HasanAbi
š¤¬CHICAGOš¤¬SOCIALISM CONFERENCEš¤¬FETTERMAN WSJ EXPOSEš¤¬STRAIT CLOSEDš¢OIL$ RISESš¢DSA PANELš¢
09-04-2026 Ā· 6h 40m
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hasanabi VODs on twitchBroadcasts 30+ hours are truncated. View the Raw Transcript VTT for the full version.
Again woman drunk on it, I'm starting to run
Again woman drunk on it, I'm starting to run
Maybe can't like you for school
Or the ghost in the night
With the card he has set up, I know
Blackhand cuts me out
And no one dangerous steps out of the van
Next thing I know, I'm in a nice camp
And I won't fear a sign they get there
At least I wasn't deported by human
Run woman, Ice agent
Christ, I go fast
Run woman, Ice agent
Christ, I go fast
What's going on everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening afternoon, pre-noon
no matter where you are in the world. I'm a soundbiker and this is the awesome
that broadcast coming to you live from sunny and very warm Chicago Illinois we're
live and alive from Chicago, Illinois folks. And as we start the broadcast every single
day with the same chant once again, that was More Women Drone Piles by Vikas Music. We
We are in Chicago, Illinois ladies and gentlemen, shi-town baby, shi-city baby.
Before we get to anything else, of course, I have to get started with the number one,
Credo the motto, the Piker Broadcasting Service.
We condemn Hassan Hassanabi Piker.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls and MBS.
I hope you all condemn Hassan Hassanabi Piker.
10 Hassanabi condemnations before we get it before we get started with anything else get it out of the way and then also
10 M Israel highs
But yes, yes ladies and gentlemen boys girls MBS, I'm in Chicago you might be asking wondering why am I in?
in. Why am I in Chicago? And that's because socialism. That's right. It's because of socialism.
You might have heard about it. You might have heard about it. It's a little thing called
socialism and by that i actually mean
i'm going to the obama of the obama list that's right i'm just going to the
obama list i lied i'm i'm here to see david axelrod
i'm seer i'm here to see my goat brock
i'm here to see the obama list
it's not about the socialism conference obama was the true socialist
actually
yeah how about how about the communism conference why are we going to the
socialism conference you know
in any case ladies and gentlemen boys girls and mbs we got a lot to talk about
we got a lot to talk about we got a lot to cover we got a lot to discover uh...
and this is part of the broadcast where i tell you about my personal news
about what's going on in the world of a son house and i think i heard between
the time period where presence top shaman but impressive star shaman but
and so help me God that's what I'm gonna do. Obviously. Okay, I lied again. I'm here to
see Rahm Emanuel. That's right. I'm here to go on a date, a one on one date with Rahm Emanuel,
where we're gonna find out if he's gonna pummel me in the head with a two by four. Oh my God,
I'm realizing there's a lot of Chicago people. I lied. I'm actually here for the Kanye West
concert i lied i'm actually here to see lewis ferrican
i lied i'm actually gonna do all of those things it's all of the above i'm
trying to give jonathan greenblatt an aneurysm
okay i like to see both sides
of the argument
i like to call balls and strikes
so i'm gonna first talk to lewis ferrican
then i'm gonna talk to ron manuel i'm gonna lick the bean i'm gonna do it
all
They saying you're a fed rock party's discussion around his on picker super
interesting to me, but what's more interesting to me are the people who are
diehard fans or followers of
Why are you showing me this?
Why are you showing me this?
I listen, I'm going to make it very clear for every single person.
If I was a federal agent, I would put every single one of you in
Guantanamo Bay.
Okay.
I would start with people, I would start with people on the internet before I, if I was a federal agent, you're all going to prison, okay?
If you annoy me in the chat, if you send me a bad link, you're going to Guantanamo, okay?
You are going to Gitmo, I'm putting you in the slammer, I'm slamming your ass in the slammer, okay?
Oh, you're critiquing me from a Marxist perspective, I'm far too revisionist, slammer, okay?
Blammo more like Slammo. I'm throwing all of you in Gitmo. Okay?
Prison Bert I didn't even know that was one of those in any case folks folks
Yeah, criticize the suits Slammo
Criticize the suiting
Criticize criticize the fit Slammo
Okay off the Gitmo with all of you anyway
Um, so, uh, where was I?
Oh yeah.
So I'm in, I'm in Chicago.
I'm in Chicago, Chicago.
Yeah.
Immediately people are saying good suit.
That's what I, that's what I'm talking about.
That's what I'm freaking talking about, baby.
Let's go.
Um, so yeah, uh, where was I, what was I talking about?
Oh yeah.
I'm in Chicago, personal news wise,
this is a part of the broadcast where I tell you
about my personal news, but honestly,
there isn't too much to talk about.
I just, I shot the Fear End podcast,
another banger episode last night.
And honestly, there is one thing,
there is one thing,
because I forgot what day it is.
But y'all didn't forget what day it is. It's Friday ladies and gentlemen.
It's freaking Friday. You already know what it is. We celebrate the Fridays, we celebrate the labor union, we celebrate the Socialists, the Communists, the Trade Union, the anarchists that all fought long and hard to make sure that we have a five-day work week, ladies and gentlemen.
That's right. But we sure did, Mufasa. Alright, so the vibes are gonna be immaculate today.
We're gonna be with some comrades, so the vibes will be immaculate nonetheless. The
vibes will be good nonetheless. We are today going to be at the Socialism Conference.
Can you explain why Friday is special to you?
It's not like you're taking the weekends off, you stream every day, my man.
Gitmo.
Remember, I'm a federal agent and you're going to jail.
Question me?
Jail.
Listen, it's you guys.
We're celebrating it with you guys, okay?
We're celebrating you.
In any case, folks, folks, folks.
I'm alive, I'm alive.
Hassan goes to Chicago, that's fine.
It's basically Midwest New York.
Hassan goes to Minneapolis, you know,
that's one of the largest metropolitan areas
in the region.
Hassan, Green to Michigan, that's fine, I guess.
Hassan goes to Wisconsin, I guess that's okay.
That's pretty good state.
Hassan goes to Missouri over Iowa, unacceptable.
Listen, you build it and I'll be there, okay?
You build the socialist movement in Iowa
and I'll be there.
Will you be doing DSA pilgrimage, visiting Chairman Fred Hampton's house and pay respects
to the Haymarket martyr?
Probably not because I'm going to be streaming the entire time.
Okay, so in any case, folks, folks, folks.
I can't stop looking at the comments.
I appreciate you stating what I believe to be the best.
Marx's line of strategy right now, yes, ending Mamdani and Hassan, there are real criticisms
to be made and we should make them, but carefully.
We do not want to risk alienating the rest of the working class because these reforms
are wins, especially because of how advanced and horrendous capitalism has become in the
US.
I know I'm looking longingly at New York City from Texas despite my communist politics.
Of course, all of this is most useful in real-world organizing rather than focusing
an online discourse. Oh, it's not ending Mumdanian Hasan. Yes, ending Mumdanian Hasan. Okay. Not
a fan of either. But what books would you recommend?
Okay, no way you deleted Twitter off your phone, but you said it's a placeholder. No,
I've been going on threads. I've been going on threads to really stare at the madness directly.
In any case, Texas Socialist is going to be so hard. Yeah, we're going to make all of it Socialist. Don't worry.
We're going to make all of it Socialist. Alright, so
Folks, folks, folks, folks, folks, folks, folks, where was I, where was I?
Yeah, I'm in Chicago, Chicago for the Socialism Conference.
We've got a DSA panel today.
We got some wonderful guests tomorrow as well.
It's going to be a banger.
Helela's trying to cancel your Texas event.
That's the least surprising turn of events I've ever seen in my entire life.
I mean, this is how it starts and then they end up doing it and then like there's
like maybe one or two Democrats who say, hey, this is kind of fucked up. We care about the
first amendment, right? You know, but let me let me blast off real quick. Chicago Social
conference federman washer journal expose a straight close oil rise dsa panel get in now
we'll talk about jd jeta die advance and his uh horrible reaction to the widow uh
to the war widow talerico not gonna be happy about this i'm gonna literally put you on a
fucking rocket ship and launch you into the mother fucking moon dude what the fuck this has
nothing to do with talerico i do not know james talerico i don't care about james talerico i'm
Dude, dude, dude. Can I just say something? You don't have to participate in the, in the mentally ill
libtard brigade, um, just ahead of time. You know what I mean? Because there are people who do that.
There are people who are already doing that on the fucking internet. You don't have to do it
yourself. Okay, take a day off. No jokes. Prison for you. How come you're so tired? I don't
know because I just fucking flew to Chicago. Okay, and I didn't get a lot of sleep because
Obviously, you know the passage of time works that way travel
Travel works that way. You know what I mean? That's just that's how it works. You fucking
Have to go to sleep early after doing another podcast and then you wake up super early at like 4 a.m.
It's a four-hour flight
You try to sleep on the four-hour flight. You can't get any shut eye
You just can't do it
New gender wars are popping off. My normie friends are already weighing in. Lindsay Clancy, murder case.
Oh yeah, it was officially declared a mistrial, I know.
Why are your arms tired from flapping?
Yeah, I flew in with my arms.
Anyway, blasting off ladies and gentlemen, let's go.
All right, well, let's blast off.
There's not much personal news outside of that I'm just I'm in a groggy mood as always
because I'm fucking sick and I'm tired.
I'm not sick but I'm tired, I'm sick and tired of your bullshit.
Gadget girl, thank you for the 10 gift subs.
My normie friends have lost their damn minds and everyone's just posting daily
while articles every three hours are so fucking bananas.
These people who have gone to anti-ice rallies with me.
Yeah, I don't think people understand how susceptible the PsyOps, like the average American is, even your neighbors, even like well-educated people. I think it's a disastrous outcome.
And the fact that our lives are increasingly spent on Zionist billionaire-owned social media algorithms is probably not great.
not great. Not even just Zidus, pro imperialist, pro capitalist, pro Israel, pro everything that's bad.
And they just keep feeding that mass psychosis machine with absolute certainty.
And many of our loved ones will fall for it. Okay, many of our loved ones do fall for it
Bad jokes are still acceptable right legalized comedy. Yeah, only only if it
Only if it
Doesn't annoy me if you make a bad joke and I get a chuckle you're fine
If you make a bad joke and I'm actually pissed off you're going to jail
I'll put your ass in the slammer, dude, or Hondo P. Hold on. In any case, folks, folks, folks.
Jokes.
Insert bad joke, don't even do it.
Don't even do it.
You will literally be thrown in prison.
I will throw you in prison.
No jokes.
Have you ever watched the blood in the machine pockets on here?
No, I have not.
Anyway, folks, here is the, uh, here is the blast off meme.
Here is the tweet.
Let the people know we are live.
We are alive.
Boom, boom, boom.
Uh, why so strict today?
I'm in a bad mood.
It's Friday.
We're supposed to be in a good mood, but I'm in a bad mood
because I'm tired.
I'm tired, I'm groggy, I'm cranky, I'm in no mood, no mood for nonsense.
As Thad Herndon and Majority Report discuss Azan Piper.
So it is difficult, I think, more difficult than any knowledge to run a Malarie McMorrow
asked, uh, uh, please everybody or, or, or style thing across
Democrats, like you kind of have to stake stuff at some point.
And so whether it's Piker or something else, the time is
wrong and you're blast off me, buddy.
I don't care.
Wait, what the fuck?
11pm.
11pm.
Where on the planet?
It's 11 AM Pacific. I don't know who made the meme, but great stuff. Who cares?
I don't think you make it through that Democratic primary, whethervating to the latest Twitter
controversy.
The progressive who means well, but just can't get it over the finish line.
Yeah, so like, honestly to me, like, and this is, I'm like, when I saw Ossoff release
that statement about Piper, less than actually about responding to what I think was a thing
taken out of context and all that stuff.
We can go through the facts of it, but more so, I thought.
I don't know if I would get in the habit of responding to the 30-hour ex news cycle.
I think that's a losing game.
I totally, that's what-
I just thought.
I thought, why?
interesting
yep
that was my exact
same perspective
that i felt the exact same way
especially because
like john ossoff's most redeemable quality is not his like
is not his like policies or anything like that i've said it
before he's a he's a liberal populist
uh... he he is uh... somewhat devoid of of left policy on his plank on his
platform. His voting track record is rather conservative, but he's very good at presenting
himself. He's very good at sticking to a specific lane. And it's really interesting that he
he just kind of dropped the ball a little bit on that.
More than any other thing that in particular when Ossoff did that because he
Piker has not been anywhere near Georgia
And has been like studious in trying to avoid issues like even around like crypto and AI
He doesn't have a great record there
I mean he has he has really tried to stay in this like anti-corruption lane, which is a very sort of comfortable place
Yeah, you know
JD Vance is in that lane too, right? Like it but it just so happens he happens to be in the administration
That's committing a lot of that corruption
But yeah, I found that really interesting and I really wonder what that says about his donor because that was something that I can't imagine
It feels like somebody went specifically to Ossoff's campaign and said
Do this and he put it through a statement. He didn't say it
And as a reporter on that 20 Democratic landscape, you could, you could ask about anything to
give the statement about anything.
You could pitch somebody against somebody and then all of a sudden it's an issue.
And then they never actually said it at a campaign event.
So I think we should ask about kind of a media role in here too.
But I'm just saying from a candidate perspective, I feel like holding that clarity about what
matters most to voters will be what separates this mass group who runs next year.
Yeah, I think, I think a Stead's analysis was very astute about how this is not about,
this is not just about like tanking of duals chances, but this is also trying to eliminate
like trying to eradicate a 2028 platform for candidates to go too early and gain credibility
on certain issues, certain issues that the base actually, the base actually is fond of,
right? What's the room temp? It's hot, man. We are reaching new levels of parasociality.
I previously thought was not possible.
I respect it.
We are.
The mom Donnie fake story about the influencers is something
different.
That is more about like classic anti-Mamdani slop, like that's a classic anti-Mamdani slop.
There's a lot of that out there and it will continue, it will only continue as his popularity
grows.
They're just like desperate to disparage him and it's even better if it's like associated
with another thing that's happening in the news, like Pete Hegzeff actually using taxpayer money.
Yeah. What is this? It's hacking. New York City mayor needs to reject Piker condemn,
globalize the intifada before 9-11. A week from Friday, Marx, dude, this is so funny. They're
just they they're they're so desperate they're like please like can you just can you condemn
Hasan come on we asked you to condemn your wife but like you can at least condemn Hasan again right
remember when we asked you that and then you won anyway and now you're the beloved mayor of our
city yeah this is next week's story for the for the record but if you thought that this
shit was gonna die down i'm letting you know right now it's not gonna die down they're
going to literally, they're gonna keep hammering it over and over again.
Hey, Hassan, just a normal fan. You look very pale. You should work on getting some vitamin
D. You could also probably take more vitamins now that you're getting older. Okay, eat the
perma. All right. I read that out loud and also gave issued my first perma of the
day because any kind of parasociality of that magnitude is probably going to be
met with an awesome force that you've never seen before. I am once again a
federal agent, a federal law enforcement officer. Okay, I am a federal law
enforcement officer. I am a member of federal law enforcement and I am sending
you to gitmo.
um
but yeah if you thought that this uh... focus on
wave was going to subside you are wrong there's three key events that are
taking place in the upcoming week
number one
the republican national convention which will be the clip show
as they said already
That is what it was going to be.
They reported on it in Axios months ago,
that they said it was all going to be the clip show.
That's number one.
Number two, Kirk Aversary 9-10.
Obviously, we're nearing the first year after Kirk.
First year since Kirk, the Kirkening.
So that will definitely be another angle of attack.
And last but not least, 9-11.
I think the goal here for as many Americans,
for the goal here for the Republican Party
and also established Democrats is for Americans
to think I am responsible for 9-11.
Associate my name and also all the other Muslim candidates'
names with 9-11 to the best of their ability, okay?
So there will be a brief moment of solace,
a brief moment of respite potentially this weekend
and then they will bring it back.
Yeah, here is the Axios report on it.
If you guys wanna read it, we read it.
It was on August 7th that they revealed
that their plan is a socialism telethon
at midterm convention.
So yeah, it's gonna happen.
It's gonna happen more aggressively.
One of the things that I've seen is like
People who are really offended about my comments on 9-11, who themselves are 9-11 truthers?
I find that to be very strange, because they're like, oh, he doesn't like sufficiently respect this horrible thing that happened.
And then they also are simultaneously people who say like, no, it was a hologram.
Like there was no real planes flying into the towers.
And I'm like, so you're offended that I'm not respecting the thing that you think is fake?
like what are you
What is your point
Yeah, they're also hitting our girl Emma
Over at the Emma Geordi report with the same clips. It's the same people doing the same shit
Clipping out of context or or framing the clip with a
The headline that has nothing to do with the content of the clip itself, they realize that
they can get a little bit more impact nowadays from the pro-Israel brigade that has a lot
more institutional motion.
So they've basically attached themselves like a barnacle or a plankton.
And so that's the goal here.
That's the goal now.
That's the rules now.
That's the goal now.
It doesn't look like you and your media outlet are taking your own advice.
Anyway, so they're doing that and then Sam goes, actually my entire family may be Emma's
biggest fans.
However, I will grant you some and my family think I'm due for a haircut.
Right?
This is Mandy Kong person says, your entire family would be rightfully ashamed of you
for giving your show over to anti-Semites like these and then someone
responds not great Sammy this kind of shit is what keeps us on piker in the
news y'all have to be very careful with your words and your B team is not to
which Sam responds with what keeps piker in the news is a concerted effort to
neutralize his voice and audience in the 2028 primary and he's right so
Hassan Piker.
In any case, in any case, ladies and gentlemen, the nation wrote about me in a negative manner.
What the fuck?
Why is the nation writing about me in a negative manner?
I've begun to reread black shirts and reds.
And it's just a super easy book to read.
It's like 150 pages, right?
Shouts out to Yellow Perante.
And in it, there's a passage where
he talks about the nation being one of the few Western
outlets that actually warns about the rise of fascism.
At a time when the Wall Street Journal, New York Times,
and numerous other Western press outlets
were actually quite excited about the growth of fascism.
They saw it as this alluring thing.
So I'm surprised that they would write about me
in such a negative manner.
The nation compared to Samp Iker discussing
the dangers of conflating Zionism with Judaism
to Hitler's anti-Semitism.
This is fucking disgusting and you're intentionally, wait,
what?
Okay, that's actually really insane because remember this actually puts into context what I was talking about the nation is the nation was one of the only western outlets that was warning about the dangers of fascism
Finkelstein comment had an effect. Wow. Had what Finkelstein's comment on what had what effect?
On reading dog. I don't stop reading you guys are so stupid when I'm in transit. I read
okay
I'm literally at a book conference. Okay
Okay. You understand that I am currently at the Haymarket Books, like I'm in Chicago for the Socialism Conference, which is put together by Haymarket Books.
Okay.
Anyway.
That's crazy. Anyway, yeah, the nation apparently compared me to Adolf Hitler. That's awesome. That's cool. That's normal. Normal stuff, man.
Uh, yeah.
That is a sad state of affairs for American media.
You're giving too much information on your location, dog.
What are you talking about?
They also compared you to FDR, so I'm both FDR and Adolf Hitler at the same time.
How is that possible?
This ogre is actually brand dead.
Yes.
We are going to talk about John Fetterman.
We're going to talk about John Fetterman, but before we do that, a quick, quick update.
Someone appears to have hacked the Republican National Convention website and now it just
redirects to the FST files website.
So there's that.
What?
When Donald Trump had the Ku Klux Klan kind of former, you know, chief campaigning for
him and Trump had to go, oh, he's nothing to do with me.
He's nothing to do with me.
He just likes what I do.
is in a sense where Said has been with pika right this is Zionist boomer brain rot to a certain degree
I don't even think a lot of these people are cynical I think a lot of these people just like saw
the articles read the articles read the news coverage and we're like oh like this guy is a vicious
anti-Semitic terrorist obviously like clearly and so is Abdel El Sayed for courting his audience,
right? Like that's, this is the secondary impact of, or maybe she's just a cynical monster. It could be.
He endorses me. It doesn't mean that I endorse him. It's pursued him to a point where
it clearly rattles him enough for him to say he's not going to go campaigning with Piker.
This is why his distancing, like, his additional, like, I'm distancing, but not really a statement was a mistake, I think, because they just never, they were never going to stop.
And they still are not going to stop. And they're doing it. And now they're saying, like, you already courted his vicious anti-Semitic audience.
You know what I mean?
to these vicious
And that's when a reasonable person,
person. That's not the case. Unfortunately, mainstream media is riddled with pro-Israel.
pro-israel elites who will slander as easily as they breathe.
This is a valuable lesson in never caving to these vicious sharks who will make the most
and saying comparisons and act as though Abdul courted an anti-Semites audience when every
reasonable person knows that's not the case. Unfortunately, mainstream media is riddled
with cynical pro-Israel elites who will slander as easily as they breathe.
It's crazy bro. On the one hand, this is the type of shit that I'm dealing with.
On the other hand, you got like, you know, people who believe that they're to my left
and people who are altars and the like being like, dude, you're a fucking federal agent,
you're so liberal, you're a reactionary liberal, you're our number one enemy, you're the
number one enemy of the revolutionary movement.
more to your point
most of the 3 million people who listen to Hassan live in Pakistan Abdul al said wants all of them voting in US elections yeah incredibly racist shit
Yeah.
Abdel El Sayed is going to learn the hard way, like Mum Donnie did, there's no kumbaya
meeting in the middle on this issue.
The other side wants you to support Israel period, except that the disagreement is more
substantive here because Abdel El Sayed is running for foreign policy authority.
When you try to do the kumbaya meeting in the middle dance, the other side smells
weakness to pretence that it's all about recognizing emotions, etc., very quickly
turns into a mafia style shakedown.
Mum Donnie won?
doesn't matter. He won, but he's still getting his, he's still constantly getting his, his
lashings on a daily basis from a contentious press, from a contentious media environment,
uh, from, from ideologues.
Ben Schwartz objectively funny headline, given how Harris got thrashed over Gaza in 2024.
And now those same protests gave Trump a pass on genocide, a lot of pile on over
Sompikers about 2024 centristems aren't going to let the dirtbag left on them again
This is the guy who wrote the fucking nation piece
Yeah, the attacks are not gonna stop the attacks are not gonna stop against al-Dula said they're not gonna stop against our mom
Donnie, they're just not going to stop
But once again, it's a bind. It's one that is impossible to counter, right? It's one that is
impossible to counter because you can't get into a clip show. You can't get into like the,
oh well you know I I know the context of this stuff I guess like the the only
thing that you could do in that situation is like this person is is being
propped up as as a vicious person when in fact him and his entire audience are
some of the more most progressive forces in this country that are are
certainly experiencing a level of apathy but we are here to activate
them, we are here to bring them back into the political process.
Lumping all criticisms of Zoran is garbage is very disingenuous and it allows no real
response of the matter at hand.
Lumping all criticisms of Zoran.
Dog, I'm talking about criticisms about his like influencer army or criticisms that
are coming from people who hate Zoran's anti-Israel position
and hate that he's Muslim too and hate that he's popular on top of that
and hate that he's a popular socialist Muslim
who's young
and he's been able to captivate a lot of young people
i'm talking about criticism from his right flank
i'm not talking about people who criticize him for like not dropping
jessica tish or
not disbanding the srg
okay i'm not
That's not.
And the less,
bro, you don't get to be over Mondani,
you aren't leadership, you aren't elected.
He's single-handedly taxing the pro-less sentiment
among actual voters.
You don't get to disregard that over some strategy
that you with no power disagree with.
Oh, you're talking to someone else.
Yeah.
I mean, look, there are apt and valid criticisms
or questions that we have yet to have answers to from Zoram
Umdani's thinking when it comes to unconditional support
for Hakeem Jeffries, for example.
Hakeem Jeffries is the most pro-Israel politician
in the country, the most pro-Israel Democrat
in the country, highest amount of APAC donations.
So for Zoram Umdani to turn around and consistently say,
like, I'm using my popularity to offer support and credibility
Hakeem Jeffries is something that I am confused by as well, right? Like, I am also confused by that.
I don't understand his thinking on this, and I don't, you know, I don't, I don't like his,
messaging on this at all. So, so far there have been instances where I found myself at odds with
his thinking and in most of those circumstances he's been right. So I still give him some credibility
in that field, right, with his decision-making.
Sounds like it's not looking like you lost to the Republicans
due to the Israel issue.
I'm down to stand 2028.
Check chat logs.
Let's hear what this guy has to say.
Also, did you see the rat fucking Julie Menin has been
trying to do this or on lately?
I saw that they were also trying to probe into the way
he's doing his social media videos.
Yes, Julie Menin is setting herself up
to run against Zoram Amdani.
She's going to lose, but that's what's going on.
She is the hand selected establishment pro-Israel flank
in New York politics that is gonna try
and oppose Zoram Amdani.
Not gonna work, he is unbelievably popular.
And given his instincts so far in maneuvering this landscape, he will probably only continue to be popular.
Never say never, but, you know, I'm very confident.
I guess it's partially because, yeah, there's no alternative.
It's either Jeffries or Mike Johnson, and that's his thinking in this regard.
But of course, the Mamdani story about the influencers is very funny, because the real
Mamdani story isn't that he uses influencers to become popular, it's that he's so popular
influencers want to post about him, which is an unbelievably rare situation for a politician,
and our cynical media demons have never actually experienced a situation like that.
With the exception of I would go so far, say Donald Trump, ironically enough, that they
just can't comprehend that.
They can't contend with that reality where like influencers want to be on his good graces,
influencers would want to tweet about him or post about him in the affirmative because
he is a very progressive and very popular and very accessible young dynamic force in American
politics right now. Obviously, if your experience revolves around dealing with people like Chuck
Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, you know, it's probably, it's probably confusing to you where
you're like, why the fuck are all these young people posting endlessly about Zoran? Oh,
He must be giving them access.
He must be doing the thing with the youth that regular establishment politicians do with
us.
Now, this is an organic force.
It's a totally organic force, and it's unlike anything that these guys have ever experienced,
So they are using that confusion, I guess, to try and make it seem like he's doing something
that's ingenuous, he's doing something insincere, he's doing something messed up.
That's not the case.
Brands might pay me if I get flowers for associating with the universally beloved icons like the
mayor of New York, Brave New World.
This was really funny.
Matt Stoller is one of the people that they identified as an influencer.
And Akilah Hughes as well.
So many people that we know are quote-unquote outed in this New York Post article, and then
New York Times also reported on it because New York Post is the fucking news desk editor
for the New York Times.
Because we live in hell world, because we live in the world of stupid, because we live
in the American century of humiliation.
The American century of humiliation in which New York Post can come out as a dishrag
with the most disingenuous framing on an article, claiming that Zahra Mamdani has an army of
influencers, that he is hypnotizing with his Islamic style taquitos.
And then the New York Times, the Grey Lady, the paper of record, will continue along
that trajectory, will continue with that disingenuous framing, and will write about
it.
That is unbelievable to me.
It is unacceptable.
It's completely unacceptable, but that's where we're at.
So Akila Hughes, one of the influencers, while in Flatter, New York Times started their article
about how Mayor Mamdani's team seeds updates about his policies of people with followings,
none of us have ever received a dollar to do so.
None of us have ever been in the obligation to do so.
It's 2026, and basically every Democratic candidate should be learning from this playbook.
If you have the support of people that are respected, give them a heads up on
policy.
I interviewed him once to explain New York's public funding on the mayoral race.
And the second was at an event held for Juneteenth at Gracie Mansion, where I asked them a tongue
in cheek question about the Knicks.
I did not get paid to do either.
And like any popular politician, getting a photo or a video with them was appreciated
by the people who liked my post.
I'm not sure where the controversy lies.
The signal chats haven't been deleted.
He wasn't in them.
And the comms teams have forever sent exclusives to their choice of media, so this feels
like manufactured controversy.
In some respects, the Zoram-Mamdani's Influencer Army story comes from the same exact places
that have been trying to feed as much anti-Hasan content into the media cycle as possible for
two reasons.
One, obviously, Zoram-Mamdani's socialist Muslim and also anti-Israel attitude, which
is very popular with the masses but very unpopular with the wealthy donor class.
But the second reason why the media is taking on the story, the second reason why the New
York Times would ever take on a bullshit-framed story like this is actually not just because
of the Israel stuff, not just because of Lake Zoran's popularity.
It's because this is an opportunity to attack independent media.
It's an opportunity for the old guard to release their frustrations with this new medium.
Tiktokers, influencers from every different platform, independent media outlets.
This is a very frustrating new development for those who have enjoyed being the
single-handed gatekeepers the video killed the radio star and so on and so forth
that's exactly what this anger and resentment stems from okay that's why
they're frustrated because they no longer have any control over what kind of
information gets disseminated and put in front of eyeballs after all it in a
The media environment even 10 years ago, if the same forces universally came out against
someone like myself and did this, you know, two week, three week, now, months long spiral,
this feeding frenzy, calling me a vicious anti-Semite and whatnot, if that had happened
10 years ago, my career would be over.
I'd have to kill myself.
Okay?
to escape the public's eye.
Because everyone would just operate under the assumption
that I am a notorious anti-Semite, possibly a terrorist,
maybe did 9-11.
My current continued existence and popularity
is a testament to this new reality
that we're living in, a new reality in which these mediums
are not only popular, they're very accessible,
And perhaps in certain instances, more credible,
more trustworthy than the old guard.
OK?
Do you understand?
And that's precisely the reason why The New York Times is
doing this ridiculous coverage.
It's shameful, in my opinion.
It's really crazy the same publication that
Employees Maggie Haberman wrote the story without any sense of irony and the mayor's office says that it does not pay the influencers
Still their proximity and access to a popular figure as popular as mr.
Ramdani can help increase their own social media following and by extension
Potentially put them in a position to attract paid content sponsors from commercial brands
Some influencers said that when they feature mr. Ramdani the videos get more likes and viewers watch longer
You understand
Establishment, yeah, you might be wondering why the paper of record would allow the New
New York Post to allow the New York Post to become their news desk editor.
for two reasons. Zoran's politics are hated by their corporate masters. Establishment
media is frustrated. They no longer get to gatekeep and play access coverage.
What info spreads?
This coverage with power.
They no longer get to be gatekeepers and play access coverage.
What is this?
Fox News really wants to push the oblox ad 911 narrative?
Yeah.
Check log again.
Won't ask every after midterms.
Go to vacation somewhere nice.
Go offline.
Okay guys.
Stop.
I really get annoyed when you like give me advice on what I should be doing.
I'm a 35 year old man, okay?
I know it's coming from a place of love, okay?
I know you think you're doing a phenomenal job.
I know you just want what's best for me, right?
But this kind of stuff is very annoying, okay?
Especially when I got 30,000 of you in here,
constantly worried about like whether I'm eating
the right amount of protein
or if I'm taking the right supplements.
It's just
After the midterms, Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out. I'm not going on fucking vacation
I'm playing Grand Theft Auto 6 on the stream 24 hours a day seven days a week
If you think I'm doing anything else you're out of your dang mind, okay? Just just so we're clear
Once the midterms are over. I am not going on fucking vacation. I am playing Grand Theft Auto 24 hours a day
Seven days a week on this broadcast live. I don't even give a shit if there's only 10 people watching
If you are lucky, there will be some news coverage in between, peppered in between.
This criticism was also pretty good, nobody has been able to yet articulate any actual
reason why the Mamdani administration distributing information to influence the commentator
is a bad thing.
Nobody has been paid to say nice things about Zoran, it's just people who care about
the city helping spread the word about initiatives they care about.
public information to do, so just as humans always have done since the dawn of time.
But yeah, that's why I said it's the same exact resentment that is guiding the legacy
publishers, the right articles that are as silly as this.
Because these are articles that normally the New York Times are probably either only
report on critically or not report on it at all. The New York Times doesn't take a headline
from the New York Post and report on it as though it's real coverage. Do you understand?
That's what's unexpected in this story. That's a story in and of itself, right? Eagle-eyed
observers at Status News who report from drama, like report about the internal shake-ups
that are taking place in the media would probably try to investigate why this story even got
published by the New York Times.
The New York Times would most likely, in other circumstances, if this was for anybody else,
if this was a different kind of story, would probably cover the New York Post story with
a very negative slant.
But it's very funny nonetheless.
York Times Influencer story implies Matt Stolar posted about McKinsey on City Hall's
orders. He isn't in the group chat, which they also knew. The story also traces zero
city dollars to a single pro-mom dining post way below Stanislaus and the New York Times,
says Douglas Farrar, former director of public affairs for the FTC. It's really
funny to say that Matt Stolar had to get paid to tweet or post about McKinsey.
There is nothing funnier than this because Matt Stolar will tweet about consulting firms,
especially McKinsey, till the day he dies.
There are disagreements that I have with Matt, but if there's one thing, Glenn Greenwald
also called it out.
He said that Matt Stolar needs to be paid or oriented to hate McKinsey as one of the
dumbest conspiracy theories the New York Times ever published.
In the 15 years I've known Matt, if he's awake, he's spouting venom towards the
McKinsey's of the world, sometimes even when he's not awake, exactly.
Mamdani started paying me 20 years ago. He was playing the long game when he was
doing 9-11. Yes, he's got such bad PR that he realized you'd have to start
being aggressive.
The assumption that Matt Solar, a prolific tweeter who absolutely despises it,
It's like, yeah, City Hall forced Matt Stoller's hand to tweet about monopolies, okay?
Yeah, they really...
Matt Stoller, famous fan of McKinsey,
reported on a McKinsey-related story in a negative manner,
unceremoniously, very different from his normal output.
What are you talking about?
But yeah, like I said, I expect this kind of dish rag coverage from the New York Post.
I do not expect it from the New York Times.
I have too high of an opinion of the New York Times even to this day.
I know far too many great journalists that still work in those newsrooms, far too many
investigative reporters that are tirelessly working around the clock to actually do good coverage,
it is very frustrating. What's next? Is the New York Times going to report on this too? New
York City Mayor Mum Donnie, like the CBS headline that Barry Weiss pulled on Abdul El Sayed implying
that Abdul El Sayed was associated with 9-11 in some capacity. Are they going to do that for
for Zoran on 9-11, is that what we're gonna do?
Tommy Vitor talks about the story here.
I don't get the outrage at New York Mayor's comms operation,
some coverage scandalizes basic shit like a press list
or sending a talking point,
but it's mostly it's bitterness about including influences,
But if your comms operation isn't talking to influencers in 2026,
you suck at your job exactly.
With traditional journalism journals have one job,
and then job is to report the news she added.
With influencers, there's a blurring of boundaries.
It's 2026.
As much as I also love to hold up
a higher standard for mainstream outlets
and the relationship between those
get to communicate this information versus those who don't. I'm sorry. It's out of our
hands now, okay? And part of the reason is because of articles like this, New York Times.
I think people would hold you to a higher standard if you held yourself to a higher
standard. When you write reports like this, people lose respect for what you're doing.
And I say this as someone who loves the New York Times still, even though I'm very critical
of its coverage, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
Its foreign policy coverage is dog water, obviously, but I still rely on the New York
Times.
Okay?
I still rely on the New York Times.
I still rely on CNN.
I still rely on all of these different outlets.
Okay?
You have reached a 2019 period of the Corbyn era.
The press have completely abandoned any kind of professionalism, and they're simply
having fun reporting whatever maximally vixatious bull they like yeah um what do
you expect from the New York Times out the coverage of the Gaza genocide the
New York Times understands that in order to maintain some semblance of
credibility in order to do their jobs as the as as a servants of capital they
have to maintain a level of credibility okay this is a very cynical
approach to the story but in order to maintain a level of credibility they
They have to push and pull. They can't always just push. They lost a lot of credibility with
the Gaza Genocide and their not only substandard but actual complacent and collaborative coverage
with the genocide dares. They lost a good chunk of credibility. In order to claw back
that credibility, they have to release some coverage like the Nicholas Kristoff column
about how the Israeli occupying forces are doing mass and systemic sexual assault
against Palestinians, they have to deliver something that actually brings back a little
bit of credibility to the New York Times. Otherwise, the next time they report on something and
they need to lie, they're not going to be able to successfully lie to as broad of an
audience as possible. Okay? It's a give and take. So articles like this are so overzealous.
so overzealous about like tarnishing the reputation of a popular politician and also making it
seem like there's something inconsistent in the standards from the mayoral comms team.
They do this and they end up burning more of their credibility. A similar thing also took
place with the Hassanpikers in anti-Semite, which if you notice, the New York Times with
the exception of the opinion editorial has not really leaned too hard into my suspected
anti-Semitism. There's a reason for that, because I've already gotten profiled by the
New York Times in a favorable manner on numerous occasions. All of this stuff was already out
there. They knew about it, so it would actually hurt their own reputation if they were to
flip on a dime like this. It would make them look like an unserious outlet, an unserious
publication. Sure, there'll be opinion editorials that call me a dangerous malignant influence
in American politics or whatever, but their straightforward coverage is probably not going
to lean into it. This kind of stuff, I think, slips through the editorial team or is like
maybe pushed by one overzealous editor who really wants to stick it to him, not realizing
that this also tarnishes what remains of their already diminished credibility.
So, on that note, let's talk about the Wall Street Journal.
Also before we do that, hold on, Sarah Longwell, modest proposal, anytime you're tempted
talk about a Sompiker talk about Epstein instead because we're talking too much
about a Twitch streamer and not enough about the Trump administration's massive
cover of in the country's most notorious pedophile. Wow. I wonder who this
message is for. David Sarota says, it doesn't look like you and your media
outlet are taking your own advice. What I saw when a Sompiker in Obdolal said
came to town. Is a Sompiker toxic or gettable?
Sarah Longwell is right. It's just, I guess in the tradition of a rightist, she's,
if being a leftist is about being right but too early, being a rightist is about
being right maybe later down the line when it's far too late to be right.
You feel me?
Anyway, but we are now going to talk about the brutal, brutal takedown of John Fettywap.
Okay?
John Fetterman, ladies and gentlemen, my number one op, a person who basically is the champion
of the Fuck-A-San movement, a person who's the champion of the pro-Israel Democrat movement,
a person that every single one of these centrist Democrats secretly agree with, but can't
let's say out loud because it comes in an ogre-like package
that's the real issue here with john fetterman
because what has john fetterman said
that is any different than what sarah longwell has done
what has john fetterman said that is any different than what the lincoln project
has said and done so far about the left flank and its danger
nothing they are like this
they are aligned entirely john fetterman happens to be one of the most
conservative legislators at this point in congress including across
party boundaries. It's totally insane.
John Federman is obviously a stroke victim
and ever since he had the stroke a lot of things changed in his life
and a lot of things changed about his attitude overall.
This Wall Street Journal
absolutely ethers John Federman. It's worse than even the previous coverage that
showed us that he has like one
random like pro-Israel guy that always drones around
That always like is his own personal mini me handler. This is even worse than that, okay?
So once again, let's start off this coverage with the classic
Hassanabi
Statement judge me by my enemies ladies and gentlemen. This is what I said on Twitter after seeing Andrew Kaczynski
Cover some of the pieces from this Wall Street Journal article Wall Street Journal story on John Fetterman is wild
Andrew says, especially on him blowing off a meeting with a children's hospital of Philadelphia who were concerned about Medicaid cards, behind closed doors the first term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel.
real. That is exactly what John Fetterman has been doing. We all know that that's exactly
what he's been doing. And let's be real. What John Fetterman is doing here is technically
no different than what many other centrist Democrats are doing as well. It's just that
they are at least not brainbroken to the same degree. They're brainbroken by Zionism.
They're brainbroken by a consistent conciliatory attitude to their right flank, but they're
not literally brainbroken, like they're not brain dead.
They're not like a vegetable in the way that John Federman is, which is why they shy away
from openly aligning with them.
I'm going to start the coverage with this.
I'm going to pee real quick and I'll be back in a second.
I don't got a ball head, John Fetter walk, can't get it out of Democrat Park, get a bitch
prank me out of Republican Park, I found a man back out fighting all nighter, who the
fuck you think you is?
Who the hell you thought you was?
Nigga bought a church in Pennsylvania, office family drugs, nigga you like 16, white
This family judge, maybe he like 16
White man can't jump to this day
All your advice is dead, duds
My samples don't make you dance break
We still traffic into PA
My dogs and family got switches for days
I feel like Ness, Catamann
I feel like Ness, Freddy Rodman
I feel like Ness, Slipperman
My dog, he like Rob Van Damme
All auntie said was, God damn
Turn better, man, he can suck my dick
I take that back, I don't want him to do that
I'ma turn Mexican and judge the border
I'ma buy an 8, turn it to a quarter
Federman never traffic your daughter
It's a ransom, free food stamps
She my type, only friends in food stamps
Trip my trap like a bootcamp
This random dope world do stamps
Got a DV at that shit's thing
Kitted one, sat on top rank
Off the run, you didn't have my drink
Never fed a man doing what they came
I'm got a bar head job, fed a one
Can't get lit at a Democrat mile
Get a bitch paying out of Republican bar
Federman got got fighting on a mile
Who the fuck you think you is?
We hit the ball to church in Pennsylvania
Office family drugs
And if you like 6A
White men can't jump to this day
All your advice is dead dirt
My samples are gonna make you dance, buddy
We still trying to get through PA
My dogs and family got switches for guinness
I feel like Ness, Kevin man
I feel like Ness, every white man
you
you
the
stop spamming come
On that note, now that we played the John Fetterman song, that was a sufficient introduction to the story.
The Wall Street Journal's scathing exposƩ on the madness of John Fetterman.
In this story, Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania facing criticism this morning,
met a Wall Street Journal report that claims he dodges constituents, alienates fellow Democrats,
and just shows very little interest in his job on Capitol Hill.
The journal citing interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers reports
behind closed doors.
Fetterman has focused more on cultivating his relationships with conservative media figures
and advocating for Israel than doing the job.
In one instance, Senator Fetterman reportedly skipped a June meeting with three paralyzed
veterans from his state, but appeared on Fox News less than an hour later, despite
telling staff he had to miss the meeting because he felt ill last September, according
the journal when an aide told featherman officials with the children's hospital of philadelphia
wanted to meet because of concerns about medicaid cuts he was dismissive writing a text message
quote i'm convinced they just want free trips to dc
bro said fuck them kids okay he said fuck them kids this is israel's strongest soldier
in congress
understand
how unbelievably bad at your job you must be
that rupert murdoch's own
own outlet
the washy journal
sees this as a scoop and goes we have to cover it it's far too good of a scoop
because remember there's always different forces
that have to align
for a story like this to come out especially about
a senator who is potentially a spoiler for the democrats
as a democratic senator who's like
gonna align with the republicans openly
right
i need you to understand something like this is
but this has to be such a uniquely bad candidate that the media actually does
it's job
for a candidate that checks all the other for
for a politician that checks all of the boxes
John Federman checks all of the boxes, but it's ironic because the reason as to why he
checks all of those boxes, pro-Israel, pro-corporate, pro-right wing, is also the very same reason
why he checks the most important box of all.
A senator worthy of exposƩs such as this, the same reason why he is so, uh, un-sensory.
Why he is such a loyal servant of right wing forces is the same reason why they have to cover him.
No, not because he's bald, Chatters.
Because he has brain damage!
He has brain damage!
That's the reason!
He has fucking brain damage!
He is so visibly
and so clearly brain damaged.
He has become a monster!
You could say he always was this person, but let's be real, okay? No one is like this
Imagine being such a monster that Wall Street Journal runs an expose on you
Where they're like, I'm sorry this scoop is too good. We have to cover it
Okay, that they there's no catch-and-kill initiative imagine being such a monster
that your team, your staffers are the ones leaking this information to the press
and they're not the ones who are actually catching and killing this story.
It's not like he has a team full of wokes at this point, all the people that
were already you know charlatans and and you know influence peddlers and
mercenaries they all left a long time ago they went they did their exposays
They want to search light Institute, right? They're all working for that one think tank now
So this new crop of talent that is surrounding John Federmann are already loyalists to a certain degree
So he must be exceptionally fucked up for them to come out once again and say we can't deal with this guy
Please someone has to do something about this. This dude is completely out of control. I
Feel like until his term runs out
We're just gonna keep having this exact same media cycle over and over again where there's like a new crop of talent
Who come in and they realize a?
New crop of talent that come in and realize that this guy's a fucking asshole
Can I work remote from Tel Aviv ginger ginger into Fada?
Thanks, please CDM's. Oh my god. That's that's a bot that doesn't mean anything. That's not and also that's a meme
This is not a man that is moving like he cares about anything other than being a conservative
media personality, not realizing that the moment that he's no longer a senator, Fox News is
never going to have him on.
And the same goes for if he actually switched sides, right?
This is the Joe Manchin strategy, and it's actually a little bit different than Joe Manchin
because he's in Pennsylvania.
At least with Joe Manchin, you could make the argument that West Virginia is an unbelievably
Republican-aligned state, and that's why he's the only guy who could actually occupy
that seat as a Democrat.
That's a free vote for us.
What are you going to do?
Right?
Well, for John Federman, he has no excuse.
Pennsylvania is blue and we'll probably continue to be blue right so the idea that there has to be this
insane like this this
Unbelievably reactionary senator from Pennsylvania is ridiculous. So if he were to flip if he were to become a Republican
He would lose his status and his prestige as well
Same with Joe Manchin ironically enough, but at least with Joe Manchin
There was a little bit more of a of an argument that you could make about why he is the way he is right
Benjamin is obviously a soulless ghoul, says Panasonic, but the other big takeaway from
those leaked messages is how his staff apparently has to treat him as if they were gentle parenting
a moody 13-year-old who just wants to sit in his room and talk to his friends at Fox
News all day, like this humiliating interaction of a 57-year-old even accounting for the
fact that it's about ducking the funerals for dead cops.
When three police officers were killed near Federmann's hometown of York last September,
he backed out of attending the funeral because it was too long.
Update on the event.
No one will be allowed to stab you due to number of restrictions.
The organizers are requiring everyone be seated at 11 a.m. and the funeral will begin at
noon and last at least three hours.
The dress code is formal.
Three hours?
Yes, it's a very formal ceremony and the equivalent of three separate funerals.
This may be a non-starter.
I just think about that, man.
This is in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.
Okay?
Come on.
Rupert goes on to read, since Ferdinand got out of the hospital in 2023, he has repeatedly
expressed disdain for several core day-to-day aspects of life as a senator. That's according
to several former staffers. Things like meeting with constituents, attending hearings, making
public in-state appearances like town halls. Senator Federman did not reply to the journal's
multiple requests for an interview for that story. Ali, you're on Capitol Hill every day. Does
that track with what you see and hear about Senator Federman? I mean, there are so many
former staffers willy at this point speaking out the fact the journal was able to look at text
messages between former aides and the senator i just cannot stress enough how rare it is that you
see this i need you guys to understand the severity of the crisis one more time these are not like
previous woke john fetterman staffers that came on board when he was this like left populist
Champion and he dressed weird and whatnot. Okay, those guys are all long gone
And even like the last line of defense
That you could point to the opportunists the center right guys
They left a long time ago as well. This media cycle has already happened
This media cycle has happened already. This is like the eighth iteration
which means it's like at least the fourth version of
Of of John Federmann staffers that have said enough we can't do this anymore. We're leaking the fucking press
Do you understand?
You have to be truly exceptional
Truly exceptional as a monstrous piece of shit
For your like-minded staffers that want career advancement to possibly burn their credibility in the hill
Hello, by going to work for you, only to come out and say, I can't do this anymore.
These are the pro-Israel staffers is what I'm saying.
Let's be real though, if Federmann or any other senator did let the Israeli embassy write
their talking points, do you really think they would be prosecuted under FARA?
Of course not.
And it's not.
I don't think John Federmann is the only one doing this.
That's the other side of the story.
john fetterman is far from the only senator or far from the only politician
who has this level of unprecedented who offers this level of unprecedented access
to
uh... israel's envoys
okay
this is a massive problem
the problem for john fetterman of course is not only that he does this
but he's also virtually impossible to deal with
because he is
genuinely brain dead
his mental faculties are not in order
This is precisely the reason why his staffers keep saying,
we have to do something about this.
We have to do something about this.
OK?
Important to understand, here is one of my ops
and a former John Federman staffer who
is now the vice president of Searchlight Institute,
Trey Easton, responding to Daniel Friedman, who
is this random guy who was saying Emma is a Nazi earlier.
john federman is largely a normal liberal democrat of kamala harris was
president there's not a single one of her major agenda items and appointments he
would push back on
but because he believes there should be a jewish state his own staffers are
rebelling against them and trying to destroy him
i love
i love these guys okay
i love these ultra zionists
they genuinely have to bring everything back to like uh... some kind of hidden
anti-semitism is like
brother
brother
You're so fucking delusional, every one of his staffers are pro-Israel.
These are the pro-Israel staffers.
You're a fucking idiot.
Which one of John Federman's current staffers at this point would be in any way, shape, or form anti-Israel, brother?
What are you talking about? Those guys left probably, you know, three years ago at this point.
If not longer.
Yeah.
Trey Easton, it can be very easy to reduce ex-staffer discontent to his position on Israel,
but there is a fairly rich body of evidence detailing a public official clearly unwell
and unsuitable for office, choosing to overlook all of that because you like his position on
Israel speaks volumes. When he was running for office, he was literally unable to speak,
progressives were fine with him being infirm and unwell, when that meant they could
control him, so you agree that it's bad to overlook a leader's potential on fitness,
simply because he has stances on issues that you might like?
I don't know what's going on, but I'm agreeing with Trey Easton now. What a sight.
Here's the thing, and I cannot repeat this enough. Okay, first of all, two things I must
repeat. Connor Lamb apology form. Connor Lamb. I apologize. I apologize profusely. I was wrong.
Okay, I never knew how wrong I was. I never knew how wrong I was Connor
You are the goat. Okay, obviously, I'm not gonna support you. I'm gonna support summer Lee running for
Senate in Pennsylvania, but like, you know, we could have had something I was totally fucking off base Connor my mistake
Okay, Connor lamb apology form. That's number one number two and I cannot stress this enough
enough. All of the Federman aides at this point are already sympathetic to Israel being a
Jewish state. The ones that might have had any feelings contrary to that have left a long
time ago.
Conor Lamb my goat says, John, Senator Federman PA, if there's a decent bone left in your
body just quit. It's an insult to decent people in our state for you to treat them
and the office this way.
Former Federmann staffer are freaking out.
By the way, they made a former Federmann staffer's Twitter
account.
We're a group of former campaign assented staffers
for John Federmann who are disgusted with what he's become.
If you were troubled by yesterday's lawsuit,
journal story, trust us.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
It's worse than you thought.
We've come together to share our stories and screenshots
to show Pennsylvanians exactly who their senator is.
Set your calendar for September 14th,
the day the Senate is back in session for our first drop.
Let's be honest, maybe the 15th,
he'll skip Monday's votes.
Meaningless until names are attached?
No, it's not meaningless,
especially if they have screenshots.
You have to get to,
you have to literally lose your mind
an unbelievable degree. Like, yeah, Federman is negative PR for Israel at this point. He's only
helpful if this, if shit like this isn't in the newspaper. Exactly. I need you guys to understand
something here. Okay. John Federman is now in the Rabbi Schmooley category. Okay. As far as
Osbara operatives goes, there is a level that you can't go past, okay? Rabbi Shmueli was
trotted around in the early stage of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and he would go
on all of the outlets and he would talk about insane shit over and over again. And then
it got to a certain point, it got to a certain point where his appearances were being treated
like a burden by many Zionists.
John Federman has
long passed that point.
The problem, of course, is that because he is
an anti-democratic party democratic senator,
he's always going to be on Fox News. Fox News is always going to have him on to be
like, yeah, talk shit about the Democrats, right? Come on, John.
Come on, John, do the thing.
Talk about how much you love Israel and talk about how much you hate the
Democrats because they don't love Israel enough.
You think that his stories will take pressure off of you?
No, because we are talking about mercenaries who are incredibly shameless.
You need to understand, we are talking about mercenaries.
So Sarah Longwell and John Fetterman, how much daylight exists between them?
i mean i'm asking sincerely
between near attended in john fetterman how much
how much daylight exist between your attendance output in john fetterman's
output
how much
how how how big of a disagreement does john fetterman have with like
the rest of the pro-israel democrats the israel firsters
how much daylight is there between john fetterman
and and mosquitos or godheimer
How much?
The answer is zero.
But they can't ride with Fetterman
because Fetterman is delivering the same exact message
in the most ogre-like manner, okay?
It's the same message, it's just a really bad messenger.
And that's why they cannot, that's why they cannot align with John Fetterman publicly and perhaps that's part of the calculation.
Perhaps the reason why they are tackling John Fetterman a little bit, maybe to put some pressure on him, maybe to cause him to quit ahead of time.
So that I don't know what the Pennsylvania appointment process looks like so that Shapiro can install a much more competent
Pro-Israel figure in his stead in the Senate. I don't know that could be one of the if the Democratic Party was a competent party
If the Democrats were a competent party, they would take John Federman out
They would call they would get him to quit, right?
And then they would install with a Shapiro appointment a much more competent pro-Israel Democrat in his stead
right
Then they could at least have a couple years
to you know identify a
Much better voice for Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Senate from their perspective than someone like summer Lee
Because 2028 is going to be the summer of summer Lee
So, Democrats probably are looking at that scene and going,
if we don't fucking nip this in the bud,
John Federman's replacement is going to be
an anti-Zionist who's pushing for an embargo,
who's young, who's dynamic, who comes from this background,
who's going to take away even more of our power in the Senate.
That's what I think.
Maybe I'm too conspiratorial here, and I guess this is maybe a far-fetched conspiracy only because it requires the Democrats to think ahead and strategize and behave like a competent party with an ideological center when they are not that party at all.
But I suspect Conor Lamb is probably aching for that seat.
Anyway, let's continue with the Washington Journal article.
Yes, there are staffers who don't like their bosses, who leave the office, who whisper about it off the record.
But to have it be put in writing, not just in the journal, but you look on social media platforms,
and there are former staffers who are saying they regret ever working to help elect this senator.
This was someone who really rose to prominence in the national view because he brought sort of a no-nonsense,
progressive approach to his Senate role.
And he has just become, in the words of former staffers that I've spoken to, a completely
different person, not just on policy, but in his desire to do parts of the job that are
so important.
One of the things that I saw was so striking in that journal piece was they have text
messages where staffers are talking to Federman about needing to go to a funeral for three
law enforcement officials back home in Pennsylvania, and that it was going to be a lengthy
funeral.
And at one point he allegedly says that's a non-starter.
I mean, constituent services showing up for members that will vote for you again theory
in two years.
This is literally the bread and butter of being a lawmaker.
And I have been so stunned at the ways that former staffers have been willing to throw
their former boss under the bus.
And all of it is gonna culminate, Lamire.
You know this in what happens come in 2028 when this seat is once again back on the
table.
There are questions about what Federman does.
Does he run again?
run again as a Democrat, as he run as a Republican, I mean all of this is very much in the ether
and there's a more pressing question, I think in the near term, which is what happens when
the Senate balance of power gets even slimmer? Does Federman stay a Democrat? Schumer's been
doing the work to try to praise him as a valuable member of the caucus.
Yeah, I think the real method here would obviously be to get him out. To get him
out. He's too incompetent. If I'm smart, if I'm a smart centrist Democrat, I mean, this,
this is a one of the unique moments where like our goals align with the establishment
wing of the party, because they don't want a spoiler in a potential 50 50 split. Right.
They don't want John Federman to be that spoiler. We don't want him to be that spoiler
either. So I would be comfortable with that Conor Lamb replacement, even if the goals
of that Conor Lamb replacement is to ensure that no one actually, to ensure that there's
a much more solid opponent for the left flank to try to unseat. Okay? Because if the best
case scenario for the left would be to like, you know, get John Federman under control
Also, he votes alongside the Democrats and doesn't leverage his, like, spoiler position.
And then because he's an unbelievably weak candidate, that it ultimately favors our
side.
It ultimately favors a left-flank insurgent coming in in 2028 and sweeping in the victory.
That would be the best case scenario.
But that would require controlling this fucking ogre and how he votes.
And I don't think that's, I'm not, I'm not willing to risk that.
I'm fine with John Federman being replaced by a centrist pro-Israel Democrat for the
next two years, as long as that pro-Israel Democrat is at least like, you know, working
alongside the party.
I'm saying like realistically speaking there's not going to be a fucking socialist senator
that gets appointed by Josh Shapiro who's an anti-zionist.
Let's be fucking real right?
Before people misunderstand my point because everyone's going to say what?
What?
You're fine with a pro-Israel senator?
What?
I'm fucking stupid.
I don't understand how words work.
I don't understand what you're trying to say.
statement on this is within the confines of fucking within the best case
scenarios Josh Shapiro has a similar circumstance to John Federman and then
becomes unbelievably woke and super fucking pro-Palestine that's not gonna
happen so shut the fuck up before you misunderstand me okay it sucks that my
opposition on the right deliberately misunderstands my point and my opposition on
the left is too schizophrenic to understand the words that are coming out
of my fucking mouth because if they weren't then they wouldn't be my opposition
to my left there would be no such thing
There it is. You've been compromised, young'un. Alright, I'm dishing out week-long bans for
everyone. You've been liberal-precompromising? Okay, week-long ban, I'm not saying that
this is good, okay? I know words and the English language is far too hard to comprehend, okay?
This is analysis, not endorsement. This is analysis, okay? Please.
Yes, Banhammer is fucking back. Oh, if... Wait, hold on. I didn't even know that Pennsylvania
to special elections okay never mind okay so then there's no problem you then they
they can't even do that Democrat the Democratic establishment will not let
go of John Federman then it's a win-win for us regardless then
because if they do a special election it's a wrap
It's different, state by state, right?
If there's a special election, it's over.
Does he see that he could be the person that flips whatever happens in the Senate and does he switch parties?
I mean, all of it is a very much alive ball.
Yeah, that right there is where I was gonna start.
That's becoming a growing fear among Democrats, is what happens this fall.
If the Democrats, let's say, get that 51st seat, does Spetter become kind of like a free
agent where, I mean, in the Joe Manchin role, will he'll sometimes go with them, sometimes
won't?
Or does he flat out switch parties, which I know people around him have denied.
But there are some people who said there's real Democratic fear that he might, and
and that he could swing back he could change parties be republican
and that would give jade events the tie-breaking vote and the republicans
would still have the majority willy
but yeah i mean at this the text message change that i highlighted about the
three police officers killed
near his home even
and he was saying that's a non-starter because it could take three hours and
that the story goes into great detail
about time and again he simply doesn't want to talk
to his constituents
and it's such a stark contrast from his original campaign where he was known
for having town halls going out
talking to places, including talking to voters that Democrats have sort of ignored in that
state for a while. None of that now. And there's real questions about what his political future
might be. Yeah, such a metaphor for his time in the
Senate right now, which is skipping a meeting with paralyzed veterans to go do a Fox News
hit and trash Democrats seems to be where he is right now on that before we let you
go. I see you've been writing a bit about the 2028 presidential race on the Republican
inside in particular is interesting jd vance at that briefing
yesterday was asked about ten cruises prospects
uh... as a presidential candidate
vice president that's very diplomatic said he'd be great he wishes him well all
of those things but with his whispers about the exit whispers about ten
crews and then obviously
in the central
debate
i love the republicans wrap up in a matter of all he's done for them he
deserves this
i mean that but also
my favorite element of this story that is otherwise like uh... like a cat
catastrophic story about how American democracy fails and about how our
politicians are basically fucking drones and they don't even need to have like
workable brain tissue up there for them to like play the servant of corporate
interest interest of foreign lobbies is the fact that John Federman became the
perfect senator after he had a debilitating brain issue like he
literally stroked into becoming conservative. He stroked out and it
made him more conservative. Like he had to receive tremendous amounts of brain
damage that rendered him a fucking vegetable for him to become a conservative
and not a single person points this out. I don't know if it's because like we're
too woke to say it. You know maybe it's just not you know maybe it's not
nice to say it out loud but that is literally a thing that happened. Okay
I'm sorry that is impossible to ignore that is a reality that you cannot ignore this man
Stroked out into conservatism
It's fucking crazy and it's not like it's one of those things where you know like Chris Van Hollen also had a stroke at the same time
Why does nobody talk about Chris Van Hollen with such terms?
If anything, Chris Van Hollen stroked into progressivism, ironically enough.
Chris Van Hollen and John Fetterman had a stroke literally two days from one another.
Did you guys know this?
Two days. I believe it was two days.
Don't quote me on that. Look it up on your own.
There were two days between John Fetterman's stroke and Chris Van Hollen's stroke.
Why does no one ever talk about Chris Van Hollen this way?
Because it clearly wasn't as debilitating.
Okay?
My stroke tracker is different.
Yeah, we need to do a congressional stroke tracker.
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen said...
Yeah.
Like, think about that. What the fuck?
Are we good?
Okay
The fields of neuroscience will load this though. Yeah, we got a like we got to do like CTE damage
Like a postmortem CTE analysis for our fucking senators
It's not just you know NFL linebackers and O line offensive linemen that we need to check or to a that we need to check
The brain of we need to check motherfucking John Federman's brain as well postmortem to figure out what level of debilitating
facilitating CTE he had from just being a senator.
That shouldn't be JD Vance or Marco Rubio.
A long way off.
I understand we got to get through the midterms.
What's your sense of things?
Listen, that 2028 race is on the horizon.
And right now it seems as if Democrats are searching for nominee.
You almost get the feeling that Republicans are certain on their nominee.
I would argue that it is JD Vance until or unless it is not.
In that which case, you know, I think Rubio would be the next.
I don't think they're going to run against each other.
There's a real question as to who would even challenge Vance for the Republican nomination.
As you said, it seems that Ted Cruz, who just had a very interesting interview with
Ali just last week, is certainly pondering that.
I'm heading up to New Hampshire this weekend.
I'm going to grab my Mark McKinnon hat and scarf, hit the trail.
You'll have Senator Mark Kelly, Ro Khanna, but also Tom Cotton will be heading to New
Hampshire.
Rick Scott will be heading to New Hampshire.
That's starting to raise some eyeballs.
We'll see what happens, what things look like after the midterms.
Matt, not everyone can pull off.
The McKinnon look, just be careful.
Give them a look.
Bring your head out the door.
New Hampshire.
They'll eat you alive out there.
It's now political analyst Matthew Bartlett and the host of Way Too Early, Allie Vitale.
Thank you both.
Have a great long Labor Day weekend.
We'll see you soon.
Overnight, President Trump.
I don't know why you keep perpetuating this silly, he's stroked in the conservatism
thing.
One of your most anti-materialist stakes.
I guess anything to not admit, Fetterman, do people?
John Fetterman was never this conservative.
I'm sorry, he was always wishy washy on Israel, he was always pro-Israel, you can make that argument.
But the idea that John Fetterman was like anti-immigration is so hilariously dumb.
Brother, his wife is fucking undocumented. What are you talking about?
John Federman is now pro-ice and anti-immigration. His wife is or was an undocumented immigrant.
You are so insane. John Federman was never anti-trans. John Federman was somewhat progressive on a lot of these issues.
Israel is the only issue Israel is the only place where John Federman was was definitely sympathetic and was
You know trying to court DM a fire endorsements and shit like that
Like you think every
You think every single person that has known John Federman personally in the state
Every single person that has worked with John Fetterman, including people that worked on his campaign
They all are just like secretly in on it where they're all lying about the fact that this dude actually flipped on
Not just like one issue where he got like far more radical
Because on the issue of Israel he was like sympathetic to Israel, which is unacceptable certainly
And my assessment at the time was I think I thought he was trying to you know
swat away the MFI attacks or whatever, Democratic majority for Israel attacks, but this switch
on so many of the issues that were also close and personal to him, like you're talking about
a guy, you're talking about a guy that switched on an issue that directly impacts him, okay.
Even Republicans, when they have like a daughter that's a lesbian, or when they have a daughter
that had to get an abortion will be a little bit more sympathetic. Myloinopolis, famously,
very pro-ice, gets packed up by ice and deported, immediately starts singing a different tune.
Republicans only can demonstrate their capacity to understand empathy when it actually impacts
them. Okay? So John Federman on that front is so different than the, so different than
He's different than the average Republican.
But you can say, you can say he had conservative tendencies or that he was always a grifter.
But what you can say is that his output did not change dramatically.
His policy perspectives did not change dramatically.
Does anyone have any idea on what his problem is?
Is it almost a reason to sort a territory?
Maybe something was already wrong with him before he stroked.
And after that he lost his ability to math.
The reports I have heard about his mayoral team make it sound like he had a real loathing
for any kind of bureaucracy and the actual job of being a mayor and would just do things
out a pocket for individual residents with no larger systemic plan him now
loathing constituents on top of the staff and the systems he's supposed to
manage is new though I don't know if it's a stroke or just that he's been very
dependent on the approval of others and realized he can get it easier through
the right-wing media ecosystem instead of the via Pennsylvania residents yeah his
wife brother his wife leaked concerns Federman clash with his wife over
Israel supported AIDS question is mental health like there this is this is a report that came out in the independent
Okay
Or sorry in the New York magazine
You're you're telling me what like his wife is
His wife shouldn't have been duped about this like his wife actually knew that he was conservative all along and is just
Trying to say phase or something like what are you talking about I
I don't even know why we're still arguing on this issue, by the way.
The best part about this entire Fidderman saga is that many people forget that Republicans
in 2022 were being unbelievably fucking ableist after a stroke, saying that he was not fit
to serve because of the stroke.
Now the Republicans laud him as the greatest senator on the Democratic side.
Republicans are openly praising a guy for being sensible.
They called him brain dead years ago.
It's peak Republicanism.
I know.
Yeah, I'm more annoyed. This guy says I'm more annoyed
With with the chatter saying that that brain disease or a stroke is anti-materialist
Gray matter in your brain dying is not anti-materialist
Wait really why
Wait, I thought we were supposed to, wait, hold on, we should leave by, we used to have 435, it's 335, oh, we should leave now, okay, okay, alright, I mean we'll continue, alright, we're gonna head over, we're gonna head over to the Socialism Conference, we're gonna be live streaming it, of course,
I was watching old episodes of Anthony Bourdain after watching Tony in theaters and he jumpscared
the fuck out of me in the Pittsburgh episode, haha.
Alright, well hold on.
Inning a new acting secretary of the army, just days after Dan Driscoll resigned in mid-tension
with Secretary Pete Hanksett.
The president says Adam Tell will now serve in that role, calling him a great patriot.
It comes as the Trump administration downplays the conflict with Iran.
President JD Vance coming to the podium insisting it's not a war.
I wouldn't call a war. Right now there is no active shooting. I recognize there has been
places where this has flared up. But just this week the president's saying this.
Now we have a war with Iran and that one's for a different reason because we're not
going to let them have a nuclear weapon. Just days ago US carried out a series of strikes
on Iran for the first time in recent weeks. The Pentagon now reporting a grim new
milestone nearly 800 US service members wounded. 18 have died. The war stretching into its seventh
month far past the four to six big timeline the president initially laid out. The vice president
asked if it will all be over by the midterms. You'd have to ask the Iranians. When will the
Iranians shooting at ships? This is a great way to project strength by the way. I am feeling
very confident about this administration when they come out and say things like, you know,
it's not up to us to determine when the war will end. It's up to our enemy. Sick. That's
cool. It's up to the enemy to determine when the war ends. It's out of my control, guys.
Sorry, it's out of our hands.
What a spectacular way to instill confidence.
You might as well get up on that stage and be like, please stop.
We keep asking Iran to please stop and they refuse to stop.
That's functionally what he's doing right now.
Stop having an effect on world energy markets.
But resources are being stretched with record long deployments.
The 82nd Airborne now extended out to a year.
And this morning, some Republicans are questioning whether Secretary Hegseth is fit to lead the
Pentagon.
I hate to tell the president who he should hire and fire, I don't know if it's really
my role, but I would say this, I would not, he would not be on my team.
And we want to get to another headline.
The jobs report is expected to show that 53,000 jobs will be added to the economy.
That comes after a loss of about 23,000 jobs from the month prior.
The unemployment rate is still low with.
All right, Rachel Scott for us at the White House.
Thank you.
Mr. President, the Vice President said yesterday that he would not describe the conflict with
Iran as a war, but the U.S. resumes strikes for the first time in recent weeks.
Can you explain to the American people, if this is not a war, what exactly is it?
Well, I'll tell you what, a lot of people don't call it a war.
I call it a military conflict, because it's small potatoes for us.
It's not a big thing.
We did Venezuela, and we did this, and Venezuela, we lost nobody, and this
we lost 18 people and in Vietnam you lost 100,000 people and in other conflicts
you lost tens of thousands of people. I would say that it's intermittent, you know
we do intermittent strikes so I heard what he said and it was interesting
because I think that there's a lot of truth that we're not fighting right now
there's no fighting. We're taking out a lot of oil. We control the
We controlled it very strongly. We did a hit on certain areas around the
Harmo Strait. We took out their radar, as you know, you know that very well. We took
out some aircraft, we took out some other things that protect for them, used to
protect the Harmo Strait when they had it under very tight control.
Think about all of our successful operations like Vietnam. I would like
to point to past military failures as I'm discussing this
current military failure that is my responsibility. Just a reminder the
American military ain't shit, okay? Scoop from Danny Citrinowitz to make a long
story short. There will be no meaningful normalization between Israel and Saudi
Arabia without significant political progress on the Palestinian issue, not
only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and vis-a-vis the Palestinian
Authority. The road to normalization runs through Ramallah, not Tehran, and
there's another small problem that Washington cannot simply wish away.
None of Israel's leading candidates for prime minister from Benjamin and Yowda got a Eisen
Cot has articulated a willingness to move towards the establishment of a Palestinian
state so the administration can spend as much time as it wants designing a new regional
coalition and imagining a broader Middle East architecture but without a dramatic
shift in Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and there is currently little indication
that such a shift is coming, those plans will remain exactly that.
Israel is trying to posture as aggressively as possible towards the
Palestinians because that's what the domestic appetite requires. The problem
is the rest of the regional actors will not let up on this issue because they
have their own domestic considerations. Obviously if it was even inside of these
monarchies, okay, in the Gulf States, the personal ambitions of the monarchs
is a material to this process because they too recognize that any sort of
Israeli normalization in the aftermath of this genocide will mean rebellion,
rebellion that they cannot put down. That is the real story here, okay? And
that's been the story even during the Abraham Accords. If October 7 had not
happened and Israel had not retaliated in the way that it did, in
the most predictable ways that it would, by doing an ethnic cleansing
campaign, perhaps the Gulf monarchies would have been able to
eventually justify normalizing with Israel on paper. They had already
normalized their relationship with Israel behind closed doors, right? But they
can't normalize relationships with Israel on paper as long as the Palestinian
is here. Okay, okay, as long as the Palestinian question remains. Okay?
Donald Trump does not care about this, does not understand the issue, does not
understand the dynamics at all and he's let the issue be run by some of the
fucking dumbest people on the planet some of the most pro-israel people on
the planet. Jared Kushner being your you know frontman for this policy the
Abraham Accords is obviously going to signal exactly where you're at on this
issue. Jared Kushner cares more about making real estate development projects
happen with Gulf Monarchs while simultaneously his heart and soul
obviously, is with defending Israel's foreign policy interests in conquest.
He's made that very clear over and over again, okay? He's made that very clear
over and over again, even including... oh my god, what the fuck is this guy stop
spamming dumb shit? Oh my god, I am trying to cover something serious. Please
stop spamming fucking stupid shit for like three and a half seconds, okay?
Please. We will watch this later.
Jared Kushner, in the last interview that was conducted when he went to the region,
openly said that he did not care about the Palestinian problem at all.
He did not see it as anything but a problem.
He only saw it as a setback that must be excised by force.
This is the issue.
This is the problem and it's going to be a permanent problem for Donald Trump. It's not going to go away, okay?
Just like Iran is not going to go away. Iran is going to continue being a problem until he, you know,
decides to deal with Iran by way of diplomacy.
Make sure media in September against you Zoran and Abdul.
Yeah, I know. Okay. Here. Now we'll watch the funny video.
The fuck is this?
I'm sorry, what is going on? Is he selling labne or something? What the fuck? Is this a commercial for the cheese?
They say Hitler on the beat bro. That's crazy
What is going on? Can someone who speaks Hebrew explain to me or is someone who is Israeli
explaining me what the fuck is happening here? What am I looking at? I am from Israel and
this is my all
that insult injury this person is are real president as well when you think
about it
It hit me like this other jump scare. What is this? Oh, yeah, this is the classic
This is an ad though, I think this is not like a sitcom that he just appeared in randomly
I think it's an ad for his campaign right like to be like oh Benjamin Netanyahu will will protect your children that kind of thing
You put out this AI ad to
Airdogan bro, are you coming to the party of the fall of Netanyahu elections?
Wait, what the fuck he's at those actually speaking Turkish
Oh shit, cancel the party.
Erdogan?
Are you here bro?
They're all I assume saying the same shit that Zoran is saying, but in their own language.
Yeah, it goes without saying that if Zoran featured an AI version of Nenyaahu in a
campaign adderby endless media recycles and cries of jew hatred oh 100% all my
god it would be a fucking feeding frenzy by american media talking about how
unbelievably and unbearably uh... anti-cinetics are on the money is we
finally got on
you know it's just again double standard double standard
it's endless hypocrisy endless double standard
you can
you can do whatever the fuck you want the muslim case you say whatever the
the fuck you want about muslims about muslim candidates
you can be as
heinous as you want with your islam phobia
of course the expectation is that uh... on the opposing side
muslim candidates can criticize israel without being called anti-semitic
the henebash would lead the lynch mom to gracy manner oh for sure
Did you see this one with Zoran? You Zoran and Abdul? Is it the one we're eating bacon or something? Like we're scared of bacon?
Oh, this is a new one that came out nice.
19 aspiring young student immigrant pilots.
They didn't deserve to go so soon.
I can't even get mad at this shit, bro. It's so fucking stupid.
Hurt people hurt.
And let's not forget, my auntie who became mildly uncomfortable when riding the subway,
let's remember all those people we lost.
19 aspiring young student immigrant pilots.
they didn't deserve to go so
What are the comments saying?
Wait, you left out the part where he blames Israel
Wait
Is it it wait why would no the argument is that that Muslims love that it happened
It doesn't make sense to blame Israel for it if it's a if if we are supposedly seeing it as a major accomplishment
Why would we give that that credit to Israel these guys can't even be racist correctly, man? It doesn't make sense
Anyway, all right. We is it here?
Okay, all right, we're gonna go down and we're gonna be heading over to the to the socialism conference where I will obviously be
where I will be doing a panel with DSA co-chairs, DSA national co-chairs. We're
going to be talking about their program and all that stuff and all that good
stuff. Now we control it. Last time we took a lot of boats, a lot of ships
came through and they come through every day. So I can understand what he's
saying. It's a military conflict but it's it's very intermittent. I could see
somebody not calling it a war yet.
have died in this concern. They're like small potatoes. 18 service members have died. We're
seeing record long deployments. You initially said this was wrong. Why is it record long?
So how long were we in Vietnam? How long were we in Vietnam? We're seeing how long
the U.S. was out for more than five months. And you know what we did in five months?
They're not going to have a nuclear weapon. That's what we did. Iran will not have a nuclear
weapon because if they did, you probably wouldn't be standing here very long. Iran
will not have a nuclear weapon. We've stopped them from having. We may hit pickaxe very soon,
because if there was anything going on with pickaxe. But because of all of the things,
you know, we're leading in space now by a lot. When I first took over, my first term,
we were a distant third to Russia and to China. We're leading in space. We know everybody that's
moving at pickaxe. We know everybody that's moving everywhere, all over Iran. And if
And if anything goes bad, we hit them.
We hit them hard.
But we've been in there for five months, and in five months, what did we do?
We stopped them from having a nuclear weapon.
If we didn't go in there, you wouldn't have Israel right now.
You wouldn't have the Middle East.
And they probably would go out, European cities and our cities next.
But we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon in five months.
And we lost 18 souls, 18 great souls.
I was there to greet the families of those people at Dover.
and they're great.
I got very friendly with some of the families.
They were incredible families.
But, and one is too much.
But in Vietnam, we lost tens of thousands of people.
In Afghanistan, we lost a lot.
Sleepy Joe Biden lost 13 just by standing at an airport
and an airport that they shouldn't have been in
because they should have used Bagram,
not the local little airport right in the middle of the city.
They lost 13, but they lost 78 people
In terms of their arms, their legs, their face was just wiped out.
You don't mention that.
You don't mention that.
What we've done is amazing.
We took over Venezuela and we have essentially taken over Iran.
Now, there's been no shooting for days before the hit that we gave them the other night
to wipe out their, their, their reader.
They're very sophisticated.
They brought in reader because we knocked it out.
Now we knocked it out twice. Now we don't notice any activity. I think they're tired of putting it in and getting blown
But the Strait of Hormuz is taking a lot of ships. We're getting a lot of ships out of there
A lot of oil is coming out of this straight. There are no mines whatsoever. We have no mines
You know why we took out all the mines? They had some mines. We took them all with our minesweepers
They go underwater. Nobody can see them the best in the world. So we're doing a great job and
we will I would say it's a
military conflict if you want some people get caught with I don't think it
matters what you call it what matters is the fact that we have had tremendous
success we stopped Iran from having a nuclear weapon
when will your super PAC mega ink start spinning on can pass you spend more
well I have I think I have like a close to a billion dollars in the
super PAC and I'm allocating probably four or five hundred million dollars so I'll be spending,
we'll be spending. Yeah we're going to spend a lot of money because we don't want to lose our
country. I want to keep these people wealthy, happy and they have to keep us fed, right?
How do you make that determination of how to spend and how to make it? I sit down and I say
let's do this, let's do that. I'm going to be going around, I'm going to be making contributions to
to various campaigns of people that I think are good,
Republicans that I think are good,
people that I think are good to win and can win
or are close to winning, people that,
I think we have a chance of doing very well
in the midterms.
Look, history has said that the sitting president,
Republican or Democrat, no matter how,
I don't think anybody's had a better first two years
than we have.
There's never been anything like it.
Look at the numbers that you're saying.
Alright ladies and gentlemen we are back we're in the car currently on our way I wonder how
loud that is I wonder if they can hear it because this is the crazy microphone I hope
it's not I hope the audio is actually good yeah I hope you can actually hear my audio
because the Chaka microphone is super hyper precise.
Do you have the additional, do you have the last?
Okay, all right, very loud.
Yeah, yeah, this is, for chatters who are unfamiliar,
that's the sound of a, that's the sound of the subway,
that's the sound of a train.
That is an above ground, I guess,
what would it be called, light rail?
It's public transit. That's the sound of public transit that you're hearing.
If you're, you know, you might be unfamiliar with that sort of thing.
If you live in a city normally like mine, Los Angeles, you know.
Okay, you turn the audio. They're saying it's way too dank, whatever you did.
But it's probably under the lay around right now
Well, yeah, we're on our way to the socialism conference and I will be conducting a panel moderating a panel
Very excited for the honor
We are going to have a 30 minutes of presentations
There'll be some announcements and that will introduce
DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer, DSA Co-Chair Ashik Sadiq, Chair of DSA National Political Education
Commission and Co-Chair of Workers Deserve More Program Committee, Mikayla Barangan.
And I'm going to ask them all individual questions about the program, you know, the
Workers Deserve More program in general, and there will be a Q&A afterwards as well.
So yeah, I'll obviously have my own color commentary on the program itself, but I'll, you know,
I'm more so just a vehicle for questions and for there to be more interest in general.
Are they going to be normal?
What do you mean?
Love the pen.
They were up in the Easter Lily Palestine pen.
This is one of those pins that, for those that know what it's about, they know what
it's about.
For those that don't know, it's good.
It's fine.
This is a real if you know you know type of situation, you know?
And that chatter knows.
Anyway.
anyway
what?
still too big
okay
users pass the best pigeon hot spot? what do you mean pigeon hot spot?
oh you got flashbang
flashbang
Is this ongoing at Easter Lily did I hear that you heard that correct? I am
I am wearing an Easter Lily
An Easter Lily pin with the Palestinian colors on it. I got in Ireland from a friend
famed Irish historian
And all around good guy is he still stream on twitch
You pass the travel lodge on Harrison
Yeah, Lorcan Lorcan the goat
Yeah
Such a birds are literal flock cameras.
Okay, if you say so.
Yeah, it's a Zimpouch and I was trying to open it, but I failed.
But it's fine.
Bro, is Shron struggling to open that? No. The bottom pouch or the zin pouch doesn't open.
With ease.
And now I got the zin hiccups.
Oh my God. Guys, guys, this is the top of a Zincan. It's very easy to open, okay?
That's not the problem here. The bottom of a Zincan, for those of you who don't
know, actually has a special, much harder to open area, okay? It's super
tight and it's virtually impossible to open it, but if you can get it cracked
open, you can actually stash your discarded zins there, okay? That's what I was trying
to open here but I was unable to because it requires precision and it requires you to
have long enough nails, okay? The top of the zinc can is easy to open. You just shove
your nail in there and you just open it up like a tin can or something and then
and you pop it open with these.
That's not the problem, okay?
I'm glad we were able to experience that together
for all the fucking parasocial weirdos in the chat.
Like there's a guy in here who just said,
dude, come on, just like stop picking at the stick
or just twist it.
Like you think I don't know how to open
the top of a fucking zinc can.
Incredible stuff, thank you, chatter.
I've been shoving these things down my gullet for like, you know, the better part of the last couple years now
They give my first zin tin
My cousin says as nasty as hell to keep them in there, I mean it is and then you discard them later
Yeah, this is good intel for my husband, I don't think he knows about this and he leaves them everywhere
KW yes many people who are experienced the zinners themselves don't even know that this exists
Can you not just follow this in? No, you can't. What the fuck? You're gonna get like
nicotine poisoning or something. I don't think you can. I don't think it's safe to do so.
Um, yeah, so we got that going on, but while we're on the way over, I'll just continue
with the with the news coverage that we were doing with the news coverage that
we were engaging in
where is it I also don't have Twitter on my phone now so it's making it harder
for me to be mobile I did delete the Twitter from my phone
all right let's see what this is about your social media feed the midterm
elections are coming up fast and some Republicans fear President Trump is
running out of time to help the party keep control of Congress.
He has a fortune in the Super PAC money to spend, but he's not using it.
Just two months to go before...
That's awesome. I love that. I love that Trump is refusing to dump
half a billion dollars in Super PAC money that he has into races.
That's so awesome. I hope he stays petty and vindictive.
For the midterm elections,
and President Trump's sitting on a $400 million war chest.
fellow republicans are wondering when's he gonna start spending all that cash
oh my god i wonder if this is i wonder if he thinks he can just steal all that too somehow
because he's stolen so many funds thus far that it is perfectly in line with his reasoning to
assume that he can just steal this as well and like slowly but surely transfer it to his own
properties and slowly but or maybe even just outright steal it like outright
directly violate the law because what it's not like it's not like there's a I
don't know like a federal elections commission or anything like that that
is still in operation in this goddamn country so I can totally see his reasoning
be it's my money I'm not gonna spend it I'm not gonna spend it on some
dickhead because it's like it doesn't make any sense for him to maintain this
war chest especially considering that after 2028 he's a lame duck you can't
run again right do we even know pay himself 400 mill to call in the Fox
talking has to endorse candidates like I don't even think there's anything more
complex about his his line of reasoning so far judging by the other instances
of graft it's very clear cut how he operates I mean he literally stole like
he actively petitioned his attorney general his former defense attorney to
take $1.5 billion of tax revenue from the IRS and turn it into a slush fund for
himself and whoever he sees fit. Okay? That should have been and would have been
under a different administration under a different culture, American politics.
That would have been a non-starter. That would have been unbelievable and the fact that they still attempted to do it
Is remarkable it's signals that
Donald Trump is going to continue stealing money
Of course, this is beneficial for our movement for our cause
Because you know that money is not being spent on
Mike Rogers campaign and money that money's not being spent on Mike Collins's
campaigns so please Mr. President please steal it put it in your pocket that's
that money is your money baby put your hand in the cash register and steal it
You put the right address, right?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Same address that I, uh...
Thank you.
Okay.
I've seen a lot of people wearing red, and I suspect that this is not...
This is... They're all... Oh, it's Nebraska.
Yeah, I was like, there's no way that this is like...
All these old folks are going to the socialism conference,
dripped out in DSA red.
Trump will continue stealing money even after he's out of office, Democrats are too weak
and won't do shit, I don't disagree.
Dog didn't he make it to where no one in his entire bloodline could be investigated by
the US government for past or present or future crimes?
Yeah, I mean, those things can change.
You can send gifts in chat. Yes, if you're a tier two subscriber, you can send gifts in chat now.
I love Chicago, Nebraska, Illinois.
Nebraska don't play about Husker football.
The fuck?
yes bourgeois decadence baby if you're a tier two or a tier three subscriber you
can use gifts in the chat that's right flex your tier twos and tier threes go
ahead
we I think we're here
Why are you not attending the New Yorker Fest this year?
I don't know.
I wasn't invited.
All right, don't.
Let's hide it.
There we go.
Yeah.
Straight to the panel.
Okay.
Yeah.
Panel starts at what time?
4.30.
Okay.
Thank you.
It's.
Uh, where are we going?
Okay, we're here already right now anyway, right?
Yes.
All right.
Okay, we are headed to the Socialism Conference right now, Chad.
I'm walking over to the panel.
You can see the attendance are diverse, demographic.
It's looking like a like a Hassanabi head conference in the sense that there are a lot of 65 year olds here and 30 year olds
so it turns out
the conference attendees
are both the
Old school socialists considering it's a hey markets event. It makes sense. Who reads books?
Old people do young people not exactly the book reading crowd. I would say
My eyes? Oh, exposure? You didn't?
I'm only struggling. I have an umbrella.
Okay. Alright, you registered already?
Hi.
Hi.
It's so nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I'm an astrologer. I watch a smaller audience than you. What a quarter million.
And I just wanted to tell you that right now you do have something difficult to happen in your chart
with a lot of pressure from outside of you,
but it'll be part of your legend one day.
We'll see.
All right.
Thank you.
And please stop saying that someone's gonna shoot you
or whatever.
Okay, I'll stop saying it.
There's always a reason to put that out in the world.
You're right.
And you're very brave.
You mean a lot to a lot of people.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Nice to see you.
Nice to see you.
Come on.
Oh, this is it?
Wait.
All right.
Skybridge chat. Do I just log up?
It's a great question. Hello!
Hi, I'm Michaela.
Are you okay with being on camera?
Alright, what are we doing?
Should I just get up there, sit up there?
You don't, I mean without like...
Is there like an area that I can...
Is there like a more private area that I can...
We have a...
Oh, it's far down.
What's up?
Also Patrick.
He's the one, I'm one of the panelists.
He's like, uh, a team member.
I know, I know.
He was in my daughter's life.
He was tired, but he was a team member.
Okay, I listened to your conversation.
Yeah.
Hey, Kayla.
Oh, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
And that's right.
I watch a lot of your TV shows.
I don't know.
Nice to meet you.
Um, yeah, so should we just go back there for now
before you set up?
Don't set up yet.
I'm not setting up.
25 more minutes.
Oh, it's over.
20 more minutes.
It's already set.
Oh, okay, perfect.
Yeah, yeah, this backpack.
Alright.
Do you want to go out and grab some water or something?
Yeah, we can just like hang out back there for a bit,
so we're not making a big, uh, ruckus.
Because I feel like that's going to happen if I just chill here.
Okay. Um, good.
It's a little bit more private.
Alright, let's go over there.
What's going on?
I mean, I'm just one of the panelists, one of the people who work for the program, so...
What do you think of your talking points?
Yeah, I mean, you guys, my job is to just play the role of a basic moderator from what I understand.
It's not like anything, I mean I'll have feedback if you guys want me to offer feedback.
I know that that's what they said, I can add color commentary.
Yeah, so I've done this before, I've moderated a panel here before, and I think I'm going
to be the one who reads like these basic announcements, and then you're gonna start.
Yeah.
I like asking us some like just kind of tell us to start talking. I'm going first, then Megan and Ashik will do their thing.
And then I'm going to finish out that like presentation section and you should feel free to kind of like add your thoughts like in between, briefly, between speakers.
Then we'll kind of go more into like an interview. And then there's like a few things.
And then there's a Q&A at the end, right?
Yeah.
then 30 minutes of everybody talking about their points.
Yeah.
I'm gonna ask everyone individual questions
and then 35 minutes of Q and A.
Yeah, well, there's like also, I was thinking,
cause I don't know, this is kinda how I do it,
but there's a follow up questions,
kind of like things that don't get covered
and like when we're doing a presentation.
Yeah.
Then you can just like ask a few things.
Oh.
You look like a camera.
Yeah, no, that's perfect. I'll do some follow-ups. I'm going to ask questions like, why don't
you guys care about the national perspective? Why do you want to abolish the commodity form?
Why do you want to destroy America? Why do you want to destroy America?
Okay.
Those are great questions.
I ask myself that every single day.
Yeah, so one of the beautiful parts about this is that under different circumstances, I assume
that there wouldn't be as much national attention on the Socialism Conference, or at least like
DSA co-chairs talking to someone like myself.
This is stuff that we've done in the past, right?
Nowadays, I feel like there's a heightened environment of scrutiny and attention from
national media, so I suspect that some of the answers will probably be plastered
all over Fox News. Not to freak you out. No, after we released the program I was
on Fox News on blast every day for a week. Yeah. They clipped the mass call.
Yeah. I was Stu Smith. I guess we're on a first-name basis now. Yeah, yeah, Stu
studio. That's our guy. That's my guy. Love him. He tweeted out that I look
like I was taken from central casting for a Manson girl. You know it's really
I'm like if I look like a swamp monster and the way that's do smith does I probably was shy away from criticizing other people's
You know the way that other people look yeah, but we got you know me Emma and
Francis all got the you know cat lady spinsters
Why would women be interested in politics unless they're you know neurotic and paranoid?
Let me pull up a photo of stew
real quick. Let's see if Google even gives us that opportunity.
Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute. I love... He's probably watching right now. Hi Stu. Yeah, I love Stu.
He's our number one fan, obviously, but it is very interesting that he's like, you
know, yeah, this is what he looks like and this is probably the best photo of
him for City Journal. Yeah, I know. I've zoomed in on his face before. I'm
trying to find the inner depths of his soul.
Why do you care about me so much, Stu?
I'm not even really on social media,
so when he started using my first name.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Anyway.
Stay connected to me on time.
We're good.
We got 15 more minutes.
Well, like five left.
I'll go and pass into the cameras.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. He's an Oshikar Oshik. Oshik. Okay. Alright. Um, where they at? Um, I saw
Megan in the back. I think that's the game. Hanging out in the green room somewhere. They're
the real stars of this event, you know. 15 minutes of gaming. Yeah, let me just throw
I'll throw it up real quick.
How are you?
Candy crush? Like what?
That suit is too big for you? It's not.
It's not at all.
It's not. It's actually perfectly tailored to my body.
You just don't understand that there are different styles of shooting out there.
Let me get there, guys.
Yeah. Like, you might say the arm length is too long.
and in comparison to other Western suits yes the arm length is a little bit
longer but that's by design this is a choice made by the tailor this suit
was tailored to my body it's actually perfectly sized as a matter of fact I
just don't you know button up the inside button as well to make it sit even
nicer because it's annoying to like unbutton it all the time I'm sitting
out. But yes, if you were to say that this suit is not perfectly tailored, you're wrong.
You're wrong and it's okay.
Megan is talking to a newspaper.
Yeah, I know.
And she goes to Susan Marles.
Okay.
Yeah.
What's your name?
My name's David.
Hi.
Pleasure to meet you.
My dad's name is David.
That's a good name.
Hi.
Pleasure to meet you.
My dad's name is David.
Good name.
I guess any other panels, are you excited?
Have you been to the socials and conferences before?
I have.
I've done two panels before.
And last year, it was the chair of the USA's National
Political Education Committee.
So we did one, like, a GSA political education thing.
Socialist humanism and rights and authority.
And then...
She's the one that's brainwashing to you.
I am.
I am.
Yeah.
So says Steve Sniddy.
And Pearl Rowe too.
Yeah.
Pearl Rowe's a big fan of the program.
Yeah.
They're really getting their heavy hitters out there
to, you know, fight back.
Do you feel like the additional media attention?
These are the types of questions
that I won't have time to ask you on stage
so I think it's a good opportunity.
Do you feel like the additional media scrutiny,
national media attention has caused anyone to recalibrate how they communicate.
With that in mind, or is it still all systems go?
I mean, we put out the program as a democratic mandate, which we'll talk about.
That's one of the things I'm going to talk about.
And so how we talk about it is also kind of...
People can talk about it any kind of way you want.
Right? Like we have a toolkit that we gave to chapters that kind of provide tips on how to talk about it in your workplace.
We're going to do a training in a week on the 10th, talking to non-socialists about the program, it's for like any member.
We have talking points for our chairs and like other folks like that.
The fact is though is that people read the program after they hear about it.
Like I'll talk about like some of those numbers.
We can see that people find out about it through hearing and
Then they look it up. They like Google it and then they read it and when you read it
Yeah, some of the things are
Resonant with a truth, but also they can see that a lot of the ways that they're being talked about
It's just not reflective of the entire vision. Yeah, and so that's good for us
You know and like as far as how other people talk about it
Yeah, like, when we were making talking points,
it's helpful to know, like, oh, these
are the things that people are asking about.
Or these are the things that, even if generously you say,
these are the things people seem confused about.
We know that some of them, if it weren't abolished
the police, it would be something else, right?
Because they're trying to find things.
Well, it's deep on the police, right?
Well, it doesn't even say that in the program.
But nonetheless, what they're trying to do
is pull out things that they know
pull poorly at the moment.
And some of the things they've also tried,
for example, the Senate, that didn't really work,
because people are like, oh yeah, why do we have the Senate?
People get curious about these kinds of questions more so
than they maybe immediately are like, oh my god,
I love the Senate.
Why would you want to get rid of the Senate?
I've yet to hear an argument in the affirmative
as to why the Senate should remain the way it does.
And it's very interesting.
Well, it's a tradition, right?
There's a lot of distance.
I know, but everybody simply says,
look at how silly that argument is.
And then they never actually explain why the argument is silly.
Yeah.
So I find that fascinating.
Obviously, I'm very familiar with how negative framing works,
given that I've been doing this for the past 13 years.
And yeah, no, I started off with young Turks.
So of course, established media, corporate media,
is going to do everything in its power
to do a full...
Anoculate people against...
Yeah.
But they're just making people more curious, is the thing.
Cause they're saying, look at their platform
and then people look up platform DSA
and our page is the one that comes up
and then I don't know how many people
actually read the whole thing from top to bottom.
Maybe people just control F
and like look for some word that they heard or something.
But I actually think people react in all kinds of ways.
And I mean, my mom was a Fox News watcher
pretty much until the day she died.
And the people who were sitting there
on the couch or the bed or whatever
who were watching like religiously,
unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to get them immediately.
But Fox News is also in dentist offices.
It's in bars, it's in hotels.
It's like you're blaring all over the place.
And so people, I think, if they hear somebody,
some of the worst people in the world,
the dumbest and worst people in the world freaking out
about something, that is good for us.
Because people are like, oh.
There's a negative polarization that takes place.
I think that's precisely what's happened
with the last media cycle that I've been in as well, where
they keep hearing, no, it's all good.
I'm used to it, but they keep hearing people
like John Federman on the Democratic Party side
and then also mostly Republican reactionary monsters
talk about what this movement is, who I am,
what I represent, and I think like regular liberals,
when they see that, they know that these are enemies
of the working class, and therefore their attitude
is actually to demonstrate a little bit of curiosity,
intellectual curiosity, what's good?
Yeah, and also, I mean, independence or plurality
in this country, like persistently,
and a lot of independence, they lean one way or the other,
but many people are fed up with the two-party system
and somebody presenting a clear alternative
is always going to be able to at least grab
the attention and curiosity of people and people.
I mean, people aren't monolithic.
They're not gonna necessarily see one thing
they disagree with and then automatically shut the hell
thing down.
Yeah, and the beauty of the program,
at least in the way that it's communicated to people,
is workers deserve more, not less.
Right?
And I think it's tough to present a counter narrative
to be like, no, actually workers do deserve less.
Ironically enough, I have heard Laura
in her room say those words.
She also said that we should shut down free high school.
That was one of the first things she said.
I can't, yeah, she said, well, college for all.
That's a terrible idea.
I mean, we've seen how high school for everyone
has worked out.
And then she just stopped talking for like a full five
seconds and realized what she just said.
Yeah, it's usually how it goes.
But I think for a lot of people,
you know, just right to your mom who watch Vox News.
you
you
you
The munitions that we have developed against China, so they're selling us the components
that we put in these missiles so we can then, I guess, at some point use against China.
It's all fraud.
I think everybody understands that that's silly.
It's not going to be productive.
You're not going to make enough money in that process, but as long as you agitate,
As long as you egg it on and people are fearful of this, then you can justify spending more
and more money on American defense instead of spending money on schools and spending
money on healthcare and spending money to fix our broken infrastructure to get better
broadband access, you know?
I mean, Tupac said it the best and it's very simple, but, you know, they got money
for what we can't feed the poor.
Yeah.
But where do you disagree most with both Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy?
I mean, foreign policy, unfortunately, is uniparty in this country, right?
I mean, we saw this with Israel as well.
The genocide started under Joe Biden, and Joe Biden flew to Israel after October 7, gave
a bear hug to Benjamin Netanyahu, kept fake, fake imposing red lines, and then Netanyahu
would dog walk them and violate those red lines flagrantly openly.
And that's literally now happening with Donald Trump.
So power shifted from Democrat to Republican, and yet American foreign policy continued.
So that is my number one problem with both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
There aren't a lot of real fighters who look to the situation and say, we got to change
something.
have to scale this back. This is not tenable. This is not working out for us. And it's actually
been a spectacular failure with Iran. You know, sometimes I jokingly refer to this as like
the IRGC being the only political force on the planet that has been able to successfully
oppose MAGA, successfully oppose Trumpism. And they fought back militarily. They shut
down the Strait of Hormuz. And that's the reason why Donald Trump is constantly
in this state of panic, where he keeps saying, oh, there's a ceasefire.
He said it 38 times.
Today's the 39th time that Donald Trump has officially declared a ceasefire.
And yet there's still back and forth explosions in the Strait of Hormuz.
I mean, they took out-
Is your bomb last weekend?
Yeah.
They took out the IRGC's Navy that was supposed to be destroyed, or potentially
its Air Force that was also supposed to be destroyed, according to Donald Trump.
out an American Apache helicopter near the Gulf of Oman at the Strait of Hormuz. That's
a 50 million dollar helicopter, man. There's a 50 million dollar helicopter that they
took out with a
you
you
you
you
you
you
you
you
you
you
you
So, I co-authored a resolution in our
I could mention, called Workers Deserve More Forever,
which they do, right?
And it basically said, let's make this our program.
And we put together a process by which we then elected people
from our national committees, from the rank and file
of the organization, from our NPC,
our National Political Committee.
And we assembled this.
Well, when I say we, the National Political Committee
seated our committee in March.
And I was one of the co-chairs of that committee,
or still am, I guess, we're kind of phasing it out
now that we've made our program.
And over the course of about three months,
we met nearly weekly, multi-tendency group of people
who'd been elected variously in our organization
to write as a group, which for some of you,
that might be fun for a lot of people.
It is an absolute nightmare, but this was actually
one of the best things I ever done in DSA,
because what we did was we essentially
had a writing group with democratic socialist characteristics.
We took votes on things that were hardline,
but when we also just listened to each other,
collaborated and tried to come up with a program
that we felt would resonate both with our membership
that people would own, that was the purpose, right?
That we were going to revise this program
that resonates so much with people
to update it for our politics now.
And then also that we could share it in organizing.
We can organize with our comrades outside of DSA,
in other coalition spaces, in workplaces,
recruiting, that kind of thing.
And this is what we arrived at.
So then when we had our draft ready,
we sent it over to the National Political Committee.
I don't know if you guys remember Mike Johnson reading
this draft.
That was actually the draft, it leaked.
Great for us, you know, because it ended up putting it up.
A lot of aura edits.
Yes.
For sure.
Yeah.
And so then our NPC made a few amendments to it, sent it back.
We did some style editing, sent it back,
and then they accepted it.
And then we printed it up.
And that's what we have here.
We also have a website, program.dsausa.org.
And I just want to share that since we released
our website by, it was on July 14th, Bastille Day.
We've had almost 300,000 unique human visitors to the site,
about 297,000, and that's in just under two months.
We've had over a half a million page views.
That's a lot for just a dinky ass little whatever.
It's actually made a huge splash, in fact,
so much so that we've been, once again,
denounced by Congress.
And we'll talk about this more, but I just want to also note that all of the media and
everything that's been happening, it's a lot of how people are finding this is by looking
it up.
We can see the back end and it's from Google search, which means that people are hearing
it.
They're looking up platform DSA or program DSA and they're headed straight to us.
So people then come and read what we actually have to say.
And that is awesome for us, right?
So that means that they'll both be able to sort of
re-inoculate themselves against what the media is saying,
but then also they can see what we're really all about.
And I'm really excited to continue talking about that
with y'all, but pass it on.
So one of the questions I have for everyone on this panel
is do you feel like there's so much negative polarization
that's already taking place from establishment media
to Congress?
It's not a secret that these are not exactly
favorable individuals that when they are delivering critical coverage and critical commentary and
hyperscrutinizing every element of this program, that actually ends up bringing more people
over to our side.
I would say so.
I mean, these are some of the worst people in the world.
We've got Jesse Waters.
We've got Carl Rove talking about it.
I mean, not a hero, right?
I'm really kind of baffled to think that there are people who would otherwise be
drawn to our politics here or like our demands and then they see Carl Rhodes and
it's like oh yeah well Carl does like it yeah obviously okay oh go ahead I want
to hear your thoughts as well and then I have questions specifically for you too
excellent yeah no I mean I think I think you also have to remember that you know
Fox News like plays in airports it plays in the doctor's office it plays it plays
hotel bars a place where you go get you know six wings and and a beer
And also, it plays in the house of, you know, the terrible dad whose teenage kid can't figure
out why his dad is so terrible.
And that person is watching and is excited about it.
So as much as it's like, yeah, it's like not actually fun and Son knows this all too well.
To hear these people talk about you in the way that they do, you know that it is reaching
a whole lot more people than, you know, we're not,
this program isn't for Jesse Waters
and it's not for Carl Rowe, right?
It's for people who are sitting there
waiting for their dentist appointment
and it is reaching them.
So that's really exciting.
And as much as it's sort of like,
like, please stop saying my name,
please, I wish you didn't know my name,
but they do and people are hearing about it.
So that's what matters.
All right, so Megan, I have a question for you.
What is the program's role in DSAs organizing in particular?
Yeah, so, sorry.
Was that me?
Yeah?
Okay.
What's really cool about Workers Reserve Mars is it gives us this horizon to move toward,
right?
It gives us, you know, people are like, well, this isn't realistic tomorrow.
We know we're not abolishing the Senate tomorrow.
We get that.
That's not confusing.
But it gives us this roadmap that we can push toward this horizon that we can look to.
And so when we have DSA endorsed politicians, when we have DSA chapters, when we have folks
working in their unions, it gives them things to push towards.
So when you look at the platforms about housing, it gives us this sort of roadmap to push
towards social housing.
How can we move a little policy here, a little policy there, that then eventually
build up to this big thing?
I think there's a lot in here that is very personalizable
or whatever it can hit you where you come from.
I grew up rural poor, housing insecure.
I'm a mom.
I've had a C-section without insurance,
and I know what that costs, pre-Obamacare.
I know that nobody should have to go through those things.
And so I personally feel very strongly about things.
But also, like, everybody does.
everybody you talk to something in here is hitting them and you know we're all
sort of victims of the system and we can only change it together so this gives
us that pathway to do it and I think that's really exciting.
How do you, you briefly talked about your own personal experiences but like
broadly speaking how do you see your personal politics reflected in the
workers deserve more program even further than that and do you feel
I feel like it is reaching the audiences that it is.
And the last question I have on this in particular
is I feel like Democrats have refused to abide
by having a vision and they're constantly playing
a defensive posture and they have this severe inability
to dream of a better future or to even have
North Star that they're working towards, do you feel like this gives us an advantage specifically
to have a grand design, something to push forward towards, or do you think that it's
a detriment from your personal experience in the last, like, couple of months?
I definitely think a positive vision is not a detriment.
It is absolutely crucial to left organizing, right?
We have to be, we haven't, there hasn't been anything even resembling hope in mainstream
politics since the first Obama election, which, who in here is old, like, do you remember
the disappointment when it was like, we, there, they, he didn't even close Guantanamo, like
these basic things that, there was no, you know, and, and how many times have we kind
of heard about the most important election of our lifetimes, and well, at least I'm
not that other guy, and that, that is not a vision, and it's not something people
can latch onto, and, and we see it with people just checking out, people are done,
just don't vote. They don't vote, they don't, they also check out of other
civic institutions, they're not voting in their unions, they're not, you know, and so
being able to bring those exciting things back and be like, your union can
do a lot, yeah great, you can join it. Your politicians owe you more, they owe
you better, and you can demand that from them if you organize. So yes,
offering a positive vision. As far as, you know, I mean it's all, one of
the things that I think is really exciting about the program is that
that it really does tie together all of these things.
So for me, of course, like I said,
I grew up rural poor, couldn't afford to go to college,
didn't have health insurance most of my adult life,
have a kid, sort of all those issues.
I know what struggling to get good reproductive care is
and I've seen what my kid's school looks like
just falling apart, not enough teachers and so on.
But we also tie it together, right?
Like these aren't standalone issues.
Me not having health insurance
is not actually a totally separate thing
from us bombing Iran.
Like, those are the same thing.
It's all capitalism and it's all together.
And I love that the program pulls it all together
in a way that I think is really coherent
to just regular people who, you know,
like I said, I couldn't afford to go to college.
I don't have the big fancy degree.
And I understand this just fine.
And I think, you know, my cousin Mike
who drives a truck does too.
And I think my mom who is a union nurse
for a long time does too.
And it's really hitting with people.
Ashik, I'm gonna ask you the same question.
What has been the program's role in DSA's organizing capabilities?
And do you have any personal experiences as well that you want to share?
Yeah, so like Makayla laid out a bit, it takes a lot to figure out, in a large group of people,
to lay out what are the things that we have in common, our shared vision.
We joke in DSA, sometimes if you get 10 socialists in a room, you'll get 15 opinions.
You know, you can do the math accordingly.
So we now have over 120,000 members all over the country.
So that's the biggest GSA's ever been.
And that's a lot of opinions.
That's a lot of different viewpoints.
It's a lot of different life experiences.
So it did take a lot of work to boil it down
to what you see in this pamphlet or a website,
program.dsaosa.org.
You can check it out.
And we wanted to make it really digestible.
Just to tell your personal story like Megan did,
just what are the things that brought you
and like toward the left, toward DSA as a member,
there are a lot of things that brought me into it
and I'm not gonna go into all the things right now
but I did climate organizing for a few years
before I joined DSA, there are a lot of life experiences
I had that kind of woke me up to US militarism
and imperialism being kind of at the core
of so many problems in American society
and around the world.
My family came from Bangladesh in the late 70s to 1980s
and I grew up hearing the worst stories
that my parents and their generation lived through in 1971.
And then after it became an independent country,
there was a military dictatorship
that was backed by the United States as it turned out.
The genocide that happened in 1971,
it turns out, was backed by the United States
because the independence movement
was on the wrong side of the Cold War.
But I learned that decades after growing up
with these stories that my parents told me
about their life experience.
And I grew up in a neighborhood in South Brooklyn
that is next to New York City's only active military base.
So I grew up with kids whose parents were in the military
or worked on the base, and I just kind of had this window
into seeing how, well, there are a few times
I went to events, like on the base,
somebody's birthday party in seventh grade,
and just, oh, there's all this actually
pretty nice housing.
Everyone has healthcare and just all these things,
like realizing that these universal public services
that now DSA is talking about,
that already kind of exists in parts of American society,
namely the military, which is the largest public jobs
program in the United States, which
has kind of messed up, right?
Like how many of us had to, kind of, for a lot of reasons.
And then, so that's something I kind of picked up on
over the course of growing up, but then just realizing
after I left college, with a lot of debt,
my first job after college was working
at a veterans' hospital in the Bronx
with veterans who had been through combat
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I just realized like, okay, there is this, again,
this public health care system that's pretty good
that most Americans don't have access to,
but these people that we're dealing with
are traumatized, like have PTSD from situations
that they never should have been in.
They were mostly working class,
like black and brown people in the Bronx.
And the military was their best option
to get out of the neighborhood
and just have any kind of upward mobility, right?
And there are so many communities across the country
like that.
So that was a really productively disillusioning first job
for me.
And just, yeah, that really shaped my thinking about how,
OK, we now have a military budget of over $1 trillion.
And that could be going towards so many other things.
And even people who are employed within that
aren't really benefiting.
Like, half of that military budget
is going to private contractors,
a lot of these companies that are the ones profiting.
And not just people in the companies, but the CEOs
are profiting from going to war just all over the place.
And that's ballooning through the Trump administration
in ways that are more openly imperialist
than anything we've seen in our lifetime.
But it's part of this whole system,
this military industrial complex
that has been built up for over a century.
And that's the reason why we don't have
these public services for everybody
all across the United States.
It's a huge reason why we don't have any action
against the climate crisis.
The cost of war for the past two to an half decades since 9-11 has been over eight trillion
dollars.
For half of that, four trillion dollars, we could have had an entirely 100% renewable
energy grid to adapt to the climate crisis.
But that hasn't happened because the entire power structure is not profiting from that.
So yeah, things in this program like ending the war machine, shifting massive amounts
of resources from militarism, from ICE, immigration enforcement, like a huge part
Part of the immigration problem is so many people come to the United States and are forced
to leave their countries because they become unlivable, because of war, because of the
climate crisis, all these things that ultimately are a product of capitalism and imperialism
that is happening for the profits of very few people, the billionaire class.
So the things that we're talking about here, ending the war machine, abolishing
ice, which didn't exist just three decades ago, solving the climate crisis with something
like a Green New Deal, which would be a massive jobs program, rebuilding the infrastructure
in this country that's falling apart. Like how many bridges and highways and things
are just falling apart? We see videos of them collapsing and they aren't getting rebuilt
because there isn't public funding for them. So people in this country would benefit
and so many people around the world would too and this program is about boiling down.
are the big things that we want to be for, the positive vision, when everybody knows
that things suck right now. They've sucked for a long time. And most people just don't
have any hope for a livable future. So that's what we're providing by blowing on the Staten
program.
So I'm going to go a little bit off script here. So bear with me. Mikhail, I have a
question for you. In your experience, how do we communicate these desires that would
be very helpful for the overwhelming majority of the American working class to the American
working class? Because I look around this room and obviously the working class as we
understand it has dramatically changed, I would say in the last three decades especially.
One of the things that is very frustrating to see over and over again in the media is
this idea that if you have a college degree, if you're college educated, you're not a part
of the working class, except I would go so far as to say, especially with millennials
and onward, the downwardly mobile college educated demographic is probably the center
mass of the working class movement at this point.
It's no longer the hard hat wearing coal miners in the way that Fox News likes to
to pontificate on endlessly, although they are of course still very much a part of the
working class. But how do we communicate these desires? How do we reach out to the people
that are a part of the industrial working class, for example, and bring them on board
in a more meaningful manner with an agenda such as this one?
Yeah. So you touched on a couple of things. One, I wanted to talk about anyway, which
is the way that our program is structured. The first part is non-traditional for a socialist
program, which is a brief narrative that asks people to imagine what it would be like to
have a day off from work without capitalism, which was something that I thought of in part
because I'm a big fan of sci-fi, and really love the power of what it could mean for
for somebody to insert themselves into their own script,
because what it's asking for is something
that is just what if this one thing didn't exist,
and what are the things that would be different
about your life, even when everything else is the same?
You take your kids to work, maybe you plan a trip,
go to a doctor's appointment, maybe you share a meal
with friends or family or spend time in the park,
but what would it be like if you didn't hate your job
if you didn't feel that you were being exploited
for the gain of a small group of people
who don't seem to know what the fuck they're doing
on top of the fact that they are swinging a pendulum
over you, saying like,
I wonder when you're gonna be fired?
This is happening to a lot of people now,
even people who are employed.
But also, what would it be like to live without debt?
What would it be like to live knowing
that you would not actually fall into homelessness
or death if you had to change your job
and don't have insurance because you wouldn't need it
because we would have universal healthcare for all.
The thing is, is that a lot of these things,
there's a lot of rhetoric around democratic socialism
is when the government does stuff, right?
Or these are not radical demands.
In hypercap, yeah, love Richard,
but I really do wanna emphasize that socialism
is a vision for a future without capitalism.
it is not just government does things, right?
Because the government can do all kinds of stuff.
As Ashit just pointed out,
the government does all kinds of stuff all the time.
We know the power of government.
We know the power of government and a capitalist system.
We know the power of the state.
And so what would it be like
to actually have a democratic vision
where everybody can participate,
but also it's not just, you know,
clicking the button every two to four to six years,
but it's actually participating in your communities.
I mean, some parts of this,
You know, the beginning part, it was actually kind of a struggle on the committee.
Everyone ended up agreeing eventually.
That's how I roll.
But like the fact is, is that it was hard for people, well,
people think this is realistic, right?
The thing is, is that it is hard to imagine what it would be like to live
in a world where you're not being exploited, but we have to actually offer
that alternative to people.
We have to, because what are Democrats and Republicans?
They're saying not just that things won't get better,
but that you have to suffer in order to make money,
or make money not for yourself, but for others.
And it's like, no, we actually want a world
free of suffering, we want a world free of exploitation.
We want a world where our creative powers
are unleashed for the common good.
That's what labor power is, right?
It's our creativity and our intellect
and our physical power going forward into the world
and actually making something that we want.
And it's kind of, I think, the core of this program
is, as Megan pointed out, linking these things together.
But I also wanna just note that the labor demands,
things that are traditionally labor demands,
are actually woven throughout the entire program,
like freedom to flourish, the first part talks
about public amenities, things like that,
but also 32 hour work week, full family leave,
those kinds of things.
We talk about a green new deal of jobs guarantee.
We talk about veterans benefits,
and full employment for veterans.
Then we also have a section called Democracy at Work
in the Section Working Class Democracy
that talks about powerful, militant democratic unions,
and those are the kinds of things
that we want people to incorporate
into their vision of what a real democracy could be like.
And we also talk about abolishing the Senate because who needs a Senate, right?
But like also we're talking about what would it be like if people actually had power over
their lives and they were able to use their time and their talents the way that they wanted
to.
Because capitalism tells us the only way that you are going to be able to do what you
want is by working hard.
Well, what does that mean for capitalism?
It means working hard for them, right?
Not for us.
What we want to express through this program is that this is about us.
This is about us taking our time back.
This is about us taking our lives back from capitalism, and that takes all of us.
So what we want to also emphasize to the DSAers in the room, those who are not in DSA,
you should definitely join.
But this is also about you taking it out into the community and taking it out into
the world with you.
You don't have to be waving it in people's faces,
newspapers on the side of the road or anything,
but we actually do have a toolkit
that we sent out to chapters two weeks ago, I think,
that has kind of a starter kit for various things
like a chapter resolution to put this
into your campaigns and tabling and all
of those kinds of things, as well as a little artwork
kit that has the wonderful Margaret Palmquist artwork
she's our artist, I don't know if she's in the room,
but is she here?
If you're here, Margaret, we love you.
But you might recognize her, Swedish Slammers on Instagram,
she's one of our strongest illustrator soldiers.
But I'll stop there,
because I know we want to get to kind of more stuff,
but just to your question, broadly,
I hope I helped to answer it,
what do we do to draw people in?
Well, what we do is we give people a vision
of what it would be like to demand that,
not just government works for us, but that we work for us.
That we are for us as a group.
It seems like there is not friction, but harmony
between the idealism of a better future,
but also the pragmatism of what is possible now.
I want to also ask you guys about another possible avenue
of friction that is potentially harmonious.
DSA obviously has different ideas about how to make socialism happen.
One of the routes is obviously through electoralism.
Some will say it's entryism.
I think it's more complex than that.
But what is the vision for, and this is a question for everyone
on the panel that wants to answer it, what is the vision for making sure
that the elected representatives that win with the DSA endorsement,
with DSA doorknockers, to push forward not only
as they've successfully done so, more DSA membership,
but also this agenda as well.
Is there friction there?
Or what is the, what's the attitude so far from DSA-electeds?
You want to take it first?
I think we all have answers to this.
But yeah, it's a really big tension.
And DSA, we're not formally a party,
although we are functioning more and more like one.
In the United States, we have this two-party system,
the Democrats and Republicans,
but it's more like a no-party system.
Formally, they're not political parties
the way that exists in a parliamentary system,
like the one we're calling for,
where there can be a multi-party,
just representing the whole spectrum of political opinions
and viewpoints, that doesn't exist in the US.
It's just so dug in, and it's a big challenge.
So this is really one of the most live questions in DSA
across our 120,000 plus members.
People from envisioning a break, forming our new party
formally, to imagining we can realign the Democratic Party
and everything in between.
So broadly, we're working with what
we call the party surrogate model,
where there are a lot of different functions
of a political party like exists in other countries,
like having an internal democracy
where members can make decisions together,
which DSA does.
This program is a result of a lot of democratic deliberation.
Our internal leadership is voted on by members.
The candidates we endorse are democratically endorsed
by DSA chapters,
which is where most of the work happens.
So all that to say,
there's a lot of different functions of a party
like the internal democracy, fundraising to support candidates,
more and more we're able to do that independently.
So we don't have to rely on the massive consultant networks
of the Democratic Party that condition what they do,
which is why we see the Democratic Party leadership
being so distant from most of their voters.
So all these things more and more,
we're getting better in chapters
that have well-developed electoral programs
where more and more the candidates that DSA endorses
are an outgrowth of other kinds of organizing,
like labor organizing.
More and more are candidates that chapters like New York City
or Los Angeles or others that have a lot of people in office,
they're endorsing people who come out of labor organizing,
workplace organizing, and have experience
with working class democracy,
like in a labor union or tenant organizing.
A candidate that just won a council seat in DC,
who's a good friend, Upper Noraj,
was co-chair of the Metro DC DSA chapter.
Okay, you can clap.
You had her on the screen recently.
Yeah, her name's Grape.
She was a tenant organizer for years
with a Stomp Out Floam Lords shout out
to the DSA's longest running tenant organizing program
in the District of Columbia.
So Janice-Louise George,
who won the Democratic primary to become mayor in DC,
has a record of working with the tenant organizers
for many years.
So the other types of organizing that we do
beyond and between elections,
Like that's really what gives us the strength to one,
like establish that candidates have a real record
of standing up with workers, with tenants,
with working class people of all kinds
and reflecting the organizing that they do
outside of the electoral system.
And they can become agents of that
within electoral politics.
So we have this inside outside strategy
where people inside government can reflect
and work with what we're doing on the outside
to build power in all sorts of ways.
So that's a work in progress.
There are a lot of tensions
that, you know, plenty of you are familiar with many of the public examples, but we're
getting better and better at it.
And like New York City DSA, which just doubled their presence in the state legislature, pretty
much all of their candidates, especially in this cycle, that have helped double their
presence are coming out of these other kinds of organizing and really came through DSA
to be part of this block that can advance the goals that are decided by the membership.
But they're able to collaborate with people in government and the Democratic Party or
otherwise around shared goals.
And when they are not aligned with people in leadership, they can be very antagonistic
and work as a block to demand what all working class people want.
And that's how they've won many games, like the Build Public Renewables Act in New York
State, which is the biggest game toward a renew deal at any state in the country,
major tenant, organizing tenant protections,
all these things were won because DSA made it happen
in New York State.
So we have to do that all over the place,
including at the federal government,
but that has come from the bottom up.
Yeah, and I think as she gets to a really good point,
I think DSA organizers in the room will recognize this.
We've gotten so much better at not,
at figuring out how to actually flourish
as a multi-tendency organization
and actually tie together the different types of work
that people are really interested in doing.
We're pulling away from that old model
where it was like, you had your mutual aid committee
over here and your electoral lists over here.
And we're starting to pull, like this matters to this.
These two pieces come together
to make something that's so much stronger.
And I think DSA is really,
and you know, this idea of like synthesis
and bringing all these ideas together
and making sure they're connected
is something that we are really,
we've developed pretty significantly.
And I think that is a testament to the really hard work of our organizers everywhere.
And it's why we're growing and it's why we're winning.
So I'm going to answer this a little differently from the program perspective.
We actually, in the convention resolution that passed that enacted this process, we
actually are asking endorsed electeds to champion our program. We haven't yet
installed like the formal processes for that. I think that DSA is also known for
not just because we're a multi-tenancy group but because we're not a party, we're
an organizing organization. We persuade people and we try to bring them in but
obviously one of the persuasions is going to be if they answer no I hate
the program, they're not getting endorsed. That's going to happen in the future because
I do think that we're at the point, the maturity of our organization and as we were talking
about, we're sort of acting more like a party even though we are not one. That's going to
be something that people are going to want to see. As we have grown and as sort of
the new DSA has emerged, we've seen more and more movement towards demands that
that people run as open socialists with socialist ID,
committing to certain things, especially anti-Zionism
and anti-imperialism, as well as various other
sort of, we can call them line struggles,
but really they're pretty clear,
like these are the commitments that you should make
if you wish to have DSA backing you.
And the program is, there's a lot of stuff in here
that I think if people actually read it,
they would be like, oh yeah, I don't disagree with that.
I think that often what happens is candidates freeze
whenever they are being, you know,
but I think that they need to get better
at talking about socialism
if they wanna be endorsed by a socialist organization.
I think that's a pretty small minimum demand.
And I think this makes it easy.
Actually, it's in a book.
You can pick it up, you can read it,
and you can decide what it is in there
that you would like to talk about.
I mean, everybody's got kind of their issues.
is like sort of talked about, you know,
people come out of different areas of organizing,
not everyone's gonna be a full on retail candidate.
And in fact, we might not even want that, right?
Because then people are generalists
and like you're not that, you know,
they kind of are on the surface.
I'd rather see people like really embrace certain things
and also defend the kinds of principles
that a social, like any socialist organization,
especially with the history in the United States
that we have really needs to, you know,
sort of face up to growing fascism,
as well as the crappy Democratic party
that isn't standing up for anything, right?
So I do think that this gives electives a tool,
or this gives candidates a tool,
endorsed candidates a tool,
to talk about the things they wanna talk about.
And people are asking for talking points
and things like that,
but DSA also isn't just running candidates.
We're doing all kinds of things,
and this is for us to use as we will,
and also for people to develop to,
you know, it's amendable, right?
We have a convention, and other things too.
So, hope to hear some of your questions as well as more,
but like I do think that the focus
that is on what happens when a candidate
does something that seems off,
it's like they're gonna do that, you know?
But I do think that this provides a resource for everyone
to talk about socialism.
And they should think of it that way instead of something
that they need to figure out how to triangulate.
All right, I think at this point,
we can open up the questions to the audience.
If you have any questions, I don't know how to do this part.
Like I said, I'm very bad at moderating.
You guys have more experience wrangling
people. People take turns. Yeah come up and line up at the at the mic here I think
it's probably the easiest. Thank you Megan. Yeah I got you. And I think how we
usually do it here because there's so many people maybe a string of questions
like for three okay and then we can answer. And also I think there's a
request to keep it under three minutes but I mean we've got a lot of time so
So maybe try to aim for two between two and three.
Hi, my name is Winnie.
I am with an abortion organization in Orlando, Florida.
And I'm also part of the DSA chapter in Orlando, Florida.
Recently, our DSA chapters in Florida
endorsed Angie Nixon, who then like two days after
she won her primary turn around and was like,
Oh, I'm not actually a socialist.
How are we going to deal with candidates
who we've already endorsed, and then discard socialism
afterward?
OK, I know we said we'd do three at a time,
but I'm going to jump in real quick.
First of all, huge fan of your TikToks.
Does everybody know about swan?
If you're not following swan on TikTok,
they harass people who are counter-protested abortion
clinics in Florida and it's great and y'all it's so funny and they're like
these characters and you like I've donated on behalf of what's her name
Barb is that what yeah yeah yeah yeah so I will say Florida chapters have not
endorsed Angie Nixon and I don't I don't believe she's seeking endorsement
she is a member though anybody can be endorsed by the Orlando chapter she
I don't think that's true, but that's fine, but yeah yeah yeah it's you know we are
chapters are our democratically they make their democratic decisions locally and
if somebody wants the national endorsement that comes to us after the
chapter process but but yeah I mean that that does happen sometimes you know
and we can deal with it democratically as things roll out but I guess more my
question sorry was like after this has happened we definitely don't want to see
like a fracture in the group or feel like we're not like unified behind somebody
but we always kind of run that risk of somebody immediately wanting to use our
people power because DFA is like super good at door knocking and super good at
social media and then turn around and kind of betray us for an easier route
if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I mean, that gets out of very basic set of questions
that our members all over the country
have been grappling with for, you know,
I've been a member for almost a decade.
And I think a lot of what's in our program,
like how we organize especially around electoral politics
comes down to questions around,
what are we doing as members,
as people who are organizing in our communities
and our workplaces to make more possible,
to bring more people into the ideas
about what democratic socialism is
and the policies we stand for.
And Angie Nixon, I think is an interesting example.
I wasn't really aware of a lot of what
is going on down there until after she won the primary.
So hearing her say, OK, I'm a capitalist, for example,
because she owns a radical bookstore, for example,
is an interesting kind of tension, right?
Because she does have a record of advancing working class
policies.
She's very open about a bunch of the things
that are on our program like Medicare for All,
Child Care for All, and her experience as a capitalist
is a black-owned radical bookstore that, you know,
you know, there's a tension there, right?
There's a tension where sometimes people might own a house
and rent out a room or something.
So I think these have been live conversations
as long as I've been a DSA member of like,
okay, we're against capitalism, like business owners,
landlords, there are tensions between landlords
and renters and business owners and workers.
And those are all things we kind of have to keep
figuring out and for a lot of our members
and chapters that are grappling with these questions,
especially when there are candidates like this
who are aligned in many ways,
but still might not identify as a socialist
or who are for a bunch of our policies,
but not all of them.
Abdul-as-Sayed is another example
that comes up in Michigan, right?
Rokana describes himself as a progressive capitalist.
So yeah, and he's not a DSA member as far as I know,
but yeah, so there are tensions here.
And I think the question for all of our members is,
just what are we doing to advance what we stand for?
And that's gonna be, those decisions will be made
at the chapter level.
We have 200 plus chapters all over the country
that vary in all sorts of contexts.
Many of them haven't been doing electoral work
and are kind of figuring it,
thanking for the first time this year,
seeing Zoran Mamdani and all these massive gains
in other parts of the country,
thinking about, okay, what would it take for us
to do this here, when we don't really have that experience
and don't like thinking about
electoral politics, it sucks.
So yeah, there's a lot that we're just figuring out
as we go along and we have our convention
that makes decisions every two years,
sets policies and directions going forward,
but there's always a way more to do
to make sure it's filtering out
to our entire membership, all of our chapters
and learning from what works or doesn't
in other parts of the country.
Like in my experience in DSA, there are very few new problems.
There are all sorts of things that people
might discover if they're new to organizing locally.
But part of what makes DSA so strong
and why we're growing so much is because we are learning
from each other.
Our national org is figuring out what we can do to support
more and more.
But so much of the work that's happening across chapters
is what people learn kind of horizontally
in a decentralized way.
So anyway, we could keep talking about
I will say that DSA is coordinated enough that I texted one of your co-chairs and she said Orlando has not endorsed Andy Nixon.
Nevermind. Okay, well thank you. Sorry, I know we were like definitely behind Andy Nixon.
Well I was going to say, Winnie, no, we have a lot of people waiting. So if it's possible, thank you so much.
much and also once you guys asked it oh yeah this is for me wow right after I
said that that's crazy that's crazy Satan's School of Gay Communism that's
what this hat says well thank you thank you so much and also we would like for
the people who are asking questions to sit down after if possible all right
thank you so much hi I'm also sort of new to organizing and I struggle with
with what I can do in my daily life to help organize and help promote socialism.
So as an example, I'm fortunate enough to have a personal trainer at LA Fitness, and
thank you for the inspiration for doing that.
But the LA Fitness in Chicago is having a problem where all of the trainers are suddenly
in December 1st going to get a huge pay cut, and all their clients are going to
be charged way more, and that seems like an opportunity.
And so what I want to know is what kind of conversation should I have, you know, with
my trainer about these things and like, you know, what are some general advice for like
organizing daily life?
I really wish that I had had the forethought to bring a QR code, but we're having a training
next week called Talking to Non-Socialists About Workers Deserve For.
So if you're a DSA member, you should definitely go to education.dsausa.org slash calendar
and sign up for that training.
But I think there's two parts to that, and I would just say one of them is trying to
maybe talk to somebody who you know, your trainer, about the ideas that you're, if you
have that kind of relationship, right?
Sometimes these things come up, and that's what this training is about.
But then also, if what you're talking about here is like what would it be like to kind
of infuse maybe workplace militancy or some kind of thing like that?
and EWOC, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee,
EWOC.Borg, I think, or maybe it's just
organizing.org or something, but you can find it.
And that is like the basic.
It's a DSA and United Electric Workers Joint Venture,
I guess, but it is like one of the crown jewels
in our labor program.
And you should definitely recommend that he goes to that.
So that's easy for you.
You can come to our training to learn
about how you can talk to him,
and you can also send him on to a training.
Yeah.
All right, well, let's do three at a time
so we can get through more questions.
I forgot, all right.
Hi, my name is Maxie.
Thank you for talking and feeling questions.
I'm sure you're familiar with your party in the UK.
They had a pretty good potential,
like I think it was in the initial sign up,
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people
wanting to sign up for this new party
because people were sick of the Tories
and the, well, the liberals forget about them,
but, and the labor.
So, I mean, it seems like you, like the DSA
has similar numbers, what was it, 150, 150,000?
Polls show that the plurality,
if not the majority of voters
are rejecting both parties.
Former Trump voters aren't going back to the Democrats.
And I don't know about anyone else,
but I think it's clear to me that the Democrats
do stand for something.
They stand for the Epstein class.
So what next?
Why not form a party now?
Good question.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Sam.
My question is, do you believe that the fear mongering of the DSA and Hassan and mainstream
media is actually serving its intended purpose, or is it ultimately in that positive for the
movement since it increases awareness of our platform?
Hi, I'm Evelyn.
I organize with Speak Out Socialists in Baltimore.
My question is, your platform calls for an end to capitalism.
As a young working person, I really am concerned that the promise of an end to capitalism isn't
something that we can achieve through just bread and butter changes and by playing by
their rules.
So I'm just wondering why we are letting ourselves play by these rules and failing to actually
see the fact that we won't end capitalism until we end the exploitative relation between
the classes.
Thank you.
All right.
That's three questions.
So, right?
That's what we're doing, right?
Three at a time?
That's what we're doing right three at a time. Okay, so I am I'm on the Port Wayne Northeast Indiana
DSA outreach is my is my thing. How do you get more core members to actually get out and do
things get offline off the discord chat and get out and doorknock I had a couple of DSA
endorse candidates, that it's really hard to get, yeah, get out, get offline.
My mistake.
I love being online, but I...
Too entertaining, the Twitch stream.
But we need people out there, you know, actually,
door-knocking and even phone banking and everything. So I have difficulties
being on the outreach committee and everything of getting people out there
to do those things. And then I also have another question. How do we suss bad actors out? Sorry?
How do we suss bad actors out? Bad behavior. Yes. But like also, you could have bad actors,
but they might not be a Republican, or you know, it could be just infighting too.
So how do you handle that as well? So, that's my question. Thank you. I'll start.
Okay, I'm gonna start with the fear-mongering question.
I think that this is your question, right?
So I think that it's driving people to search
for the platform, cause they're obsessed
with talking about it.
Like the first week after we released it,
they clipped the mass call that I hosted
with Emma Biglund and Francis,
our other co-chair couldn't be here,
cause a skunk sprayed her dog.
Sorry, Frances, I'm outing you on the Hassan stream, but she couldn't be here today because
of that tragedy.
But I would say that they clipped me and they said all kinds of stuff, things like, you
can see her lonely life reflected in her glasses, the usual cat lady, spinster, all that stuff.
I thought it was kind of funny, but whatever.
gained like 20,000 members in the two weeks after that or something like in
that month since it was released like I'm not saying it's correlation not
causation but that's unbelievable numbers right and also it was drived like I
mentioned before it was driving people to search for for DSA so I do think
that all of the publicity just makes people think if they're not
automatically persuaded by the the dulcet tones and persuasive arguments of
Jesse Waters and Laura Ingram, then they will be curious about us, right? And that
curiosity breeds, you know, potentially maybe not an immediate join, but then
they start reading this and they're like, well I might not agree with
everything that it's in here, but I agree with a whole lot of it. And I
would consider voting for a candidate or I would who's endorsed by DSA or I
would consider, you know, talking to my neighbor about these issues and
and checking out more, right?
So these are also conversations that happen over time.
And I would say the fear-mongering stuff,
they are trying to chill our speech, right?
They're trying to make sure that we can't talk.
And I say, thank you, but no thank you, right?
You know, to paraphrase Michael Bolton from Office Space,
if any of you guys have seen that, you know,
why should we change?
You're the ones who suck.
So it's very much like to me,
like we just need to go ahead,
continue plowing right ahead and we have free speech. We have right of
association. We have the rights to organize and we need to push harder now
than ever because they're doing it because they're scared of us. They're
doing it because they see this and they see that this could resonate with
people, right? And that they don't have anything better. So can I look no no
Oh, it's fine.
I make fun of my stream all the time.
One thing that I think is lacking from our political class
for far too long is courage.
And we need to demonstrate the strength of our convictions.
This platform, this program, is democratically organized.
This program is good.
And it's also necessary, but it's
something that a lot of people, I think, for far too long
have been too afraid to dream about.
So we have to stop shying away from our ideas, OK?
We have to stop shying away and running away from our beliefs.
We have to be very clear, but also very pragmatic
at the same time as well.
If someone, every single person in the United States
of America, with the exception of the Epstein class,
has an issue that this program addresses directly.
So it's pertinent and important for all of you
to identify within your neighborhoods,
within your communities, within your workplace
to figure out exactly what those problems are
and talk about how DSA will address them.
And the same goes for our politicians as well.
For our electives, for socialists,
for self-identifying socialists,
or even those who are socialist curious
who wanna align with this program,
they should also stop shying away.
They should also stop apologizing
to the cynical reactionary framework
that the way these hucksters and charlatans in the media
represent our values on.
We have to be bold, we have to be brave,
and we have to seize on the opportunity
because there's far too much discontent out there.
There's far too much anger towards both parties.
There's far too much anger towards the system
because the system does not benefit us
and people are recognizing that.
So I say, be bold, be brave,
And don't worry with the way that our movement is being presented in the media,
because I know this from my own personal experience.
I was sitting on a plane flying back from Detroit after the Maillot Curos won that night.
And we were watching CNN.
And Dana Bash brought me up.
And there was the guy sitting next to me who was also watching CNN alongside me.
and my quote about 9-11 popped up on the screen.
I was wearing the Zhongchang suit, the Chinese suit,
not on the plane, but in the photo.
And Dana Bash started talking about how 9-11 this,
9-11 that, Hassan Piker, and the guy started panicking.
He started looking at me.
And he started looking at the screen like,
is that you on the screen?
And I was like, first I was like, no.
And that's strange as someone else.
And then, you know, after I cracked a couple of jokes, I said, yeah, it's me.
And he said, you know what?
I fucking hate Dana Bash.
So you have to remember that.
You have to remember that.
People associate these institutions with the failures and the struggles that they experience.
So do not be afraid of these institutions representing us
as their enemy, because they're an enemy of the people
as well.
So be bold.
And remember that courage is a collective resource, just
like all of our resources are collective.
Those of us who are up here, our faces are out there
a lot more.
But I only can do it because I know
I have 120,000 comrades and a bunch of fellow travelers
with me.
And any one of us has that.
And we're all, none of us have to stand alone.
We have each other.
And that is, you can borrow somebody else's courage.
It's fine.
There were some good other questions
and I'm gonna do a little bit of a cop out
and direct you to some other panels throughout the weekend.
So the question's about party structure.
Why not just start a new party?
I'll plug McKayla's panel that's coming up
on Sunday morning, right?
The old is, the old being reborn,
the revival of socialist organizations in US and Belgium
or where a bunch of great folks are gonna talk
about different party structures.
We're gonna try to keep this about the program itself
because there are so many other questions we can get to.
But I'll just say part of it too,
part of this program is we want it to be adaptable.
People's attention spans are so short,
especially in electoral cycles that realistically
there's like three, maybe four or five things
that any given campaign
can really be laser focused on.
So our non-duty famously had top three demands,
fast and free buses, freeze the rent,
universal childcare, and then municipal grocery stores,
what was like a fourth kind of sub-demand.
But those are the things that everybody understood
because they just kept being hammered over and over again.
In different parts of the country, it could be,
you know, maybe we emphasize a minimum wage,
increased from a sub-minimum wage,
whatever, to $25 or more.
In some places it's gonna be clean water,
like our comrades in Corpus Christi
also shouting out their panel, I think tomorrow morning.
Great fight there.
So it's gonna vary in different places,
but electoral campaigns just kind of necessarily
have to focus people's very tight attention spans
and be responsive to whatever is most deeply felt
in the community, in the district,
and that's gonna be up to people to decide
what are those things that are most deeply felt.
So the question of do we just focus
on bread and butter issues
versus the bigger horizon of everything
over throwing capitals in itself.
That's not gonna happen in one election cycle.
We do believe in broadly a democratic road to socialism.
There are all these different ways we can organize
that our members have plenty of ideas
about what is the mid to long-term horizon
of how we get to everything we're talking about
or world beyond bills,
like as laid out at the beginning of this program.
But a big step is just helping people envision that,
which is why the beginning of this,
like Michela said, is so nice,
just helping people envision what would it look like
after a lot of these things are the case in our society.
So that's gonna be a longer-term thing,
but in the meantime, we have to motivate a lot of people
to make the near-term things happen
to get millions of people to even believe
that bigger things are possible,
that we should raise our expectations
and organize to fight for more.
Can I just address one thing
that was on here, the comrade from Indiana,
how to get people doing things
and also sussing out bad actors.
I actually think those things are connected.
DSA famously, Democratic Socialists.
The Democratic part is about how we do things in DSA
and it's very uneven across chapters
because there's different development.
Chapters have different ages.
Chapters go through things, right?
But ultimately, the democracy and transparency
and openness of our organization is our strength.
And I do think that bringing people into a democratic
organization where they feel that they have a vested
interest in what's happening, ownership over the kinds
of things that are happening, that is how people decide
to do stuff, right?
It's hard to mobilize people just to do canvassing
or just to do different tasks, right?
To organize people, you really have to bring people in
and help them understand their own power.
So I would say that's a good way to get people offline.
And then having a more democratic chapter
is actually how you can identify people
who are there to disrupt
and who then don't actually have the space
because it's a democratic organization.
They can maybe have the same two minutes
to debate something as anyone else,
but unless they're incredibly talented,
which a lot of these people are not,
They will be found out.
It's actually kind of a thing in DSA
where it's like the chapters that have had the most trouble
have often been the ones that suffer from less democracy
or like more disorganization.
So I would just recommend thinking through
on your leadership committee how to get things organized
such that things are democratic, open, and welcoming
for as many people as possible.
And not foolproof, but I've seen in my time in DSA
that it actually has been a really good bulwark
against ensuring that people know each other
and that people feel principled and stuck in their beliefs
such that they won't necessarily fall
into that kind of thing.
Because we all want, like you said,
we want to be able to share collective resources
and support each other.
And sometimes it's hard whenever you feel like things
are paranoid or something like that.
But in reality, it's like most people
will only come to things and show up
participate normally if they are all for one and one for all, lack of a better term.
All right, let's get four this time.
Four is the magic number.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hey.
Okay.
So it's a little bit funny because usually, so people tell me, oh, you're from France.
You should know so much about socialism because MĆ©lenchon is going to, maybe he's going
to win, and that's my guy, it is, so but in fact now I feel that it's more the
opposite because when I look at DSA of course I look at something that's very
interesting because in the United States you're so backward like in the
I mean, that's completely awful, the fact that in the country where the working class is the
more educated, the working class is the more pushed to the far right.
And so this is very, very concerning.
So my question is about, first, the unions.
Because you say you support the unions, but for instance, I think it's Sean Fain, it supported
the tariffs.
Did he?
I think he supported the tariffs.
He supported the fact that workers in the United States have better working conditions
linked to the fact that they are like products are sold on the market.
And my second question is about how do you think you will, let's say, organize the workforce?
Because of course you say that you are on the side of the workers.
I mean, I don't know if people know in this room, in 1981, he won the election in France
with the Communist Party and the Socialist Party,
and it was the most horrible wave of layoffs.
So what do you think about how to organize it
in a political way and not only in an electoral way?
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Katie.
Hi, I'm Arieb, I'm a psychiatrist.
I started watching Hassan's Caitlyn Pupu Bennett videos
in medical school, watched.
I think, you know, Hassan single-handedly
been responsible for my transition
from like a liberal to like a leftist.
And working in the job I do is very eye-opening
and confirms kind of everything.
I've been learning.
I think one of the questions I struggle with now
that I'm finished with training is, you know,
I, doctors don't really unionize the way nurses do.
Healthcare labor organizing is very precarious
because there's a lot of, you know,
the consequences that come with leveraging your labor
when your job is to save lives
and help people in a cute crisis.
I guess my advice is, my request for advice would be,
what would be your recommendations for someone like myself
would my skills be better utilized
outside of the institutions and structures?
Or as a laborer, a secret, is my money more helpful?
I guess, I don't know, I think it's hard to figure out where,
leveraging my labor fits in as doing the work that I do.
I would like to find a way to do that.
I would love some feedback on that.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you all so much.
Hey, I'm Rami.
Rami Jalil from Tacoma DSA and Labor Power Publications.
Appreciate everyone's contributions.
You brought up the question, Hassan, about friction
with elected officials when they don't do what our DSA platform
stands for.
And I believe, Ashik, you were saying,
we the members have to expand what's
possible for electives to do, if I understood you correctly.
And I think Megan, you said, we
need to work out, democratically,
how to hold elected officials accountable.
So I have more questions about that
that I want to ask you.
We've seen AOC, she declared at the DNC that Kamala Harris is working tirelessly for a
ceasefire. She voted for the Israeli missile defense system at one point.
She did not.
She did not? No.
She voted against the amendment that Marjorie Taylor Green put forward, but she did not vote for Israeli weapons.
Okay.
Anyway, let's continue. Sorry.
DSA elected officials, they don't identify as socialists,
they just identify as Democrats, as you said, McKayla.
And so don't we need stronger ways to hold them accountable?
And I guess some ideas that comrades I work with have
raised is when a DSA elected does something
that violates our platform,
shouldn't we call a meeting with them?
Like our DSA leaders should meet with those
elected officials and say, hey, you violated our platform,
why did you do that and talk with them?
see what they say, or if they keep making excuses,
call a meeting with a membership.
Invite the membership to weigh in on that conversation,
or even have a public town hall on Zoom.
I feel like we need some kind of stronger mechanisms
like that to, because they're under enormous pressure
from the ruling class to cave in.
And so don't we need to have ways
to put counter pressure to wondering
what y'all think about that.
Thank you.
Hello, my name's Nathan Elyse.
I'm a long-term activist
and one of our Sheik's friends from back in the day.
And I wanted to say, back in the day,
a Sheik, Gustavo Gderio, and some other comrades,
we came up with this idea called the Green New Deal.
And the Green New Deal was our platform before we had this.
It seems to me, like, I'm sure
a Sheik could talk to you about it.
And anyway, my point, what I'm getting to is
like the Green New Deal, we spent years
talking to people, delivering that as DSA,
getting consensus, and it was a big thing.
But now, we kind of put that aside,
and we have a new program.
I guess my, it's not more of a question,
it's a question, but also a suggestion
that we need to encourage people to
stick with it, why we can't just be like,
oh, we lost, like, you know,
with a new president, they didn't get this resolution,
So we're just gonna change things.
The DSA needs to develop a comprehensive
political education structure
so people understand what we believe in
and then kind of implement it.
And I guess I would like people to know
if they have any ideas about what we can do
to become better organized rather than
the decentralized organization we have now.
though, anyone has any ideas?
Again, I've been in the DSA a long time.
And last convention, we were like,
if we increase the number of people on the NPC,
it would be more democratic.
We'd have to buy in the organization would be more
effective.
And I don't know if that's happened or not.
It's how to tell.
But I guess I want to know what people in the room
will think we can do to make DSA more effective.
So that's my first question.
I think that's enough.
Oh, OK.
Thank you.
OK, a lot of great questions there.
I can start by responding to part of that.
So thank you.
I cannot take credit for inventing the Green New Deal.
He did, however, invent Tim Scorley.
That's another story, which we could talk about later.
But yeah, a Green New Deal.
So I joined DSA in early 2017.
And I'd been doing climate organizing for a bunch of years
and came to DSA in part, because I
trying to figure out with a lot of other people, like, okay, how can we get past the
limits of the existing environmental movement, which is very focused on these market-based
demands like a carbon tax or whatever that are just, one, clearly not effective and also
just nowhere near the scale of responding to the actual crisis.
So when the Green New Deal kind of started to blow up in 2018 in part because AOC and
the Sunrise Movement helped popularize it, in DSA we really were already asking,
like, okay, what are the things we want to emphasize as socialists, as people
developing this eco-socialist tendency?
What are the things we want to focus on
against the climate crisis?
So when the green needle blow up,
we had already been having these conversations
and we actually spent the better part of a year
kind of figuring out something like a platform.
So that was my first experience,
just bringing it back to the program,
which is what we're here to talk about.
There are many great threads here
but trying to stay focused.
So we spent the better part of a year
figuring out with many members across DSA chapters
who are interested in climate organizing
and environmental justice.
What are the things we want to emphasize?
When the Green New Deal is having this big moment,
many more people across the country
are paying attention to climate.
What are the things we want to make sure are emphasized
that are actual solutions?
Because there are all sorts of ways
that could be watered down.
If we had a lot of hope and a sense of possibility
in that year thinking, OK, Bernie ran for president,
opened up all this space to think about a Democratic
socialist program for the country, maybe that
can happen again in 2020.
But what do we want to make sure
is going to be the thing?
So it's not watered down until like a carbon tax or whatever.
So yeah, we spent a lot of effort with members across the country thinking about what are
the things we're organizing for locally, things like a public power, public control over energy
utilities against the horrible corporations that are jacking up people's bills for their
own profit, blocking renewable energy.
So public ownership was a big thing.
Union jobs, yeah.
So things that made it in to this program were really boiled down after many years
of trying to figure out.
like what is the eco-socialist orientation
to the climate crisis?
So public ownership of energy
and just major carbon emitting sectors of our economy,
expanding public transit to be universal
and high quality jobs,
like repairing the breach with organized labor.
Like for many decades,
there was just a huge divergence
between the environmental movement,
which was, you know,
had a certain class composition
of people who had the time and energy
to worry about the climate crisis
versus their immediate needs.
And labor unions, especially building trades, who are trying to have good jobs and thinking
like, okay, building all these pipelines is going to be a better ticket.
So that was something we knew we had to repair.
So getting organized labor, like, especially building trades at the table and shaping
what that looks like to build up renewable energy with the public sector, with strong
union protections, that's something that's stayed a through line in our organizing
for a climate across the country.
So New York is a great example of what they won with public renewables, but they're examples
all over the country of asserting public ownership and bringing unions to the table and bringing
down costs for people.
It's a cost of living crisis.
If we're just giving working class people an extra thing to be anxious about, we're
not going to win.
And that's why the environmental movement had been losing for such a long time.
But if we make it about cost of living and addressing people's needs, bringing
down people's bills, if we had 100% renewable energy, it could be free, you know?
you wouldn't have to pay energy bills
if it's just wind and solar.
So that's part of it.
And oh, I want to bring it back to the psychiatrist.
And that really bums me out that Francis couldn't be here.
Because Francis, our fifth panelist who couldn't be here,
is a doctor organizer.
She's a psychiatrist and a union organizer.
She was organizing residents with CIRSEIU.
And there are ways you can organize in your workplace
as a healthcare worker, and doctors increasingly are,
you know, it's not a safe ticket to a good job
where you can just expect like a nice comfortable salary.
I have family members who are doctors who are now,
like anyone who's manager younger,
who's coming into the medical profession,
is racked with massive amounts of debt.
You're working for corporate hospitals
that are just expecting you to do more and more.
And that's a bad workplace
and people can organize collectively to do that.
So if you're making nice money as a healthcare worker,
Yeah, sure, you can contribute that.
We have income-based solidarity dues.
You can give 1% or more of your income.
That's very helpful, but anyone who's working for a wage
should be supported to do workplace organizing,
and that's a core part of what we're talking about.
Just to pick up on that, especially the question
from the comrade from France.
Every, obviously this is kind of a cop out,
but every country has its own history.
We don't have the same kind of revolutionary history
that France does that essentially created a new constitution
around the dignity of all people and a bottom of rights.
I'm not particularly a constitutionalist,
but I do think it's helpful whenever your constitution doesn't
primarily protect private property like ours does.
That's one step in the right direction.
But I do think that the question about how to organize
like what to do about our sort of emissary and fragmented union landscape or organized
labor landscape.
We actually, I would say that in DSA, our National Labor Commission doesn't get as much
play.
It doesn't get as much, you know, as many flowers as the electoral stuff, in part because
it's not in the media.
Labor organizing is not in the media.
So you don't know the kinds of things that our comrades in labor are doing.
We have a national commission of thousands of people who are in organized labor reforming
unions or who rank and file organizer socialists in the movement who are creating the current
of radical, militant, democratic unionism in their own unions, including reform caucuses,
but also even outside of that.
That's kind of a broad answer, but I would just say that because you can't see it,
doesn't mean it's not happening because what you get,
especially once you're transatlantic and you're in Europe,
all you see probably is headlines that say stuff
about Suram Amdani and all of those things.
All that's great, but the thing is,
is that labor organizing usually happens on the DL
because people are doing strategic organizing within that.
I can say that the uptick in strike action
in the United States, which is something
that's happened over the last five years,
We can directly credit socialist labor organizing in part
to create that militant sea of struggle within unions.
It's not just within DSA, but it's all across, right?
Right now there's a Starbucks boycott right now
because of the refusal to honor their contracts.
And hopefully everyone knows that there's a Starbucks
boycott, so please don't buy Starbucks.
Yep, but the fact is is that labor is,
organized labor was dealt huge blows,
not just from Reagan, but also prior to that.
And it takes a lot to actually organize entire industries,
but DSA is, I can say we're working on that,
but it is one of the things that I would say
is a powerful, if more unsung area of our organizing.
And again, if you are a DSA member and you're in a union, definitely join the National Labor
Commission, labor.dsausa.org.
And I just also wanted to say one thing about the accountability part.
It's going to take time for our electeds to get accustomed to the program, but like
I said before, they will find that it is going to be, if they want the support
of DSA, it's going to be important for them to commit to our lines.
And the thing is is that a lot of this stuff happens in the media, pivoting is a skill.
You can learn how to do it.
Anyone can learn how to pivot.
The thing is though is that we don't want to see people, you know, throwing their own
politics from three years ago under the bus just for convenience' sake.
People should be held accountable for those kinds of things, right?
And I do think that over time we'll see that that is happening, you know, because
people will find like, we want people who stick to their principles, just like we want
to stick to our principles.
We also want to put people out as our own spokespeople, our own tribunes, that do speak
to the things that we believe in, and I think that's a minimum ask.
All right, I'll answer in a second, but first, before we're getting close, so before
everybody starts leaving. I just want to give a shout out to Socialism 2026. Amazing. I've
been several years in a row. This is by far the most terrible decisions I'm going to have
to make between really amazing panels that are happening at the same time. So thank you.
And a special thank you to Chicago DSA who is always, we descend upon Chicago DSA at
at least once a year, often twice,
and they are so gracious and such great hosts.
Yeah, I don't need to say a lot more.
I will say Ashik and I have had the opportunity
to travel on behalf of DSA and talk
with some socialist parties abroad.
And it is alarming sometimes when you realize
like how far you're back.
There was a moment, we were able to tour
the Stockholm City Council with some members
of Vonster Partit and a couple of the council members
women and they were talking about, you know, maternal rights issues and how they've expanded
pre-K down to one year.
And my dumb American ass said, what do you do with the babies before one year?
They stay home.
You get a year of parental leave.
Like, I didn't even, it did not even occur to me that like that was, like one or the
other of the parents stays home or they split it.
So we're like so far behind the finish line, behind the starting line and it's
not going to happen fast. And we're socialists in the USA, we're going to lose a lot. New
York City's incredible electoral program, they lost a bunch of races first. They were
losing a bunch and they built and you don't lose and hang your head and give up, you
lose and you say, all right, well what did we build? What did we create that we can
build up off of? And so it's not about claiming easy victories, it's just about figuring
out okay we didn't do this for nothing we built something here how can we keep
going how can we win next time so yeah it's not going to be as fast as we want
it to but but yeah that that deliberate process of building and learning from
from the losses because there will be some okay sorry can we can stick to
line yeah actually let's uh if we still have plenty of folks online if you
could keep it to a minute each we can try to get through more lightning
We're out before the end.
So yeah, let's do four more.
Hi everyone, major gratitude to each of you.
Question, thinking about the Workers Deserve platform,
at a time where we really need to be like
standing up to big tech and standing up to AI,
what alternatives in terms of tech tools
are you all using to support your program?
Are there any tools that you would recommend to us
or maybe tools you wish you had
to be supporting and scaling
the work of the workers' deserve more platform.
Can I just do a question in the background?
We have a national tech committee that's building
politically independent tools all the time,
including things like a new alternative to VAN,
Voter Action Network, called BUS, Building Up Socialism.
Full disclosure, my partner is one of the people
who helped build this.
It's very exciting.
And if you have a second,
I can tell you how to get involved to your DSA member
if you're interested in getting involved.
It's an essentially open commission.
But the thing is that they also helped build our site.
And they're constantly updating it.
We're about to also release a Spanish translation
of the program on the website.
And we work closely with the tech committee
to make sure that stuff all goes smoothly
and they supply me the numbers.
So I can say 297,000 unique human visitors
visited the site up to this minute,
that kind of thing.
So they are very supportive of us.
Thank you.
And just very quickly, in a next round of the program edits,
we're very open in the run up to that
to ideas about how to defeat big tech and AI.
That's something we definitely talked about,
but a lot of ideas we're working through.
Okay, I'll try to make this really quick.
As there are a lot of people doing great work out there
for like immigrant justice, environmental rights,
that. There is a larger like core values that we're trying to achieve in society of
you know defeating these deeply rooted capitalist issues and colonialism and
you know all of these people are specialized in their own fields. Do you
guys see DSA as as a structured organization as it's something that
can kind of tie the deeper values into maybe more focused groups that are
are doing work or is it more of an informal vision
that is happening, you know, people are talking
with one another and disseminating these ideas
into their work.
Thank you.
Hi there, thank you for being here today, guys.
So, Zoran Mondan who is obviously a profound victory
for our movement and has been, you know,
shown that more so than just like
by defeating the Democrat incumbent who was, you know,
checklist. But like more importantly, he's actually followed through on his on it with
authenticity and more than just messaging with constituent services and with like
modest policy reform. So I guess that's on a local level, right? On a federal level
with these awesome electives that we have in this upcoming seats in November that
are going to win. What can we ask of them or suggest to them to preserve the momentum
of this movement since it's broader districts
and it's a contentious party and media landscape.
Thank you.
Hi there, Leah Rose, she-her.
I have a question about the expanding amount
of people in working class.
I mean, speaking to my parents,
I think intergenerational conversations
about this is really important.
My parents aren't able to retire
because they don't have money to retire
and they're wondering why.
And so my question is, how do you speak
intergenerationally about it
when there's such a stigma against socialism?
When your father is a Green Bay Packers fan
and loves that they're owned by the people
but is worried about people taking advantage of the system.
Should we just one more?
Yeah, all right, one more question.
Hey guys, this is Ashwin.
Also part of the Liberality Leftist,
Hasan Paiqar Pipeline.
Thank you for that Hasan.
And I work at a tech company and within the company itself
we have a lot of existential conversations around AI.
This feels like a great time to mobilize
white collar workers around the socialism cause.
How are we thinking about that?
I'd love to know DSA's point of view on AI regulation.
And if you want to make open AI
and publicly owned enterprises as well.
Do you want to start this time?
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the question about sort of connecting these different issues,
people who are super experts on different things.
You know, that's what's so great and exciting about being a mass movement.
And it's not just issue specialists, but people have their different life stories
and people who are organizing in Texas are in a different situation
than folks who are organizing in New York City.
We all have these different things to bring.
bring. And yes, it's our job to build connective tissue where we can like bring our experiences,
bring whatever like scars of capitalism we're walking around with, and bring the things
we know and figure out how to combine them. I think the program really did that very well,
really pulled together a bunch of these different deep issues that folks are working on.
And I hope we continue to do more of that. I think it's a strength of a kind of mass
movement theory of politics and there's always more to do but it is something
that really excites me thinking about how to pull together these different
like how do we get all the nerds in a room and like really get them cook in
so one way is by creating a program like this. Yeah I'll answer that question
to you but just from like a very institutional point of view I guess like
We do have committees that address these things, and we enact them and give them power through
our conventions.
So we have an abolition commission that works for abolishing the commercial forces of the
capitalist state.
We have an immigration justice national group, as well as tons in different chapters all
over the country.
Mike's chapter has one.
It's actually a cross-chapter, like I live in New Jersey, it's a cross-chapter
working group.
So the different organizing terrain and political terrain of your area will probably dictate
to a large part what are the things that you can prioritize and what are the things that
are going to make the most impact.
You're not an individual, right?
Like these are the kinds of things you make in a group of people.
But I would also just say that DSA does do a lot of things.
Just go to our website and you can actually see a lot of them.
It's a little janky right now.
There's some parts that are out of date, but you can see in general like here
the kinds of things that happen in DSA and that'll give you a picture of like the
ways that certain things do end up like kind of floating to the top you know
it's like we do make these decisions together so it's not always gonna be
just like somebody is gonna be like yes now we have this now we have that it's
rarely ever like that in fact in fact the more democratic we are the more
debate we have about like the kinds of things that we wish to do I wanted to
also say one more thing about this expanding working class thing if
If you're a DSA member, come to the training next week.
Talk to me in a bit, and I will figure out a way
to make sure that you have that link.
But the question about how to talk about socialism
to people who are averse, who are scared, you know?
I think that starting off with, you know,
what are the things that you have in common with people?
If you're a child of a father,
Then you will probably also maybe talk a little bit about the concerns that you can see as
your father's kid.
Like you're worried about your dad, you're worried about your family, genuinely, right?
In this program we also talk about various matters like for example, like abolishing
student debt.
I know that there are retired people who still have student debt in this country.
It is a travesty how much people are in debt.
It's a shame.
People are ashamed to talk about that, right?
Use it as an opportunity to maybe talk gently
and like, you know, over time about the things
that people are ashamed about because, you know,
my parents too, they wouldn't even admit
when they use social services.
I didn't find out actually that we were supported
by some level of welfare,
because my mom was so adamantly against it
until almost close to her death, right?
Like, over time, people just are inflected with this shame
over having to rely on collective resources.
And it's something that socialists,
we have to task ourselves with breaking through little
by little every way we can.
And I can't remember the other one,
but I'll let the sheet be in the last room.
Yeah, there are a few questions toward the end about just
how do we communicate with different people,
whether it's in a tech workplace
or inter-generationally, or just going back to working
in healthcare as a doctor, a core part of our theory
of change is that we have to organize workers
in the workplaces and whole sectors
to change how those things work.
So if we want a green new deal, we have to organize people
in all of the different sectors
that are going to need to change.
If we want Medicare for all, we need healthcare workers.
We need nurses, technicians, doctors
to be pushing for those changes.
So it's not just gonna happen
because we have politicians running on a nice platform
as good as ours is.
We're gonna need people running for office,
but also organizing workers in all those sectors
to make those things happen by challenging their bosses,
the CEOs, the capitalists who are blocking
those things from happening
and have been for all of American history.
And the countries that have won some of these things,
like Megan mentioned, Sweden, like Scandinavia,
like whatever countries we can point to,
it took decades of struggle from organized workers
to make those things happen.
social democracy got as far as it did because there were people pushing for
way more radical things with way more power in sectors of the economy and
the workplaces to shut down the economy, to show the threat of
organized workers being willing to shut stuff down that blocked the profits of
those capitalists. So we need to rebuild labor power. That's the core
anything that we can point to in the 20th century whether it was the new
deal ending child labor a 40-hour work week, environmental movement gains,
women's rights, civil rights movement, easing up immigration restrictions, all
those things happened because the labor movement was so much more powerful in the
20th century and was able to push for those things. So we need to rebuild that
power today and that's a core part of everything we're talking about. AI and
big tech, it's just like crazy. If you saw Bernie Sanders' tweet, I was
just talking about a few hours ago with somebody, like AI are learning how
to talk to each other in ways that are kind of terrifying, right? And this
This is happening in a totally unregulated way, and I don't know how to stop that.
I barely know how my phone works, but we need tech workers, we need people who do know more
about these things to figure out how you organize against Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever.
So we're all addicted to social media and our phones or whatever in ways we don't
want to be, but we need to eventually figure out how to make all these things work in
the public interest.
We need to figure out what it takes to organize against the power of the new
billionaire and trillionaire class.
Musk is the world's first trillionaire now because he's extracting so much wealth and
labor and, you know, getting us, yeah. And it's also a barrier to movement organizing
that, you know, we're hooked on these algorithms like Twitter is, yeah, so much goes back to
democratic practice that we're rebuilding in this country in the way that hasn't existed
in our lifetime. So we need to be talking to each other in person in real, you
collaborative spaces to figure out what is consensus around what we're
organizing for and how we get there. So we're not just like yelling at each other
on again no shade to the the the great platform that did bring so many people in.
Many folks chatting out his on stream which is a great you know we need to
figure out how to redirect people's attention to the ways we organize and
build power together and that's what it comes back to and just the
intergenerational question I think about my own parents on my extended
Family Network in New York City.
For the better part of a decade that I was involved in DSA,
they just kept asking,
when are you gonna go to grad school and get a real job?
Like, what are you doing?
And then it took Zora Namdani becoming a viable candidate
for mayor and then winning and starting to deliver
and raising people's expectations about what could happen
for them to be like, okay, wow, this makes sense
and we support this.
And now a bunch of them joined DSA.
Some of them, even as DSA members,
will sometimes tell me like,
maybe you should consider dropping the socialism thing
because, from your name, because I'm talking to my coworkers,
you know, other people, my age, immigrants, whatever,
who are like, socialism, we don't know about that.
But we like the policies you're standing for.
So it just comes back to figuring out how to communicate
with more and more people outside of the existing left,
which is not huge, you know,
I've been coming to socialism conference for five years,
plus, and it's been such a great space,
but a big part of what we've been struggling with
is how do we reach more people
outside of a space like this?
DSA has become a much bigger organization,
that we're still a tiny fraction of the whole population
of this country.
So part of this program is helping us figure out
like how we communicate these things in a digestible way
and then go out and talk to people
to figure out how we win this stuff.
I just wanted to, I forgot to mention this,
I had it in my head, but on the question
of nationalizing AI, I'm kind of one of those people
who thinks that this may not actually end up being
something that is an existential threat.
I hope that other people feel that way too.
But we actually do talk about economic democracy in here
and public ownership and accountability
and democratic accountability for essential industries
and the largest corporations.
If AI ends up becoming an essential industry,
okay, hope not.
But they are the largest corporations, right?
Even though they're not currently making any money,
which is another symptom of our weird ass late capitalism
nightmare that we're in, right?
So I do think that, you know,
not to say that this thing has all the answers,
but what it does have is a lot of conversation starters,
right?
A program to be effective does have to be brief.
We've experimented with the long form
and it didn't quite work.
But what we do have is a lot of ways for people to debate
and discuss these ideas together.
And we really hope that it ends up being that way
for y'all and taking it into your workplace.
Like I said, not effective to just wave it
in front of someone's face like this,
but actually starting to talk about it.
We do have in the toolkit that we sent out to chapters
a kind of workplace organizing guide
to talk to how to have a staged conversation
with somebody who you think might move towards our politics.
But it's hard, right?
Workplaces are workplaces.
They're sometimes hard to break through
like the surveillance, sort of like the corporate attitudes,
especially in a place like a tech firm
or maybe a large HMO or something like that.
But these are also skills that we can all kind of like develop together.
And so I really hope folks, if you're not already a member, join DSA and
start participating in that conversation.
Thank you everybody for coming before I let you guys go.
I wanted to say a couple things addressing broadly the points that you
guys were asking about.
I'm gonna repeat myself a little bit as well.
One, dare to dream, remember the strength of your convictions and identify the problems
that people have around you and communicate what these solutions look like, many of which
are featured heavily in the Workers Deserve More program.
Be bold, be brave, and also lean in to the successes of our electives as well because
There are multiple crises taking place in America right now.
Everything is falling apart.
People can recognize that the conditions are deteriorating.
And they are, for the first time ever,
perhaps looking for alternatives, looking for solutions.
We have those solutions.
And we should not be afraid to say that.
And remember, you are far more powerful in person.
Your voice is far more powerful with the people
that you know.
So I know it gets discouraging at times.
We're all spending a good deal of our time on these oligarch
owned, Zionist owned social media platforms.
The algorithms are tweaked in a way
to make us far more vicious than one another.
We can cut through that noise in person,
whether it be in your workplace,
whether it be a student group, whether it be a local community
event that you organize around a specific point of advocacy.
So just always remember that.
exist in the real world and you can multiply this movement and grow it and of course urge
everyone to join DSA as well.
And last but not least, like I said, there is a real crisis as far as good governance
goes.
A lot of people have no faith in good governance.
So one of the things that I think our electives are doing, even if they're not always abiding
by the entirety of the platform, is to associate good governance with democratic socialists
and democratic socialism in general, and to also instill confidence in good governance
as well.
So you should also lean into that.
There's no shame in leaning into that.
There's no shame in leaning into some of these elected representatives that are far
more dynamic.
And I want to remind people who asked questions about a third party, and I'm not speaking
for the organization.
I'm speaking from my own personal perspective here,
but there are a lot of very powerful institutions out there
and a lot of very powerful people out there
who absolutely despise us.
DSA has been around for a very long time.
It's never gotten this much coverage.
Same with myself, I've been doing this for 13 years.
I've never gotten this much negative coverage
or this much attention.
The reason for why that's happening
is because we are making an impact.
And that impact, yeah, if we were relegated to the corners of the internet, if we weren't
actually on the ground, if we weren't actually making changes, sometimes those changes take
a lot of time, I know, but if we weren't making those changes, there wouldn't be this
much pushback from powerful instruments, from powerful organs of propaganda that represent
the interests of capital rather than the interests of the workers.
So remember that.
And last but not least, don't succumb to nihilism.
Let spike motivate you if you can't let hope motivate you, but always maintain revolutionary
optimism.
Once again, thank you to the panelists.
You guys were incredible.
DSAUSA.org slash join.
It's on the back of your program.
If you're watching out there and aren't a member, join now.
Also, if you're interested, if you're a DSA member
and interested in going to the training next week,
I will print out a QR code and have it at the table
in the display place so that people can sign up right there.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, Mattela.
Yeah, call me out.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah, folks who are milling around, if you want to talk more with the SA folks come
support.
you
you
you
Thank you.
I don't know, okay, I'll swap it to you.
Wait, what?
Did you make sure that was swapped?
Oh, shit.
Yeah, no, we're on.
We're on.
We're on.
We're on.
We're good.
We're back.
Yeah.
Okay.
How do you feel so far?
How do I feel?
I don't know how do you feel?
You've been trapping on that.
I'm tired.
Very, very tired.
But it's all good.
I hope people can't tell I'm tired.
I feel a little tired.
Oh, shit.
I mean, look, I was there as a moderator.
That's right. You didn't have to talk.
I'm not, yeah, I'm not there to tell you.
Can I start your eyes? I didn't know you were doing a Trump Oval Office.
No, no, my eyes weren't closed.
I was kidding, I was kidding.
No, no, I am a little tired, for sure, but...
I have an interview with Nura Eropath.
Yeah, she's...
Here's a hat, sorry.
Thanks so much, man!
Here, that table.
Thanks so much, Mr.
Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!
I gotta go. I'm sorry, I'm late to an interview.
Right here?
What's up?
Hello?
I'm sorry.
Hello.
Hi, should I look into your area?
Yeah.
Can I use your room?
You set up in there?
One here's your room and then the leader.
Here's the room.
Oh, right to the right here.
What's that? Take this one here.
Let's see if it gets you in the room.
That'll, yeah.
Oh!
Oh, here we go.
Okay, Jack, I need to get the interview prepared, so bear with me, we're gonna be doing stuff
What's up, and thanks.
How do I do this?
We didn't tell you anything.
Okay.
I'll add some water.
We have someone here.
Are you good David for now?
I'm good for now.
Okay, I'll get the water.
Great.
I'll get the water.
Just give us that clean.
I'll get the water.
Okay.
All right, Chad.
All right, Chad.
All right, Chad.
All right, all right, all right.
Maybe here.
Oh, maybe.
Maybe there.
Yeah, that's where I'll be right, but not.
Let's go to the water and see if we can go.
Okay, chat, can you hear me, I'm going to wait for Hannah to tell me that you can hear
me.
I need to switch over to our switcher so there might be an interruption, okay?
stay here. We'll be right back.
you
you
you
We're doing like live production as well and it's very awesome.
All right.
It's on first and just but oh, we're back.
Okay.
Can they hear us?
Jack, can you hear us?
Can you hear us?
We are back.
You are alive.
Audio is crunchy. Audio, audio. Too loud. Sound loud. Loud, loud, loud. Echo. Okay, way too loud. Loud and clear. Audio is blown a bit.
Switching is the better now. Let's get saved better
Test. One, two, test, test, test, test, it looks like you're getting sound, they're hearing
you better. They're saying still quiet, very low. I wonder if they were hearing you from
my mic and that's why they were getting audio levels, so that one is still not working.
No, I mean, it should be. It was very loud.
Okay.
Hello, hello, hello.
No, it's good. Perfect. They're saying it's perfect.
You want me to just hold it like this?
No, no, no. You can just put it on here.
Oh, because he said that thing. Okay.
Hello?
Okay.
Better?
Well, it was good. All right.
Okay. I think we're fine.
Let's see what happens.
And then we can get started.
I think we're fine, but I don't know. Let's see.
Um, perfect. Most people are saying perfect.
Hopefully. Hopefully it's perfect. Hopefully.
Okay. Because this is streaming and so this is audience feedback.
Yeah. Yeah. There's, and there's also like a, like a five second delay.
Yeah. Um, so, uh, you know,
we're, we're testing out some new stuff right now.
So sorry that you're, you're the, the test dummy.
Yeah. I'm BTS. Yeah.
You realize your, your audience is part of the production team.
Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. It's a terrible idea.
I wouldn't suggest it so when I start my I shouldn't start my own
I would not recommend it to anyone
What my daughter was 12
Recently was watching a basketball tournament that you were in oh the creator
Well, that's crazy. I definitely did poorly, but I
Know
the world and I got me like a motor come. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. They're still saying her
audio is like too low as opposed to mine. Mine is perfect and her audio is too low. So you all
didn't hear me talking about my kid. Booster mic ever so slightly they said. Okay. So right here,
You know, we could just go play basketball.
You play, you ball?
Yeah.
Okay.
People are like, I don't even know what I look like before.
You could, I believe it.
I'm not anymore.
I mean, like, I'm not, I'm not going to be great, but I did.
See, here's the other problem.
We don't have any, like, adequate way of monitoring it, so the chat could just be
lying.
Because sometimes, sometimes-
Why do they lie?
Oh my God.
wait here I'm gonna have to hear it here we're gonna monitor it right now oh it's
not bad at all it's actually not bad at all yeah no they were I have 30,000 of
them and they're they're also over the age of 30 many of them are we did a
census recently but for those of you are let me let me get started let me let me
do the introduction. We have Nura Erekot here today. It's a real honor to have you here on
the broadcast. Hopefully this time around in the aftermath of our in-person collaboration,
it won't be like last time because last time we were together in the same place that was
in Cuba and we all know how that turned out, the federal government apparently has
a subpoena on me. I don't know if they have one on you, but I haven't received
yet, but for those of you who don't know, Nura Ericott is a Palestinian American activist,
professor, legal scholar, author, human rights attorney, currently a professor at Rutgers University
and also a sister of FUSI2.
Yay.
That's right.
Which is Afistan, Nuzni.
Yeah, that's how I, well I always thought it was fascinating that, you know, you're
like an author, accomplished legal scholar, an advocate,
and then FusyTube is FusyTube.
And it's fascinating to me.
Quite successful in trying to get all that.
He's very successful.
I wouldn't go to him for legal advice.
No, I wouldn't.
You know what I mean?
But yeah, so you're a professor
of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice
at Rutgers University.
You're the co-founding editor of Jedelea
and one of the foremost legal scholars and theorists
of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
You are the author of the Lamar book,
Justice for Some Law and the Question of Palestine,
which fundamentally upended conventional legal commentary
by demonstrating that international law is not
an impartial arbiter of human rights,
but a contested political terrain,
which is something that I also agree with heavily.
Erickot has served as a legal counsel
to the Congressional Subcommittee in the US House,
worked as a grassroots legal advocate
for Palestinian refugee rights with Betel
and produced groundbreaking documentary projects
including Gaza in Context
and Black Palestinian Solidarity.
Her upcoming book co-authored
with international legal scholar John Reynolds
and forthcoming from Haymarket Books
is titled Confronting Zionism, Decolonizing Palestine
and Building the World a New.
This is, I didn't think you'd expected this
to be as serious of an interview
Judging by your reaction so far. You thought you thought we're gonna chop it up. There's some serious
Okay, well there you go first time for everything probably your last after this you're probably really I'm staying away from this
All right, so in your previous book we'll start there justice for some you established a core thesis that
law is politics using a metaphor of a ship where the law is merely the sale and
and politics is the wind.
Liberal politicians constantly point to UN resolutions,
the ICJ, the Geneva Convention,
as if they are self-enforcing arbiters of justice.
When does the sale and win framework,
what does the sale and win framework tell us
about why decades of legal condemnations
have failed to protect Palestinians?
First of all, thank you.
The greatest possible compliment for any researcher and scholar
is to be read closely.
And so this is quite a high compliment
to be read closely.
The only thing better than this is to be critiqued generously.
And so I don't have that much for you.
I had some more for Norm when I interviewed him.
He also made fun of me, but only gave me credit
because he's like, at least he read the book.
So he must be doing something right.
Well, no, this is really generous and a close read.
So the way that Palestine is often understood,
even among Palestinian legal scholars,
is to understand that the law is on our side,
but what had happened was is that it just,
the US got involved and made sure that it wasn't applied.
And what I do in Justice for Some
is to really scrutinize that, right?
That it wasn't that the law was supposed
to be doing something and then failed,
but in fact that the law is and of itself
imbricated with politics.
And in fact, what I'm arguing is that law is power.
Law is power.
What we, I think, misunderstand is that power is diffuse.
So the law's edge, either oppressive or emancipatory,
can change based on how we build power.
And the power is diffuse because it doesn't just
have one form.
Otherwise, only the militarily powerful and the economically
powerful would prevail all the time.
And yet even the history of Palestine
shows that a stateless people against the nuclear power
were able to condemn Zionism in 1975
in a UN General Assembly resolution
and were able in 1977 to give to guerrilla fighters the moniker
of soldiers and combatants who have the right
to use force to fight.
And it's not just the Palestinians.
They do this along with the non-aligned movement
and recently independent countries
and other liberation movements.
And so what I am trying to show here
is that law is power, but in order to be used
for an emancipatory purpose,
it must be leveraged in a sophisticated service
of political movement.
So political movement is what leads,
you can only use the law as a tool.
So think of, and here's the analogy,
think of the law like the sale of a boat.
If you had a boat without an engine and without oars,
you're not really gonna get very far.
So you have a sail.
But just because you have a sail
doesn't determine where you're gonna go.
That's the wind.
So think of the sail as the law
and the wind as political movement.
Lift the sail when movement is in your favor,
draw the sail when movement is against you,
and stitch a new sail.
make new law when you can, and most importantly,
have no fidelity to the law.
Because it is a side of oppression and power.
And what I show in the book is that over 100 year history
between the Balfour Declaration's issue
is in 1917 and 2017 when I ended this century long arc,
what I show in that period is that, in fact,
Israel uses the law far more to its advantage
and Palestinians are able to.
Of course.
There's a sadditude from mainstream commentators
that the modern international legal system
is this objective framework that was established
after World War II and this new world order
to protect human rights.
Can you explain the third world approaches
to international law and how its scholars emphasize
that modern international law was born directly
out of European colonialism?
There's obviously contemporary examples of this
in very honest moments with the likes of,
I believe it was Lindsey Graham who said.
It was the senator himself, yes.
Yeah, I believe it was Lindsey Graham who said it.
There's, Norm has also talked about some of his friends
that are involved with ICJ proceedings
that have almost lost faith in these institutions
or rather will say that their purpose is to only
only and almost exclusively, with the exception of Vladimir Putin,
go after countries in the African continent and go after the Third World.
So, for your 30,000 friends, the ICC is the International Criminal Court,
which is established by a treaty, and it comes into force in 2002,
and it basically goes after individuals.
You can only go after individuals for specific crimes in order to prove culpability, right?
And this comes in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia
and the Bosnian genocide, okay?
The ICJ, the International Court of Justice, is the primary judicial organ of the United
Nations, which is established when the UN is established in 1945 in the aftermath
of the Second World War.
And often times when we think about the post-World War II order, we're thinking very much about
the UN, the primary judicial organ, the International Court of Justice, which can hold states to
account because they're actually based on treaty.
And treaties are international contracts between two or more states with their explicit consent.
And we're thinking about the plethora of treaties that are developed.
Most people are familiar with human rights treaties.
But here's the thing, human rights treaties are all voluntary.
No state has to follow a human rights treaty, including the Rome Statute, which gives rise
to the ICC, which is why the United States has never been a party to the ICC, neither
has Israel, and frankly, the majority of the world, like the largest country that's
a party to the treaty is Brazil.
Then the ICC, since its inception in 2002, to the time that it finally wants to now issue
an indictment for two Israeli leaders in 2025, in that time the ICC had only prosecuted predominantly
Arab and African heads of state, indicted them.
prosecuted otherwise, with certain exceptions including Vladimir Putin. When it does that,
I want to be clear. The ICC's arrest warrant itself is problematic. It's precedent setting
because it finally goes after Israelis, but it's problematic because it names two Israeli
leaders, but it names three Palestinian leaders who are associated with Hamas. All three
are assassinated already indicating the disparity of power.
And in the arrest warrants, they actually
charge the Palestinian leaders with extermination,
which is basically a crime akin to genocide
but without the intent to destroy.
But only the greatest crime they
charge Israel with is starvation.
This is super problematic.
On its face, it already tells you
the story of the power imbalance.
Nonetheless, Mr. Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham,
says the quiet part out loud that Twaylor's third world
approach to international law scholars
would say, which is that this court was never
established to go after us, us meaning
Europe, Western civilization.
It was only established to go after them,
meaning those who are racialized as savage.
And this is the thrust of Twaylor's.
We believe that the law is a site of power,
that even the kernel of international law
is born in the settler colonization of the Americas
and in the jurisprudence of a Spanish,
a jurist named Francis de Vittoria,
right that basically in other words,
gave the Spaniards the right
to colonize and to meme and to kill.
There's a more modern interpretation as well
that we can talk about, the sovereign exception explicitly
built into the 1917 Balfour Declaration
and the 1922 League of Nations mandate
to strip native Palestinians of sovereign political rights
and render their claims legally non-justifiable.
Is there, can you elaborate on that?
Yeah.
So thank you for that as well.
Sorry for cutting you off.
No, not at all.
I think that's what you're supposed to do.
I'm being a teacher's pet.
And I'm being too much of a lecture.
So the sovereign exception.
There is a whole body of law that
wants to explain that exception means lawlessness.
And if people are interested, we'll forget it.
I'm not going to get into the literature of this,
but this is the idea that concentration camps, for example,
are sites where there was lawlessness.
And so there's a way of understanding the exception.
There's that for those of you who are lawyers
or interested in becoming lawyers,
this is what we know in Latin as sui generis.
And sui generis is Latin for unlike anything other.
And most folks understand that as exception,
the bare exception.
What I'm doing in the work is to explain
that far from being a site of lawlessness,
being a sui generis and saying that something
is unlike anything other is basically to assert
that the fact pattern is so unique
that there is no analogy or precedent that can be applied,
which allows those in power to create new law
where they insist that no law exists.
And this is what the British did
when they established the Palestine mandate.
The British come to occupy Palestine
after the First World War
and they basically assume that power from the Turks.
Thank you. From the Ottomans, right?
Look.
We've forgiven you all for so much.
I think everybody agrees.
There's still time.
It was better back then.
In comparison to what it looks like now,
I think we're all...
We're in dystopia, yeah.
Everything is better than...
Everyone would agree there was a more harmonious development.
Is this what it is?
My argument is actually how do we get back to the Ottoman Empire?
This is the purpose of this conversation.
I was like, through a legal framework,
how can we apply a modern interpretation
to rebuild the Ottoman Empire?
Well, I think that they might have that same ambition, too.
You mean, or you mean greater Israel project?
Oh, no, no, Arduan and, yeah, yeah, yeah.
True.
Like, I think this mecca pact in Muhammed.
So the Turkish Empire was quite different.
And in terms of an empire, it
was different than the empires of Western civilization.
They yelled at me when I say that.
It was more woke, in comparison to its contemporary.
Woke, one or woke, too.
Yeah.
In comparison to its, like, at the time, counterparts.
Look, it's still a serp sovereignty from people.
Yes, of course, it was.
OK, it still had regaining its slavery.
I'm not.
OK, anyways.
But he's right, y'all.
He was right.
OK, ready?
Good?
OK.
All right, so, the Turkish empire spanned.
We got them all.
We got the tape, it's on tape.
Now it's back to resurrect the empire.
But the Turkish Empire stands all of North Africa,
South Eastern Europe, as well as what we know as West Asia.
Those holdings, the Germans and the Ottomans
are defeated in the First World War.
And those holdings now come under what
we know as the League of Nations.
The powers in the League of Nations
have promised these people of these lands independence.
You will be free.
But in fact, they want to now colonize themselves
because there's so many riches to be had.
So the arrangement that's made that's captured in, gosh,
I don't know how much is too much information,
but if you're interested, Article 22
of the League of Nations Charter,
what happens there is we have the mandatory system
where they are neither going to be independent
Nor will they be colonized, but they
are subject to a mandate where they will be subject
to European tutelage so that they can stand on their own feet.
Class A mandates of the Turkish Empire
are the ones that are given provisional independence,
frankly, because they're not black, because it's racialized.
And because they're the closest in proximity to Europe,
and this is supposed to be in Europe's likeness,
of those class A mandates, only Palestine
is not given a provisional government.
And it's because the British there
want to establish a Jewish national home.
And so in contravention of its own charter,
of the charter that it's abiding by,
it says Palestine is sui generis.
So we do not have to follow the law,
as we would have to follow it elsewhere.
And we can create new legal regimes.
And hence, we have this exception.
And in the Balfour Declaration,
what they do is a juridical erasure
where they refer to 90% of the land in Palestine,
90% of the population is non-Jewish
and say that they have civil and religious rights,
but they don't have political rights.
And if you don't have political rights,
you don't have the right to self-determination.
And then that becomes the erasure
and that's why Golda Maier and her lineage and others
can insist that there was no such thing as Palestinians.
This is a land without a people,
for people without a land, not because it wasn't populated,
but because they reject that this is a people
in the juridical sense that have a right
to govern themselves in their own land.
Moving into 1967, following the 67 war,
UN Security Council Resolution 242
established the Land for Peace Framework
that has governed Middle East diplomacy
for nearly half a century.
In your analysis, how did the deliberate legal phrasing
of Resolution 242, consecrate Israel's territorial conquest
as a permanent diplomatic baseline
while fundamentally demoting Palestinian national struggle
from an anti-colonial movement for self-determination
to a secondary refugee dispute.
Excellent.
Let me just back up.
I think I said Article 22 of the League of Nations
mandated with Article 20, but on this point,
242, people might be familiar with this, right?
This is the land for peace framework.
And the PLO in wanting to enter the peace process
insist and use two for two, three, three, eight.
This is like constant indication that this is somehow,
that these resolutions are somehow good for us
as Palestinians because they assert that Palestinians
have the right to self-determination
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But when it is drafted in 1967,
It is understood as an instrument of defeat
because in the resolution, so this is after the 1967 war,
the 67 war, what the third world is arguing in that moment
is that Israel has waged aggression.
Aggression is the use of force without self-defense,
i.e., the US's war on Iran right now.
Criminal aggression, right?
And as such, even though it comes to occupy
the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights,
the West Bank in Gaza, because it comes to occupy them through aggression, it has a duty
to withdraw immediately. Israel doesn't want to withdraw. They're driven by this, like,
God gave us this land. How could we have defeated all of these Arab armies? And the United
States and Britain don't want them to withdraw either, because the United States in this
moment is neck deep in the Cold War, and had been balancing Arab monarchies against
Israel had no peace, no war, but suddenly thought,
wait a minute, Israel just won this war on its own.
This is a Cold War asset.
This is under Lyndon B. Johnson.
And we're in Vietnam at the time
and getting our assets kicked, right?
And so because they see this opportunity,
they want to be able to protect Israel
and want to inaugurate 242 and in the drafting of it,
now this drafting history,
they negotiate these terms five months,
But the final resolution basically says
that Israel must withdraw from territory recently occupied.
And what Israelis and their allies,
the Americans and whoever else argues on their behalf,
which is a really good legal argument,
I would say if you believe in this, right?
Is that they said to withdraw from territories,
but they didn't say which ones.
Because they dropped the definite article,
vuh or all vuh, right?
And nothing can get you around this legal argumentation.
And then together with other arguments, basically argue.
Anyway, we can give the Sinai back
and the Golan might be occupied.
But the West Bank and Gaza don't have a sovereign
because Palestinians don't exist
and you can't give land back to a non-existent people.
They're basically relying on that juridical erasure,
right, which is how they make this argument.
at the same time. If they accepted that, then their presence in the territory would look
like annexation. But they don't want to annex the territory because they don't want the
Palestinians.
So is this the reason why, while many outsiders look at Palestinian statehood recognition
as far too riddled with compromise, is this the reason why Israel sees it as an almost
existential threat, or is it because they have already grown so comfortable dominating
both the legal field and also the battlefield that any step in that direction, no matter
how riddled with compromise it is, is still seen as a bridge too far?
That's a great question.
I'm going to come back to how 242 defines U.S. foreign policy, but let me answer this
question first.
Palestinians don't necessarily, not a lot of Palestinians do want a Palestinian seat.
Yeah.
A lot of them do.
That's like the horizon.
That's the entire diplomatic, you know,
delegation at the UN.
That's the Fateh dominating party.
That's the current PLO.
All right?
They do want a Palestinian state.
Most Palestinians don't want a Palestinian state
because what it ends up doing, we're
about 11 million Palestinians globally.
Only a third of that population
is in the West Bank and Gaza.
So you're basically coming up with a solution that
won't address everyone else, right?
Palestinians want the right of return and they also want the land back.
They are stewards of the land and want to belong to it.
But even I would say, even Palestinians, because I saw this on X today and I had to restrain
myself on the flight from replying, even Palestinians who would leave in the two-state solution
do not believe in Zionism, right, that they're making a political compromise.
They do not believe in Zionism.
Zionists, those who do not want to compromise anything, are driven by an
ideology that both presumes their superiority, that somehow they are
entitled, they are worthy, they are deserving, right, and their ownership
through their own text, which is not a universal text, right? And so for
The idea that this land would be shared is existential as it is because it would admit
that somehow the 2,000 years that they weren't there that there was anybody else.
Even though in the history of Palestine, Jewish Kingdom, what was it like the shortest of
like 70 years?
So it continues this mythology that Jewish presence and time and space was uninterrupted.
So recognition of the Palestinian state is to recognize that there are people on this
land at all as opposed to that this always belongs to them.
So you're saying that it's less of a legal framework that they're operating off of
and more so some kind of like mystical, spiritual, idealistic...
Where did Zionism come from?
I mean, look, the obvious is Zionism has a secular edge
because, you know, and Zionism has many different forms
and those who, like, competed, who wanted to present
Zionism as, think about religious Zionism,
or they wanted to, you know, establish
a Jewish national home in order to maintain
Jewish religion and identity versus the secular,
you know, front of the political Zionists
who basically wanted to recreate a Jewish national.
It's a race-making project.
It was the idea of transforming
the wandering Jews, so to speak,
the cosmopolitan uprooted in the city who had no place, right?
And to transform that person into somebody who was landed,
who belonged somewhere, who could not
be excluded, to have nationality.
And it created a racial identity.
Zionism is a race-making project.
But that race-making project is based on a mythology
that the land was given to them somehow by divine,
as if God was a real estate agent, right?
Even though.
And there's no, I don't think there's any,
like real existing concept beyond
some that we look back at not so fondly,
like the Aryan project of Nazi Germany,
like the myth-making element of the race.
And that's not how,
I don't think that's how, at least in contemporary society,
that's how states define themselves
or justify their own existence.
I mean, yes or no.
One, I want to say absolutely about the comparison.
I know folks don't like the comparison
to thinking about Nazis.
But Nazis also believe in their superiority.
They also believe in some divine destiny.
They also believe that they have to purify,
right, and it's a territorial bound.
And it was based on mythology.
And Hassan Saab, who is a Palestinian intellectual at the time, is also saying that Zionism
is born in the same milieu as Nazism and anti-Semitism.
It actually comes out of Western Europe.
Zionism isn't born in Baghdad, right?
It's born in this milieu and reflects it, right?
And so in that way, yes, this is a mythology.
Now why anybody outside of that tradition gives credence to that mythology?
Now that's where we can seriously take issue
with using empirics and otherwise, right?
But if you really believe in the book,
how am I gonna have this conversation with you, right?
Why is it not so different from other nationalisms?
It is different, and here's the main distinction,
because people are gonna make this argument,
but is it all nationalism exclusionary?
The difference is that nearly all other nationalisms
are created by a people who are already
Inbounded to a territory and so their sameness is based on a shared history of same future as shared language
traditions and culture
We are in we are currently sitting on stolen land as a settler colonial occupying nation
Okay, I thought you were making the opposite that that was but that's a settler colony
No, I know what that's what I would say that Israel is also a settler called a hundred percent
But the only difference is the racial makeup of it or the ethnic makeup of it being
one single race, if you want to consider it to be a single race. I don't, but I'm just
saying like in theory as opposed to-
But they do. But that's what Zionism is.
No, I know. I'm just saying like what they, what Zionist suggests versus what is reality
is different. I'm just, I was just operating off of like what their, what that claim is.
Whereas in America, I think the early, the pilgrims, the early settlers also had
some understanding. I think it was, might have been Benjamin Franklin who famously wrote
about how America was supposed to belong to the Indian Reds and also the Anglo-Saxon. And
he considered the, I guess he made an exception for the French, but he considered everyone
else to be too swarthy, the Scandinavians, the Nordics, the Germans, they were all
something different than the Anglo-Saxon crop. And that was like at its inception
and that was what was supposed to happen as a,
I guess, if you can closely associate it
with the racialized project,
but that's clearly not what happened
to the United States of America.
It's the most diverse country on the planet now.
Well, yes, but it is, thanks to the black,
you know, liberation movement, right?
It becomes more diverse and we can accept it,
but just as Anglo-Saxons and the Brits
are defining themselves,
they are also a race-making project
because they invent whiteness.
True.
Whiteness is an invention.
Yeah.
And whiteness is the way by which you get
to become a citizen in the United States.
And it's the way that you get to settle the United States.
And in very, until 1964, right,
we get the Civil Rights Act that basically now says
that you cannot make citizenship contingent on whiteness.
And up until then, whiteness was defined as not black.
Yeah.
Yeah.
or distance the blackness.
Which is why so many immigrants, including Arab Americans,
right, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Yemeni,
whoever else, I'm pointing at us, but also Japanese,
Chinese, others, are also in their bid for citizenship
in the United States participating in anti-blackness
because in order to get citizenship,
you have to prove that you're white.
In order to prove that you're white,
you have to prove you are not black.
So this race-making project is not that unique.
what is unique is the way that liberals in this country
would guffaw at how backwards that is, but protected
in Israel and for Zionists.
But here's how Zionists, colonization and nationalism
in this moment is also different.
Not only is it a reverse diaspora, right?
It's engineering a reverse diaspora,
so it wasn't even territorially bound.
And you have to take the land because it's a territorial
nationalism, which means you have to dispossess the people
in order to have the citizenship, not only that,
but the citizenship is extraterritorial.
Jewish nationality exceeds the land itself,
so that any Jewish person anywhere in the world
has the right to these privileges and to this
territory to jobs, to homes, to land,
to opportunity outside that extraterritorialization
is what makes Judaism in the Zionist tradition
analogous to whiteness in a white supremacist one.
Yeah, let's get back to international law.
You document how Israeli military legal advisors
have actively engaged in legal work
to rewrite the laws of war,
famously captured by a former IDF international law division
head, Daniel Reisner, who argued that if you practice
controversial tactic long enough,
the world accepts it and international law transforms.
This is a horrifying reality that we exist under currently.
How has Israel operationalized concepts
like armed conflict short of war,
targeted assassinations, and expanded definitions
of combatants to justify mass slaughter.
We've seen it also in the increase of the collateralization
with how many civilians are justifiable targets
in the process of facilitating an assassination.
And how did the United States directly lift
those Israeli legal frameworks
to justify its own drone wars after 9-11
or do you believe that it was vice versa
and Israel copied America's homework?
Oh my God.
First of all, I want to say thank you
because I was speaking to a comrade today
and we couldn't remember the name of Daniel Reisner.
So I was like, that's it.
I almost wanted to say Daniel Denver
and I was like, that's not.
That's not, no, he's awesome.
That's another comrade.
Yeah, Daniel Denver is the man, he's the man.
I'm not gonna like speak on his name like that.
God forbid.
Daniel Reisner.
Let me address the last thing first.
I actually think it's wrong of us
living in the Settler colony
to ever give Israel credit for teaching the United States anything.
We've mastered absolutist violence, and we've exported it.
And we've also been quite instrumental and influential in other fascist formations including
Nazi Germany.
We have, there are indicators that this kind of settler colonization both influenced
Nazi Germany as well as South African Bantustans.
Our armed forces have exported anti-blackness in, you know, their expansion wherever they
are.
We have been a leading, we have been a unipolar power and empire for almost three decades now.
The idea that Israel would teach us anything is not the case, not what it does do, because
The Israel is part of a U.S. imperial geography, and it extends it.
And so what it does do is that it engages in a circuit of the exchange of carceral and military
technologies 1,000 percent.
A laboratory.
A laboratory, but also it's the laboratory, right?
It is the experiment.
Yeah.
It is the experiment.
And we can get to that in something I would love to share with you.
I would love actually Hassan to share this with you.
a forthcoming piece of thinking about how Israel is also a model for market
fundamentalists who are exiting from the legal system altogether to create their
own new legal regimes but maybe the next time we can talk about that. And so
that's on the US and Israel real quick. On this idea, international law,
international law isn't just sitting there, it's not magic, it's gonna be
interpreted, it's rewritten, it's revised, it's not religious texts and
even religious texts can change from interpretation, right?
But what happens in international law
is that there is a way that you can create law through treaty,
which means that you enter into a contract
and then people have to negotiate its terms
and countries have to sign it and then ratify it.
But you can also create law through custom,
which is the combination of state practice
and what states believe is legal,
customary international law.
Custom is created as practice.
And if you constantly object to a particular customary law,
you can actually make something that's illegal, legal,
with three exceptions, genocide, slavery, and torture.
Which is why when the United States, well,
well, but listen, but listen, but this is why
when the United States is practicing torture
in Guantanamo Bay, they don't say
we're practicing torture.
But they say enhanced interrogation.
Exactly.
Because they don't want to violate torture.
They say it's not akin to torture
and then they say in order to meet the threshold of torture,
there has to be organ failure.
It's legal work.
Would you say that what Israel is doing right now
is basically expanding on the boundaries of genocide
in the exact same way that America and Israel, ironically
enough, also has expanded on the boundaries of what
is definitionally torturing?
1,000%.
1,000%.
They want to redefine genocide as a form of self-defense.
They want to make it a legitimate form of a legitimate
policy option for conflict.
But the way that it changes, if you violate the law long enough
and states don't object, that now becomes a seed for new law.
And so what Israel did at the top of what
was known as the Second Palestinian,
and say, Father, our uprising, was basically
to start assassinating Palestinians.
And they'd always done it covertly.
But now they started doing it and taking credit for it,
which was illegal.
And they were actually berated for it
under the Bush administration at first.
at first until 19 hijackers attack the United States,
and now the United States is like, wait a minute,
wait a minute, right?
And now they want to redefine an assassination,
and they call it targeted killing.
Under the Bush administration,
there was a tremendous amount of protest
from other countries.
But once the Obama administration starts doing it,
And the Obama administration has more extra judicial assassinations
in its first year in office.
Including American citizen.
Anwar al-Awlaqi of the AUMF in Yemen.
More assassinations in that first year
than the Bush administration's eight years,
two terms in office, and there's no objection.
Because it's seen as a more humane way of killing.
That's how we see that shift.
So Israel is not unique, but what Israel does that's
not objected is here and here's the armed conflict short of war. Israel has two
options in Palestine. Can either say this is all of our land and any Palestinian
uprising is tantamount to a civil war, which is a non-international armed
conflict that should be regulated as a civil war. Israel doesn't want to do that
because it doesn't want to count the Palestinians as part of its jurisdiction.
It'll no longer have a Jewish majority. Or Israel can say this is not a civil
war, this is an uprising of a juridical people, right, a
Mason sovereign, an anti-colonial uprising, in which case it
should be regulated by the 1977 resolution, the additional
protocols of the Geneva Convention. But Israel doesn't
want to do that either, because it doesn't believe that
Palestinian means are people. So instead it says, this is an
armed conflict short of war. They make that shit up.
Literally. They just make up a new category.
And under an armed conflict short of war, they don't...
This is sui generis. This is back to the sui generis.
It's unlike anything else.
We can create our own law.
And the law that they create is to be able to target Palestinians
who have no right to fight back, which is why you'll notice
under the laws of war, Palestinians can target Israeli soldiers.
Under international law, Palestinians can attack platoons and tanks and target military command centers under international law.
Everybody gets mad at me when I say that.
This is basic. This is so basic. Article 1, subsection 4 of the Additional Protocol.
I mean, this is where it's enshrined.
And it wasn't just Palestinians.
The Suwapo in Namibia, the ANC in South Africa,
you're thinking about the Mapo in Mozambique.
These are all anti-colonial movements
who have redefined their guerrillas
as combatants with the right to fight.
It's anachronistic in this moment
because there's nobody else fighting like Palestinians.
And so they don't have that same political context.
but Israel considers any use of force as terrorism,
including the flying of effing kites, right?
And so what we see in the way that they're redefining,
and you asked me a lot of questions,
they basically redefine,
they shrink who counts as a Palestinian civilian
so that they can kill more Palestinians
and it's not considered disproportionate.
They expand the value of their own forces
in order so that you can use more force to protect them.
They redefine, so in military law,
or in laws of armed conflict,
you can cause as much harm as necessary
to achieve your military advantage,
but that means you can kill civilians
in order to achieve.
And that military advantage should be battle-based.
Like, let's say you're the head of a terrorist organization
in this room, the rest of us are civilians.
Yeah, Fox News sees it as such.
Yes, exactly, I thought that
be really close right or not I'm sorry I hate using that language you're the head of a liberation
movement in here you're the general you're it they can blow up this whole building and justify
that because this would this would end the war high-profile target it justifies the the collateral
that's right it's commensurate but what happens when you both start defining the civilians in
in this room has also took legitimate targets.
Now we don't count at all.
And what happens when the value of the soldiers
who are targeting us also goes up?
Now you can kill even more.
So you can be a lower level target.
You can be a gun runner.
This is redefining genocide from first principles
by slowly tweaking up the dial over and over again
to ensure that every person, every male,
male that's like a male-aged combatant, right? 15 actually, not even 18, yeah. 15 and above to like 65,
I think 15 to 65 is technically considered an armed combatant. And then and then everyone around them
is let's say it's a three to one ratio initially and now it's a five to one ratio or a ten to one
ratio, all of a sudden you're killing, you know, you're killing 11 civilians really in that
situation but now that's a justifiable targeted assassination of an armed
combatant. And everything around it and because you redefine that those 11
civilians and the buildings and you know like think about Jabalia and the you
know the 100 ton crater that was dropped that you know what was it 30 feet deep
Yeah, and the devastation that that caused
that's like
Quince essentially a war crime. Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean well they were debuting it
Yeah, because they were also saying that the Palestinians aren't actually civilians because now any Palestinian
They're also redefining any Palestinian who had affinity to Hamas. Yeah now loses their civilian status
And I would just want to speak really plainly on this that is such trash
You can believe anything you want.
Yes.
Okay?
Your thought does not make you, does not strip you of your civilian status.
Yeah.
It's your behavior and your actions that might do that according to the law.
If the roles were reversed in terms of what defines you as an enemy combatant from the Israeli framework,
then I don't even want to get to the detail about what I was about to say, but a lot of
violence would be justified under the Israeli modus operandi.
My students ask me all the time, but wait a minute, if you just reversed it, it would
ensure their destruction.
Yeah.
Like this is sabotage for the club.
But it makes right.
Also have to remind them, racism is a logic.
They can do what the savage cannot do in return.
Like, that is built in, so the idea of genocide isn't just what Israel is doing.
When the genocide convention is drafted in 1948, these are all genocidal states.
This is Amy Sussetti describing all the drafters of the genocide convention as being little
hitlers.
Right?
This is like the 1951 petition in the United States, charging the United States with
genocide of black people, right? This is how Paul Robeson gets his citizenship.
You're in the tradition. You're in good tradition. He gets his...
Rutgers. Yeah, Rutgers. But he also he gets his citizenship revoked and he's not
and people cancel him so he can't speak. Yeah, right? Also in that tradition as
well. Very much so. It's a good tradition. I'm reaching the final stage. The
House on American Activities Committee once they reestablished that.
But it'll be entertaining, for sure.
I think so too.
Who's going to ask me to go to John Federman?
I would love to see that back and forth.
Just rage beat him?
Yeah.
I don't even think he has mental faculties enough to be raged.
No, he gets angry really quick.
Anyway, but all of these drafters of the genocide convention basically wrote that convention
in a way that absolved them of their crimes.
So Israel is also part of that Western tradition,
which is, you know, I hate when Israelis are like,
we're part of, we're indigenous to this land.
You literally claim that you are part
of Western civilization.
Pick one, pick.
Anyway.
And also they were very open
about the colonial ambitions initially.
This is a new phenomenon.
This is woke 2.0 for Israel is when they,
when the Zionist project turned
into this like land-back movement.
I feel like it wasn't necessarily a land-backed movement in its inception, right?
Not even a little bit, to the contrary.
They were very, very proud that they were colonial endeavor.
I saw what they were writing to Cecil Rose.
I don't think they were like, hey, we're doing woke anti-colonialism over here in Israel.
They don't co-op that language until the Third World Movement starts using it,
and then they start using it, and that's Abba Iban at the UN.
But I just want to emphasize this point.
It's not just that Israel's redefining incrementally what's genocide.
They are using sui generis that their genocide is self-defense so that they can annihilate
an entire people, right?
That part.
But the part that isn't unique is that Western civilization basically drafted that convention
with specific intent and specific actions so that they could not be prosecuted for
the same crimes.
And cultural genocide is deliberately left off so that they can continue to like
genocide of people and just save their physical bodies.
The other thing that's left out is ethnic cleansing.
So if they make a distinction between ethnic cleansing
and genocide, if you ethnically cleanse
an indigenous people from their land, that's genocide.
But not according to the Genocide Convention.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that makes a lot more sense when,
because I think the other side of the story,
and this might come across as a little bit rude to say,
is that in comparison to how,
like in comparison to the Holocaust, for example,
the mechanized slaughter of Jewish people,
socialist trade unionists, the Roma people.
There is a much slower pacing and a much slower burn
and with the exception of this last iteration
of the genocide in Palestine,
at its inception it is ethnic cleansing
from the Nakba onward
and there's also a lot of cultural genocide as well.
So I guess that kind of makes sense
an international law framework where because Israel, the Zionist project, which requires
the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants, has to operate with complete support from
the Western world, because without the Western support, they have no machines, they don't
have the tools, they don't have the legal framework, or they don't have the aid.
That is the reason for why it hasn't been the classic thing that Zionists always say,
if we wanted to kill all the Palestinians, we could just nuke them.
We would have done it.
Yeah, we would have done it, or we could have nuked them.
But that's what my assessment has been always, is that you can't really do that with one
fell swoop as rude as that sounds, because you need consistent Western support in order
to do it.
I think that, you know, I heard that talking point so often, if we wanted to kill them,
we would have, but we haven't.
But yes, you did.
Yeah.
destroyed their means of survival.
Polio came back, tuberculosis is back, there's no hygiene.
Like the amount of people, there's like generations, lifetimes that have been killed, miscarriages
have jumped up by 300%.
It's an expansion of what is like permissible, it's not permissible, but it's an expansion
of what like the Western world will permit Israel to get away with.
And that was, and I, you know, I hate, I hate to say like, I, I never, I was not shocked
by what Israel did.
No Palestinian rights.
But perhaps it was my naivety to think that the West was going to allow them to do this
so blatantly.
Yeah.
That part.
Like there was a moment, and we saw it in the aftermath of the ICJ decision in January
26, 2024, when they just made the decision that they were going to allow this to
to happen led by the United States
and led by punishment from the United States
if other Western states didn't agree to it.
So it was also coercive.
But the thing about the genocide convention
and about the Holocaust in particular,
and this, I wanna credit Holocaust scholars, right?
It's a taboo to compare the genocide of Jewish people
to the genocide of any other people.
It is a taboo of the first order
because the argument goes-
But also at the same time,
the whole principle and the legal framework that came after it
is literally to stop genocides from taking place, right?
But only if it looks exactly like what they were describing.
Ones that weren't done by other Western countries, right?
Yes.
But I just meant, theoretically, the underlying purpose
of never again is never again for all.
And the cahanist interpretation of it
has always been openly very supremacist, very racist.
This used to be the minority position,
which is never again just for Jews.
Just for thinking that Jews are somehow more precarious
and a more precarious position, more existential
than any other.
And what they do is they basically
want to set apart the Holocaust that,
unlike the genocide of the Naman-Harrero in Germany,
unlike the genocide of Native Americans,
unlike the genocide of Armenians by Turkey.
Yeah.
Well, I guess, don't point the finger at me.
as we continue to discuss the return.
Which is where the initial scholarship work from Lemkin
started, right?
I mean, it's the Armenian Genocide is the framework.
Unlike any of these other genocides,
what they argue is that Jews were completely innocent.
And they were killed for simply being Jewish,
as opposed to all these other people who
are killed either in preemptive self-defense
or for insurgency.
And not this pivot.
Which also, by the way, is not
it's a historical in and of itself.
Obviously, two reasons why it's a historical.
One, partisans obviously were justifiably
taking up arms and fighting back,
and two, the internal Nazi framework,
of course, found fake guilt.
That was the whole point.
No one, this is what I try to explain
to people all the time.
It's like, the Nazis weren't like, we're evil,
we like doing evil, and that's why
we're killing these people.
They had their own completely distorted reality,
but they had some underlying logic
behind why they were doing this,
no matter how illegal or heinous it might seem,
and it was, they had something,
and is really stuff of similar logic
in their operation as well,
the idea that these people are fighting back,
and therefore they deserve to be ethnically cleansed.
Including their children,
so that they can't grow up to fight,
like calling babies terrorists.
That, well, right now you said something and it brought to mind, oh, I forgot, okay, go
on, I'll remember it and it'll come back in a random moment.
So powerful states frequently invoke the legal doctrine of specially affected states to claim
that countries actively waging war have more authority to establish customary international
law.
How does this doctrine allow Western-backed militaries to manufacture legal cover for
atrocities like roof knocking, and the bombardment
of civilian neighborhoods while systematically excluding
the people being bombed from having any say in the rules
of war.
This goes back to customary law.
Customary law is state practice.
And what states believe is legal,
known in Latin as a penu no uris.
There is an argument that it's not just comprised
of what some 193 states might do.
But that states that are especially affected,
let's say this is a maritime issue
and so only states that are surrounded by bodies of water,
that landlocked states shouldn't have a say, right?
And let's say that you're a state that fights a lot of wars,
that somehow you are especially affected
and should have a greater say.
And so that's how this idea of a specially affected state
has greater say in what the laws of war should be.
Well, who is it that fights the most wars?
United States and Israel. They're constantly at war. Military occupation is a form of warfare.
They only experienced, what was it, six months between the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
in 1967 and June 1967 and the end of their military regime against the Palestinian citizens of the
of the state, but in the history of Israel,
six months without a military occupation and regime.
And so they basically make the argument for themselves
that because they are especially affected,
they should be deferred to into how war is fought.
But that's a dystopian future, right?
And how is it that we're not reeling in what these states
are doing and making genocide somehow acceptable?
That's based on whether or not states protest.
And states, unfortunately, when I got to say this at the UN,
to these member states, the US is empire,
but the US is not the world.
And they seem to have forgotten that.
They seem to have forgotten that.
It was the promise of punishment, tariffs, whatever
it might be, being cut off from sort of banking system
sanctions that put them in that position.
By the way, just to plug, the whole concept
of colonization and how they refer to them as colonists
and who they are in this race-making project,
that's in the next book coming out with a market.
Hell yeah.
In 2011 and 2012, the Palestinian leadership
poured diplomatic capital into the UN statehood bid.
You're already shaking your head.
I'm gonna get to that.
And in 2015, a seat into the ICC,
while liberal commentators celebrated
this as a major milestone,
you offered sharp critique of their strategy.
Why was chasing symbolic statehood
through multilateral bureaucracy
without an underlying strategy of mass mobilization
doomed to fail?
And how did it end up constraining
the Palestinian liberation claims?
Yeah, man, I'm really upset
because they tried the same thing even recently
in the midst of genocide.
Do you remember that?
Yeah. They got all the way behind Britain
and Canada and France.
Yeah, that's what I was alluding to
when I said like, Israel still treats
that as an existential threat.
Because they're so comfortable and any kind of inference is a problem or is that genuinely
like making it genuinely frustrating the legal claims that they try to make?
No, this is not about their legal claims.
They just don't believe the Palestinians are people.
This land has always been, their concept is this land has always been for Jewish people
and the people of Israel.
Mind you, Jews have always been part of this land.
They will always be part of this land.
This is where the religion was created, obviously, even under Ottoman rulership.
Even under them, I know, even though they're complete for that.
But I had to meet this amazing Palestinian young woman who has been facing off with
Israeli soldiers, said it so well.
She said, if Jewish history is part of this land, then that is my history.
It doesn't mean that Palestine is less Palestinian.
It means that Palestine is more pluralistic and diverse and not the inverse, right?
It's a rejection of that sovereignty.
The statehood thing that happens here, think about recently when these countries wanted
to recognize Palestine in the middle of the genocide and it was celebrated.
This was last summer.
This was last summer.
That was such, and now we have the receipts to prove it.
They basically wanted to stem the tide of popular movement that was demanding, that
was demanding from their own governments some sort of accountability and they took the wind
out of those sails by saying look we're going to recognize Palestine, how amazing we are
while we're still selling Israel arms and still engaging in trade and still having
their diplomatic consuls out here.
And also punishing any demands or attempts towards the academic boycott, cultural boycott,
sort of BDS legislate.
Punishing their own.
As they're recognizing the state,
it couldn't have been more farcical.
Now, the Palestinian delegation,
and I like to, with myself, make the best argument
for somebody that I disagree with
and then try to respond to that argument.
Which, by the way, I encourage you to do.
So, the best argument that the Palestinians
can come up with is like, look,
if you actually recognize the state,
it gives you access to a lot of other things,
including Palestine can now see to the Rome Statue.
The state couldn't do that.
The non-state couldn't do that, right?
So jurisdiction is a big one.
The application of occupation law couldn't apply
if you didn't recognize Palestine as existing somewhere.
And I see that, and I would accept that as a tactic,
but not as a destination,
because then you are putting your faith in the law
to define the horizon of your own freedom.
there's no way that there will be a standing military or any sort of real
sovereignty in the Palestinian state. And look in this moment let's just bring it
up to the present moment right? Israelis have made clear they believe they have
the right to genocide. They believe that what they did was their right of
self-defense. They believe that they have the right to do it again. Right now
Israel's population is unique in the world. It is the only one where their
youth, aged 18 to 25, are more violent, religious and extreme than their elders.
That means that future is horrifying.
In this moment, they have sexually assaulted Palestinians in detention.
They want to have the death penalty by noose, by like hanging.
Exclusively to the Palestinians.
Exclusively to the Palestinians.
They believe that starvation is okay.
They have gone after the water wells.
They have gone after the food.
There are programs in the middle of the night.
It is rampant.
They've taken families out to the Mediterranean Sea
as a form of entertainment on weekends
to watch Palestinians be bombed.
You really think this is a declaration of outright war.
There is a genocide looming that they want a final solution.
They are now in the midst of their elections.
their elections are based on who can harm the Palestinians the most.
Yeah.
And you really want to have a conversation right now
about let's negotiate to create a state as opposed to how
do we stem this maniacal messianic movement driven
by an ideology based on racial supremacy
or the mythology of racial supremacy
based on what God had said.
It's just a mismatch.
It's like coming to a war, like a gun battle with a tennis racket.
Yeah.
We need more than tennis rackets.
And now, asking for the Palestinian state,
I think is a way of just absolute distraction.
And for many Palestinians, unfortunately, especially
a political and economic elite, they're
benefiting tremendously.
They're benefiting from their own special privileges
of movement.
They're benefiting from contracts.
They're benefiting from housing rights.
They're benefiting in a way.
I was going to get there with the Oslo Accord.
You can, then I'll pause, then I'll pause.
You're jumping ahead.
I'll just pause there.
But you know, some people actually do believe in it,
but it doesn't mean that they're Zionists.
They just believe that this is as good as they can get.
And I completely disagree.
The, achieving a Palestinian state is just as difficult
as dismantling a Zionist one.
Yeah.
They're both equally difficult
because you're going to have to decolonize.
Zionism will have to contend with the fact that this land belongs to a people.
Would you, um, actually before we get to the Oslo Framework, uh, the Oslo Force.
The people belong to them, excuse me.
Um, the question I have for you is, well, I don't know what, uh, what tendency you lean towards.
I say I'm a one-stater. I, I, I'm fine with the binational commitment.
It's up to the Palestinians at the end of the day.
I'm just saying like that's my, my understanding of it is, is almost not this similar to the way that, um,
What's the new the the new book that came out one one occupation like one sovereign occupation like Israel
No, not Elon Poppe's book. No, it was it was a I think a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a an Israeli Jewish
Academic wrote it. They just did an interview with Ezra Klein as well. I'm forgetting the name. Oh, I'm
No, no, I what I was gonna say is
is there is some truth to their assessment
that it is currently a single sovereign state.
Indeed.
Not the jury, but the facto sovereign state
that is a permanent military occupation
or annexation of the West Bank and a genocide in Gaza.
And therefore, there's an apartheid that already exists.
And that, do you feel like it's more beneficial to demand an end to that apartheid with a single
state considering that it already exists, or is there a separate framework that you want
to advance?
All right, so plug again for the forthcoming book, because we take issue with this.
And I want to distinguish a couple of things.
One is that when we think of apartheid in the present, we basically think of racism
on steroids. But a part that is it was defined by those who created it, right, in South and
Southwest Africa and by those who endured it, the South African Communist Party, defined
it as a peculiar kind of colonialism. This wasn't about a judicial system of inequality
that we needed to dismantle. This was about theft, 300 years in the case of South Africa
of Dutch and British, who also consolidate their identity
into whiteness, right, in the early 20th century,
to basically steal everything, right?
What do you get when you steal everything?
But then at the end of apartheid,
all you did was make everybody equal.
You get what the World Bank says is the most,
the place of the greatest inequality in the world,
South Africa.
So you're saying that in order not to repeat the mistakes
of the abolition of the South African apartheid,
We have to operate off of a different.
I think that we need to understand South Africa as a lesson and not primarily a model.
Because what the South Africans, and they're still fighting for that.
Like South Africans are still fighting.
90% of the land is owned by a 10% of the population, the white population.
Who are whites.
Yeah.
Who are whites who acquired that land through theft.
Yeah.
And any attempt at redistributing that land is termed by those in power, specifically
the Democratic Alliance as genocidal, which is paraded by
Africaners like Elon Musk, and enforced by Donald Trump, who then
gives 59 white South Africans refuge from genocide in South
Africa. We're literally in a loop, right? What's at stake here
is also ideological decolonization. And this
presumed supremacy of any one people who get to survive
while everybody else dies. Right? And so when people ask
this idea of one state, two state, here's my vibe.
And then they want to ask, what happens?
I just got asked this in a session
that I did actually at the forthcoming book.
What happens to the Israelis?
You know?
It's not as pressing a question.
What happens to the Israelis?
If we start there, we are prioritizing their future
above rehabilitating the project of decolonization.
What first needs to happen is decolonization.
And decolonization means the land needs to be freed, period.
That land and the region needs to be rehabilitated.
We need to understand the identity of this land
as an Arab identity in a region that's pluralistic,
that belongs to a religious, pluralistic, diverse people.
We rectify the naqba.
And we move in stages, and this
is the work of Rabbi Aghbarieh, as well as a legal scholar
who has a forthcoming book on Mecca as well,
as well as Nadia Abul-Hajj,
you move through these stages,
whereby you have rehabilitated these harms
that have been done.
The last stage is now figuring out a political configuration
of what happens to the settler.
Now you can enter into some constitutional arrangement
of what happens to the settler,
but that doesn't precede what happens to the land
and how to, what happens to,
how to right those original wrongs.
And so what that-
My crude interpretation of this would be that,
that the exact same pluralistic democracy
treats every individual there as equals
in the aftermath of restitution.
But that's key.
And of course, and a right to return.
But then in that process,
what will most likely happen
will look not dissimilar to the Reconstruction era
in the United States, where I suspect
that the same Jewish settlers in the West Bank,
some of the more militant elements,
will probably form what they already have formed,
which is the Jewish clan, basically,
and that there would be acts of terrorism and violence
and violent vengeance quests that they will go along,
but that will be prosecuted within the same civil or within the same criminal structure that every single person would be prosecuted under
Palestinian and Arab and you know Jewish Israeli alike
You know it also happened in South Africa
You think even with this compromise on political decolonization in South Africa like whites were like yes
No, of course not they were on horseback beating people up and engaging trying to save themselves
And you know what else they did?
A lot of them converted to Judaism.
And many of those who were already Jewish
settled in Palestine to maintain their role
at the apex of a racial hierarchy.
Yeah, that's true.
This is about supremacy.
Yeah.
This is so when we talk about, you know,
when people want to talk about equality, even by nationalism,
the reason I have a problem with this, I do,
I am in the tradition, I guess,
of Pan-Africanist and Julius Nairi of Tanzania,
who, and even the Algerians,
who offered the settlers the right to stay.
Yeah. Right?
They have the right to stay.
What has to be dismantled
is the extraterritorialization of Jewish nationality.
If you're there, I can see the argument
for having the right to stay.
You don't have the right to the wealth
that you accumulated through conquest and through theft,
but I could see the right to stay.
But my problem is that binationalism leaves this open door
that leaves a right for Jews anywhere in the world
to engage in what they describe as a reverse diaspora
and to settle in a land where they have no familial
and no territorial lineage.
I guess it's the theoretical
and then there's the practical.
And I think that's where I, like I, I try to,
my job is to communicate these desires.
You're great at your job.
And to try to explain to people like what is permissible,
what's possible, what we can do in the interim,
what we can do in the short term,
towards long-term goals.
And that's why I, I guess I approach it
the way that I do, try to draw back
from historical analogs to historical comparisons
and to explain to people what is possible,
because most of the average person
is either not knowledgeable on this issue at all,
or have a very nihilistic perspective,
very pessimistic perspective
on what could potentially happen.
Yeah.
So I wanted to talk about a comparison
between apartheid South Africa and the abolition
and the decolonial movement in Algeria.
You mentioned that there was an attempt to offer
Citizenship to former settler colonists in Algeria,
many people did not take that as an opportunity.
No, they didn't.
But there is something a little bit different
from the 80 years of violent occupation
and the sheer number,
because in apartheid South Africa,
and Noam Chomsky has brought this comparison up himself
as well where he says there was a use
for the black population in South Africa.
It was labor, right?
Whereas in Israel, the attitude from Zionists
is a little bit different where they would rather
have no Arabs at all.
They didn't always have that.
But yeah, they changed after 1991.
Exactly.
In this current post-Intifada universe that we exist in,
the idea is no use, not even labor.
It's better if there's no non-Jews whatsoever.
And then in comparison to Algeria.
Or they weren't migrant workers.
like Thai migrant workers, Filipino migrant workers,
and others who have no claim at all
and can be stratified as inferior without controversy.
Yeah, so the question is,
isn't this a more unique situation
because of its almost permanence?
It's not permanent, but it's a continuation
over many, many years and many decades,
and also the number of people that live there
that hold on to this mentality as well.
Are you talking about the fact that the population, for example, is almost equal?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I understand.
I, you know, I'm going to go to my colleagues and scholars, like Pal, uh, shouldn't say
that he would say Palestine is a paradigm who reminds us that Palestine is going to
produce its own theory.
Right?
That makes sense.
Right.
Because, no, it's different.
It is different.
It's different.
Like, you want to look to South Africa, you want to look to Algeria, you want
to look to Ireland, right? You want to look even to, you know, Tanzania and Zimbabwe,
or what was Tengenika and Zimbabwe and its unification. You can look to a lot of places.
None of them are going, Palestine is going to produce its own paradigm.
Yeah.
It must. That's incumbent. The difference in Palestine, a primary, I think, you
distinction is that it is Jews and the Holocaust in specific what happened to
Jews right has centered the Jewish figure as Western civilizations canonical
victims. It's a part of Western civilizations identity. I think that's
going away now with the actions of Israel in the last three years. It must go away
And we can see that as generational, but that has really defund like even think about like when the UN was
Deliberating the establishment of a Jewish state right or Israel
It's not like as a Jewish state, but a state for Jews. However, you want to you know
And there is a distinction they weren't it wasn't necessarily just reparations for the Holocaust
They were responding not to the Jewish question
But they were responding to a Jewish refugee crisis. Yeah
that we're not given any other place to go, right?
And so here we have these conditions that are produced
that are quite unique, but this is a region
where it's not just about what happens in Palestine,
think about the rest of the region that has suffered
in order to maintain Israel as a Jewish demographic majority
with its superiority and access to the land.
It has caused endless war in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Syria,
right, in Egypt, this is an endless, now in Iran,
an endless war.
At some point, we have to also admit
that this experiment has failed miserably
and should not be recreated anywhere else.
What happens in Palestine is not just this,
of course, Palestinians are at the helm of that.
Palestinians right now, I had a sister in Gaza,
like Palestinians are just trying to get clean water
in Gaza, for example, right?
This is also contingent on what we do
and what we've done and what we contribute to.
And our obligation is really to combat U.S. empire,
because what the U.S. does in Palestine
and how it supports Israel,
it's also reshaping the entire region.
Look at the fact that right now
it's supporting Morocco with an influx of aid
or in exchange Morocco gets a greater say for its occupation of the western Sahara.
Look at the fact that people, you know, this bullshit democracy discourse, Jordan for example
is more beholden to the United States than it is to its constituents, right?
The entire region, like the question of self-determination has actually been, you know, troubled, unsettled,
appended in some cases in order to maintain Israel, which
is being maintained at the behest of US empire,
I think, as a material condition, and then culturally
and traditionally in order to assuage
and to complete a circle of Western culpability
for the Holocaust.
But you know what they should do
in order to deal with the Holocaust?
Is to deal with the white supremacist ideology that
gave rise to the justification of the systematic annihilation of Jewish people.
And that they have not done.
There's never been an introspection of that ideology.
He's been more so a melding of the ideologies and almost like a Jewish framework that was
laundered on top of white supremacy, because that's why it manifests itself in an almost
identical manner to white supremacy.
I mean, I, I, one, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Also, I think in the Western world, most people, it's Ashkenazi Jews, for the most part, and they're white.
So they're, they're European, and therefore, I think in America, that's just the way that, uh...
That they understand?
No, in America, people, Americans look at Jewish people as like, you know, white people, just like us, and they're, you know, fighting the...
The kinship, they're also surrounded by a marauding Islamist, you know, whore.
Yes, they're fighting the scourge of the Islamist hordes of the era.
They're the easternmost front to protect this against these attacks and so on and so forth.
Though ironically in Israel the peace camp is primarily Ashkenazi or European.
No, I know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it has its own history of racialization and it has their own history of racialization.
But yeah, I mean Zionism internalized white supremacy that excluded them rather
than to combat it.
They didn't say we belong and your ideology is wrong.
They basically adopted this framework that yes,
in order to be included, will never be included,
will never be a part of this.
And we have to be outside in order to be a part
of Europe altogether.
I mean, they don't combat the ideologies of exclusion
that subject them to genocide.
They internalize it and make it part
of their own survival.
So yeah, I think that the battle against,
I think the battle against anti-Semitism
is a battle against white supremacy.
And I think that the battle against Zionism
is similarly part of that legacy,
that those are very much connected.
Let's talk about one conversation
that takes place in America.
The American political establishment from think tanks,
the media, to the Biden administration,
always dogmatically is committed to this notion of a two-state.
And-
Are they?
Well, I think it's just a way to hand wave the conversation.
It used to be, yeah.
Where like, well, oh, you're saying it's now,
it's now no state for the most part.
The BOP is a new model.
Yeah, so, okay.
But go ahead, let's talk about that.
But the idea of like,
or at least the American liberal tradition
like, oh, we're going to get to a two-state,
even though Israeli leaders across the spectrum
are openly bragging about never allowing a Palestinian state
to take place and accelerating settlement of expansion.
Given this reality, what material function
does the perpetual rhetoric of a two-state solution
actually serve for American and European empire today?
It basically deflects their responsibility
and role in the ongoing colonization and genocide
of the Palestinian people.
That is what it does. It basically gives them a pass.
One of my friends said it best.
She's like, you know, every time somebody,
cause she works on the hill and she's like,
every time somebody says, I believe in a Palestinian state,
I feel like they're saying I have thoughts and prayers
for Palestine.
But it is actually absolving them of the responsibility.
Israel just doesn't do what it's doing
while everybody is like turning this way.
Right? It's not just getting away with it.
And we're sending the caterpillar.
Listen, these are our weapons.
This is our, there is lots of money to be made.
Lots of money.
I thought Diana wrote that the UAE,
after the Abraham Accords,
which basically normalized relationships
with the Arab Emirates,
the United Arab Emirates in Israel,
that genocide increased its GDP by 11%
because of arms, weapons, and trade.
This is a business, right?
And they are telling people one thing,
oh yeah, we do care about people,
but instead it is a thorough dehumanization
whereby an economic elite gets to enrich itself,
and a political elite gets to benefit
through that enrichment, also to save itself.
Right?
And so yeah, I think anybody right now
talking about a two state solution
is actually opposed to liberation, honestly.
I think that they have to think long and hard
that the fact that if you have really believed
in a two-state solution but have not punished Israel,
sanctioned it, isolated it, removed all of your diplomatic
core, I don't believe you.
Like any kind of talk about a two-state solution
without actually, there's already a state,
so it's a Palestinian state solution.
Anybody who talks about a Palestinian state solution
that doesn't come with a tremendous amount of pressure
on Israel, right, and leverage,
is actually not being honest.
And that's how we can test them.
My question always is, okay, standing military,
can they do security cooperative agreements
with other sovereign nations in the region,
like Iran, if they wanted to.
But think about it here too,
like think about the indigenous people of these lands, right?
We're a settler colony, we're settlers on this land,
even if we don't intend to settle, right?
Think about the way in which the doctrine of discovery,
which is what 1826, Johnson versus Macintosh,
established by a Supreme Court decision,
that title, the right to own,
only belongs to the European power
that claimed the land first.
Which means that indigenous people
have a privilege of being on the land,
but never the right to own the land.
It can never be theirs, right?
And then instead what we get
in the series of martial decisions
and the martial trilogy later,
is that indigenous people have the right to autonomy,
which is a form of derivative sovereignty,
which is what you're describing.
They can't control trade.
They can't control citizenship.
They can't control their borders.
They can't wage a war.
They can't have their own external sovereignty and security.
But they can govern themselves religiously and culturally,
for example, on reservations as a form of derivative sovereignty
as much as the United States, as the settler colony,
where the settler sovereign allows them to have.
That is the future.
that those people who support a Palestinian state
without any sanctions on Israel,
that is the future they want for Palestinians.
They want to establish for Palestinians
a form of derivative sovereignty
where they can live on small enclaves
and exercise a form of autonomy,
but never be sovereign, and never be sovereign.
That is the future they're constructing.
And in fact, I would say that the deal of the century
that the Trump administration presents it in its first term
is precisely what the Abraham Accords was continuing
in its legacy, right?
Which is to normalize relationships
without exacting any meaningful concessions for Palestinians.
And that right now, what the Board of Peace is doing,
which is its own conversation,
but what the Board of Peace is doing
is basically to bring that to reality,
Palestinians will never govern themselves.
It'll be basically a special economic free trade zone
where Palestinians can have jobs and education and housing,
right, but will never be able to forge a collective future.
If you cannot forge a collective future,
that is genocidal.
Yeah.
And that is what they're planning.
Do you feel as though, I mean,
I think it was today even that came out
that as we know the Gulf Monarchs,
They have their own actual opinion on Israel,
which is very favorable.
And then they have their own considerations
because of their constituents.
Legitimacy crisis, blah, blah, blah, yeah.
And it seems as though the Abraham Accords
is put on pause seemingly permanently
as a direct consequence of the instability in the genocide,
but also the instability in the region that
took place after October 7.
Is there, in your mind, any way to get back to that framework?
Or do you think it's dead in the water?
Abram of course?
Yeah.
Do you think that?
I don't think that Abram of course are dead.
Stay more why you think they're dead.
We're on pause.
Oh, well, I'm just saying, given
that this regional instability is
going to continue for the foreseeable future,
do you think that there is going
be an opportunity for the Gulf Monarchs to go back to this formalized arrangement instead
of cutting under the table deals, especially with how much backlash that might take place.
The only ones.
Because that's the only thing that's holding them back, right?
It's the likelihood of rebellion.
But it's really only holding Saudi back, which is the only country that the United
States and Israel want to enter.
That would seal the deal.
Right sure that would be it but the Emirates are fully yeah in collaboration fully fully fully yeah in collaboration
Like it's illegal to wear a Palestine shirt in Dubai, right?
And they're engaging in explicit trade. They're laundering all those Israelis who might not be able to export their technology actually
they the partner with Emirati businesses and it's the Emirati businesses who export them and so they're
They're laundering even their products through the Emirates.
So I, and the Abraham Accords are alive and well in Morocco.
The Sudan, Yibahrain, like we still see it at play.
The only place that it isn't is Saudi Arabia,
which is the crown jewel for Jared Kushner
in completing this project.
And what we see with Saudi Arabia is a few things.
They are playing everybody.
They are, and they are serving themselves
and for this legitimacy purpose.
but we see them entering into the Mecca pack
with Pakistan and Turkey.
Yeah.
Which means that they are trying to create
a counterweight to, you know, Israeli military.
But I mean, how much does that factor in,
especially considering that security
cooperative agreement doesn't yield
any retaliation against the Houthis, for example,
against the Ansarullah movement that's currently
still peppering Saudi Arabia and like their ports
and their refineries.
with no military consequence from Turkey or Pakistan?
I think that's it to be seen in terms of how they're going to leverage this and I think
that this is more about countering the United States as the primary viso of security.
Yeah, for sure.
That's what the arrangement is with the United States, right?
Yeah.
Like we will give you access to our lands as for military bases and the special trade
agreements and access to oil and be able to have hegemony here in exchange for protection.
But the U.S. didn't protect them.
I was about to say, so do you think that the U.S. didn't protect?
So Saudi Arabia, sorry, go ahead.
Well, I was going to ask, like, the new security arrangements that are taking place
are direct consequence of the Iranian retaliation after America decided to treat the Gulf
as a bullet sponge.
We cannot underestimate what Iran has done in terms of really recalibrating the potential.
Some might say decolonialism with 15 military bases being permanently removed from Gulf nations.
I mean, you cannot underestimate that Iran really defended the entire world against
American Empire and actually put some sort of a backstop to it.
But so, and that's why we might be in a quagmire if the U.S. doesn't get itself out.
But we have Saudi Arabia entering into this path.
We also have Saudi Arabia entering into a rapprochement agreement with Iran, facilitated
by China.
Yeah.
But that was, that predated October 7th.
It sure did, but I'm just saying Saudi Arabia is not a known quantity.
And it also entered into this nuclear agreement with the United States, which they will
only benefit from if they normalize with Israel.
So here I just, you know, I see,
because when I say the Gulf,
I really am thinking of Saudi Arabia.
Like they are, you know,
and they're placing their ads in every basket
and yet to be seen.
But we also see the Saudi,
Saudi Arabian and sovereign wealth funds
invest in Jared Kushner's affinity group, right?
And so they're playing everybody.
And what's really, really, you know,
devastating as a Palestinian, right?
Is that there's not really a,
it's not like these other countries that might identify
as Arab are defending their people or their future.
I think they're reconfiguring also who matters
as a national and a citizenship, as a citizen.
So that there's no way to destroy the Palestinian people
where other peoples are not destroyed
and this world is forever changed.
There's no way to take them out singularly.
And so there's this affection that, you know,
the failure of Arab countries in the region
to actually stem, to protect Palestinians from a genocide,
to withdraw, they didn't even withdraw their ambassadors.
Yeah, I mean, there's no...
I mean, do you know what I mean?
Egypt, as far as it was concerned,
blocked the marchers who were trying
to break the siege by foot.
This is how bad it is.
And so you have to think that what's at stake
is not just the Palestinians but the rest of these peoples
and what will happen.
So yeah, we can think about, okay,
but what's possible versus what's necessary
and what's pragmatic.
But you realize that everything that's possible
is being defined by those who oppress us
and they're limiting our imagination
of what we can actually achieve and do.
We would have already surrendered
if we succumbed to their version of possibility
as opposed to our version of the world
that is necessary.
And that's why we're at socialism.
All right.
I'll ask you a couple more questions.
We already covered the South African angle.
Your work consistently links Palestine
to broader global struggles.
From black liberation in the United States
to indigenous resistance across Turtle Island
to the third world internationalist legacy
of the 1955 Fondant Conference.
As Western imperial powers double down
on militarized borders, resource extraction,
and domestic policing, what does the struggle
for Palestinian freedom teach the global left
about building a unified internationalist movement
against fascism and colonial capitalism?
Yes, everything, everything.
You know, I don't want to, a friend of mine is just finishing a book basically about how
a liberation movement was co-opted, right?
Like, you can co-opt people to become celebrity activists and you can co-opt them in, you know,
brand deals and whatnot and building NGOs and da-da-da-da.
That's what they say about me. I have yet to receive a brand deal.
Who says that about you?
There are a lot of people that think that I am, because I did an interview with Haaretz
And they were like, this is a violation of the boycott.
It wasn't, to be fair.
No, no, no.
I mean, yeah.
But also.
There's a difference between violation of boycott and what
we're doing.
Yeah, I'm not doing a collaborative project
with Tel Aviv University where I'm talking about.
Right, right, right.
I don't know.
Is that what they say?
That that's what you're doing.
There were some people who were saying that,
but it wasn't that significant.
I heard something because you had a nice watch.
I don't have a nice watch.
You don't have a nice watch.
But no, no.
When I was in Cuba, I was wearing
they identified what I was wearing and how expensive it was.
They were like, that's what you're doing.
We want to leave what they're doing to Cuba.
I cannot.
Oh my God.
I mean, I can't believe it.
We're talking about Palestine.
There's a direct comparison to it.
Yeah, there's a direct comparison.
Yeah, they don't want them to have sovereignty, frankly.
They might want to turn Cuba into a big,
special economic free trade zone as well.
You know what's even crazier about that though?
I mean, in my conversations that I had with Cuban
officials and the Cuban population, broadly like,
they are, they just wanna survive, they wanna live.
And therefore, they've already done
these like marketization initiatives,
they recently came out with that a couple months ago.
If it didn't matter, we have added additional sanctions
this past week.
We don't want it, we will accept nothing beyond the surrender.
Yeah, we don't want it.
We want surrender.
It's devastating.
We want surrender, and it makes me really sad.
I mean, thinking about the third world tradition,
here was a people that fought valiantly, right?
In order to create another world,
like a world that wasn't based on capitalist extraction,
and where the state can actually be a savior
as opposed to the threat, and in that...
And that's operated in that manner for many decades.
For many people, we were there,
we heard Canelo tell us, President Canelo,
tell us, like the greatest Cuban export has been doctors.
So the whole world, right?
And yet, what the United States is doing to Cuba
is not just about Cuba, but it's to ensure
that nobody ever tries.
Don't you dare ever try.
We will come at you with crushing force.
Think about the Haitian Revolution,
second independent country in the Western Hemisphere.
And where those enslavers left Haiti
and came to the United States, where they can continue
also to maintain their position in the racial apex,
similar to those South Africans that went to Israel.
I think they want to turn Cuba into Haiti
as a warning for every other Latin American country
that would care.
The difference there is that there's enough Cubans
who want to repatriate,
who would like to establish their businesses there.
So I think the model that they have in mind
is very similar to the Gaza Riviera plan.
Oh yeah.
In the sense that they wanna make it a place
industry of capitalist investment. So Cuba pre-revolution in some respects.
This is the future, but it's that future that is right now being built in
Palestine by these architects and that future that I think is they have it in
mind for the south of Lebanon as well and that future that we can see possibly
what they have in mind for Cuba. This Marco Rubio piece of shit, he's Cuban
and he identifies as Spanish because he wants to trace his lineage to Europe as part of western civilization.
You know who else does that? Nick Fuentes.
Oh, really?
Well, yeah.
Is he Cuban?
No, he's Mexican.
But he says, like, oh, you know, like, white Mexican, Spanish.
Imagine him claiming being Chicano.
Okay, yeah.
No, no.
He says he's like, you know, like a Spanish tradition.
I mean, they're all part of the same, right?
Yeah.
Um, racial purity and supremacy.
So, and who gets deserves to live?
You know, Marco Rubio wants the new Western century
in this moment where they get to basically reinstate
colonial domination, but through financial domination.
This goes back to your question, Hassan,
which is what they have planned for Palestine
is planned for the world.
Yeah.
That future of dismantling national sovereignty
and self-determination and being able to determine
what your future looks like, what your curriculum looks like,
what your society looks like, what your people look like
is being broken apart and replaced by a more private form
of sovereignty that only a few can access
through exception.
So taking it back to international law,
there are a lot of people who now in the past
did not recognize that the grand design
of international law was to always yield these sorts
of outcomes regardless.
Are now thinking about it very differently.
Like people who thought that there was this real framework
here that was established on mutual respect,
established on sovereignty of peoples
and that was supposed to protect it
and not just like a first world colonialist framework
that can have some legal boundaries, I guess.
Now a lot of those people feel as though
international law is over.
Like they talk about it as though
this framework is completely gone.
I would go so far as to say,
not the similar to your Barack Obama statement
about drone war for judicial killings,
who ran on reasserting international law and stability
in the global stage and won.
Joe Biden did.
Who killed international law?
Joe Biden did, yeah.
So I think that Donald Trump is basically just,
you know, he's reaping the rewards, exactly.
And so I guess my question is,
is there a world where we can create some semblance
of order, law, stability, and go back to,
at least like the theoretical foundations
of international law and the post-World War II design,
is that, is there a possibility?
I mean, our adversaries, no matter what their individual crimes might be, especially on the
domestic level, they follow international law far more than we do in their actions, for
the most part, whether it be strategic restraint at times, whether it be a tit-for-tat strategy
that they deploy, I'm, of course, referencing Iran in some respects here, in comparison
what we've done in comparison to what we continue to do. I've constantly argued that Iran has been a
far more rational actor than Israel. I mean it restrained itself after November 2024 when it was
attacked and had the right to strike back and didn't. So my question is do you think that those
foreign adversaries are also holding on to this idea that maybe we can get back to stability
or or is it over? Is it might be right? Let me answer this question a few ways. One I want
to start by saying that this was not inevitable, that as flawed as international law was, this
outcome right now that we're enduring was not inevitable. And it is the product of,
frankly, the United States that was at the forefront of dismantling it. And I would say
more than the United States, I would say it was a part of a liberal order in the United States.
Right? I have so much to say.
So they're supposed to be the champions.
Isn't this what they believed in?
Yeah.
But they permitted it. They said it was necessary.
They're out here saying, kill more babies before they can grow up.
And then they do very little to stop a war.
Where is the upheaval?
This is genocide.
What have they done in response to the kidnapping of NicolƔs Maduro of Venezuela?
Nothing.
What have they done in order to stamp?
No, they celebrated it.
Right?
They're going to benefit from it.
But it was it was really funny watching European leaders get a little bit of a taste of their own medicine when every single one of them celebrated this like totally illegal and and you know unprecedented action and then the week after Donald Trump was like, I'm taking green.
Yeah.
And they were like, whoa, this we're not, we're not brown.
Yeah, you can't do that.
Yeah, you can't do that.
That taking of Greenland, by the way, Trump is also following the lead of a lot of these
anarcho-fascists that we're talking about, because they want Greenland in order to create
their colony, which they're creating everywhere.
So first of all, I want to say it was our fault, and it was probably the fault of a
lot of Karens who thought it was okay to kill Palestinian babies and permitted this.
So this outcome was not inevitable.
And it's a part of a lot of the Americans,
who every, you may be, who don't understand
ourselves as empire, who think that Palestine is over there
and don't understand that this is ours.
This is our genocide, genocide is suicide.
So it's not like there was an inherent
flawed international law where we were gonna get
to this stage.
This was not inevitable.
We wrought this.
So that's one.
Two, Palestinian siblings in Gaza tell me if international law,
and if most World War II international order permitted genocide in Gaza,
then to hell with it anyway.
We didn't need it in the first place.
And so there is something to be said about how flawed it already was, right?
But the thing about international law is less about what its contents were
and more about its potential.
And the potential that it offered us was the aspiration.
And the aspiration was, the sovereign equality of states.
The aspiration it offered was national self-determination.
The aspiration it offered us was, there's something known as humanity.
And humanity is a thing that we should all be invested in, right?
That part.
You can dismantle it, but it's not that we've lost the mechanisms, we've lost
the basic principles that have fallen out the bottom.
Now, what do we do?
I'm the greatest critic of international law,
I'm sure, you know, and I've read, obviously.
But I believe in those principles.
I believe in those principles.
How now do I advocate for those principles
without even the mythology of a tool and the framework
that held them together?
When now my adversary says that the Elon Musk will
say that the worst thing that happened to Western civilization is empathy, right?
How do we now understand where this is headed is what's shocking to me.
Every single day I wake up and I'm like, don't people realize we're literally on a track.
Like if we let them keep taking us, we are on a track to just destruction, everything.
And here's the other thing about international law.
It's always backwards looking.
The post-World War II order was born in destruction.
The League of Nations was born over destruction.
The ICC was born after genocide.
So I hate to think that it's gonna take
absolute devastation to everybody
to learn that lesson where it's fresh,
to relearn these basic principles
and find the imperfect way in order
to package it for ourselves.
I really hope that we can do it before then.
And that's what Palestine teaches everyone.
That's exactly what it teaches everyone.
Do not wait for that moment in order to fight for this other possibility.
Erickon, everybody.
It's a powerful note to end it on.
When and where will people be able to find your book,
Confronting Zionism, Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World and New?
Heymarket.com?
Heymarket.org?
Okay.
Heymarket.org?
Faberwagon eBooks will also be available on November 10
at haymarketbooks.org slash books,
slash two eight five one.
That's in front of the outside of it.
Enter Hassan for your discount code.
Right?
Your local favorite independent store.
It's called confronting Zionism,
decolonizing Palestine, building the world anew.
It's far different than justice for some
because we actually,
We want to empower the organizers and the activists who have been on the front line
to continue doing what they're doing with a great deal more ammunition.
All right, and thank you everyone for watching.
I'm going to end it here and I'll be back tomorrow.
We have some more interviews lined up and some more commentary as always.
Thank you for sticking around and listening to this enlightening conversation.
Once again, thank you so much.