's security and the civilized values
01:14:06.800and democracy for which Israel was widely promoted. Her army, which often behaved with
01:14:11.980cruelty and undiscipline, was to be regarded as an exemplar of, quote, purity of arms.
01:14:17.440And those of us who witnessed Israel's killings of civilians were to be abused as liars,
01:14:22.440anti-Semites, or friends of terrorism. Yeah, the free press, that little institution,
01:14:27.060the free press talks all the time about how Israel is known as the most ethical army.
01:14:33.120Yeah, it's like insulting to your intelligence.
01:14:36.940It's honestly hard to even stomach that. Yeah, Fisk is a British journalist who lived in the Middle East for a long time. And in this context, if an Arab person commits a violent act, it's terrorism. If a Western person commits a violent act, it's security, it's self-defense. There's a very obvious hierarchy happening here.
01:14:55.500So to kind of bring this home to how this is playing out today, particularly in places like college campuses, in Katie J.N. Baker's reporting on the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, she describes how the Heritage Foundation crafted this paper calling for foreign students who were vocally pro-Palestine to have their visas revoked.
01:15:17.260Similarly to some of the frameworks we discussed in our Mangione episode, Project Esther aims to categorize participating in any pro-Palestinian activism of any kind as, quote, providing material support to terrorists.
01:15:33.400Because if terrorism is who you are and not what you do, to be Palestinian or aligned with Palestine in any context is to, by default, be terrorist.
01:15:43.380Quick cutaway to that sweet little eight-year-old Palestinian kid who always goes viral, who's like, these are the plants we're growing. This is my zucchini and my eggplant. And it's like Hamas. That little kid must be Hamas.
01:15:56.520They classify pro-Palestinian activism as the global Hamas support network.
01:16:02.420Heritage Action, which is the think-takes-grassroots advocacy arm, is helping states pass legislation that penalizes those who support boycotts against Israel.
01:16:13.200The author said, quote, this isn't just a battle for the Jewish state. It is also a battle for the United States.
01:23:47.300It is intimately connected with the emergence of the carceral state in the U.S., which is
01:23:53.200what we're going to talk more about in a second.
01:23:55.360It's also like, again, just a perfect moment to be like, all right, who do we think is
01:24:00.680more clear-eyed about what's taking place here?
01:24:03.160Which group do we think are more clear-eyed about who is being persecuted?
01:24:09.260Who do you think is more aware of power dynamics? Is it Black radical intellectuals? Or is it your mom's friend who is DMing you angrily because you shared something about Gaza food aid? I guess it's up to you, but I know what my answer is.
01:24:25.260I would like for you, please, to now clock in as Malcolm X for me.
01:28:55.120The way the American public understands Israel is as much about Americans' own need for a particular story about ourselves to be true as it is about what's happening in the Middle East.
01:31:46.540Netanyahu will reference the same biblical passage to justify wiping out Palestinians that early American settlers used to justify their extermination of Native Americans.
01:33:46.000because his state is suffering a disaster.
01:33:48.520And he likes to escape to Mexico for a better life
01:33:51.620when he's actually called to do his job.
01:33:53.940Yeah, busy getting those little beads in his hair.
01:33:58.300So, all of that, everything that we just went through, makes, quote, the complacency of the liberal international order that has wittingly legitimized and supported this state of affairs all the more concerning.
01:34:10.540Because what happens there can happen here.
01:35:09.380Okay. One of the actual functions of orders, police, prisons, and militaries is to define, quote, us by controlling, banishing, and killing a racialized them.
01:35:20.200While this is true for all nation states, it's doubly true for settler colonial states like the United States and Israel.
01:35:27.040As settlers, their identity is always at stake. This is why they're so insecure and sensitive about anything that seems to threaten it.
01:35:33.720J.D., J.D. Vance, we're calling your name.
01:35:35.920Oh, yeah. The Natcons, those fucking psychos.
01:35:38.640Oh, yeah. It's why so many members of the dominant groups in these countries are so aggressively and obnoxiously patriotic. It's why they try to control anything that could interfere with, quote, good breeding, like reproductive rights for people with uteruses and the affirmation of LGBTQ plus identities.
01:35:55.240It's why they angrily and mindlessly repeat slogans
01:35:57.920like lock them all up or push them into the sea,
01:36:01.400even after they're presented with evidence
01:36:03.120that these policies make the world much more dangerous.
01:36:06.640Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously,
01:42:32.580and the way they were violently cracked down on
01:42:34.340should be a huge fucking wake-up call to Americans.
01:42:38.060In the last two years, I feel like I have obviously, if you follow me on social media, I have become very outspoken about this.
01:42:43.780But I remember maybe two or so years ago when all this was, you know, rising to the fore again, I was employed as a W-2 employee.
01:42:51.320I was more careful about what I was sharing.
01:42:52.880And I remember so clearly looking around and being like, OK, let me do the thing that I always try to do, which is like, what are other people saying and which people do I respect and admire and what do they think?
01:43:05.800And I noticed immediately that all of the artists that I had learned about during grad school were totally unified on this. And almost everyone else was like, fuck those terrorists, the only democracy in the Middle East we have to support.
01:43:22.980And I remember being like, this is really interesting. I'm not going to name those artists because they already have risked so much to defend and support Palestinian liberation. And that is not without consequence. But it was really striking to me. And it was a moment that I feel like I will always remember just being and then learning about James Baldwin and learning about Malcolm X and seeing Ta-Nehisi Coates and being like, which group do I think are the most intellectually and morally and spiritually rigorous? And like, who are the people that I want to learn from?
01:43:51.980And then I think about the alternative, which is like a whole lot of white liberal women on my Instagram stories and in my DMs who were talking nonstop about how dangerous college campuses were. To this day, I have never seen any of those women change course. I have not seen them talk about the starvation taking place in Gaza, but they've become very quiet since Trump won.
01:44:15.760And I maybe once every two weeks have to resist like an almost overwhelming urge to DM them and be like, so are you happy?
01:44:24.940Yeah, checking in. Are you still really concerned about those college campuses? Are you really happy that they're abducting college students who wrote op-eds in their student newspapers? Or do you feel fucking embarrassed for what you do? Like I just, it's so hard for me to understand.
01:44:40.720Do you remember there was a podcast that you and I listened to for sort of like market research purposes before we started this one where the argument being mounted was that the protests were disruptive to the students who didn't want their final semester of college to be about protests.
01:45:02.080This was like a so-called feminist podcast.
01:45:04.440And you and I were like, cracks, beer, taps, Mike.
01:45:06.940And I was like, slowly presses pause, like, okay, that's enough of that.
01:45:12.800I remember that moment you and I were texting about that episode.
01:45:15.000And then we were like, so yeah, I think we're pretty clear to go.
01:45:17.500I think the market's pretty wide open for a...
01:45:21.960There's actually a whole lot of space.
01:45:24.200So again, I think like things are escalating quickly in the US.
01:45:28.080You mentioned the student who was arrested, detained for writing an op-ed.
01:45:33.400You've already talked about Mahmoud Khalil.
01:45:35.440Well, interestingly, the McCarran-Walter, or Immigration and Nationality Act, authored by a very anti-Semitic congressman in 1952, is what's being used right now to prosecute pro-Palestinian protesters and revoke their visas.
01:45:53.280because it gives the federal government the ability to deport, quote,
01:45:57.080an alien whose presence in the United States,
01:46:00.080the Secretary of State little bitch boy Marco Rubio,
01:46:03.220has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially adverse
01:46:06.140foreign policy consequences for the United States, end quote.
01:46:09.180I love that a man named Marco Rubio feels safe being, like, chief deportation czar.
01:46:15.760I'm like, my brother in Christ, I promise they are going to come for you.
01:46:19.140So this was originally created with the purpose of keeping Holocaust-surviving Jews out of the United States. That was the point of this law, was they didn't want Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to come to the U.S. And now they're using this same law to crack down on Palestinian protesters.
01:46:40.300Do we think that this is about Jewish safety? Do we think that this is about protection?
01:46:45.660Or might this really be about projecting power over civilians and making it clear what ideas you're allowed to have and what beliefs you're allowed to loudly espouse and what will get you thrown in the fucking gulag?
01:46:58.960So this brings us to Francesca Albanese's report on the economy of genocide.
01:48:52.940I'm going to have you read this excerpt from the report.
01:48:56.720Microsoft's technologies are embedded in the prison service, police, universities, and schools, including in colonies.
01:49:04.140Microsoft has been integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003 while acquiring Israeli cybersecurity and surveillance startups.
01:49:15.840They believe that Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology and what they call, quote, core defense infrastructure for rapid construction and deployment of military software.
01:49:28.900As we know, Palantir is friend of the show and EV Magazine investor Peter Thiel's company.
01:49:40.940And it's a platform that they have sold to more than 30 foreign governments, including the UK Ministry of Defense, the Danish police, Ukrainian intelligence, and, of course, Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.
01:49:52.900Its identity-matching tech, which was field-tested in the occupied West Bank, is what now powers U.S. police fusion centers.
01:50:00.880So here you see, as one of my sources put it, quote,
01:50:04.800the global spread of U.S.-style surveillance regimes justified by fear, driven by profit, and largely unchecked.
01:50:12.880Now, I don't think many Americans realize just how surveilled we are.
01:50:20.520Like we are constantly being watched. Atlanta is the second most surveilled city in the world. They have 124 CCTV cameras for every thousand people. That is 448 cameras per square mile.
01:50:38.580Meanwhile, we're all just like in our fucking bedrooms with our fucking double chins looking at ChatGPT being like, look at this cool toy they made for us.
01:50:46.300They're just fucking strapping every camera, filling us with all of this data tech, monitoring our fucking heart rates, getting access to our ancestry, taking pictures of us everywhere we go.
01:50:55.900And we're like, oh, thanks for the ring package.
01:51:36.600Okay. But the point is, is that this technology is honed in Israel. It is trained in Israel.
01:51:43.040That's where they figure out how it works. It's how they make sure it works.
01:51:46.060This is from an investigation from The Intercept.
01:51:50.460In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered
01:51:55.920catch-and-revoke initiative, oh my fucking God, to accelerate the cancellation of student visas.
01:52:02.220Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxings, and doxing sites. Awesome. To enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threatened to, quote, overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional republic stands. Wow. Talk about a Nazi dog whistle.
01:52:24.240The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed in part within the U.S. immigration system.
01:52:32.160Quick cutaway to Mark Zuckerberg being like, yeah, you know, I'll bite, but can we get people to stop calling me a loser online?
01:52:39.000Rubio's Catch and Revoke initiative emerges from longstanding collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares.
01:52:47.080The AI industry's business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of data, which makes less than democratic contexts, where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial, legislative, or public oversight, particularly lucrative, proving grounds for new products.
01:53:03.060The effects of these technologies have been most punitive on the borders of the U.S. or the European Union, like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece.
01:53:10.920But the inevitable is happening. They are becoming popular domestic policing tools.
01:53:18.560As Israel authorities expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism, lol, in the early 2010s, U.S. technology firms flocked to the region.
01:53:30.040In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems, Israel's security apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information economy's most prized commodity, data.
01:53:40.840IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings.
01:53:45.900Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces.
01:53:49.440This is like all of the men coming to Jesus with like, I bring frankincense and myrrh, except they're just bringing like all the fucking, yeah, we three kings bring all of our different.
01:53:59.500I'm bringing you cloud computing infrastructure.
01:54:05.680Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems.
01:54:09.740The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats.
01:54:17.780Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint. Yeah.
01:54:23.560So, like, do we see the fucking problem here?
01:57:17.480in this. We are responsible for this. Yeah, we are the aggressor. U.S. tech conglomerates refined
01:57:24.520these systems abroad until Trump's re-election and taking office again in January made it easier
01:57:30.940to do this at home. This year, OpenAI, Google, and Meta announced its products could be used for
01:57:37.360American national security purposes. So currently, Palantir is building for ICE an immigration OS,
01:57:46.000And it's like written in the same way all the Apple products are, where it's like all lowercase and then uppercase OS, all one word, that will generate reports on immigrants and visa holders, including what they look like, where they live, and even to monitor their locations in real time.
01:58:02.980Okay, so things are not going to be okay then.
01:58:06.840One major issue with this beyond the like obvious is that anyone who's ever used chat GPT for anything knows that it's wrong a lot. These technologies are flawed. They lead to lots of errors, but it's okay because obviously the current administration is like really good at recognizing when they've made a mistake and like rectifying it really immediately. And yeah, so I'm sure it'll be fine.
01:58:33.000The craziest thing is that even the justification is beginning to converge. Whether you are a
01:58:38.920Palestinian living in Gaza or an immigrant in the United States, political speech that is shared or
01:58:44.320liked online or offline that is critical of the capital R regime is deemed support of terrorism.
01:58:51.500As we know, ICE budget was just expanded like between seven and tenfold. They're going to get
01:59:24.200As far as, like, all the enforcement agencies go.
01:59:26.340So like you have the IRS, the DEA, the FBI, CIA, whatever, ICE's budget is like larger than all of them combined at this point. It's like an unbelievable amount of money.
01:59:37.820It's also worth noting, and maybe just saying really explicitly, if you are one of the moderate, neoliberal, fiscally conservative, socially liberal dunces in this nation, and you think that this is actually about just getting rid of that, the heavy, heavy weight of the undocumented, the people who pay into a system and get none out of it.
02:00:03.540If you think that this is going to end with them, then you are so sorely mistaken, and I am so sorry for the nosebleed slash aneurysm you're going to get when they come for you.
02:00:17.100Like, this is fucking not about undocumented people.
02:00:21.080So, in conclusion, many, not all, but many Americans, especially kind of like your classic center-left liberal, are horrified and outraged by these ICE raids, by the disappearing entertainment of innocent people, by the flagrant and body violence of alligator Alcatraz.
02:00:42.480And it's like there's this kind of disbelief. So much of the oppositional national narrative is
02:00:47.820this isn't America. This isn't who we are. Yeah. But it is who we are. Bad news, babes.
02:00:54.100It is who we have always been, how it was created, how it became the global center of capitalism
02:00:59.980through enslavement, domination, violence. It may be liberal in the sense that it espouses
02:01:05.220values of self-determination and individual freedom, but it is a profoundly right-wing
02:01:10.200history this is actually remarkably consistent for us to be completely honest yeah and we believe
02:01:16.520ourselves to be better than this because we don't see ourselves clearly we have spent some time
02:01:21.680today talking about the power of zionist propaganda but the only reason that we feel surprised at all
02:01:29.000or horrified at all by our ability to commit these national atrocities at home is because our own
02:01:35.780propaganda has worked too well on us. In conclusion, that is why I believe Palestine
02:01:42.640is the key. It is what we must be willing to confront. It is what we must be willing to
02:01:47.000understand, not just if we want to honestly understand our own history, but how we're
02:01:51.380going to move forward from here. How we respond as a nation to this genocide and the larger
02:01:56.800question of Palestinian liberation tells us absolutely everything we need to know about
02:02:01.980the future of right-wing extremism in this country. It is everything. And it's the reason
02:02:06.480why there's such a violent crackdown on people who are willing to call it what it is publicly,
02:02:11.200because once that unravels, nothing is safe.
02:02:15.680First of all, bravo. Standing ovation. I think that in the same way that this is a reminder that
02:02:20.460we are and have always been a conservative extremist Christian country, like it's embedded
02:02:26.020in our DNA, our kind of toothless liberalism is also embedded in our DNA. And so, when you talk
02:02:32.300about, like, where's the Democratic Party? Where's our leader? When is someone just going to come up
02:02:38.700like Barack Obama and talk about, yes, we can, and then drone strike kids in Yemen? So, that is also
02:02:45.540very much par for the course with America. Like, you cannot have any sort of, like, neoliberal
02:02:51.660center-left movement that's going to, like, stand for it. Because all of these theories
02:02:56.600have always been a little bit toothless. We talked about this in the abortion episode. Like, we
02:03:01.180again and again fall for this kind of belief that the rights that a few of us have are the rights
02:03:06.580that all of us have, because this great nation that we live in grants rights to everyone. That's
02:03:12.480really not the case. And Barry Weiss, if you're still listening to this and taking notes, we need
02:03:17.340communist revolution. All right, that's it. The episode is over now. The episode is over. And if
02:03:26.160you are going to come into our DMs with anything other than praise for us being the two smartest
02:03:30.480women on the planet, our virtual assistants, aka our two cats, are not going to fucking read it
02:03:35.240because I don't read them. So you're talking to yourself in there, baby. I'm so proud of you