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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi, Shereen. Hi, James. Hi.

That was alarming. Yeah. I went into like 2010s YouTube voice.

Wow. Yeah. Hi. Hi. James is excited today. I am excited. I'm always excited to make a podcast. You know, I love to cast a pod. But today I am especially, especially with an X, like espresso, the coffee drink. I am especially excited to talk to you, Shireen, because we are talking about a subject which I have wasted far too much of my life reading and writing about. What are we talking about, Shireen?

Sports. Sports. The Olympics. Yeah, just sports. I'm going to explain to Shireen sports, why they're fun, why I did too many of them. Okay, we're talking about the Olympics, the Olympic Games. Specifically, I guess they're happening in Paris this year. They may be happening in Paris by the time you listen to this. But I want to talk a little bit about the history of the Olympics because I wrote a book about it. And so I get to drone on about it for half an hour and you have to listen to me while you drive your cars to work. Cool.

Cool. The modern Olympic Games is, it draws links to ancient Greece, right? And it does that because at the time that the modern Olympic Games in the late 19th century were being created by a guy called Baron Pierre de Coubertin,

the aristocracy of Europe were obsessed with drawing links to the classical period, right? This is the same time when we see all those like neoclassical buildings going up. Yeah. People were trying to draw links between themselves and the ancient Greeks and to sort of

posits themselves as the new Greco-Roman font of civilization. Hey, I took art history. I minored in it, so I know stuff too. Okay, yeah, go off. Because I did not take art history. That's all I know. Good job. I'm sure you know more. You can tell me all kinds of stuff about impressionists and shit I don't understand. So, if

If we're looking at like, to understand the Olympics, we have to understand sport, right? And to understand sport, we have to understand play. So I was right about sports. You don't have to. Yeah. No, no, you're right on it. Great. Yeah. But first we do play, right? So if we're looking at like kind of the classic text on this, it's a book called Homo Ludens. But we probably don't need to read that. It's not a banger. Yeah.

Very few academic books are bangers. I like to think mine's in the sort of semi-banger category. It's also overpriced and you shouldn't buy it. Just go to your library and get it for free. Play is...

It's pretty obvious what play is, but the difference between play and sport is that sport is bounded. It happens in a certain place within a certain set of rules. Play doesn't. So the archetypal kind of example of transitioning from play to sport would be folk football in Britain. So back in the day, in the place where I come from, for holidays, the Saints days...

And other days when people didn't work, they would have a game of football, which consisted of a ball, inflated pig's bladder or a similar device. And you have to get it from one village into the other village. And those are about all the rules, right? Sometimes they had specific rules against stabbing. There had been like an outbreak of stabbing incidents. But other than that, it was pretty much...

You do what the fuck you wanted, right? You want to go on a five-mile detour and come around people, come in the back way? No problem. You want to form a phalanx of all your mates and just kind of go through like in a wedge style? Not a problem at all. You want to start hitting people with sticks? Yeah, not an issue. It was very loose, right? Every village or pair of villages that would play had their own kind of understanding of the rules, but it wasn't a codified set of rules that existed across all institutions.

incidences of folk football. And then we go from there to association football, right? That's where soccer comes from, right? A soccer, soccer, association becomes a sock. A sock becomes a soccer. That becomes soccer. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'm going to say yes. It's a very 19th century posh British effect that takes the word association football and comes out with soccer. That's so funny. Yeah, that's where it comes from. So...

Association Football codifies the rules, right? There's a pitch. The pitch is the same size as a goal. The goal is the same size. You can't pick it up now. And from that comes rugby football, right? So rugby football is type where you pick up the ball. There's a kind of founding myth for rugby football that this guy called William Webb Ellis with a glorious disregard for the rules, quote, picked up the ball and ran with it. It's a bit weird that they've created a founding myth for a dude who effectively just like

sucked at football so he picked it up and ran with it like it's it doesn't seem like he deserves a literal statue that he has uh yeah and that happened at rugby school right which was one of these english boarding schools that existed to prepare young men to be officers and administrators in the british empire and that is really what's the codification of sport as far as we can sort of create like a uh

a reason for it is to prepare young men and just men to be administrators in the British Empire. It's supposed to make them physically strong, it's supposed to make them obey the rules and learn to do what they're told even in stressful situations. It's part of an idea called muscular Christianity and as far as we can attribute this whole combination of things to one person, it would be Thomas Arnold. Thomas Arnold being the headmaster at rugby school.

He develops this idea of educating young Christian men and doing so using sport as well as academia. And sports very quickly develop a set of rules around amateurism. Amateurism, like sometimes we just use amateur now to mean not very good. But at the time, it specifically meant not paid to do the sport. And so...

Yeah, the Olympics until relatively recently have an amateurism rule that people can't participate if they are paid to do the sport. They have exemptions for fencing coaches, which I think tells you about everything you need to know. This isn't there for any purity reason. It's there to serve as a class barrier.

And we see it used as a class barrier. First of all, in football, right? Like that's why we have rugby league and rugby union because the rugby league people tended to be working people and they needed to be paid. So rugby league allowed for professionalism. Rugby union did not. And those tended to be wealthier people, right? But it's...

at the Olympics extensively to police class. Probably the most prominent example would be Jim Thorpe. Are you familiar with Jim Thorpe? Jim Thorpe's a cool guy actually. I got to read some of his correspondence. He actually wrote a history of the Olympic Games, which is very sad when you consider that Jim Thorpe himself, he's a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, right? So he's indigenous to North America.

He won a medal for the United States in the 1912 Summer Olympics. He won two gold medals, actually. One in pentathlon and one in decathlon. So decathletes are kind of like the uber athletes, right? You're doing 10 different sports. You have to just be good at exercising. And Jim Thorpe was good at exercising. He also played collegiate and professional football, professional baseball, and professional basketball.

He's an all-round sports dad. Unfortunately, he lost his Olympic title because he had been paid at some point for playing baseball, even though he didn't do baseball in the Olympics. That's so fucked. Yeah, it's very clearly used as a way to class and race police the games. That's so shitty.

And I think this gets to our point about what the Olympics are. So the early Olympics tend to coincide with what are called World's Fairs. You familiar with World's Fairs, Shireen? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. People sort of get together and they have these big exhibitions and they show off their, like, you know, if you're in... Look what I got from Paris. What?

Yeah. Look what I stole from this country that I have colonized and under force extracted, the following things. If you're in Britain, the most famous World's Fair site would be Crystal Palace. Crystal Palace was built, burned down, but it was built for the World's Fair. If you're in San Diego, Balboa Park was built for 1914. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I knew that somewhere in my head. Yeah.

When you go to Balboa Park, a little niche San Diego diversion for the millions of you who are not in San Diego, you can just tune out for 10 seconds. There's little cottages, like the international cottages. Yeah, yeah. And there's like a Palestine house. Yeah, Palestine house. Cool that they got recognition in San Diego at least. Yeah.

Those are from the World's Fair. Each country would have a little exhibition in their house, right? And then all down the Prado. So yeah, that's actually how the zoo started as well. Someone in their exhibition had lions and then fucking left them when they left. And they were like, "Ah, guess we better start a zoo. Got a couple of lions on our hands." Wow. Yeah. Incredible vibes.

The Olympics happen at the same time as World's Fair. It's for a long time. And that is because the Olympics are essentially a gathering of transnational bourgeoisie. That's not a phrase I came up with myself. It's from my friend David Goldblatt, who's written a really excellent history of the Olympics. It's called The Games. And if you're going to read one book about the Olympics, it should be David's book. He's a lovely guy. I'm sure he's not listening. But hello, David, if you are. I would recommend his book because I think his analysis is great, right? That

what these become is a place where the people who make money from finance capital all around the world can gather together and share their little ideas and play their little games. We see that, for instance, in the 1904 St. Louis Olympics. In St. Louis, in addition to the World's Fair, they have the Olympics and they have something called the Anthropological Days. Have you heard about this, Shireen?

I don't believe I have. No, it's one of the more fucked things to happen in St. Louis, which I think is saying a lot. They essentially kidnapped people from around their various imperial possessions, brought them to St. Louis, which in itself is a crime, and then forced them to compete in events that they didn't fully explain to them. What the fuck? Yeah, and then concluded from this that white people were better.

That's like some gladiator shit. Yeah, yes. What are you doing? That's too modern. That's too modern to happen. This is 1904. Yeah. Not so long ago. Yeah. And this kind of exhibits what the world's fairs were and to a degree, what the Olympiads became, which was a way for the colonizing powers to get together. Right. Shireen,

Do you know what will not kidnap you from your home country and fly you to St. Louis and then force you to compete in games that you don't understand? Gold. Yeah, you're probably right. Well, indirectly it will, you know, because as a sort of source of wealth. Yeah, right. Okay, whatever. I was trying to think of something that I might hear next. It's probably gold, you're right.

We're back and we hope you have bought your gold. The only metal that you can make an Olympic medal out of, incidentally. Really?

I'm allergic to gold. Oh, really? Do you turn green? I get like, it's not good for my skin. Oh, wow. I'll get like, like not infections, but like I'll get like an eczema kind of reaction. Oh, wow. What do you, did you have an alternative jewelry? I don't wear a lot of jewelry. I wear rings the most, but I can't wear earrings anymore. They're too, my ears are too sensitive. I usually like stick with silver if I have to, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

Not meant to be rich. No, shame. Or maybe platinum is what's for you. Oh, yeah. I could do platinum. Yeah. Okay. Listeners, send Shireen platinum doohickeys.

Yeah, to wear. Yeah, gold. The Olympic medals are not solid gold. They're just gold coated. Interesting. Yeah. That feels a little cheap. Yeah, right? Like you spend your whole fucking life trading something and then they did screw you on the medal. It chips off. Yeah, you drop it and it's just plastic in the middle. I guess they have more value as Olympic medals than they do as lumps of gold anyway.

you can sell them and people have sold them online because as it turns out, like spending your entire youth exercising and then getting to a point where you're too injured or old to compete is sometimes not great for your future career prospects. And I've unfortunately seen lots of friends take that path. And so I want to talk about like the Olympics in the

20th century and specifically I want to talk about the Olympics in the 1930s right so when the Olympics by the time we come to the 1930s the Olympics have really become like they're an American thing the Los Angeles Olympics gives us a lot of the modern Olympics and the rest of the modern Olympics we get from friend of the podcast Adolf Hitler um

And his Nazi party, of course. Yeah. I knew that you were expecting them. We never, never don't expect Hitler. So 1932 is great. Like 1932 Olympic Village, they build this Olympic Village. They have it patrolled by cowboys, just like Hollywood cosplay dudes on horses, cowboying around. It's so weird. It's very weird. It's the first Olympic Village.

And it becomes a real estate investment, right? As soon as the Olympics are done, they're in classic Los Angeles fashion, flipping the houses for more than they were paid.

So, it also creates this idea of the Olympics as a mass spectacle. 1932 is sometimes called the Hollywood Olympics, right? And it really changes the game from rich people getting together for rich people to a spectator event and a mass spectator event. In 1931, Spain's dicta blanda collapses. Dicta blanda is like a soft dictatorship as opposed to dictadura as a hard dictatorship, right?

Spain becomes a republic. 1931 is also the time when the International Olympic Committee is meeting in Barcelona. For geographically challenged listeners, Barcelona is in Catalonia, but Catalonia is within Spain at this time.

The IOC is almost entirely comprised of very rich people. And many of them are like barons, counts, princes, other people who like their job is being someone's kid. Right. And they just do things like being on the IOC to occupy them while they spend their parents' money. So they're in Spain at the time when Spain has just deposed a monarch.

and it has this revolutionary republic. The anarchists are in the street. It's about to begin a campaign of two years of removing the church from its official position, like anti-clericalism, and of land reform. These are things which rich people do not like. The vote happens in Barcelona

about where to hold the next Olympics. And the two leading candidates are Berlin and Barcelona. After Barcelona, something a little weird happens. The IOC members all go home and not everyone has come to Barcelona, right? Because of the change in the situation. And instead of being like, okay, well, we had a vote and Barcelona won. The IOC makes an interesting and relatively unique decision to have another vote by telegram.

And in the Telegram vote, they, instead of going for the unstable Spanish Second Republic, opt for a more stable and liberal democracy, which is, of course, Weimar Germany. Oh, of course. Yeah. Good choice by the rich folks. They really helped us out there. And it's very interesting, like,

I've spent a lot of time with these telegrams, like the actual paper telegrams in the International Olympic Committee archive in Lausanne, trying to ascertain, did they just, like, did the vote happen and then they were like, no, fuck, we can't go to Barcelona. Like, we got to redo, we got to work out a way to jig this. Like, we can't go to this Republican place. Or that they claimed that there weren't enough votes, right? That they didn't have like a quorum. But

I've looked at previous and subsequent votes, and there are plenty of other votes that have fewer participants. And it was relatively normal at this time for not everyone to show up at a meeting, right? Because it's 1931. Travelling is hard. And so I can't categorically say what's happened, but maybe that's what I suspect has happened. I can't really see any way I could find out now, unless I went to every member of the International Olympic Committee at the time and looked in their personal archive. But...

Either way, they decide to give the Olympics to this little place called Weimar, Germany. In between 1931 and 1936, history fans will know that the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Nazis, not very nice people. No. And no, bad, many people are saying. Yeah, many people are saying. The mosquitoes of the world. No, maybe not. Sorry, we just recorded the mosquito episode. Oops. Yeah, in many ways, like the mosquito could be eradicated. Maybe it wouldn't be bad. Yeah. My favorite George Orwell line, one of my favorite George Orwell lines, I joined the militia to kill a fascist.

Because if all of us did so, then there wouldn't be any of them left. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Very prescient. So...

The Olympics, when the Nazis come to power, first they want to do away with it. They're like, "Fuck this. This is some bougie shit. We're not into it. We don't want to see other people. We don't care about other nations. We're Aryans." Then over time, the administrators of the Olympics, including a guy called Carl Diem, who would be classified according to the Nazis' own standards as a Jewish person, they

persuade the Nazis that having the Olympics will be good for them. It will let them exhibit their shit on a world scale. And they are not wrong, right? The Olympics turn into a massive boon for Nazi Germany. We don't have enough time in this short episode to explain the whole boycott movement. There was a substantial boycott movement, including in the United States,

The United States very nearly boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but in the end, it ended up not doing so. You had opposition from really interesting groups, actually. You had opposition, obviously, from Jewish groups, right? Because...

You have opposition from elements of NAACP, but not from other elements because they have this very reasonable objection. They're like, well, America is also racist as fuck, actually. This is a time when we exclude black folks from a lot of support. And so you have black folks boycotting and you have black folks being like, no, fuck it, we'll take it.

We'll take the chance, you know? And then you have the opposition from an interesting group, like the liberal Catholics, right? Because the Nazis...

have their own ideas on religion. And so a lot of Catholics were anti-Nazi at that point, including Jeremiah Mahoney, who was president of the Amateur Athletic Union at the time, who was kind of leading the boycott movement. The United States decides not to boycott. Lots of other places in the world decide that they are going to boycott, right? Or lots of other people around the world. And that's where Barcelona, they had a conference in Paris, actually, the International Conference for the Respect of the Olympic Ideal. And...

That is the conference out of which the Barcelona, remember Barcelona applied in 31, right? Okay. So they have all their shit together. They actually have the site of a former World's Fair and that's what they're going to use. So the Catalans come to this conference in April of 36 and are like, hey, we can have another Olympics which isn't shit.

And they go ahead and have their Olympics, which isn't shit. Now, first happened the Nazi Olympics, right? The Nazi Olympics give us so much of what we consider to be the Olympic tradition today. The torch relay, you know, the torch relay. They go to Olympia and bring the flame. Yeah, that's a Nazi thing, actually. It comes from the Nazis. The idea of drawing a link from ancient Greece to Berlin was a Nazi idea.

Why do we still do it? Yeah, that's a good question, Shireen, isn't it? The good question is we enter the Paris Olympics. One thing they have done away with is the Olympic salute because it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazi salute. Did that also start in '32? No, the Olympic salute predates it. So you have these interesting people march, the parade, the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Lots of these, the pageantry of the opening ceremony also comes from the Nazis, by the way.

And we've got people walking in and the French come in and they're doing a salute. And people are like, is that the Nazi salute they're doing? It's at the Olympic salute. I'm pretty sure it's the Olympic salute. Wow. I'm pretty sure. I mean, if it's too close, I think it's bad. Yeah. If it's getting confused for something else, I think you should stop. Yeah. I just try to not do things that look like I'm Zeke Hyling. Like that is how I live my life. You have other...

other nations who don't do it. You have the Americans. The Americans traditionally, they're supposed to dip their flag. The Americans have never dipped their flag in Olympic opening ceremonies. So sometimes you'll see this written as like, "Yeah, the Americans said fuck Hitler. They just did what they'd always done," which was to not dip their flag. And that

That Olympiad is a great success for Hitler, right? This is where a lot of this, like, oh, but yeah, he's very efficient. He makes the trains run on time, kind of shit comes from, right? They use it as a pageant and they downplay their racism. They include a couple of Jewish athletes on their team, which is one of the demands of Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee. Brundage is an interesting dude. Brundage

You can read more about Brandage in my book. Robert did a Behind the Bastards on Brandage. I don't think he begins the 1930s as an anti-Semite, but after the boycott campaign, which he calls a Jewish communist conspiracy,

Wow. Yeah, yeah. He absolutely becomes an anti-Semite. Like, he grows closer to Hitler when other... Because, like, his idea is that politics shouldn't influence the games, which is inherently a political choice when the games have been given to fucking Adolf Hitler. Yeah. So...

The 1936 Olympics go ahead in Germany. Lots of fascism, lots of Sieg Heilig, a real success for Hitler. 1936 Olympics in Barcelona don't go ahead because of Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona Olympics are like an alternative to the Berlin Olympics. Got it, got it. At this time also, it should be pointed out that you got the Winter Olympics when you got the Olympics. So the Nazis already had their Garminch-Partenkirchen Winter Olympics.

And I predict we've done a bunch of Nazi shit, right? Which didn't stop anyone going to the Summer Olympics. Shireen, do you know what won't do a bunch of Nazi shit? What, James? It's the products and services that support this show, Shireen. I found it's easier instead of trying to come up with something just to give you the question right there. Yeah. Damn. Foiled again.

We're back. So yeah, these Olympics that are supposed to happen in Barcelona, they don't happen because the Spanish Civil War starts at the same time, right? Lots of these anti-fascist athletes go on to participate as fighters in the Spanish Civil War, about 400 of them. The popular Olympics are cool. The main reason they're cool is because I've written a book about them.

But other reasons include that they had like elite amateur and then provincial races. So like you could just show up and be like, yeah, man, I'm just going to fucking check my hat in the ring a hundred meters. Let's see how I do.

There would be a place for you to compete. It wasn't about who was a freak athlete. They were really interested in working class health. For that reason, they also had these mass relay events where you'd have the 50 by 25 meters or the 10 by 50 meters, and you couldn't have all runners. The idea was that the country that would win or the nation that would win, they competed as nations rather than states. The exiled Jews of Europe

competed together. For the obvious reason that if you're a German Jew in 1936, you don't want to compete for fucking Germany. So even at the popular Olympics, they competed to Jewish workers sports associations. And you have exiled antifascists from Germany and Italy competing under their own banners. And you have Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque country competing as their own little nations. And the same with the colonized people of North Africa. And you have the women students of the world

with their own little team, which is nice. They also made a big deal of including women and allowing women to do sports that men do. At the time, in 1936, women couldn't run more than 200 meters.

Well, they actually could, as it turns out. Yeah, yeah. They just weren't allowed to. Surprise! Yeah, shocking discovery. They didn't just involve that capacity since '36. But these Olympics don't go ahead because the Spanish Civil War starts. Lots of the anti-fascist athletes who came stayed to fight, including people I've written about in my book.

We did a whole cool people who did cool stuff about this. So you can listen to more if you want to in Margaret's feed. I'm sure if you search popular Olympics, it'll be there. By the way, you'll sometimes see it translated as people's Olympics. I prefer popular because it's inherently tied to the idea of a popular front, right? Which is a policy of like united front between everyone from like the liberals to the communists, to the anarchists against fascism. Sometimes the anarchists don't participate in the popular front because it's

It is dominated by communists, and the communists, in fact, love to kill anarchists a lot more than they love to kill fascists. And they use the Popular Front as cover for doing that, as we see in Spain. But the anarchists did participate in workers or popular sport in Barcelona, at least to an extent. So these games, as I said, they don't happen. You can read about that in my book, or you can listen to Margaret's podcast about it. But I want to talk about what the Olympics represent today, the modern Olympics, right? They have become...

As they always were, they continue to be a spectacle that they've been since '32, and they continue to be a vehicle for capitalism as they have been forever. If we look at their recent Olympic Games, we look at London, we look at Rio. I think Rio is a really great example. The Olympics, they were able to clear areas of the city using the pretentious Olympics, displace favela communities, displace

poor and excluded and marginalized people and take advantage of incredibly underpaid labor. It's a bit rarer now, but for most of the last eight years, you've met Haitian folks in Tijuana mostly. The US has been especially racist and bigoted towards Haitians. I wrote a piece for NBC about Biden's hypocrisy on Haitian immigration. But

There were people who had worked on the Olympic stadium in Brazil. So they'd gone from Haiti after the earthquake, the economic and political issues they've had ever since the earthquake. They'd gone to Brazil and then they'd worked in Brazil building the stadia, getting paid fuck all.

doing dangerous work. And then eventually either they weren't able to find work, their visas had run out, or they'd otherwise chosen to come north to the United States. And they often end up stuck in Tijuana or living in Tijuana and finding work there. So often, Olympics take advantage of migrant labor. They are used as a means of reshaping the city

Into Like sculpting it Under capitalism Yeah Pushing folks Out of their neighbourhood They don't do The Olympics In bougie neighbourhoods They use it As an excuse To gentrify a neighbourhood To remove entrenched Working class communities Yeah Like It's really sad It's

When I read so much of the stuff about specifically the Barcelona Olympic Games, we see these people who are unquestionably good people. They genuinely believe that through what they see as the ideal of the Olympics, they can liberate women. The Barcelona organizers, they didn't have much money. They were putting people up. I found these forms in the archives. They'd go around people's houses and

and be like, hey, do you have a spare bedroom? And in the form you can tick, I have one, two, three spare bedrooms. I can serve breakfast. I can't serve breakfast. And that's how they would bill at the athletes, right? The athletes didn't have an Olympic village. They had a hotel and then any surplus you would just stay with a local person. It was a very different vision of what the Olympics could have been, right? Yeah.

They really believed in the youth of the world coming together. They really thought that at the popular Olympics, they could show the strength of anti-fascism. That anti-fascism wasn't just a talking point, that it was young and it was healthy. And most importantly, that they could fucking kill you. Sport Orwell, again, double Orwell quote episode, Orwell called sport war without the shooting.

And I think he's spot on, actually. It is good. He's got some bangers, Shireen. You do say that. Sounds like he's a writer, yeah. Yeah, he's a word guy, George Orwell. People do love to misquote George Orwell, but I like to quote him correctly. You know, you can always, when someone misquotes George Orwell, you can always just quote tweet them with the, I had joined the militia to kill a fascist. Right. Or the other absolute banger from Orwell is,

I have no particular love for the idealized worker as he exists in the mind of the bourgeois communist. But when I see a real flesh and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I don't have to ask myself which side I'm on. Ooh. It's a banger. Oh,

That's poetry. Yeah, it is. It's great. It's something that when I get around to it, I'll have tattooed on my body. Maybe when I have to cross fewer borders. It's probably not something you want to be showing off to the intelligence agencies of various countries.

Yeah, it's really sad to see this thing. And I think it does have potential. I think it's a potential. What I want to end on is like, I think we can recover that potential. Like we can take the Olympics away from the people who did 1904 and the people who did 1936. And like, it doesn't, we'd have to use that. Obviously the IOC is not fucking coming with us. Right. I've been to the IOC, very nice building. Yeah.

But the interests of finance capital and the interests of the IOC are inherently tied. Coca-Cola, every massive corporation in the world is a massive sponsor of the Olympics. And

It's also been a platform for some really good things. We think about Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics giving a raised fist salute on the podium. I'm sure you've seen it. There's a statue of them. Several statues of them, I think, actually. Very famous Olympic moment. The whole 1968 Olympics actually gave a platform for protest. Parisians have been protesting against this Olympics and Angelenos are already protesting against what is going to happen in '28.

You can look up Nolympics LA for those folks. I think that that is something that's worth supporting. I don't think that the idea is inherently bad. The idea of coming together to play and like sports are where we decide who's on our team and who's not on our team. What the popular Olympics did was said working people are all on the same team. They played that out. The day the games were supposed to start, some of those athletes were in the streets killing fascists and they won. That day the military coup failed in Barcelona.

a lot of them left really feeling like they'd got something out of the game that they couldn't have got or that they came to play and they saw like what they were playing for acted out

And I think there's still something really powerful in that, but we can only get there by acknowledging how fucked up the Olympics have always been. I see this liberal narrative that the Olympics were once great and about sportsmanship, and now they're about capitalism. No, fuck that. They have always been inherently about capitalism. They've been inherently about colonialism, about eugenics, the medal table.

We don't do the medal table for shits and giggles. The medal table is there to prove the superiority of one race. That is why Hitler is obsessed with the medal table. He's extremely worried that either the black folks in the United States or, God forbid, the Japanese do well in the Olympics. And then the Olympics are trying to sort of

Posit itself as inherently pro-human rights I think is very problematic when we look at how Olympic stadia get constructed, by whom they get constructed, where they get constructed. And where they get constructed. Yeah. Who they affect. Yeah, and who they're for and who they take from. So I'm not saying don't watch the Olympics. When I was a kid, the Olympics were fucking formative in me wanting to do sport. When I was an athlete, the Olympics was also something I wanted to do. I have friends who are going to be at the Olympics.

And like, I guess I wish them the best, but still a bad thing. And like, I certainly don't blame folks who come from like resource poor settings for taking that chance. Yeah, of course not. But it is like, yeah, the way it currently is and the way it's always been is just doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. But maybe there's a different timeline where, I don't know, Barcelona's idealism of an Olympics is like true. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. I think we can bring it back. I think like anti-fascism is having a moment that it probably hasn't had since the 1930s. That's true. That's very true. The last four years, we can get together and we can have our own institutions too. Like, I don't think we should abandon sport to the chuds. No, of course not. Just because the chuds have liked sport. Yeah. There's a way. But I also don't want anyone to use it as a way to like...

Not sports wash, but like kind of focus on something that is not as relevant as the bigger picture. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Like, yeah, it shouldn't be used to distract. Yeah, exactly. That's what that's the short word to say. Yeah. And like it has been like global sports are increasingly going to like

petro states in the middle east yeah right like and that is a problem i think if you're an athlete i would encourage you to really consider what your role is i know some of my friends listen who are still like professional athletes and uh just think about what you can do and like i will tell you that when you stop getting paid to exercise all of it seems very unimportant uh and like you suddenly realize that in my case but uh

There's important shit that you can do if you have a chance to do it and you should do it if you get the chance. But yeah, I think...

Hopefully, you know, if people want to know more about the popular Olympics, I will fucking talk your ear off. Send me an email. Yeah, my book. I think it might be on Libcom now as well. I think it's been pirated, which is good to see. You can get it from your library. I'd love you to get it from your library because then it's there for someone else. I love libraries. Yeah, I do love a library. We should do a library episode. I was trying to get the San Diego Library Association on because we've been defunding the libraries here in San Diego to have more cops. Yeah.

Yeah it's fucking great isn't it No I love Libraries are just this I don't know Pure little place We gotta do some library episodes Yeah we'll do them We'll get them back We'll get the libraries If you work in a library And the police are taking away The money you use to read books to little children You can DM me on x.com Yeah hit us up Yeah and we will fight the good fight for you Yeah

All right, that's been the Olympics. I know, go forth. Do a little decathlon. Here's a fun Olympic fact for you. A fun fact to end the episode. General Patton, right? American war guy. Entered the pentathlon at the Olympics and used such a large pistol that they were unable to determine the size of his grouping of shots on the target because he just eviscerated the whole target with his hand cannon. Wow.

Yeah. So embody that, the pentathlon, a sport that was designed to train officers, right? You have to run, swim, ride a horse, sword fight, shoot. Yeah. So make a better pentathlon, make an anti-fascist decathlon. Yeah. Send us your, you can tag us with your decathlon ideas on x.com. We both use at I write okay. Bizarrely we have the same Twitter handle. But yeah, send us your sporting ideas.

enjoy your little uh little olympic viewing now that i've ruined it all for you i guess yeah no i mean it's good to know context but yeah until next time yeah until the next time me and james talk about something either terrible or fun or somewhere in between yeah yeah yeah we'll uh yeah we'll be back soon with something else you'll never know what this is always fucking just these must just come out of left field for people like what the fuck are they talking about today yeah

Well, I guess you'll never know until you listen. That's it. You can listen every day. Bye-bye. Bye. The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget. I did something in 88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh, gosh. The U.S. Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes. We're going out there, smashing into each other full force.

Listen to The Podium on the iHeart app or your favorite podcast platform weekly and every day during the games to hear the Olympics like you've never quite heard them before.

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Listen to Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay as part of the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

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Welcome to A Kid Happy Here, a podcast where I, Mia Wong, have read Kamala Harris's dad, Donald Harris's book. This is the podcast that you're listening to now with me to experience this actually genuinely fairly interesting work of political economy is James Stout. Hi, Mia. I'm so excited to learn what Donald has for us today.

Me too. I'm, you know, I'm of a bunch of minds of this book because I think the actual key element of this book, which is called Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution, is that it is unbelievably technically dense.

Okay, we're going to get into the book. First, we should talk a bit about who Donald Harris is. So a lot of the focus around – this is Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee's dad. So a lot of the media coverage around him is around him being a Marxist. This is –

debatable obviously it's the conclusion i'm going to come out of this with i am shocked that people in our media today might misunderstand basic things about marxism and who is and is not a marxist yeah i mean i i think but so the thing about this book so this book is from 19 1978 which is actually after he had broken up with kamala's mom and so kamala doesn't like know him super well is he like not present in her younger life

Kamala's mom and dad divorced when she was like five, something like four or five. So this is written about a decade after that. Yeah, much like the new American Communist Party. Like a lot of divorce guys just love to be communist. It's a thing about divorce guys. Oh, God. Yeah, so...

You know, the sort of – the thing everyone kind of cites about like Donald Harris' politics is that he was in this sort of like Black Studies – I guess proto-Black Studies group that produced a bunch of like Black Panthers, produced a lot of very radical people.

you know, the interesting thing about Donald Harris is that he is not the Marxist that you would expect to see coming out of sort of like that milieu because those people's Marxism, you know, I mean, he is very interested in sort of underdevelopment and, you know, sort of like imperialism, but he's,

He's not from one of the sort of like Maoist inflected kinds of Marxism, which are the kinds that tended to be sort of floating around like that. Yeah. He, in fact, he is a very, very rare kind of Marxist, which is to say, well, a, he doesn't call himself a Marxist. He calls himself a Marxist in the entire time. Um, but B yeah,

Yeah, intolerable.

I'm developing a picture of a kind of guy. Oh, yeah. You're painting me a rich portrait, man. Yeah. So but the interesting part is he's what's known as a post Keynesian. And weirdly, dear listeners, you are you are some of the only people in this entire country who have a prayer of knowing who these people are, because we've actually had a bunch of them on the show.

If people remember the episodes that I did about inflation over the last sort of like year, I guess like two years. I don't know. It's been it's been a long time. But the episodes about inflation that we did with the folks over at Strange Matters, those people are the sort of the one of one of the groups that are the intellectual heirs to sort of post Keynesianism. It's a you know, I guess as post Keynesianism is kind of it's I guess it's like the largest of what's called the heterodox economics group.

Uh, schools, we're going to get more into what it is later because it's not just like, you know, so it's post Keynesian after like John Bader Keynes. It's not really Keynes and that that's that's going to become very important in a second. But, you know, this this is sort of an issue because it means that it's actually it's really, really hard for a normal person to figure out what the fuck is going on with this book. And this is something that I discovered.

You know, partially just from reading it and partially also, I mean, this, this, like, I have a pretty good background to do this because I know a lot of post-Hensian economics and I also have studied a lot of Marx and you need both of those to be able to write about this. However, comma, I discovered two hours before this recording, I discovered that the economist had sent some hack who they refused to name to write about this book. And this person managed, okay, on top of just like straight up, like not, like,

Literally, their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong. In just four paragraphs, they managed to make an error so egregious that if I had turned this shit into my professors in college, it would have failed me for it. So, okay, okay. So one of the things the author talks about is this thing called the Cambridge Capital Controversy. And this author claims that this controversy was fought between the Neo and post-Keynesians. Now, this is probably gibberish to like 99% of people listening to this, but...

In terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent of not knowing who fought in World War II. Like, this is... The Cambridge-Captain controversy is... It's basically the single moment in which this kind of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in a way that, like, they were able to force the sort of mainstream neoclassical economists to pay attention to. And this battle should...

like intellectually should have completely destroyed all of neoclassical economics right everything you've ever heard about how price equals supply and demand like so all those curves all of that is fucking bullshit all of it was destroyed by one single it was happening about the course of a decade between the sort of post-kensians mostly seraphim but also joan robinson i think actually started it um we're gonna talk about those people more later this is a battle between them and very specifically the neoclassical economists

And by the end of it, the neoclassical economists were forced to admit that they couldn't figure out a way to measure the value of a bundle of capital goods. So if you have two different machines, neoclassical economics cannot tell you the value of the two machines. Right.

And this completely annihilates neoclassical economics. All of it is fucking fake because they need this for the production function. Without the production function, you can't even get to supply and demand, right? Literally everything, all of their stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to attempt to do an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy, what it was actually about here, because it's a little bit...

It's something that you can understand, but it's a little bit technical and it's hard to explain in podcast form. If you're really curious about this, the book Capital as Power has a really great explanation of it in chapter five that's pretty short. You can just literally find a PDF of Capital as Power by just Googling it. But this is a level of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're like the person the economist assigned to write this like knows so little about it that, and you know, the other thing about this whole controversy is that the

The Cambridge Capital Controversy is in the book. And in the book, Donald Harris very specifically talks about – there's an entire chapter of the book that is just him using the products of the Cambridge Capital Controversy to completely destroy neoclassical economics. This is an entire chapter of the book, and this guy got who it was about wrong, right? So this is a book that is very, very easy to misinterpret and very, very easy to sort of not like –

you know, just to sort of like completely misunderstand or bounce off of. I, it was, it was hard for me and like, I'm pretty well set up to deal with it. So, okay. What, what the fuck is this book about? The, the very, the shortest answer I can possibly give is it's an attempt to build a sort of mathematical model of how, of how, of, of sort of like that measures the growth of an economy and can sort of like determine the based on different, like different sort of inputs of, uh,

You know, we'll get to the board of the second, like in terms of like inputs of capital and like parts of labor, like how you can have an economy that grows stably over time. But in order to like get into really what this is, we need to do something that actually is the first part of this book. We need to do a brief survey of the last 230, 240 years of economics. But before we do that, do you know what economics exists to sell you?

I do, actually. That is a fantastic transition, Mia. Is it goods and services? It is, in fact, goods and services. Priceless capital goods. All right. And we are back. So, okay, in order to understand literally what this fundamental project is, we have to talk about sort of the three broad categories of economists.

So the first sort of original in what we're not going to, there's a couple, there's some people before this, but like the, the, the, in terms of like economists whose work is important to now, there's three broad categories and we're going to start with the classical economists broadly. There's also about three important classical economists. And this is, this is an argument. And this is one of the arguments that Donald Harris makes in the opening of this book is about who these people are. So his argument is it's Adam Smith, uh,

Malthus and Ricardo. We don't care about Malthus for our purposes. He's most well-known for being the out-of-control population. Growth will kill everyone on Earth. We need to slow populate stuff. That's not super relevant for us. Everyone, I think, kind of has a basic familiarity with Adam Smith. But for our purposes, the important one is Ricardo, who is not very well-known at all. Ricardo is sort of concerned with...

Basically, the distribution of surpluses between the classes. So for him, there's three major classes, right? There's landlords, there's capitalists, and there's workers. And he's concerned about how the surplus product of a society, which is like all of the sort of

that's produced in an economy that isn't literally directly necessary for everyone to survive? How is that sort of surplus distributed, and how does this sort of impact economic growth? The post-Keynesian tradition that Donald Harris is in is, in a real sense, their successors to Ricardo, right? I've mentioned Piero Serafa, who is probably the central figure of post-Keynesian economics. He's a really interesting guy. He knows everyone. He knew Keynes. He

He was weirdly friends with Antonio Gramsci, the former head of the Italian Communist Party, whose enormously influential work was like knew him. And a lot of what Seraph's work is, is kind of like getting Ricardo's economics to like work properly and then turning that into sort of a new framework for how you model economies. Now, the other part of this, you know, so, okay.

Who is and isn't a classical economist is also a huge source of debate because there's a lot of people who throw Marx in as part of the classical economists. That's a traditional way to view it. Harris doesn't think that he's a classical economist. He thinks that he's his own thing. So for our purposes, you know, and Harris is also, I mean, I think he considers himself a Marxist even in this period. And a lot of this book is an attempt to sort of merge Marxism.

Marxian political economy with the sort of neo-Ricardian stuff that Sarafa's doing. Does he change later? Is Harris one of these guys who goes on an intellectual journey and becomes a fucking neoliberal? Oh, we'll get there. We'll get to where all this ends up at the end of this episode. But it's interesting because you can actually see it kind of happening in the middle of this book in ways that we're going to get to sort of in a bit. I love that. I love a book where the author goes on a personal journey.

It's also very funny because the economist guy was like, oh my god, he's so Marxist. He's concerned with the value for him. To put my Marxist cards on the table, maybe six people will understand this, but I was brought up in terms of learning Marxist theory like crazy.

through the value form school. He is not a value form guy. He plays really fast and loose what value is. I was reading this and I was going, oh God, oh no, what is this? He's so wrong. He's so bafflingly wrong. The economist article is subtitled A Combative Marxist Economist with White House Influence, which like, thanks guys.

Yeah, okay. So the basis of Marxian political economy is the labor theory of value. We're going to explain this briefly because it actually winds up mattering a lot to this book. So value is the product of the labor time socially necessary to produce a commodity, right? It's like how long does it take a specific place to produce a watch?

Workers are paid enough to reproduce themselves. They're paid enough to eat, sleep, and have kids so there can be more workers. But the rest of their labor time is stolen by capitalists and is thus unrenumerated. This unpaid labor time is called surplus value, and this is what capital is made of. So this is the very, very basis of what Marxism is. And in Marxism, and this is different than Ricardo, which is like, Ricardo understands that there are classes and that they are in conflict to some extent. But

For Marx, the central dynamics of capitalism is the conflict between the bourgeoisie or the capitalist who own the means of production and then buy that ownership, like extract surplus value from the proletariat, and the proletariat or the working class are forced to sell their labor to capitalists, et cetera, et cetera. Something very interesting, two ideas run into each other very quickly in Harris's work because –

So there is a thing called surplus in the tradition of sort of Ricardo and in the tradition of like Sarafa and the post-Keynesians, right? And that surplus is very critically not the same thing as Marxian surplus value. So part of what's happening here is that Harris is trying to square the circle basically between these two approaches to what surplus is and sort of what the nature of value is.

So in the Marxist tradition, surplus value is still in labor time, and the value you produce flows through the economy. Stealing this labor time is what turns capital into more capital. In post-Keynesian economics, surplus is... So in a Serafin work, or in this book too, you have basically a production matrix.

which is like it's a matrix that models how production works. And what it's doing is modeling the entire output of society at one time. And in this model, so there's sort of like, you know, there's all the commodity and labor inputs that compose the economy and they come back out. And there's a certain amount of commodities. This is the thing we talked about with the card. All right. There's a certain amount of commodities you need to produce so that everyone can, the entire system can reproduce itself. And beyond that is surplus. So,

What you're dealing with is this weird mixture because Harris is trying to work with both of these at the same time. On the one hand, you have surplus as stolen value in the form of stolen labor time. And on the other hand, you have it in this Ricardian sense of there's a bunch of commodities that we've produced that's access to our ability to... our need to reproduce ourselves. And he's trying to square these and it doesn't work. It just sort of breaks down.

Does he actively address this dual meaning and then explain how he... Yeah. Well, so his basic issue is that... The way he does this mostly is by just moving back and forward between the two systems and not trying to reconcile them. And then the one time he has to kind of do it, he has to... Oh, God. Do I want to try to explain the transformation problem? He has to do this thing where...

Okay, so theoretically, if you want to convert...

surplus value, like in the Marxist Marxian sense into the sort of like Neo Ricardian thing, you need to turn it into prices. And there's, there's a long running controversy in, in Marxism over whether or not you can actually do that. Cause the math is weird. It doesn't work very well. I'm not going to, he doesn't solve it. He just gives up and says that you can't do it because there are two separate spheres, which is the most cop-out answer I've ever seen in my entire life. It's like,

I love that. Yeah, it's wild. But, you know, so back to the sort of main arc of what the fuck is this book about? I promise we're reaching the promised land. We have to do this stuff first.

Okay, so those are – the two kinds of economics that Donald Harris is trying to work with are this sort of post-Keynesian stuff, which is derived from like Ricardo and classical economists, and then like Marxian stuff. There's also the third school, which is neoclassical economics, which this is all the economics that you've learned in school, right? This is supply-demand. This is like your production functions. This is your like every time someone starts lecturing you about how the economy works. This is all this stuff. Yeah.

What's very important for our purposes, and this is something that Harris brings up, is the single largest difference between neoclassical economics and whatever came before it isn't that, like, I don't know, everything's about marginal utility or whatever the fuck. It's that in neoclassical economics, there are no classes. They just pretend that classes don't exist. And in much of American politics. Yeah. Germany politics, sadly. Yeah.

Well, and this is also why the American conception of class is so nuts and why everyone's running around in circles trying to measure it by income levels because all the economics they use don't have a thing that establishes what class is. It is one of the jarring differences between the United Kingdom and the United States, how we

we are hyper aware of class and like it's something that like arguably like Britain is obsessed with to detriment of other like other things and you go to America and fucking like if you have a job that pays you occasionally you're middle class and fucking everyone is apparently and like

It becomes a meaningless term, I guess. Yeah, this is very explicitly for political reasons, right? Neoclassical economics is developed as an attack on Marxism. This is its actual origin, and its originators are very explicit about this, right? Now, and this is where we get back to Serapho, because Serapho's work effectively is an attack on neoclassical economics. And Serapho, in 99 pages, literally destroys everything they'd ever produced. But, you know...

The neoclassical solution to this is basically to get everyone who talked about it fired. And this actually worked. Like they did this basically massive social cleansing campaign of like all of the sort of heterodox economists. They got they got them all fired and it worked. And Harris actually weirdly was kind of was like one of the last holdouts into the 90s. But he just like retires in like the late 90s. And that's like basically all of them get ran out.

There's a good – we'll talk about him later. There's another post-Keynesian economist named Frederick Lee, who my friends at Strange Matter really like, who's an anarchist who's in this school. And he has an excruciatingly detailed account of all of these economists getting run out by the neoclassical people. And so neoclassical economists, in some sense, they –

Their strategy is a strategy of capitalism, which is like, obviously we're not right here, but we have money and we have force. And so we're going to defeat your ideas by simply destroying you all by actual physical force. Incredible. Yeah. The cultural revolution in economics.

Yeah, but it's interesting because Don Harris is writing this in 78, and in 78, it's still – the battle hasn't been settled yet, right? There's still kind of like the fight going on between who is going to be in control of economics. And I mean, the answer is that the post-Keynesians lose, but that wasn't necessarily the case at this time. There's also a really weird artifact of this that I want to talk about a little bit, which is that like –

Remember at the beginning of this, I said that that stupid economist person has said that it was neokansians versus post-kansians. Those two groups are not the same thing.

The post-Keynesians are the people who we've been talking about this whole time, right? They're basically Neo-Ricardians, right? They're basing on classical economics. The Neo-Keynesians are just regular Keynesians, basically, but they had to change the math to be shittier and make themselves more right-wing to survive. Should we explain John Maynard Keynes and supply-side economics? Yeah, if you want to give a brief explanation to that, go ahead.

I don't know. I'm fucking... I am a historian. But it's a... It differs from classical economics, I guess, in the idea that the state can make interventions. You could tell me afterwards if I fucked up. The state interventions can be beneficial for the economy and it emerges like in the...

I guess post-Great Depression, like I guess maybe from the New Deal and then post-World War II, right? Like it's very influential in the kind of build-up after World War II, the idea that like the state shouldn't necessarily be like, what's that Adam hand, the invisible hand, the fucking invisible hand maybe isn't killing it and we need instead the hand of the state.

Yeah, and I mean, well, you know, it's worth mentioning that, like, in Adam Smith, the hand of the state is explicitly God. I mean, sorry, the invisible hand of the market is explicitly God. Unfortunately, there was no God to bail out the markets of the 1920s. So Keynes was like, shit. Yeah, and I mean, you know, his, like, in sort of, like, more detail, like, his thing basically is about, like, he's obsessed with sort of, like,

like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by using states betting to like you know like his thing is basically that like capital will misallocate resources you have to use the state to like kick the bastards into line it's like a stable economy and the problem is that but but by the late 70s the keynesians are in crisis because in in in original like keynesian theory it wasn't supposed to be possible for there to be both rising unemployment and rising inflation

But that was happening over the entire world, and so they got kind of annihilated, and this is the thing that the neoliberals used to take power. And it's interesting because the post-Keynesians, they use – and the beginning of this book is a bit of Keynesian stuff, but then he just – they go off and do other more interesting things. But it's very funny because this is still 78. He –

Harris calls himself a neocansian and he calls all of his collaborators neocansians because the real neocansians hadn't like developed yet?

So he's just trying to fucking claim it. He's trying to get his stick in the ground first. Yeah, but that's the thing. At that point, they were the Neo. Their school had as good a claim to it as anyone. It's just that they got kicked out later by the more capitalist ones. It's also a thing that's also important about this for reasons we're going to get to in a second is that

The post-Keynesian tradition also has a lot of very eclectic Marxists in it. We're going to get to Joanne Robinson, who's a very close collaborator of a very good Marxist philosopher. She's actually the person who kicks off the Cambridge Capital controversy. And she's a very kind of esoteric Marxist, kind of in a similar way to what Donald Harris is. But you know what Marxism, in theory, isn't supposed to support?

Would that be the sale of goods and services? Yeah, yeah. It's products and services that support this podcast. We're distributing them using the price mechanism. Yeah, we're back. So, yeah, there's also, you know, there's got a Kalecki who's very important to this too. So there are Marxists kind of on the ground of this and they're trying to sort of, their goal is to try to like explain an economy that has monopolies in it because Marxist theory sort of like assumed that there weren't and that there was like actual competition in markets.

And so part of what – but this comes to the sort of fundamental project of what this book is about, which is that it's about developing a sort of growth model that you can sort of – that accounts – that can be modified to account for all of these things. So the initial thing that they're trying to produce is like a model of what they call a golden age, which is a thing that's from Joanne Robinson. Yeah.

That's basically like, the Golden Age is a theoretical, like, economic configuration you have where you have full employment, you have constant stable economic growth, and the system can reproduce itself. And, you know, I'm going to read a passage from this book so you can understand, partially so you can, because it's about this, right? And partially so you can understand, like, this isn't even a particularly technical paragraph. I know what you're talking about, sir. Hit me.

steady state. Yeah, the golden age is also kind of similar thing to a concept called steady state economies. He's writing about

A particular steady state is based on a given set of conditions and interrelations among them, a given rate of accumulation of capital, given rates of savings from the stream of net income, a given state of technological knowledge or rate of technological innovation, a given rate of increase of the labor force, and a given set of expectations. To ask whether such a situation exists is to ask whether the conditions which define it are mutually compatible or self-consistent.

So this is basically what he's doing, right? You can build these models of... These sort of Keynesian models that like... Post-Keynesian models that... If you set up all the elements right, you can theoretically generate stable growth. But then, obviously, his thing is like, this doesn't work. No economy will ever generate this because there's only really... It's extremely hard to actually get your sort of...

input levels and your technological development whatever the fuck like at the same rate to do this but he's using this as basically the model for as like as like a sort of toy model that you can then sort of warp to fit the the rest of the sort of the rest of the capitalist economy and

But in order to do this, he has to generate a crisis theory. And this is where he just like suddenly all the marks comes back in and he's like, so his, his, the project is trying to do is he's trying to use a post Keynesian model of how economic growth works. And then, and then combine that with Marxist crisis theory to produce basically a model of, you know, what, what kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like crisis states. Now, the other thing that's very weird about this, right. It's like,

He doesn't do normal. Like there's like an entire school of Marxist crisis theory and he doesn't do it. He instead like rewrites a bunch of Marxist equations and then comes up with his own like version of crisis theory of like different kinds of crises. And I like what it's it's so weird. It's so baffling. Maybe he wanted to make him make his mark, you know? Yeah, I guess it's weird because it's like this whole thing is interesting, but it's like I don't think anyone ever followed up on it really. Yeah.

Right. It's just like this dead end of academic theory. Yeah, well, I think it's also, you know, I mean, it's partially like a road not travel thing. It's partially because as as the post Keynesians went on, they got less and less Marxist. So like a lot of the original people are like, so Rafa's not a Marxist, but like a lot of the original, like Johan Robinson is definitely a Marxist, but they get like less and less over time. And so there's less interest in kind of like folding in Marxism to it.

Yeah, so he's losing interest in that. Yeah. But this is where we get to the final question, like, is he a Marxist? And my answer is, even in 68 and 78, which is pretty early, I don't think he's a Marxist. I don't think he's a Marxist in this book. I think he's using Marxist theory, but I don't think he's actually a Marxist, like politically. And the reason I don't think this is because...

So we talk about surplus value, right? So surplus value is supposed to be this value that's extracted, but it's the magnitude of it. One of the things, like how much value you extract, like how many hours of the day you can steal from a worker depends on how many hours of the day you need to pay them for in order for them to survive, right? Yeah.

And one of the crucial things about this is that – and Marx is very explicit about this – that rate of how much you need to pay them to survive is determined by social struggle. Because what a worker, quote-unquote, needs to survive in different places and contexts is different, and you can fight in order for that rate to be higher.

This is an incredibly basic part of Marxism, right? It's the part of Marxism where the function of the capitalist economy is produced by class struggle. This is like... This is Marxism 000. This is the shit they hand you on your fucking tour of Marxism school before you get enrolled in classes. Yeah, so when you get that very... There's very short introductions you can get where it's like,

like a tiny little booklet that explains. So like the sine qua non little, little elements of things. Yeah. And Harris writes pages and pages and pages of stuff about like, about, about like the rate of surplus value extraction. And do you know how many times he mentions class? Yeah.

Fucking once. It's like the 30th thing he mentions after the tactical composition of capital and some other crises. It's all of this shit, and he just doesn't mention it. This is the thing that fundamentally has convinced me that what he's doing isn't substantively Marxism. He's using the tools of Marx's political economy, but...

he's viewing capitalism as purely a sort of top-down thing, right? And not something that's actually... He acknowledges there are classes, but he doesn't see them as actors at all. Yeah, so the struggle between the classes is absent. Yeah, and it's funny because he has this thing that he calls the rate of exploitation, right? Which is this calculation of surplus value extraction. Right.

But he's like, well, obviously, because the rate is going to change over time due to the conditions of struggle. But he's like, nah, screw it. I'm just putting his one number. Like, it's just like, oh, it's like a fixation. Right? Yeah. And he's like, I don't know. I don't know how to interpret it. I'm too lazy to figure that out. And I'm like, what? What are you doing? Like, this is the basis of Marxism. Yeah. I mean, maybe he was just an economics guy, but even still. No, yeah. This is the thing that I've been sort of realizing, because one of the issues that

with seraph is that you know seraph is a genius economist right he is genuinely unbelievably brilliant but he's also a pure economist like here's here is how the start of his most influential book production of commodities on means of commodities starts let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just enough to maintain itself commodities are produced by separate industries and are exchanged for one another etc so

Okay, what is he – he just has like created a mental model. This is the basis of his major economic theory is him just creating a mental model where somehow out of nowhere has appeared a simple society that produces like one commodity, which is like just enough commodities. They're produced by separate industries and they're exchanged. And you know –

If you think about Marx, Marx is also a sociologist. He cares about the actual point of production. He cares about the production process. He cares about the

He cares that there are workers that are doing the production. He cares about the sort of historical conditions that created – these things don't – as Kamala Harris' mom – this is actually very important. The Kamala Harris you didn't just fall out of the coconut tree. You exist in the context of all that came before you. That's Kamala Harris' mom who was, I think, a better Marxist.

than Donald Harris's. And Harris will occasionally, like Donald Harris will occasionally gesture to this. He'll be like, well, yeah, obviously this is all determined by like historical conditions. And then he just has no interest in ever pursuing any of that. He's just like, yeah, this is, we left a later book that he never wrote. And what you get to is, is this, this is like a real issue with sort of post-Keynesianism is that it doesn't have,

Like Marxism, at least in theory, has politics embedded into it. Post-Keynesianism kind of doesn't. Right. It's just a form of economic analysis. I have a lot of friends who I like, I deeply care about who are post-Keynesians, right? They are political, like, you know, they're leftists because they're leftists, right? Like it's not something that's an automatic generation of their theory. And, you know, you can kind of write it that way, right? Like this is the thing about Frederick Lee, who's the sort of the

The guy a lot of my, like, a lot of the train drivers, people sort of, like, learn economics from, like, I mean, indirectly, but, like, through his book. But, you know, Lee is a committed anarchist, and that shows up in his work. But he has to, like, add that in. Just pure, like, pure seraphim by itself, you could theoretically, like, run any form of government you want with it. Right. And I think I've been vindicated in this whole process because Donald Harris writes a couple more books, one of which is a book that is, like, commissioned by the Jamaican government. Okay. Yeah.

He's of Jamaican descent, or he was born himself directly in Jamaica? Yeah, he's Jamaican. He lives in Jamaica. Okay.

I think he currently lives in Jamaica. I'm pretty sure. He came to the US for his graduate, for his academic. Yeah, well, he lived in the US for a long time too because he was at Stanford, but then he kind of left and went back to Jamaica. I'm going to read... So he wrote a book called... This is in 2011. A Growth Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and Medium Term. I'm going to read you the bullet points under a section called Guiding Principles. Okay.

Okay. Unleash entrepreneurial dynamism by unlocking latent wealth tied up in idle assets. Infrastructure investments as catalyzing for job creation through strengthening resiliency of the built-in natural environment. Build an innovative and competitive modern economy of big and small firms by strengthening business networks and removing supply-side constraints.

modernize and improve the efficiency of government social inclusion through community renewal expanded self-agency and equity and proactive partnership between government and private sector there's also a giant thing in this about crime so what has happened is that these two people have circled back around and they now have the same politics which is like tough on crime austerity uh

public private partnership fucking infrastructure spending yeah yeah they've circled back around it's funny because the the person writing the economist was like oh yeah they actually have circled back around because they're both they're both concerned about wealth inequality and this book is not concerned about wealth inequality at all like that's not that's not what it's about it's about like capital accumulation and you know it's sort of about distribution of surplus but it's it doesn't

It's concerned with the distribution of surplus is that Serafin economics, like doesn't have a fixed ratio, like way for it to be distributed. It can be distributed in an enormous number of ways. And the trick is finding out how it's actually done. Right. Yeah. There's a point in here. There's a point in this book too, that like is the thing that like really first struck me about it, where he's talking about how he's talking about surplus value. And he's talking about how this is an objective measure of exploitation, but,

But then he goes and he says, contrary to vulgar readings, this does not actually indicate who deserves. It's not a moral argument about who should have the value that's been stolen. Yeah.

And this, this right here, this, this is the road, this is the road that is going to lead this man from a kind of interesting book about, like, the dynamics of economic growth and, like, building economic models and, like, using Marxian theory to sort of make it work to straight up, I'm writing investment documents for the Jamaican government. Yeah, like, he seemed like it's very, um...

In a way, there are lots of Ed Miliband's dabbers and Marxists, but it reminds me a lot of the New Labour thing in the UK, which grew out of a party which genuinely had a commitment to socialism and became this sort of very neoliberal, really peak neoliberal kind of... Yeah, with some Keynesian influence, I guess, but certainly nothing that one would call communist or even really socialist.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, it's sad because it's like, because the interesting thing about... That was 2012 he wrote the growth inducement strategy. Fuck me. Okay, he's still in the game. Yeah, but he's still in the game in the sense that he's doing like... This is, you know, reading that, it very much felt like I was reading like a modern Chinese five-year plan. Yeah.

Except with like less weird slogans. Yeah, I mean, it reads like a fucking, like a new labor policy document, like a think tank. It's a lot of like analyst guy, think tank guy kind of talk, right? Like,

Which was extremely, like, it looks like he left Stanford in the late 90s, which is when this shit was fucking everywhere, right? Like, what's he called? Joseph Stiglitz. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this was the economic fucking theory of the day. You know, this was very popular then. But it is absolutely just like, this is not like Black Panther inflected Marxism. This is not.

What is being characterized as by The Economist here? Yeah, no. This is something genuinely very sad because...

It doesn't have to go that we know that it's possible to like do this kind of economics and not be like this because Frederick Lee was an IWW member until the day he died. Like he's he's like out there at Occupy give it like like in the first days of like not first. He's out there like there are videos of him giving speeches to crowds at Occupy right like you don't have to do this but he did and this is also like.

you know i think that this kind of political trajectory is kind of also you you can see in it like how his child even though he wasn't in her life much is going to end up as the person she is and i think that's my that's my final conclusion from this is he's not a marxist and him and his child are libs yeah these are the things that tenure does to a motherfucker they uh

you start to hang out with a bunch of other rich people who have 10 years and you begin to identify with them and uh yeah strips you away from who you were so this has been it could happen here uh don't become a a doddering capitalist bastard in your old age yeah or your young age don't do that with you yeah

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Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Shereen, and today is the first part of a two-part series where I'm going to give you all a general Palestine update and also talk about how Joe Biden's legacy that will endure long after the end of his shitty presidency and his life is first and foremost the genocide in Gaza.

On Sunday, July 21st, Biden said that he was ending his presidential reelection campaign after weeks of pressure from party officials, donors, Democratic Congress members, voters, and pro-Palestinian organizers and advocacy groups.

This move comes months after organizers led a nationwide campaign to vote uncommitted during Democratic primary elections to push Biden to end his unconditional support for Israel during its genocide in Gaza or risk losing their vote in the general election. In several states, uncommitted or no preference received far more votes than other candidates challenging Biden.

And so, Biden dropped out. Surprise. Ever since his announcement to withdraw, Democratic politicians and commentators in the U.S. have come out to heap praise and laud the president's character and draw attention to all his contributions over the years. None of that matters to me, though, and it shouldn't matter to you. Because for me and many others, Biden will be remembered for nothing else than his support for Israeli crimes. But let's hear from our ridiculous public servants, shall we?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, Mm-hmm.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the president, quote, one of the most accomplished and consequential leaders in American history. Representative Maxine Waters called Biden a kind and decent man. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised his vision, values and leadership.

She said in a statement, his legacy of vision, values, and leadership make him one of the most consequential presidents in American history. She also called Biden, quote, a patriotic American who has always put our country first. I did find it a little funny that multiple people described Biden as consequential because out of all the words you can choose to describe him, that one doesn't necessarily scream positive to me. So that did amuse me quite a bit.

Former President Barack Obama issued a statement acknowledging the difficulty of the decision that Biden faced. Quote, for him to look at the political landscape and decide that he should pass the torch to a new nominee is surely one of the toughest in his life.

but I know he wouldn't make this decision unless he believed it was right for America. It's a testament to Joe Biden's love of country and historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders will do well to follow." Yada yada yada. Democratic governors also lauded Biden. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called him a great public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes to defeat Donald Trump.

California Governor Gavin Newsom thanked Biden, calling him a, quote, extraordinary, history-making president. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Biden's decision is, quote, in the best interest of our country and our party. Several Democrats who had publicly called on Biden to step aside also issued statements praising the president's decision, quote,

Representative Jerry Nadler said, Joe's announcement today reflects what we've known all along. He is an American patriot who is willing to put America's interests over his own. Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio thanked Biden for his years of committed service.

And his son, Hunter Biden, issued a statement lauding his father as a selfless leader, writing, he is unique in public life today, in that there is no distance between Joe Biden the man and Joe Biden the public servant of the last 54 years. Well, yikes! I also wanted to mention and end with how his wife, the First Lady Jill Biden, responded, which was with a hearts emoji in response to his announcement on X.

But while political leaders and I guess his family showered Biden with compliments, bombs continued to rain down on Gaza, killing dozens to add on to the nearly 40,000 Palestinians killed and sparking another wave of mass displacement and chanyouness. For many Palestinian rights advocates, the carnage and abuses in Gaza will define Biden's place in history books, especially as the U.S. remains steadfast in its support of Israel's onslaught on the Palestinian land.

Nadine Keswani, an organizer with the Palestine Advocacy Group Within Our Lifetime, said, Nine months of saying Genocide Joe has got to go, he finally got the message, but not before committing a heinous genocide against the Palestinian people.

Abed Ayyub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the ADC, said, "...he'll be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured, and displaced in Gaza. There is no way around it. Genocide Joe is what he's going to be remembered as." And before continuing to shit on Biden, because trust me, I would love to do that, let's talk about what is currently happening in Gaza.

Since Israel's genocide in Gaza started on October 7th, well, really, it escalated starting October 7th because the genocide of the Palestinian people has been ongoing since Israel's inception in 1948. But since October 7th and well before that, Biden has offered the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unconditional military and diplomatic support.

Only once did Biden withhold a shipment of bombs to Israel over humanitarian concerns, and even then, he released part of that cargo a couple months later, amid pressure from Netanyahu. Israel's genocide, meanwhile, has killed at least 39,000 Palestinians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and fueled a man-made famine, and also has destroyed nearly all of the territory.

United Nations experts and other observers have outright called what is happening in Gaza as a textbook case of genocide. And the cumulative effects of Israel's genocide could mean that the true death toll is much, much more. According to a study recently published in the journal Lancet, the death toll could reach more than 186,000 people.

The study pointed out that the death toll is likely higher because the official death toll does not take into account the thousands of dead buried under rubble and indirect deaths due to destruction of health facilities, food distribution systems, and other public infrastructure.

Conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, the study said. And even if the Gaza genocide ends immediately, it will continue to cause many indirect deaths in the coming months and years through things like disease.

The study said the death toll is expected to be far larger given that much of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed. There are shortages of food, water, shelter, medicine. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, has also seen its funding cut.

Israel's relentless bombing has collapsed Gaza's health care infrastructure, and the destruction of Gaza's water infrastructure in particular is more than just a little significant. One reason for this is that Israel just reintroduced polio to Palestinians, but of course, Israel is only providing vaccinations to the Israeli army. And this is according to Haaretz.

Polio is a fecal-oral disease, and infections can be linked to contaminated and poor sewage systems, and it can lead to paralysis. On June 23, 2024, samples were collected from two environmental surveillance sites in Khan Yunis and Deir el-Balakh.

Polio variant 2 was found in six wastewater samples. According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative, currently only 16 of the 36 hospitals are partially functional and 45 out of 105 primary health care facilities are operational.

The impact on health systems, insecurity, inaccessibility, population displacement, and the shortages of medical supplies, coupled with poor quality of water and weakened sanitation, have contributed to routine immunization rates and an increased risk of many vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.

The World Health Organization considers there to be a high risk of spread of polio within Gaza and internationally, particularly given the impact that the current genocide continues to have on public health services. And even if vaccines were able to be given to Palestinians in Gaza, the continued bombing and a decimated healthcare system, coupled with the intentional devastation of water and sanitation infrastructure, would render the vaccines close to useless.

Without an immediate ceasefire, the threat from polio being reintroduced in Gaza will disproportionately affect Palestinian babies and eventually Israeli babies as well.

In November 2023, the World Health Organization warned Israel of diseases spreading due to Israel's indiscriminate bombing and attack on healthcare infrastructure. And then on July 22nd, 2024, three days after the news came out about polio being reintroduced to Gaza by Israel, the Israeli parliament voted to declare UNRWA a terrorist organization. And UNRWA is a key partner in vaccine campaign distribution.

With this, and with many other things, Israel has shown its genocidal intent, calculating the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza. Because if there is any war on Gaza, it's an epidemiological war, weaponizing health and medicine and the incidence, distribution, and control of disease. Back to the Lancet study. It said, quote,

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from 3 to 15 times the number of direct deaths. And after they applied a conservative estimate of 4 indirect deaths per 1 direct death,

They said it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the Gaza quote-unquote war. Such a number would represent almost 8% of Gaza's pre-war population of 2.3 million people, half of which, may I remind you, are children.

The Lancet study also noted that Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and the World Health Organization all agree that claims of data fabrication leveled against Palestinian authorities in Gaza, over its death toll in particular, are implausible.

It pointed out that the toll is likely much higher because the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza has made it extremely difficult to maintain a count that is not lower than the actual death toll. It said, quote, "...documenting the true scale is crucial for ensuring historical accountability and acknowledging the full cost of the war. It is also a legal requirement."

The study pointed out that the International Court of Justice said in interim rulings in January in a genocide case brought against Israel that it needs to, quote, take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts under the Genocide Convention. Before we continue on, let's take our first break and we'll be right back. And we're back.

I was talking about the International Court of Justice earlier. And speaking of the International Court of Justice, on July 19th, 2024, the ICJ said Israel's presence in the Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian territory amount to annexation. It ruled that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and should come to an end as, quote, rapidly as possible.

The judges pointed to a wide list of policies, including the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the use of the area's natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands, and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated international law.

As of July 2024, and since October, Israel has killed 143 Palestinian children in the West Bank, on Palestinian land that is occupied by Israel. Because since Israel began committing genocide in Gaza over nine months ago, it has been attacking and killing hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank, including these 143 children.

UNICEF reported that Israel has killed an average of one Palestinian child every two days in the West Bank. UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said, "...we are seeing frequent allegations of Palestinian children being detained on their way home from school or shot while walking on the streets."

This report by UNICEF came out just days after the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and that its occupation of the West Bank is illegal and must end. The court went on to say that Israel has no right to sovereignty in any of the territories and it is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force as well as impeding Palestinians' right to self-determination.

It said that other nations were obliged not to quote "render aid or assistance in maintaining Israel's presence in the territory." It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and existing settlements must be removed.

And this is all according to a summary of the more than 80-page opinion read out by the court president, Nawaf Saddam. The court said, "...Israel's abuse of its status as the occupying power renders its presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful. Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have established and are being maintained in violation of international law."

Mind you, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have always been illegal under international law. But that has never stopped Israel from continuing to expand its illegal settlements.

Since 1967, when the borders of what is currently seen as Occupied Palestine, which are the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, were established, Israel has since built settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and steadily expanded on them. It also had settlements in Gaza before a 2005 withdrawal. And I said what is currently seen as Occupied Palestine because, in reality, the whole of Israel is Occupied Palestine.

But as far as the UN and the majority of the international community goes, they consider the Palestinian territory as defined in 1967 as Israeli-occupied. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Baniki told reporters in The Hague that the ruling signaled a, quote, "...watershed moment for Palestine, for justice, and for international law."

He said, "...the ICJ fulfilled its legal and moral duties with this historic ruling. All states must now uphold their clear obligations. No aid, no assistance, no complicity, no money, no arms, no trade, no nothing. No actions of any kind to support Israel's illegal occupation."

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said the ruling was, quote, a significant step in the direction of ending the occupation and attaining the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to self-determination, statehood, and the right of return. The right to return, for those who don't know, is a demand that Palestinians who were forced from their homes in the 1948 Nekba as well as the 1967 Nexa be allowed to return to them.

Mansour said his team would study the entire opinion and dissect every sentence. We will consult with an army of friends at the UN and in all corners of the globe. We will produce a masterpiece of a resolution at the UN General Assembly. And then Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the opinion as fundamentally wrong and one-sided.

Netanyahu's office issued a statement in which it called the ruling a decision of lies that distorted the truth and asserted that the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land. Jeffrey Nice, a human rights barrister, told Al Jazeera that it will be hard for world leaders to completely disregard the ICJ ruling even though it is non-binding. This is one part of the legal system saying enough is enough, he said.

He also said it would be difficult for the interested, informed, concerned public not to say, it's time Israel put its house in order. Al Jazeera's senior political analyst Marwan Bishara said, "...there is a lot of room for hope that this ruling will support a movement, an international movement, across the board in the West and elsewhere in the world in favor of more sanctions, more pressure on Western governments to put more pressure on Israel."

In a separate case brought by South Africa, the ICJ is also considering allegations that Israel is committing genocide in its war on Gaza. And yes, a preliminary ruling has been made in that case, with the court ordering Israel to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to increase its provisions of humanitarian aid. And of course, Israel has done nothing to do this.

In May, the ICJ had also ordered Israel to halt its offensive on Rafah, the border city in southern Gaza, citing immense risk to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians taking shelter there. But Israel has continued its attacks on Gaza, including Rafah, in defiance of the UN court.

So it's clear Israel doesn't give a shit about international law, but it's also clear that no one is doing anything to actually stop them from continuing their genocide on the Palestinian people. Before I forget, let's take our second break here and we'll be right back.

Let's go back to Abed Ayyub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who said Biden will be remembered for the hundreds of thousands killed, injured, and displaced in Gaza, that Genocide Joe is what he's going to be remembered as. He told Al Jazeera that despite Biden's domestic achievements, the president will rank among the worst in U.S. history due to his unconditional support for Israel.

The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the USCPR, echoed that comment, saying, "...nothing will erase the fact that Biden's legacy is, and always will be, genocide." And the U.S. president has been an annoyingly loyal supporter of Israel throughout his too-many-decades-too-long political career. Biden frequently calls himself a Zionist proudly and argues that Jews across the world would not be safe without Israel.

He infamously said in June 1986, over 37 years ago when Biden was just a young chap of 43, that, quote, "...where they're not in Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel."

I want to just throw it out there that even in this quote, Israel exists to protect America's interest in the region, not to protect the Jewish population, because it never has done that in the first place. But I digress. Biden put his worldview into policy during his presidency as he pushed on with former President Trump's pro-Israel doctrine.

Biden kept the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, and he refused to reverse the Trump-era decision to recognize Israel's claims to the occupied Golan Heights in Syria.

He also aggressively pursued formal ties between Israel and Arab states, a goal that Trump advanced with the 2020 Abraham Accords. That push for normalization, however, came without progress toward the recognition of an independent Palestinian state or the dismantling of the systemic anti-Palestinian discrimination that has existed since the jump, aka apartheid.

And then the outbreak for the genocide in Gaza further underscored Biden's pro-Israel policies. And then mere weeks after October 7th, Biden traveled to Israel and publicly embraced Netanyahu in what many critics described as a bear hug. And that sign of friendliness was widely understood to be an endorsement of Netanyahu's response in Gaza.

Even early in the conflict, human rights groups accused Israel of horrific violations rising to the level of genocide, a push to destroy the Palestinian people. And within the first week alone, the Israeli military said it had unleashed 20,000 strikes across Gaza, a strip of land, may I remind you, that is roughly the size of Las Vegas.

According to AP News in January 2024, the Israeli military campaign in Gaza now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history. In just over two months, researchers said that the offensive caused more destruction than the raising of Syria's Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine's Mariupol, or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.

Israel has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against ISIS. An analysis was done of data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite by Corey Schur of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Vanderhoek of Oregon State University, both of whom are experts in mapping damage during wartime. Corey Schur said, "'Gaza is now a different color from space. It's a different texture.'"

And he has worked with van der Hoek to map destruction across several war zones, from Aleppo to Mariupol. They say the visible damage in Gaza is worse than they have found in both places. But how does the destruction of Gaza stack up historically? By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced the Allied bombings of Germany during World War II.

According to Robert Pape, a US military historian, between 1942 and 1945, the Allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas. Pape said that this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to the 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles.

Pape said,

The U.S.-led coalition's 2017 assault to expel the Islamic State group from the Iraqi city of Mosul was considered at the time one of the most intense attacks on a city in generations. That nine-month battle killed around 10,000 civilians, a third of them from coalition bombardment, according to an Associated Press investigation at the time.

During the 2014-2017 campaign to beat ISIS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Air Wars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. By comparison, the Israeli military said itself that in a single week in January, it conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.

Again, compare that to the 15,000 in the three years the U.S. was fighting ISIS. Three years compared to one week. One week had more strikes in Gaza than three years in Iraq.

To further put it in perspective about how alarming this is from the jump, that what is happening is not fucking normal warfare and instead it is genocide, on October 12th, 2023, merely days after October 7th, the Israeli Air Force had dropped about 6,000 bombs throughout the Gaza Strip.

At the time, military experts stated that the number of strikes carried out by the IDF since the outbreak of hostilities was, quote, striking, and it said it was greater a number than the U.S. military used in the month of the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Mark Juralsko, a Dutch military advisor and former UN war crimes investigator in Libya, said, In less than a week, Israel dropped the number of bombs that the U.S. drops in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller and denser area, where the margin of error increases. During the most intense year of the American fighting in Afghanistan, a little more than 7,423 bombs were dropped.

During the entire war in Libya, NATO reported dropping more than 7,600 bombs and missiles from aircraft. And not even a month after October 7th, on November 2nd, 2023, Euromed Human Rights Monitor said in a press release that Israel had dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.

The press release said that due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. This means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped in Hiroshima, noting that the area of the Japanese city is 900 square kilometers, while the area of Gaza does not even exceed 360 square kilometers.

The rights group's statement underlined that Israel uses bombs with huge destructive power, some of which range from 150 to 1,000 kilograms, and they cited a statement at the time, in November, by Israeli War Minister Yoav Galant, that declared that more than 10,000 bombs had been dropped on Gaza City alone.

And then Israel's use of internationally banned weapons in its attacks on the Gaza Strip has been documented, said Euromed Monitor, especially the use of cluster and phosphorus bombs, which are waxy toxic substances that react quickly to oxygen and cause severe second and third degree burns.

The EuroMed monitor team also documented injuries among Gazans due to Israeli airstrikes that are similar to those caused by the aforementioned cluster bombs. These small, high-explosive bombs cause penetrating shrapnel wounds and explosions inside the body, leaving victims with severe burns that lead to skin melting off and sometimes to death.

Fragments from these bombs cause unusual swelling and poisoning of the body, plus internal injuries from transparent fragments that do not even appear in x-rays. Euromed Monitor said Israel's use of highly explosive bombs in densely populated areas poses the single greatest threat to civilians in modern armed conflicts, and explains the complete leveling of residential neighborhoods in Gaza and the overall severity of the widespread devastation there.

According to EuroMedMonitor, which is a Geneva-based human rights organization, the Israeli army has admitted to bombing over 12,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, with a record tally of bombs exceeding 10 kilograms of explosives per individual.

It highlighted that the weight of the nuclear bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in August of 1945 was estimated to be about 15,000 tons of explosives.

The rights organization further stressed that Israel's destructive and arbitrary attacks are in violation of international humanitarian law, which stipulates that the protection of civilians is obligatory in all cases and under any circumstances, and that killing civilians is considered a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts, and may amount to a crime against humanity.

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1949 Geneva Convention both regulates fundamental human rights in times of war to prevent lethal health effects from weapons that are prohibited by international law, some of which because they have the potential to cause quote-unquote genocide.

According to Article 25 of the Hague regulations relating to the laws and customs of land warfare, quote, the attack or bombardment by whatever means of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited. So think of all of that as you listen to this next bit. Biden has since authorized continuous arms transfers and more than $14 billion in additional aid to sustain Israel's Gaza offensive.

Moreover, Biden's administration has vetoed three U.N. Security Council proposals that would have called for a ceasefire.

Hatem Abudeya, the chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said Biden will be remembered, above all, for enabling Israel's crimes against humanity. Quote, He could have turned the tap of money and weapons off in October, but he allowed this genocide to happen. He is complicit, and that's what will be written on his tombstone.

And with that, we'll be continuing this discussion in the next episode, where we will talk about the relationship between Biden and Palestinians. And we'll also cover Netanyahu's deranged speech that he gave in Congress last week. Until then, Free Palestine.

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Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. My name is Shireen, still. And today is part two of our two-part series about a Palestine update as well as a testament as to why Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. In the last episode, we talked about the amount of weapons that Biden has been sending to Israel and what this destruction has caused, as well as the reactions to his withdrawal from his campaign.

So I want to get into a brief history of Biden's history in politics, as well as what his relationship has been like with Palestinians in general. So let's start in 1970. Following his entry into politics in 1970, Biden quickly rose from local to national prominence, mounting a successful dark horse campaign to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate in 1972.

After nearly four decades in Congress, he became vice president under Barack Obama, and in 2021, he won the presidency himself. So the current president does not hail from a political dynasty, and he is not an exceptional orator. His success in politics is often credited to his interpersonal skills and his ability to project empathy. That sense of compassion, however, has never extended to Palestinians.

After Biden's announcement of withdrawing from the race, Jewish Voice for Peace Action said in a statement, "...for nine and a half months, President Biden has funded and armed the brutal Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, making the U.S. directly complicit in the killing of at least 39,000 people, including over 15,000 children."

Americans have watched in horror and outrage as Biden sent to the Israeli government the weapons it used to wipe out entire generations of Palestinian families, to destroy hospitals, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, universities, refugee camps, homes, and Gaza's entire healthcare system, and electricity and water grids.

And beyond policy, even Biden's rhetoric at times seemed dismissive of Israeli atrocities and Palestinian suffering. Last October, he said, I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocents have been killed. And it's the price of waging a war. It's terrible. Fucking terrible. But that stance has clearly caused Biden issues, both domestically and abroad.

Even before Biden delivered a disastrous debate performance on June 27th, he had started to trail Trump in public opinion polls. Parts of his Democratic base, including young people, progressives, Arabs, and Muslims, voiced for months their frustration and anger over Biden's support for Israel.

Groups like the US CPR, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, argued that Biden's age and debate performance were only one factor in the pressure that forced him from the presidential race. I'm going to read their statement because it's quite good. Quote, nothing will erase the fact that Biden's legacy is and always will be genocide.

It was not Biden's failed debate that showed he is unfit to lead. It was the tens of thousands of bombs he sent to kill Palestinian families. It was his callous, dystopian disregard for Palestinian lives as he ate an ice cream cone while speaking of a potential ceasefire that he took no action to make Israel agree to.

It was his condemnation of thousands of student protesters on college campuses demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Other commentators likewise argued that Biden failed to show enough concern for the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. Aaron David Miller, a veteran former U.S. official, described the situation bluntly in an interview with The New Yorker in April.

Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn't. Nor does he convey it. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

Additionally, Biden's withdrawal from the race followed a particularly deadly month of violence in Gaza. Two Israeli airstrikes killed more than 60 people the week leading up to his withdrawal, including in Israeli-designated quote-unquote safe zones and at a UN school where families were sheltering.

And then the ICJ, the UN's top court, ruled only a few days before his withdrawal that Israel must end its illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, removing settlers from the Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians.

The court also found that Palestinians under occupation suffer, quote, systemic discrimination based on race, religion, or ethnic origin. And it urged other states to stop supporting Israel in maintaining the current situation, which is also called apartheid. US CPR Action Executive Director Ahmed Abuznid said in the group's statement, quote,

The millions of people who have mobilized in the streets and the voting booth demanding a permanent ceasefire and an end to military funding to Israel have been clear. There is no going back to the status quo.

It remains unclear how differently the next Democratic nominee might approach Israel. Harris, the most likely nominee as of now, obviously, has repeatedly asserted Israel's right to defend itself while expressing sympathy for Palestinians when calling for at least a six-week ceasefire in March, which is a little hypocritical. But she was also part of the Biden administration that sent all those bombs to Israel. She does not get a pass. She does not get to be distanced from that.

And on the other side of things, Trump called Biden, quote, a very bad Palestinian during the first presidential debate on June 27th for not helping Israel, quote, finish the job in Gaza. During Trump's presidency, he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he recognized Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Syrian region of the Golan Heights, where Netanyahu named a Jewish-only settlement after Trump.

But as the genocide in Gaza continues, organizers are quick to point out the Democratic Party's complicity as a whole. Hutaifa Ahmed, spokesperson for the abandoned Biden campaign, said, We don't think this is solely a Joe Biden problem. This is an institutional problem. In an online statement, the group invited Harris to meet with its organizers.

The abandoned Biden campaign was one of the first coalitions to call for Democrats to replace Biden. We were mocked, denigrated, spoken down to, he said. But organizers stood firm in their principles as they gained momentum. And they will continue to do so as the, quote, disastrous and criminal approach to Gaza continues under the Biden foreign policy with officials like Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Brett McGurk.

Ahmed said abandon Biden means abandoning this legacy and the decisions Biden made surrounding Israel. Given the Democratic Party's lionizing the president since his exit from the race, it's, quote, becoming increasingly clear we may have to extend this to whoever becomes the next nominee. He indicated that they will continue to call on voters not to support any candidate who maintains Biden's blanket support for Israel.

The abandoned Biden group released a statement referencing the June debate, during which Biden at times was non-coherent, to say the least. It was largely his performance that triggered a wave of calls, including from prominent Democratic Congress members, for Biden to step aside. The statement read,

It is clear that the DNC machinery pressured Joe Biden to step down only after losing confidence in his ability to lead due to his cognitive decline. This action came not when he was enthusiastically supporting and sponsoring the genocide in Gaza, but when his declining capabilities could no longer be concealed.

Biden's departure from the race comes ahead of the party's upcoming national convention, which is slated for August 19th through the 22nd in Chicago. And now, with just under three months before the general election, Harris, whom the Clintons and other Democratic leaders have also endorsed, will be the first to be elected.

will need to gain the support of the majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to win the party's nomination. But for many voters pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide, the path forward remains the same. A coalition of more than 125 anti-oppression organizations said in a statement that it is still preparing to gather tens of thousands to march on the Democratic National Convention on August 19th.

The Coalition to March on the DNC said, "...when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, there is no difference between Biden, Harris, or any of the likely candidates for the nomination. They are all complicit. This protest is about more than the name at the top of a ballot. It is about stopping the most horrific crime against humanity that we have seen this century."

The statement said that the organizations that joined the coalition, quote, "...recognize the links between the Palestinian liberation struggle and their own struggles, involving issues like police accountability, immigration, labor, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA plus rights."

They also recognize that Democratic Party higher-ups often neglect their communities in favor of serving the rich and powerful. "Those responsible for the genocide, and not just Biden, are often obstacles to progress in the same movements they pay lip service to in order to boost their campaigns."

US CPR action said,

Regardless of who the Democratic presidential nominee and candidate-elect is, the next steps are clear. The group called on all members of Congress to disrupt or protest Netanyahu's planned address to Congress, which happened last week, and they urged lawmakers to pass an arms embargo against Israel. The group said, quote, As Israel kills a Palestinian every four minutes and escalates regional war, justice cannot wait another day.

Let's take a break right here before we jump into the speech that Netanyahu gave last week. So be right back. And we're back. So I had written the bulk of both of these episodes before Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his deranged speech at Congress last week. But of course, I had to mention it because it was worse than I ever imagined, actually.

This speech was Netanyahu's fourth appearance before the legislative body of Congress, and several high-profile Democrats were noticeably absent, in apparent protest to Israel's war on Gaza and the humanitarian crisis that it sparked. Rashida Tlaib, though, the representative for Michigan's 12th congressional district, was present. She is, may I remind you, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

She was there, sitting during Netanyahu's speech, wearing a kofiye and holding a sign that read, War criminal on one side and guilty of genocide on the other side. And she was holding the sign up throughout his speech. July 24th, the day of Netanyahu's speech, also happened to be her birthday.

So if my blood was boiling thousands of miles away watching on my little computer screen, I can only imagine how she felt sitting in that room as everyone cheered and applauded and stood up for this war criminal who was spewing lie after lie in the entirety of his speech as our tax dollars are supplying him with more weapons to kill innocent people.

The almost certain Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, was also not present, though she would ordinarily preside over such a speech in Congress as vice president. Her campaign cited scheduling conference—I guess she gave a speech in Indianapolis earlier that day—

I also just wanted to highlight quickly the hypocrisy of the vast majority of Democrats right now, especially the ones that criticized the speech that Netanyahu gave at Congress or said that he should have given a speech at all. How much stronger would it have been if they sat by Rashida in that room instead of leaving the only Palestinian member of Congress sitting by herself on her fucking birthday listening to the person that has genocided her people?

It would have been such an amazing demonstration of support and strength to have her colleagues sitting with her, but instead she was alone. Netanyahu gave this speech seeking to rally support for continuing Israel's military campaign, aka genocide, in Gaza. He was greeted by anti-war protesters outside the capital, understandably so.

The day before the speech, over 500 Jewish people flooded the Capitol building, demanding arms embargo to Israel and demanding a ceasefire. They shouted things like, let Gaza live, free Palestine, not in our name, and stop genocide. And then during the Enyahu speech, he blasted these protesters from his podium, calling them Iran's useful idiots, and calling pro-Palestinian protesters broadly as Hamas supporters.

And as Netanyahu praised Israeli military members as lions of Judah, Capitol Police was using pepper spray against pro-Palestinian protesters just outside the doors. The irony of this speaks for itself. And we all know by now, I hope, that our police trains with the Israeli military.

Adam Ebusoleh, an Arab-American activist from Dearborn, Michigan, said it is a shame that Netanyahu was invited to speak to Congress. It's a disgrace that members from both parties have invited him to speak here. It's a disgrace that Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, will meet with him.

Abu Saleh told Al Jazeera this at an anti-Nainyahu protest that was near the capital. He said, In his speech, Nainyahu praised the U.S. Congress as a citadel of democracy and described the genocide in Gaza as a clash between barbarism and civilization. He said and repeated lie after lie, and people stood up and applauded after practically every sentence.

He repeated proven, untrue Hasbro propaganda lies, repeating false claims about October 7th about how men were beheaded and babies were burned alive. Investigations, including those done by Israel, have found that little evidence has emerged to substantiate some of the most gruesome stories pushed by Israeli leaders like Netanyahu.

And these lies were a part of a methodology that was designed to bolster a false notion of Palestinians being an inherently subhuman people. I'm going to play this clip from Mehdi Hassan about the most egregious lie, in my opinion, that was spread around for months and is still being spread around today, as we see from Netanyahu's speech. But it's about the 40 beheaded babies. 40 beheaded babies.

How can we forget the most emotive and most offensive lie of this entire conflict? A lie that went viral and was repeated by the President of the United States, who falsely said he saw pictures of beheaded babies even though there weren't any.

nor were their babies burned in ovens. As Israeli newspaper Haaretz proved in their investigation, they were all lies. In fact, according to data released by Israel's Social Security Agency, tragically, there was one baby killed on October the 7th, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, may her memory be a blessing. But in the interests of facts, she was not beheaded. Now, one baby killed is one baby too many, a tragedy, a crime. But 40 beheaded babies is just a cynical, reckless, repulsive lie that was then used to justify the killing of hundreds of Palestinian babies.

Al Jazeera released a documentary called October 7th that goes into the potential source of a lot of these lies. It's a man named Yossi Lindau, who is an ultra-Orthodox first responder who operates throughout Israel and occasionally in South Florida. He was interviewed in this documentary, and he is the original source of the beheaded baby's lie. And he was a source of what formed the basis of the New York Times' now-debunked investigation into the alleged systematic sexual abuse perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th.

In these interviews, Lindau comes off as almost like a used car salesman. One of his claims is that he found a pregnant woman whose, quote, stomach was butchered open and whose baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed. And he insists to the reporter that if you want to see their picture, I have a picture of it.

And then the reporter apologizes when looking at this photo because they can't see a baby there. And then Landau stammers and tries to cover his tracks because the photo, as it turns out, depicts what the narrator of this documentary describes as a, quote, unidentifiable piece of charred flesh, which, as it happens, is not so unlike many of the bodies that fill Landau's accounts of unspeakable depravity.

And as the documentary further notes, the IDF has repeatedly debunked those stories on the basis of basic forensic evidence, most notably when it revised its total death count by 200 because it realized that some of the dead bodies were Palestinian. And even though the IDF lies a lot, it does concede eventually, with enough pressure, the truth.

By November, the IDF conceded that it had actually deployed Apache helicopters and tanks to the Nova Music Festival that may have killed some of the Nova Festival concert goers in accordance to something that is called the Hannibal Directive, which I will also mention in a bit. But it's a doctrine named for a general who poisoned himself rather than be questioned by his Roman captors.

And in a similar vein, this directive is basically when the Israeli army is ordered to fire upon its own troops to prevent the enemy from taking those troops hostage.

Around noon on October 7th, according to Israeli newspapers that were cited in this documentary, the IDF may have invoked a version of the Hannibal Directive and expanded it to include Israeli citizens, and in accordance to this, began to blindly open fire with rockets and helicopter gunships on any person or vehicle seen moving across the border to Gaza.

In particular, the documentary visits Kibbutz B'Eri, where a munitions expert demonstrates very strong evidence that some of the houses had been hit with IDF tank fire. It was Israeli troops, not Hamas murderers, according to one resident, who killed 12 longtime residents there. But let's go back to Netanyahu's speech.

He also lied about civilian casualties and Israel's deliberate starving of Gaza. He said in his speech, This is not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilization. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.

Of course, he didn't mention the most damning part of October 7th, the Hannibal Directive. Earlier this month, Haaretz reported that the IDF ordered the Hannibal Directive on October 7th to prevent Hamas from taking soldiers captive. It said there was a crazy hysteria and decisions started to be made without verified information.

documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal Operational Order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity. And it was employed at three army facilities that were infiltrated by Hamas. And this potentially endangered civilians as well, which we know Israel has killed. We know Israel killed some of its own citizens on October 7th. And now we know that it killed some of its own soldiers.

And of course, these deaths are lumped into this overall death toll that keeps being repeated as being due to only Hamas' attack. I highly recommend reading the Haaretz report in full. It is damning and important, especially as you see these leaders spouting lies. And then the Enyahu praise the families of captives being held in Gaza. And these families are a group that has consistently expressed frustration with the Enyahu back in Israel.

But they of course figure prominently in his messaging overseas. Because he uses them for his own benefit, believing this whole genocide, or a war if you want to call it that, was ever about the hostages is disingenuous at best at this point.

Several reporters who cover Israel reported that relatives of captives were arrested for wearing shirts calling for a deal that would bring the remaining captives home, an effort that critics of Netanyahu have accused him of working to sabotage. So you have his own people criticizing him and accusing him of lying. I'm getting heated. Okay, let's take our second break and we'll be right back. And we're back.

So Republican House Leader Mike Johnson had previously warned that anyone who attempted to disrupt Netanyahu's speech could face arrest. Jacob Mageed, a correspondent with the Times of Israel, reported that several relatives of captives held in Gaza walked out of Netanyahu's speech.

In a social media post, he said, "...several relatives of the hostages being held in Gaza have walked out of the Enyahu's address to Congress. The PM goes on to pledge not to rest until the hostages are home, leading the vast majority in the room to stand and applaud, save for roughly a dozen or so hostage families."

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid bashed Netanyahu's speech in a social media post, saying that the Israeli leader went through his speech without endorsing a deal to bring the remaining captives home. On X, he called the speech a disgrace. And he used an exclamation point for emphasis. Disgrace! That's how it read.

Netanyahu also said that a regional alliance must be forged to counter the influence of Iran, and he thanked Biden for his efforts to that effect and for calling for an extension of the so-called Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords were signed on September 15, 2020, during Trump's presidency, and it's something that Trump, of course, often takes credit for. The Accords, in brief, normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, as well as Bahrain, and then later a renewal in ties with Morocco. So as part of the two agreements, both the UAE and Bahrain recognized Israel's sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations.

During his speech, Netanyahu said, I have a name for this new alliance. I think we should call it the Abraham Alliance. And then he also thanked Trump, of course, for Trump's efforts promoting normalization efforts between Israel and other countries in the region. And as I mentioned, his speech was filled with nothing but lies, some that I've already mentioned. Here are some more highlights. Netanyahu said the majority of Americans support Israeli actions, but polling says otherwise.

He said, quote,

But a recent Gallup poll showed that 48% of people in the U.S. disapprove of Israel's actions in Gaza, compared to the 42% who are supportive. A May poll by Data for Progress also found that about 70% of all voters support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which Netanyahu has firmly rejected time and time again.

And many things Netanyahu said made me pray that I would get an aneurysm. And one of those things is when he said that Israel is going, quote, beyond what international law requires to avoid civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, of course, numerous rights groups have said Israel is flaunting international law and targeting civilians in Gaza, where it has systematically cut off supplies of food and water, displacing more than 90% of the population and wiping out entire neighborhoods and generations of families.

And then you have media outlets reporting that the Israeli forces in Gaza see large swaths of the Strip as, quote, free fire zones. And then there was a U.S. doctor who volunteered in Gaza who recently spoke to a reporter and he accused Israeli snipers of targeting Palestinian children.

He said the children were being shot right in the heart and in the head. So much so that a stethoscope was unable to go over their heart. That's how precise these shots were. I'm talking about Dr. Mark Pearl Mutter, about his medical mission in Gaza. And I want to play a clip of him here because I think what he has to say is very important and needs to be heard.

All the disaster zones you've seen, how does Gaza compare? All of the disasters I've seen combined, combined, 40 mission trips, 30 years, ground zero, earthquakes, all of that combined doesn't equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza. And when you say civilians, is it mostly children?

almost exclusively children. I've never seen that before. Never seen that. I've seen more incinerated children than I've ever seen in my entire life combined. I've seen more shredded children in just the first week. - Shredded? - Shredded. - What do you mean? - Missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions.

the next greatest majority. We've taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds, and then there's sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice. Wait, you're saying that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers? Definitively. I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn't put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head.

in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best sniper. And they're dead center shots. So, yeah. There's that.

And again, Netanyahu slammed college protesters and administrators in his speech, leaning into the attacks on student protesters who demonstrated against Israel's genocide in Gaza. He blasted college administrators who resisted calls to crack down on the protests. He also mocked queer activists who support Palestinian rights and accused them of ignorance, comparing them to chickens who support the restaurant of KFC.

And this bit might have been my favorite quote, just because the level of stupidity reached a level I didn't know was possible. Quote, these protesters hold up signs saying gays for Gaza. They might as well hold up signs that say chickens for KFC. And then, of course, after he said this, nearly every member of Congress stood up and clapped.

Netanyahu, for whom the ICC prosecutors are currently seeking an arrest warrant for his alleged war crimes, has said that pro-Palestinian protesters stand with evil. In his speech, he said, "...they stand with Hamas, they stand with rapists and murderers," adding that they should be "...ashamed."

He also said, quote, "...the outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish state, to demonize Jews everywhere. And no wonder, no wonder we witnessed an appalling rise in anti-Semitism in America and around the world." And of course, Netanyahu praised Biden for his heartfelt support for Israel.

In his speech, Netanyahu said, quote, After the savage attack on October 7th, Biden rightly called Hamas sheer evil. And then he played up their more than 40-year relationship. Because they're both fucking old and shouldn't be in power anymore.

I guess one of them won't be. He said Biden dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Middle East to deter a wider war, and then he came to Israel to stand with us in our darkest hour, a visit that will never be forgotten. And yeah, it won't be forgotten, because Biden's legacy will forever be his complicity and assistance in the genocide of Palestine. After the speech was concluded, Hamas said that the speech shows Netanyahu's lack of interest in a ceasefire,

Hamas senior official Sami Abu Zuhri said that Netanyahu's remarks demonstrate that he is not interested in ending the war, and this is according to the U.S. news outlet Reuters. He said, Netanyahu's speech was full of lies, and it will not succeed in covering up for the failure and defeat in the face of the resistance. He added that the address would also not, quote, cover up for the crimes of the war of genocide his army is committing against the people of Gaza.

In a statement, Izat El-Rishk, a member of the Palestinian group's political bureau, slammed the speech by the quote-unquote criminal Netanyahu as a party of lies. Alaa Youssef, a 32-year-old Palestinian-American, told Al Jazeera that she traveled to Washington, D.C. from New York to voice her concerns about Netanyahu's address to Congress, and she called the prime minister a quote, war criminal who should stand trial. Yes, he should. That's what an international quote wants.

She said, quote, We are just here to cause a disruption. Shut it down and say, not in our names, not with our consent. She called Netanyahu's invite to Congress disgusting. Yes. Yes, it was. She said, I don't get how people get to a level where they detach themselves so much from their humanity that they can't see what's been happening in Gaza.

She also expressed surprise that U.S. lawmakers still continue to entertain Netanyahu and invite him here. And I'm really hoping this next part is true, because while Netanyahu's speech sought to shore up support for Israel, Al Jazeera correspondent Rosalind Jordan reported that it is unlikely to alter the political landscape in the U.S., where the opposition to the war in Gaza slash the genocide in Gaza is widespread.

She said,

She also added that schisms have emerged within the Democratic Party over support for Israel, while the Republican Party remains largely united around calls for continued and even increased support. My good friend and yours, Robert Evans, said about Netanyahu's speech at Congress, "...this is both the most resistance to Israel I have seen from U.S. political leadership and the most public embrace of Israel I have seen."

And he's right. It's disturbing and baffling behavior that is so divided it seems impossible to bridge. It's hypocritical and, frankly, quite dangerous. To normalize the support of someone who the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Kareem Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for, to allow this man to address Congress in any way is dangerous.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has also urged the Justice Department to investigate Netanyahu for genocide, war crimes, and torture, which have all been well-documented and plentiful. But that doesn't matter, though, because Netanyahu still gave his ridiculous speech, and bombs are still raining down on Gaza.

And with that, we have concluded this two-part series about why Biden's legacy will forever be genocide. Until next time, please continue to talk about Palestine and what is happening there and for Palestine.

The podium is back with fresh angles and deep dives into Olympic and Paralympic stories you know, and those you'll be hard pressed to forget. I did something in '88 that hasn't been beaten. Oh gosh, the US Olympic trials is the hardest and most competitive meet in the world. We are athletes, we're going out there smashing into each other full force.

Listen to The Podium on the iHeart app or your favorite podcast platform weekly and every day during the games to hear the Olympics like you've never quite heard them before. From the writer of Amazon Prime's Red, White, and Royal Blue comes a hilarious and demented new audio mystery. Does this murder make me look gay? Master Vandy is dead! Then it's probable that whoever killed Vandy is in this very room.

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Listen to Does This Murder Make Me Look Gay? as part of the Outspoken Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

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Grindr? I hardly... This is It Could Happen Here, where today the it is gay flirting and or harassment, and the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the 2024 Republican National Convention.

I'm Gare, also known by my undercover alias, Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be one of our on-the-ground RNC correspondents. A few weeks ago, we provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation Festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think tank ghouls, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric used by popular speakers at the event.

We'll have some more in-depth episodes about those topics in the weeks to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected at the convention. But on top of our regular coverage, I also had a special assignment that I more or less assigned to myself. On this show, we often talk about right-wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people, including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation, online harassment, and physical violence.

As these are two of our most frequently covered topics, being at the Republican National Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the intersection between conservatism and homosexuality. For years, I've heard rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans flocking to the gay hookup app Grindr to get laid during the RNC.

Whether they be 20-year-old Republican twinks from Miami or 53-year-old self-hating closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages. Curiosity has often gotten the better of me, and I needed to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging on to Grindr.

In case you're unfamiliar, Grindr is technically a dating app that serves the LGBTQ community. But in actuality, it is a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way for strangers in their 40s to completely unprompted send you unflattering pictures of their penis. Grindr was launched in 2009 and is arguably the largest and most popular gay dating app, especially among men.

Grindr has only been around for two in-person RNCs prior to this point, 2012 and 2016, since all convention activities moved online during 2020 for the pandemic. So this July, for the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around the country could gather in one city, and once their wives fell asleep, log on to Grindr. And this episode, I'm going to tell you about my RNC Grindr experience. ♪

Before traveling to the city that was about to be invaded by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers liked that terrible pun. Based on the massive increase in violent anti-trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew that I would be dusting off my old boy motor skills and going undercover as a cisgender male.

Although my ability to pass as a straight male is debatable, I can at least easily pass as a not-quite-straight male.

My transfeminine fashion taste has been skewing more masc lesbian in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue. I packed up basically all my button-up collared shirts, three ties, two black suits, and a beige London Fog trench coat. Basically the vibe I was going for was half young Republican, half Roman towel boy dressed as a 1950s FBI agent. I refer to this as Dale Cooper moding.

I was unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my wavy blonde locks like Barron Trump meets Tilda Swinton in Constantine. I was kinda Gabriel Maxing for most of the convention. And though most attendees were unable to pick up on my dykish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie, I did get she-heard by the Secret Service when entering the convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke!

So that was my general look for the convention. I also completely remade my Grindr profile for the RNC. For simplicity's sake, I thought to emphasize my twinkish past and removed the explicitly non-binary transgender aspects of my profile, replacing some of my more trans-coded photos with pictures of my Light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay.

Perhaps next RNC, I can experiment with discovering how many of the RNC attendees are chasers, but for safety's sake, I went to more stealth both online and in person at RNC-related events. For my main profile picture, I chose a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing a light grey shirt and thin black tie, looking just frankly exhausted.

I chose the simple yet elegant username Twink, and for my bio, wrote Gen Z in town for convention, which I thought was pretty funny, and signals to people that yes, I am here for the RNC, but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious. So this was my bait.

On my way to the airport, I was already dressed for the part, as I suspected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part of the whole RNC experience. I arrived at the gate, and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with even whiter hair, wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits, and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range. They all kinda looked like my Republican grandfather.

The women, meanwhile, regardless of age, were all cosplaying their favorite female Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair. There were a handful of delegates, as well as Republican superfans wearing Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be going to the convention, the way a nerd would be excited to go to San Diego Comic-Con.

Others at the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention in the Atlanta airport. But I could still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their RNC expectations, and in hushed tones asking others at the gate if they were going to the convention. And that's what everyone called it. Not the Republican convention, not the GOP convention or the RNC. The convention.

As I was boarding the plane, an older woman with straw-like blonde hair, sitting a few rows in front of me, waved to me and asked, Young man, are you going to the convention?

I gave my best, yes ma'am, took my seat, and then heard her remark to her friend about how happy she was that more young people are attending the convention. And I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to learn why I was attending the convention and what I was doing there. Mainly trying to collect as much information about these weird RNC grinder Republicans as I can. And you will hear more about those weird grinder RNC Republicans after the break.

This episode is brought to you in part by the Top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening to as I was coming out from Adderall while writing the second half of this episode, as well as these products and sponsors. Okay, back to the grind. Most convention activities took place in the Pfizer Forum, which it took about four days to learn how to pronounce.

This venue is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and this is where I would do most of my Grindr cruising, so I could see other profiles within the radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into the Pfizer Forum, which was multiple times a day for four days in a row, I would find a little corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up Grindr and refresh my feed to see what profiles were in my proximity.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grindr, one of its more terrifying, uh, features is the proximity detector, telling you what users are near you, whether that be five miles away or five feet away. Every night when I got back to the hotel, after recording with Robert and Sophie, I would once again check Grindr to see if any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by the airport.

The hotel we were staying at was also home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grindr, save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels, roughly 1500 feet away from my bed.

The Grindr proximity detector was quite useful to me in locating profiles active around the footprint of the RNC, as well as when sorting through all my messages back home to confirm who attended the RNC from out of state.

Because Milwaukee is about 650 miles away from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that, I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the RNC from out of state, even if I wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've also done my best to follow up with certain profiles to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random reasons for why their distance markers might not line up exactly, and I think I have it narrowed down pretty well.

Okay, you've been very patient, and now I think it's time to read through the highlights from my Grindr inbox. And I gotta say, I think I started off pretty strong. While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the convention officially started,

I got one of the very first messages I received from a 21-year-old Republican with the profile picture that's just a close-up picture of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and magenta tie. Already horrendous vibes. He asked me if I was, quote-unquote, with the GOP.

And I said I was attending with friends, and then I got no further response. I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then after the convention was over, he moved like 300 miles away. So I'm pretty sure he was there for the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified himself as a local conservative, quote, but not a hardcore Republican, unquote. And he was excited the convention was in town, hopeful that he would, quote, meet my future husband, unquote.

The first chaser I encountered with the bio looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass saw through my cisgender disguise and messaged me, cock? I got one other message from a chaser who was pretending to be T4T who asked me if I was in town for Kitsu-Kan, an anime convention in Green Bay.

A nice local messaged me, quote, hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face, which was very nice and just kind of amusing if you consider that he thought I was just a gay Republican looking for some other gay Republican. Another local with the name Older4Young sent me the message, quote, boomer who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.

I asked him if the quote-unquote talk politics pickup line works very often, and he replied, quote, less often than I would hope for. On here, zero, unquote. He mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app telling me that they have infiltrated Grindr. He then asked me what exact hotel I was staying at. So that was the end of that conversation.

A minority of the Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and were largely excited that the RNC was in town. They vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as most were disappointed that they themselves could not attend. One such fellow who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd, unquote,

would have liked to attend, but he was busy working at the hospital because they needed, quote, "extra staffing just in case," unquote. Now, the worst profile picture I found was an older guy wearing a baseball cap and one of those half-face skull masks like Adam Woffin used to wear.

He said he was from Florida and claimed to be in town not for the RNC, but to visit family and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable. Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent. Very baffling fella.

A younger guy messaged me asking, you're a Republican? And I said, not really, putting it lightly, and he never got back to me. I did find a 31-year-old chaser named Greg, who I do believe was attending the convention, and his bio read, quote, Anon, come drain me. Trans CD, that's crossdresser. Sissy, femme, to the front of the line. I asked, you like trans? And he responded, yes. We had no further conversation.

I did talk with two other people who happened to be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I was with CNN because the Grindr proximity sensor put me near the CNN area when I was actually using Grindr at the Heritage Foundation party. And lastly, really the only guy I saw who openly claimed to be attending the RNC in his public bio was a 32-year-old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the username SuckMeOff. One word.

He described the convention as exhausting but awesome and told me he was, quote, proud to support President Trump, unquote, and called Trump's speech on the final day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump, talked about Cory Comperator, the man who was killed at the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after Mr. Suck-Me-Off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was, I just replied to him, poor Cory.

And he messaged me back, "Cory who?" And then he told me what exact hotel he was staying at. Now, part of the danger of trying to use Grindr directly in the middle of the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched over on my phone, there is a non-zero chance that some passerby or person sitting right above me might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dick pic that fills my phone screen as I try to check my messages.

This is simply a non-negotiable part of the Grindr experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos of some balding 43-year-old married man will appear in your inbox. Ordinarily, I would check the profile first to see whom might be sending me a photo to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to open up a DM.

Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed to collect the most amount of data possible. But moreover, even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles in my DMs, this was impossible without opening up each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from the chat log due to one of the many glitches I experienced using Grindr at the RNC.

About halfway through the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently. But the main glitch I had to deal with, which has since been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile from the DMs page. I had to click into each individual chat log to open up a user profile, which meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.

So there I was watching Ted Cruz's speech sitting underneath about 50 Republicans and right next to both of my bosses, scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see who was local and who was here for the RNC, hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hogs.

But I was far from the only one reporting issues with the app during the RNC. Around midday on Tuesday, the second day of the convention, over a thousand users reported a Grindr outage in the Milwaukee area on the website DownDetector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the final day of the RNC that, quote, "...reports of the Grindr app crashing increased by more than 90% in the past 48 hours across the country," unquote.

The down detector heat map showed grinder outages in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hotspot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention, indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due to an increase in activity.

And you will hear more about that activity after this ad break. This episode of It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part by the Challengers soundtrack remix by Boyz Noize, which I was listening to as I wrote most of this episode while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is also brought to you by these products and services.

We once again return to the grind. We got to keep on grinding. We're almost done, but we got to grind a little more. Just one more grind. Bro, I swear I'm not addicted. Just one more grind, bro. Just one more grind.

During the influx of reports about the Grindr app breaking during the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive increase in activity. Quote,

This quote from a Grindr executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the internet about five different articles, and even disgraced former New York Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon. Content warning, gay Republican. So Grindr executives are calling the RNC convention the Grindr Super Bowl. Folks, look, I'm openly gay Republican.

No qualms about it. Proud conservative Republican. I met my husband on Grindr and we've been together for six years going on seven. Married for almost three. Let me tell you something.

Just come out the closet, boys! Come on! It's fun! You can be gay and conservative. But look, Grindr's already outing you anyway based on the hits, and guess who's in town? It's all you conservatives. Bye! Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to. I also received messages containing variations of HeySexy from at least five accounts that have since been deactivated.

And this does line up with a report from a Milwaukee area Grindr user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, saying that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users. Quote, on any given day, you'll go on there and see a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source, who did not want to be named. The Grindr user said on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe 10 users with no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app, he said he stopped counting at 50 blank profile photos, unquote.

Now, we don't have any official data yet on Grindr usage near the 2024 RNC, only the Down Detector reports which are user-submitted. But we do, at least, have data from the last in-person convention in Cleveland, Ohio, all the way back in 2016.

A Vice article by Candace Bryan spoke with sources from Grindr and wrote that, quote, Grindr usage near the Quicken Loans arena showed a 66% increase during the RNC. Other active destinations, including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach, and Trump Tower, showed no comparable increase in active users, unquote.

Many of the local twinks and trans folks certainly were concerned about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app. People would often first ask me if I was a Republican or why I was in town before trying to hit on me. One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised if you were a delegate or something, but I had to check, unquote. As the week progressed, more locals told me that they had found a handful of out-and-proud patriots online, but really not many.

In fact, multiple Milwaukee locals I chatted with on Grindr did claim to notice an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who were online for the same reason I was, to see if there was an influx of closeted Republicans. Someone told me, quote, unquote.

Far from being the app's Super Bowl, according to Vice, the 2016 RNC's 66% bump in activity is less than one half of the increase in Grindr activity that was seen at the last in-person DNC, an event which was also a whole day shorter. I'll read from Vice, quote,

However, from Sunday to Monday, the week of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher 148% increase in activity around the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. Unquote.

It's also worth noting that of that 66% increase in activity around the 2016 RNC, only about 40% of those users were visiting Cleveland. Most were locals. Meanwhile, 60% of Grindr users active near the DNC in Philadelphia were visiting the city.

Oh, and that quote from a Grindr executive calling the RNC Grindr's Super Bowl, as well as George Santos' other claim about Grindr purposely outing gay conservatives, both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts. It's totally made up. Pure fiction. It's fiction. It's fiction. We made it up. We made this one up. It's a made-up tale. It's a total fabrication. It never happens.

It's an urban legend that never happened. So no, the RNC is not Grindr's Super Bowl. I got messages from over 150 different people. Over 90% of the messages I received and profiles visible online, even while inside the Pfizer forum, were from locals completely unaffiliated with the RNC.

And any boost in activity that can be attributed to people visiting for the RNC is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy festival of out-of-town gay Democrats who travel to the DNC. And, like, if you think about this logically...

This shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has spent the past two years screaming about how all drag queens are child groomers. And though this was the first year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to and attacks against trans people and really any display of visible queerness. Like, come on, this is the Republican Party.

There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic politicians must be so because they are secretly gay. And while there is the occasional, like, Lindsey Graham or repressed homosexual preacher...

This is not the norm, and all Republicans being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia. It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic Christian nationalism. And now for people like Elon Musk and more young Republicans, a fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on fears that young people—white people—

aren't having enough white babies, which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive or heterosexual sex.

Never mind the fact that queer and trans people oftentimes can and do have children, which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit. So no, Grindr wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans, because there simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to be attending the RNC. And while there may not be as many Republicans as I thought there might be,

I do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit a smaller bump than rumored, basically figured out. Based on my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of local Grindr users and journalists I talked with who were online during the 2024 RNC, and considering the 2016 Grindr data, I

I can report that merely a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNC attendees. The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly used Grindr or were specifically curious about who might be online during the RNC.

I observed two more groups that would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone who attends the RNC are guests or delegates. A lot of people work at the convention center or work tech. And a sizable chunk of people are like myself, researchers, pollsters, or journalists who attend conventions like this for work.

And lastly, the final group that fills out the bump in grinder activity, one that I for some reason didn't really expect to see upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense...

are cops. So many cops. There were so many cops online at the RNC. Just like delegates or reporters, they are coming into town from all around the country. There was cops or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana, and many more states, as well as U.S. Capitol Police, Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI. They were all in town as a part of the security detail.

A few of the guys that messaged me, I can absolutely confirm, are 100% police or some kind of military police. A 33-year-old cop or military guy, quote, looking for sexy bottoms with the tags jock, military, discreet, and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in the gym, said in his bio that he was, quote, really into slim, skinny, toned, and muscular people.

He messaged me saying, hey. Now, I got a lot of hey's in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grindr. You will probably mostly get hey as a message, as well as just a picture of someone's penis. But between a penis and hey, those are probably the two most received messages you will get on Grindr.

There was another guy with a username DLMilitary who said in his bio he was working security for the week and that Grindr messages had completely broke for him and to instead message him on Snapchat.

The DL in DL Military stands for Down Low. It's a tag that only the worst people on Grindr will use, mainly, like, self-hating gay men who are closeted, and it's down low because they don't want to be, like, publicly seen being gay. Just absolutely the worst. We do not fuck with DL, both literally and figuratively.

There were a bunch of other non-locals who I would describe as cop types. I can't 100% say for sure that they are cops, but they have like the look, you know, like the look, the cop look.

I don't know. They could also be like a bodyguard or working private security. But one of these cop-looking guys messaged me asking if I was a trans guy, which I always love to see. It means I'm doing gender very well. And a few other cop types sent relatively boring messages. So yeah, a lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the fact that basically half the cops in the country were at the Republican National Convention in some form or another.

A few final notes. Now, this didn't really make up a sizable chunk of the Grindr population, but after saying I was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grindr just completely unprompted told me that they were attending the protests against the RNC. Please do not do this. That's a horrible idea for multiple reasons. You gotta stop talking about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grindr, especially at the RNC. Horrible idea. Do not do this.

And despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile, a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter or the pod, but they were very nice. They gave me some recommendations for what gay bars to check out after convention hours. And one person told me this interesting anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't think Trump is going to win. I canvassed for Hillary in 2016, and at least here, it doesn't feel the same. Unquote.

I thought that was a little interesting tidbit that I received at probably around 3 a.m. on Grindr. So there you go. Anyway, that was my RNC Grindr experience. I'm sorry to report it is not the hotbed of closeted Republicans that we meme it to be. It's mostly local gays, a few reporters, and a few more cops.

I do not think I'll be reporting on the DNC grinder, but I am curious to see if there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to the RNC grinder. So I guess I will maybe post about that on Twitter at Hungry Bowtie if you want updates on that.

Anyway, stay safe out there. Be careful if you're ever on Grindr, please. Especially don't tell someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests. But in general, be careful on these types of dating apps. And I will see you on the other side. Message from Quickie. Grindr said you were super close yesterday. Wasn't stalking, I promise. Message from Birthday Present Emoji.

I almost thought you were Josh Thomas. Message from Anonymous. Wait, are you pro or anti-Republican? I'm not gonna lie, I mainly asked your politics because I thought you were cute, but I didn't want to hit on a Trumper. Message from Older4Young. Aren't all the delegates propositioning you? You're cute. Message from Anonymous.

Why establish a totalitarian state if I can't breed its dictator? Message from Suck Me Off. I'm down for anything. LOL, are you supporting Trump? Haha. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Thanks for listening.

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