 Woke imperialism explores the fairly recently adopted language of the Western foreign policy establishment post-Trump, and attempts to link this phenomenon to previous deployments of empire-justifying logic and rhetoric throughout history. During this session, we will discuss how the Western military, surveillance, and financial establishments continue to extrapolate different formerly counter-cultural trends borrowed from identity politics in order to airbrush a progressive aura onto their projects of 21st century global dominance. Here to help us expose these attempts at hiding the harsh realities of empire from the public eye is Aaron Maté, freelance journalist, contributor to the nation, and the host of Pushback, an independent media show airing on the gray zone. Previously, Aaron was a longtime producer at Democracy Now and Al Jazeera. Also joining us is Katie Halper, an American comedian, writer, filmmaker, podcaster, and political commentator. Katie is the host of the podcast, The Katie Halper Show, and co-hosts the useful idiots podcast alongside Matt Taibbi. Lastly, we've invited Rania Kalik, a journalist at Breakthrough News, a producer and host at Soapbox, and co-host of the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast alongside Kevin Gastola. Previously an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, Rania has written for a number of publications including The Intercept, Al Jazeera, Truth Out, and The Gray Zone. From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Our children can live, are to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home. Hello. Well, that's last video clip was not from MTV. You just saw an old advertisement for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign featuring Daisy, a little girl who clearly shows the cracks forming already in the American educational system. I'm awaiting the guests, Rania, Katie, Aaron. So greetings, hello, Katie, Aaron, and Rania. Thank you for joining us. This is the very last session of the first time at the Alternative Security Conference created, put together by DM25. I hear some background noise. Maybe that's me. Maybe that's me. I'll put on my headphones. Sorry about this. I'll mute myself. Yes. Well, that's all right because this Alternative Security Conference is in itself an act of sabotage and in all likelihood the official Munich conference may have postponed because of our events, the ASC, the Alternative Security Conference. They didn't want to compete. So quickly, the background for the ads that you all just saw, well, I think I already explained something about it, the behind the scenes partner in crime chose that ad and it's from the famous Lyndon Johnson 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater who was renamed Barry Newcomb Goldwater after he expressed the willingness to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam. The Johnson campaign housed on this opportunity implying, calling them Newcomb and implying that LBJ was the more rational or less likely to blow up Vietnam and the world, sustained attacks culminated in this iconic and chilling, lazy ad. Of course, we all know of the destruction President Johnson then visited upon that entire part of the world, but there was the implication that his presidency would be more rational. So let's bring woke imperialism into historical context. Imperialism is hardly a new mainstream political term, especially in parts of the world on the receiving end of it, but woke certainly is. Is woke imperialism, as you call it, really a new ideology or strategy? How does it compare or contrast to previous expressions of empire justification? Is woke to new American exceptionalism? We will explain to our viewers later what American exceptionalism is. It's a very American term. I mean, unless Aaron or Rania, you want to jump in, I can respond to that. You started off, Kathy. Okay. Actually, I think came up with this term on my show, I think, with you and Brianna Joy Gray, Rania, as my guest. But yeah, I think that it's slightly new. It's just another kind of ideology that's used to dress up imperialism and war. I think that it's in many ways, though, or at least in some ways more dangerous than other ideologies because it has the veneer of something progressive and weaponized as identity politics and it perverts identity politics. And it really does, I mean, it's really cynical and disgusting. And it really does like dress up what is just death and destruction and exploitation at best as something that's related to social justice, racial justice, gender equality. Which of course, not only does war kill people and main people, destabilize regions, displace people, but if you want to be technical, women or women and children are the biggest victims of war. And also we tend to bomb people of color. So if you do indeed care about identity politics on that level, you should also be opposing war and be upset about the victims of war and not just cheerleading the fact that there are more women at the CIA or Raytheon or people of color at the CIA or Raytheon. And to add to that, I think it's important to recognize that this is aimed at pacifying the people who would be most likely to impose these sorts of imperialist policies. Right. And there's a parallel aspect to this. You see this is imperialism is an extension of capitalism. Right. And this is happening in the corporate world as well, even in domestically in the U.S. There's this attempt to try to sort of pass by or, you know, quiet down the progressive demands for a more equitable system and more equitable policies like having, you know, universal health care. And rather than giving people that one way to shut them up, which has been going on for longer than I would say the smoke and imperialism has been going on, is to have, you know, a corporate board that includes more women and people of color. And so it's this way to really address these complaints from the progressive base that liberals, that Democrats depend on to win elections. It's a way to pacify them. So they're too busy, you know, getting excited because a woman is in charge of this or a black person is in charge of that. And to, you know, distract them from the actual causes of all of this inequality. And that's really extended out to the way that U.S. imposes itself on the rest of the world. I think it started, you know, I think it started really to take off while we've seen this sort of attempt at woke imperialism. I can remember the first thing kind of being the war in Afghanistan, right? Like using the issue of the Taliban's grotesque treatment of women as an excuse or as a way to, you know, pacify anti-war voices to justify U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. That's when I really first saw it being used, but it really ramped up when it, you know, under Barack Obama, especially because you had a liberal in charge. And after people being very war weary following the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq and there were such failures and they were so devastating. And the Obama administration had to find ways to justify these new regime change schemes on countries like Libya and Syria. And one way that that was done was to try to weaponize the issue of human rights and weaponize the issue of agency, right? We have to listen to Syrian voices. We have to listen to Libyan voices. Of course, coincidentally, the only Libyan and Syrian voices we get to hear from are ones that sit on, are ones that are pro-intervention and happen to work for U.S.-funded organizations and civil society groups. That's beside the point. But that's when it was really first being used. But then when Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016 is when you really saw an attempt to push this idea of woke imperialism. Because, you know, the identity politics have really become so dominant on the left and in liberal circles that this was a way to really paper over her horrendous record, whether it's been backing destabilizing coups in countries like Honduras or back in the Iraq war or, you know, her policies domestically, which, you know, were to deny universal healthcare to people in America or raising the minimum wage, a way to sort of paper over that was to use these kinds of woke identity politics issues. But that, of course, was, you know, put on pause when Donald Trump became president. Because it wasn't necessary. Trump is just naked imperialist, who's very honest. You know, we're just there to steal the oil, but not Biden's president. And so we're back to this kind of woke washing, as Katie calls it, woke washing of imperialism, putting people who are women. And I don't know, in the case of Anthony Blinken being excited that he's a father. They tried to celebrate that he happened to have children and he's a secretary of state. His new tender masculinity or something. Yeah, exactly. Samantha Powers, yeah. And what are some of these appointments to the CIA, the Pentagon? I know of Flor Noy. Well, the way to Austin is the first black secretary of defense, which we're supposed to be very excited about, right? I forget her name. Go ahead, go ahead. Sorry. Austin was on the board of Ray Theon, weapons cooperation, which invests in the Munich Security Conference. And as far as I understand, that he was a general quite recently, which in a way doesn't it violates the terms of becoming secretary of defense because he was recently invested in the war with ISIS, with Daesh. But more importantly, you mentioned his position at Ray Theon. He has stocks in Ray Theon and he's actually benefiting now from these weapons deals, tens of millions of dollars in weapons deals that the Biden administration has approved. But yeah, you've got late Austin. You also have Avril, I'm forgetting her name, but she was appointed as a national security advisor. But she was involved, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name, but she was involved previously with helping come up with the legal framework to justify. Avril Haynes, Avril Haynes. Thank you, Avril Haynes. And her position now is a very important one as I'm not sure if it's national security advisor. Director of National Intelligence. Director of National Intelligence at the DNI. She is somebody who played a very prominent role in helping lay out the legal framework for targeted drone strikes, for targeted assassinations, trial of Americans. But we're supposed to celebrate this, right? Because I think she might be the first woman in that position. So the woke washing under Biden continues. You even have recently Kamala Harris, who is another example of the sort of woke washing, putting a woman in charge of the vice presidency to try to paper over a very unequal and racist system. But Kamala Harris recently even suggested in a press conference that one of the root causes of migration, rather than putting it where, you know, the blame where it belongs, which is all these destructive American policies that ruin the economies in Latin America. And, you know, back dictatorships fascists and destabilized countries. She tried to suggest that one of the root causes of migration was like, was, you know, anti LGBTQ policies in Guatemala, violence in Guatemala. So, and then you have Biden saying, we're going to raise the rainbow flag, we're going to raise the LGBTQ flag at embassies around the world, at US embassies around the world. And it's, again, this kind of substance less way of pretending to be progressive while continuing and pose the same destructive policies that disproportionately ruin the lives of women and people of color around the world. Well, one example of this, what Katie first describes, this rehabilitating empire. And then, of course, Rania, you just added to it. I think immediately of the announcement of the sum in the summer to rename US military bases still named after Confederates, which was one of the major victories of Elizabeth Warren, leading up to the presidential elections. And of course, ironically, one of those bases named after Confederates happens to be Fort Benning, home to the notorious school of the Americans, the still operative training center for many Latin American tortures, death squads, operatives, dictators, who tore apart much of the continent from Central America down to Argentina, from where I call you today, Galtieri, the general, the last general of the military junta of the late 70s, was also a trainee, a graduate of the school of the Americans. So Elizabeth Warren's campaign ads and other media about the base renaming to rename Fort Benning did not mention any proposal at all, of course, to dismantle the school of the Americans, which today goes under the technocratic moniker, Western hemispheric security cooperation or something like that. So are they going to rename it after Pinochet? Fort Pinochet. The person that yeah, Pinochet killed the person who we helped get killed by Pinochet. Yeah. And look at the bases. Yeah. And look at what's even eligible to be renamed. So there's no talk about renaming the FBI building, which is named after Jay Edgar Hoover, who, among other things, oversaw the assassination of Fred Hampton. That's just the story told in Judas and the Black Messiah, that movie that came out recently. So it's like even this performative action of renaming things. There's like a shelf life where the atrocity has to have occurred like hundreds of years ago, before we can even begin to acknowledge it and take a performative gesture in that direction. Whereas the FBI, where people still go to work every day, it's named after Jay Edgar Hoover, one of the biggest criminals in of the 20th century when it comes to U.S. politics. And it's like, and that's a that's a broader trend where I feel like, you know, even now, like we talk about imperialism on the left in in the U.S. I'm noticing like people now can talk about Pinochet and Cuba and the things that happened a couple of decades ago. I mean, not that Cuba is over, but you know, like the Castro years and Bay of Pigs. But it's like we still it's still off limits to talk about what's happening right now. So we don't really talk about the dirty war in Syria or the ongoing coup in Venezuela that Biden is continuing after Trump started it. Those things, you know, at least in the leftist circles that I sort of follow and I'm familiar with, I feel like those things aren't talked about as much as things that already happen, that we can't really do much about anymore except honor the victims with, you know, through historical memory, which is good. But it's like, I'd also rather be doing something about stuff now. And that to me, actually, that's not the official kind of woke imperialism. But to me, it's like a more subtle way in which it's replicated. And I wanted to read something. I thought I would think it's so funny. Max Blumenthal of the Grey Zone introduced me to this recently. And it's, it's just one of the ways in which I think, you know, woke discourse, feminist discourse, is used to really disconfuse us into supporting non-conscionable things. So there's a paper in Journal of International Feminist Journal of Politics from 2015. And it's called Drone Disorientations, How Unmanned Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War. And the abstract says, and, you know, again, I'll credit for this goes to Max, who, who read this recently on a recent Grey Zone stream. Killing with Drones produces queer moments of disorientation. Drawing on queer phenomenology, phenomenology, I show how militarized masculinities function as spatiotemporal landmarks that gave killing in war its orientation and make it morally intelligible. These bearings no longer make sense for drone warfare, which radically deviates from two of its main axes, the home combat and distance intimacy binaries. Through a narrative methodology, I show how descriptions of drone warfare are rife with symptoms of an unresolved disorientation often expressed as gender anxiety over the failure of the distance intimacy and home combat axes to orient killing with drones. That was a bunch of nonsense. You just said... Oh my God, I couldn't even make that up and I'm pretty good at that. Well, that sounds like a joke. It sounds like they're making a joke to make fun of like the PC. Also, just one other thing I wanted to mention related to this is that another dangerous thing is the... It's easy to be... And we heard of this a lot with Hillary Clinton, which is the kind of the trope of it's easy to be progressive when you're a straight white man, which is like such a disingenuous thing to say and such a cop-out and such a distraction. And the other thing is this alleged like decoupling of racial justice, gender equality, and economic justice. So you had famously Hillary Clinton saying, well, breaking up the banks and racism, no, which no one said it would end it, but it also is not unrelated to it, right? And like these same people like Hillary Clinton like to rattle off statistics as they should. I mean, it'd be nice if they didn't do them disingenuously, but rattle off statistics about how women of color are paid less than white women. So what are you talking about? Like all of a sudden, this has nothing to do with gender or race. Like you cannot have it both ways. And they do because they have no moral compass and it's all just PR and spin. There's also... All right, go ahead. I want to make one quick point. There's also this attempt to like weaponize certain identities when it suits imperialism. And I think one of the worst ways I saw that happen is if you look at the war, the dirty war, as Aaron called it on Syria, you had a situation where the issue of Islamophobia was weaponized to justify arming and funding groups that were regressive and far right and wanted to institute a theocratic tyranny across Syria, right? Groups that were affiliated with ISIS and al-Qaeda. This is who America was arming and funding. Groups that would, you know, that were talking very openly about their genocidal commitments towards minorities and, you know, how the way that they viewed women and women's rights. But anybody who spoke out against this in favor of rights for minorities and women was then accused of being an Islamophobe. And so that was just an interesting way of like... It's an interesting example of the way that this is very... This is what liberal imperialists do. They try to weaponize identity when it suits them. So the rules are never even consistent. During the time I spent in visiting Tunisia, I noticed also how the presence of the niqab, which is the full covering of a woman who is very foreign to that culture, was being justified with arguments that basically came from Europe. And I was going to ask you also about this, about how the charge of Islamophobia can be sometimes used by Salafist groups, which is not to deny that there are people who have very... Politicians in Europe who have a very bizarre fixation, almost medieval Christian fixation on Islam and humanizing Muslims. But there is this other force, which is of course the notion that one cannot criticize a very capitalist power like Qatar sporting with their own ambitions for some form of cultural imperialism. I think that... And what you're talking about is important too, because I think that that speaks to the different experiences that people from Muslim or Arab backgrounds have in Western countries versus the experiences that they might... That those same people or people like them might have in the Middle East. And what it tries to do, it tries to project this Western idea onto or Western, this Western bigotry, onto a region where it just doesn't work. It's a very different dynamic culturally, societally. Muslims are the majority in the Middle East. And it's not... Islamophobia doesn't function in the same way in a region where they're the majority as when Muslims are a minority in a place like a European country or America or Canada. And so that's also important. And that's why it is easy for the sort of, I guess you could say pro-imperialist Alephist types to invoke Islamophobia, to sort of justify, and also American imperialists to invoke Islamophobia to justify backing Saudi Arabia. And why could you criticize? You must be Islamophobe. You don't support Saudi Arabia's cultural deficiencies. Right. Even though on top of it being totally disingenuous and selective, it's also like who do you think... I mean sometimes the victims are of various backgrounds, but a lot of them are Muslim themselves. So... Right. Yes. And in Syria, in Syria, Ron, I mean, isn't it very reductionist to the way, like we were told that the Sunnis were on one side of the Syrian war and then the Christians were on another side that actually the reality of Syria is not that at all? No. The reality of Syria is when you have a majority in a population. So actually the government is staffed mostly by Sunnis because they're the majority. They make up a majority of the Syrian army who were fighting and dying, fighting the rebels that the US was backing. So it's much more nuanced and of course not as simple as this black and white, like Sunnis are being genocide in Syria. It's not at all accurate to put it that way as like a secondary. And more often times it was Sunnis dying at the hands of Sunnis in Syria. Yeah. Well speaking of Nuwams, so Wokeness is often, let's get into the complex issue of Syria, the yin-yang of Syria. So Wokeness is often a Manahean belief in a black and white demon-filled world. Last month marks two anniversaries of horrible events in very nearby country, Iraq, the 19th of March, 2003 US invasion of Iraq, preceded by another anniversary, so-called anniversary of more than a decade before, the chemical attacks of 1988 on Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein in Halabja, sarin and mustard gas weapons, which were often sold by Germany to then-American ally, Saddam Hussein, a sort of police officer in the region at that time. He fought, used these chemical weapons, fighting the Iran-Iraq war that killed roughly one million when the US backed Iraq in the hope of defeating the recently changed Iranian regime. And he also used these chemical weapons on Kurds. Now progressives and Democrats, the point is coming, progressives and Democrats marched against Bush and Chinese invasion and destruction of Iraq never saw a need to redeem or defend the character of the Ba'ath regime. And if Republicans ever accused the left of being Saddamists, it must have sounded too laughable to have stuck. So why is there no sense of Beja'u now, or the need for nuances when it comes to Syria? How come 20 years later, we all seem stuck in this intellectual swamp in the liberal center on the left, there's a cultural logic that dictates it? Either you can be anti-imperialist and pro-Bathist or pro-interventionist and critical of Assad. Why is there no consensus that we can be critical of both Assad and all these attempts at interventionism, sabotage, and sanctions? What happens to these nuanced orders? Let me speak as someone who was actually initially duped by some of the propaganda on Syria. So when you have people rising up against an authoritarian, demanding more freedom, you see the images, protests being cracked down on, one can feel nothing but sympathy for that and support for that. The problem was, those of us who didn't do our homework and who weren't there in Syria to see the reality, missed the fact that what was going on was basically, there were peaceful protests, but then they're also separate from that. We're armed actions against the government that were being supported very early on already by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey and the US probably too. And basically those two got conflated. And unless you were there or unless you were a really, really deep critical thinker, which I wasn't initially, it was easy to get duped by that. And because what's not to support about people rising up for freedom under a dictator? And that just basically got exploited on a grand scale and then it doubled down with so much more interventionist propaganda as the dirty war expanded. I actually, to your credit, Erin, I think also Syria suffered from a lack of reporting on the ground that made it very easy for everything to seem confused and to propagandize. You got a lot of people reporting on Syria from Beirut or from Istanbul or Gaziantep or all these countries that are around Syria, depending on opposition, pro-opposition media that was largely funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey and the US and the UK. And because it was such a dangerous place to be, there was a lot of confusion about what was going on. So I think that was a part of it too is what information I'm getting, the media, both left media, progressive media and mainstream media were dominated by these narratives that were being put out by people with an agenda that were on the ground because it was so dangerous for reporters to go there. That was one side of it. But I also think it's not entirely accurate to suggest that Iraq was so cut and dried because if you talk to anti-war veterans of the anti-war movement from the 90s, there was a huge split inside the anti-war movement in the 90s between those who wanted to oppose sanctions on Iraq and oppose the First Gulf War and those who actually wanted to promote sanctions as an alternative to war on Iraq. There was a huge, I actually didn't know about this until more recently and Brian Becker who has a great podcast called the Socialist Program did an entire episode. He's an anti-war activist, like veteran of the movement, did an entire episode about the split in the anti-war movement in the 90s. And it is really, it does reflect kind of what we experienced over Syria. I also think Iraq was much more cut and dry in 2003 because it was an explicit invasion. You had an invasion and occupation by like a hundred thousand American troops. That was very obviously an American-led war effort, right? So it was easier for everybody to unify around opposing that on the anti-war side whereas on Syria. An echo of Vietnam there for Americans. Well, exactly. Well, let me just finish this last point. Whereas with Syria, it was this covert operation, one of the, I think the biggest covert operation in American history where we didn't really know the details of what happened until years after they happened. We didn't really know what was going on until years after things went down. So as a result, it was much more difficult for people to know what position should I have on this. And it was much easier to weaponize this narrative of, you know, peaceful, lovely protests trying to organically, you know, overthrow their dictator. It was much, much easier to promote that narrative because you did have protests in Syria. You do have this police state that, you know, has a lot of problems even more now after years of destruction, but does have a lot of problems, does need some serious reform. And so it was much more difficult for leftists to unite against this. And there was also, I think, a very well-funded apparatus of think tankers and very pro, you know, and like lobbying groups that were deployed to slander and smear anybody with a platform who would speak out against this. And that's exactly what happened, right? We were all for years depicted as these evil Assadists who just like loved Assad so much and somehow that's become our ideology is Assadism. I still don't really know what that means. But if people say it enough times, it becomes true. People say it enough time about you publicly, it becomes true. And anybody and anybody who calls people who oppose a dirty war, Assadists, they are a sadist because they support sadistic policies that destroyed a country that obviously has its huge problems, but once had one of the best healthcare systems in the region. And now the healthcare system is destroyed and people are in red lines and suffering and there's been so much death. And that is what these people supported in that the name calling they deployed against people like Rania who stood up against it was just a part of that. And if you were to pull people, if you were to pull people in the US, have you heard of Timber Sycamore? Have you heard of the CIA program in Syria? Have you heard that it was one of the most expensive in CIA history, something like a dollar out of every $15 of the CIA's budget was going to the dirty war in Syria? What would be the percentage of Americans who even heard of it would be like less than 1%? Especially given who we were giving that money to, those weapons too. I mean, it was the people that we invoke to justify a global war until this day. And I also think that just one off other historical detail is that with Iraq, I mean, the first Iraq war is still considered the good war, even though the good Gulf War, even though like there is absolute horror, the highway of death where soldiers were retreating and then they just had the, can we curse on this, but like whatever they bombed, they just bombed, I'll just say they just bombed, they bombed them. They were retreating literally. And Gulf War syndrome, which was dismissed as a myth, but is real. And then the other thing though is that with it with the, you know, 2003 Iraq war, Bush was president, obviously. And it was so obvious to most people that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. So it was very easy to see through that, right? It was much more black and white. People don't know what's happening in Syria. And as Aaron and Ron have said, it's very easy to have sympathy for people who are, you know, rising up against a police state. But, you know, obviously, but, but people really see the parallels between the, like the prep, the ideological like prep work that we see happening also, the media prep work that's been done on Americans, whether it's about, you know, Saddam Hussein or Assad, you know, the emphasis on how bad certain leaders are, how certain people, certain leaders are the head of regime, other leaders who we like, who are actually, you know, have much more autocratic regimes. They're not referred to as regimes. So there are a lot of parallel things. And the WMD thing, I mean, this Aaron, this is your lane, but like I don't understand, there's no coverage of this story. How many more like parallels do you need between Syria and Iraq to get that? I mean, I thought like all liberals agreed that that was a bad thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, listen, what we're experiencing right now with the OPCW story, these whistleblowers who exposed a cover up inside their own organization of an investigation in Syria that found no evidence of chemical weapons used by Assad. And can you explain what the OPCW is for people who don't know? Yes. So the OPCW is the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons. And in April 2018, an incident happened in the Syrian city of Douma, which was then controlled by an extremist Saudi funded militia called Jashal Islam. And dozens of bodies were filmed inside of a building and foaming at the mouth and the militants who controlled Douma at the time accused Syria of a chemical weapons attack. And then the US, Britain and France quickly agreed with that assessment and bomb Syria in purported retaliation. But then we got later on a series of leaks from inside the OPCW where the investigators who actually went to Douma to probe the incident found no evidence of a chemical weapons attack and plenty of evidence that this incident was staged on the ground. And now the story is out in public view because the leaks have come out. There is this internal dispute inside the organization. The whistleblowers want to be heard. They want to have their suppressed findings heard. And the media, for the most part, has just ignored it. They can't acknowledge that it exists. And there's a good reason for that is because this story is so devastating to the propaganda narrative that has been used to sustain the dirty war that we have to occupy a third of Syria. We have to impose sanctions because of this murderous dictator who gasses his own people. So when you have this, this is what I want to get at with my question. So I understand that you have presented recently before the UN this furrow investigative reporting, which is available on a number of shows, the gray zone, pushback and others. But my question really is if you go if we go through great lengths to question the evidence of a use of chemical weapons, is that not in a way of proving the idea that the use of chemical weapons, such as those that Saddam Hussein used against the Kurds, against Iranians, is actually a legitimate premise in the first place for the U.S. and allies to invade the country and to violently intervene? Isn't the public wrong? I'm not accepting the premise just by raising the issue. No, I don't accept that premise. I think it's a great premise to question that we don't have the right to bomb countries based on allegations of chemical weapons use. And there's something called international law, which states out under what conditions you can bomb and invade countries. So no, I don't think I'm accepting that premise by covering this story. I'm not saying that if there was a chemical attack, then the bombing would have been justified. But what I am saying is that you have overwhelming evidence here and it wasn't a chemical attack and you have overwhelming evidence that there was a massive cover-up inside the world's top chemical weapons watchdog. And it's an incredible story and it's incredible story watching the media can just like go to such great lengths to ignore it. They can't even acknowledge its existence because it's just too... I've never seen anything like it before to be honest with you. I was going to say real quick, I think one thing about the issue of chemical weapons, I mean, Aaron's reporting has been phenomenal and that's why he's won awards for it because he's the only one doing it and it's so important. Well, I haven't won any awards for this story. Oh, I thought you did win. Okay, well, you should win awards for it because you're the only one covering it. And of course, it's another lie trying to justify a war. But I do think that there's something interesting to what you just said in the sense that why are chemical weapons so horrible? Like why aren't other weapons horrible? Why are weapons the US use? Why are conventional weapons, which also name and kill and leave people with all kinds of horrible things? You go to parts of Iraq, people are still suffering birth defects from depleted uranium like 20 years later. So there is this interesting element to it that you've kind of raised that speaks to the fact that a lot of international law is really written in a way to basically allow the global north to justify its wars, but then to deny or like to try to criminalize anything that the bad regimes do. Yeah, I was just going to say in regards to that, I mean, I agree with what what Rania and Aaron said. But you know, I think that poking at, you know, showing that there is a cover up or there is questionable evidence does get too motive, right? So regardless of your position on the right to, you know, bomb a country or occupy or invade a country based on what happens within its borders, like there is value in just showing like these people are totally full of it. Like why are we not looking at what's happening because that can then raise red flags about like what really is the motive and if they have to be lying or if they're covering something up or they're refusing to even talk about a potential cover up, that kind of speaks to whether or not this is a good faith, whether it's bad, but honest or bad, but also totally dishonest. Totally. And the mechanism through which these imperialist agendas are pursued too, because here's an example of, you know, you have the veneer of legitimacy of this purportedly independent organization, the OPCW, which says publicly that basically Syria is guilty of this stuff when privately it's censoring its own inspectors who found otherwise. So basically you're seeing this, you know, what should be a noble institution, and it really is, it's done great work and it's even won a Nobel Peace Prize deservedly because it actually helped destroy Syria's chemical weapons arsenal back in 2013-2014, which is a wonderful achievement. But now we're seeing the imperial agenda is so strong that even this noble group that it does good work and which everyone should support eradicating the world of chemical weapons is now being manipulated to justify warfare, and it shows us how cynical our rulers are and how far they're willing to go to pursue their agenda. Well, the points that Rania raises about which weapons are banned is a good one, although international law seems to be mostly violated under the pretense of humanitarian doctrines like rights to protect or R2P responsibility to protect, as the doctrine is called in foreign policy. But the point about weapons such as the drones, for example, which are clearly they are something unprecedented in history, and I thought that strange academic assay you read out loud, I've heard it read out loud on the gray zone, and it is very interesting and it kind of fits into the way the drones were promoted. I mean, Obama tried to present drones as green, as more ecological than F-16s, which are quite polluting. And the fact, of course, that this ancient masculine notion of risking your life to go into battle is completely shirked by the invading side. So that kind of fits into this new trend of what's called toxic masculinity, where you take no risks whatsoever because that's toxic masculinity. Of course, the drone technology, the first female drone pilot was recently announced and celebrated, but apparently it does seem to appeal more to young men with the psychological inclination to video games. So Katie mentioned something that I want to take us back to, which was how the First Gulf War somehow presented as less cruel or less wrong ambushes. And of course, it had something to do bush juniors, sorry, of course, not bush the elder. And of course, this had something to do with Clinton and something to do with the character of Saddam Hussein in the Western media, who was somebody that people couldn't apparently take seriously Bashar al-Azhar and Hafez al-Assad I guess. So George W. Bush, the partisan question is very interesting. George W. Bush swore that God told him to go into Iraq and Afghanistan and find the no boots. And yet a commonly heard perception on the left outside the US goes that the Democrats have an even more aggressive foreign policy than Republicans. Does that believe have any basis of truth to it? Or is this a cynical illusion generated because of the loftier goals of Democrat propaganda? Of course, Trump is outlying cynical. I want to know, you guys, perspectives on how you think American foreign policy actually varies according to this partisan factor, because Democrats and Republicans in the US often claim to have very different foreign policies like that and makes this crazy documentaries that are about what the Clintons did in Haiti and Africa. And I believe part of it, of course, preserves Ronald Reagan's atrocity completely. So how can it be that Democrats and Republicans claim to have different foreign policies, and much of the world looks on baffled as Democrats who protest Chinese and Trump's wars, they massively approved Obama's. So other differences beyond this partisan propaganda. I do think there are certainly differences. They're very slight. I wouldn't say Democrats are worse than Republicans. I think they're more effective at empire than Republicans, because they're better at selling it with the sort of woke imperialism tactics we were talking about. And I do think they're more effective at because they don't do things unilaterally. They tend to build coalitions, which is what Obama did with Libya. He built a coalition. He did it with other countries, whereas George W. Bush invaded Iraq unilaterally, and that made it more testable. But it's not right to say that the US, that Democrats oppose the agendas of George Bush and Dick Cheney, because if you look at every major foreign policy position that George W. Bush took, Democrats supported it wholeheartedly. They voted for the Iraq War. They voted for the war on Afghanistan. In fact, Joe Biden, who's president now, helped whip votes for the Senate from other Democrats to vote for the Iraq War. So I mean, I think, you know, I want to be careful. I was saying, I think a lot of the differences that Democrats and Republicans seem to have over foreign policy is much more performative than anything else, where, you know, Republicans will say, oh, Democrats are doves, and, you know, they're being too nice to China, and they're not tough enough, you know, and then Democrats will try to one up Republicans by being like, oh, but you guys love Russia. But really, ultimately foreign policy is on its own trajectory in the US. And no matter what, it kind of just continues to go in the same direction, like the ongoing sort of covert coups in Latin America continue. Biden took office, and he recognized Juan Guaido, and all of those same policies, all of those same sanctions on Venezuela continue. But I will say is I do think that there is more opportunity when Democrats are in office to de-escalate, like potential violence and potential war, there's definitely more back channel discussions that take place, whether it's between American officials speaking to intermediaries that connect them to the Venezuelans or to the Iranians, or even to certain Iraqi groups they don't like, or even the Syrians, that is definitely happening behind the scenes. It seems more often when there's Democrats in power, because Democrats tend to be slightly more cautious about war, tend to be, or at least try to be more, you know, invested in diplomacy, and kind of like make war a last resort. So there certainly is, I think, something beneficial about having Democrats in charge instead of Republicans, but that's that it's very, it's a very small difference. I just interviewed Shireen Alademi for my podcast, and she's from Yemen originally, then moved to Canada now in the United States, but she was talking about how little, how insignificant the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is, and really lamentably so. But I also think it's important to point out, Rania, you mentioned earlier Kamala Harris is like absolutely pathologically, I honestly don't know if she's just totally ignorant or she's being disingenuous, but her attempt to classify as the root causes of Guatemalan immigration, or fleeing, Guatemalans who are fleeing their country, the root cause of that, according to Kamala Harris, includes corruption, which is a totally racist trope against like, you know, Central American and South American leaders, corruption not, not adapted to climate, climate emergencies, and not being adapted to that. Again, backwards, you know, the savages argument, and violence against LGBTQ people, which is important and exists, but it is just so disgusting to hear her pretend to care about that stuff when anyone who cares about that stuff would have been really upset when Hillary Clinton refused to call the coup in Honduras, a coup in Honduras. Because as we know, they now have this booming femicide and hate crimes industry in that country, because, you know, Salaya was allowed to be escorted out of the country in his pajamas and put on a helicopter, which apparently is not coup behavior. And you know, Hillary Clinton also, in addition to taking the wrong position on that, she lied about it. First, Obama said it was a coup, then Hillary Clinton said it couldn't be called a coup, because what the requirements of deeming something a coup are, she just lied about that. Straight up, Perta Caseres, of course, was killed, the environmental indigenous rights organizer, and it has become like the murder capital of the world. So they need, they can just like, spare all of us with that disingenuous bullshit. Like, so incredibly offensive. No mention of U.S. foreign policy, no mention of not just the support for the coup in 54, overthrowing our bends. But recently, and, you know, Bill Clinton himself had to apologize for the U.S.'s role in my genocide. They're on the same team. I think what's important, everything Katie just said, Democrats and Republicans are on the same team, and it's a mistake to assume otherwise, to assume that they're actually like on different sides. They're not, they're funded by the same people. They're both funded by a military industrial complex. They're both funded by secure border security agency. They're both funded by pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies. It's just difference and tax. That's it. But they're both invested in American empire and imperialism and maintaining this insanely unequal system that just like steals resources and destabilized the global south. So a handful of elites in the global north can profit. They're both on that team. So for all three of you, the major differences are in ideology in its most superficial form, or rhetoric. Yeah, I mean, look at Biden's foreign policy record so far. He's more committed to preserving Trump's foreign policy than he is even in going back to some of the policies of the Obama era. So take Iran, you know, Trump sabotage the Iran deal, reimpose these sanctions. And now it looks like Biden might be backing down. But so far, at least the policy has been to keep all the sanctions, even the Trump sanctions that these new ones that Trump imposed. So it's like Biden's been more even if even though Biden could have come in and said, you know, this guy sabotage one of our top foreign policy achievements, we're going back to it immediately. They couldn't even do that. It was more important for them to keep to Trump's sabotage because if they were to undermine Trump and they would have undermined US hegemony in one small little area in one area of the world, which you just can't do. That's how committed they are to the being an imperial ruler. And the same thing with the coup in Venezuela. This coup where they're trying to install this guy Juan Guaido, who no one in Venezuela has ever even voted for as the president. That was a John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams operation. They're stealing money from Venezuela. Venezuela can't access its own reserves, its own gold. Yes, the Bank of England has confiscated a large sum of Venezuelan gold. This has an activist gesture. The European Union supported sanctions on Venezuela as soon, well, part of the European Parliament, a significant sector of the European Parliament also supported. That includes also a father of an opposition leader who was also a Spanish citizen. They supported these. We have pulled a little bit. Imposing these murderous sanctions that according to some estimates have destroyed 99% of Venezuela's economy. People can't import medicine. I went there a couple of years ago in February 2019. And so it was just the early stages of it. But people were prepared to live under siege because they knew that that's what was coming. And that had already actually began with the sanctions that Trump imposed early on in his presidency. And Biden's continuing all this. No sanctions, relief, nothing. Same thing with the OPCW. Biden could have come in and said, whoa, this OPCW thing that happened under Trump's watch, bomb Syria, and then he pressured the OPCW to cover it up. We're going to stand up for transparency. No, recently at the UN when I testified, the Biden envoy, Ambassador Mills, was just, it was a carbon copy of what the Trump envoys were saying before. So the continuity is, it's incredible. And I do think there's something slightly more dangerous in some ways about Biden, because again, Shreya Nala Demi was talking about this with me, which is that we think now that Biden has very nicely, you know, announced that we no longer support Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen. And that's just not true. And in fact, you were the first person to bring that up that I heard, Erin. You know, we don't support their defensive war against Yemen, which is a hilarious idea that, you know, Saudi Arabia is somehow defending themselves against anyone, including Yemen. But that does, I think people are, they're like, they check that box off like back to normal. We're not funding and supporting the Saudis. It also forgets, it also forgets who started that war, who backed that war initiative, was the Obama administration, as when the war on Yemen began. I mean, I will say about the war on Yemen now, nothing has really changed, but there is this prospect for change because the US has been willing to actually speak to the Houthis, which does make a slight difference. But there certainly also is this danger in the, on the domestic front, under foreign policy with Democrats, which is that everyone goes back to brunch, right? When Republicans are in charge, when Trump is in charge, it's actually opposition to these policies to some degree from liberals and progressives and always the left. But then when their team is in charge, it becomes perfectly fine. And that's what we saw under the Obama administration is everybody who is united against the Iraq war suddenly was like, oh, well, wait, now Obama is doing it. I'm just gonna sit back and be quiet. And that's what kind of what you're seeing under Biden as well. So that there does lie a danger there and they're not being in any opposition to it that matters. And there's something to various too with Biden's agenda where he's basically, he's, they're definitely giving people more crumbs than Obama did. Like they're spending more domestically. It's still, they're still opposed to a $15 minimum wage Medicare for all, but they're giving the people a little bit more crumbs. But if you read between the lines, it's pretty clear what they're doing. They're basically just trying to pacify the domestic population, including progressives, making them think that they're woke at home while continuing the same empire stuff abroad. And you saw last night in the speech from Biden, he's talking about domestic spending, but he mentioned China something like four times. And he's talking about like how we have to outcompete China because this is the, this century is the race with China. He said we have to win the 21st century. I'm not sure what that means. And as if any American, is if any American cares about winning any kind of race with China, I don't even know what that means. But it's clear what Biden actually really means by that, which is that China is now the top threat probably to U.S. hegemony. And so we have to spend billions of dollars more on the Pentagon as Biden is now doing. And we have to orient our efforts towards containing China quote unquote and beating China. And what that means is more sanctions, more imperialism, more military spending, more U.S. ships sailing in the seas around China, more military bases. And the way to get that, get U.S. support, is to just throw the people some more crumbs at home. So the development that you described is of course dangerous. Biden enters the presidency after the Trump years. So he has the excuse of trying to please both camps as in some form of reality politics. He has to appear tough like Trump, just as by the Trump voters. But he also has to throw a bone to the progressive youth who are clearly a part of the future, if there is any future, of the Democratic Party. And what makes that dangerous, of course, is as a leaked CIA documents, leaked by WikiLeaks approved, or in this Glenn Greenwald, I believe, commented about this, that the CIA discussed European perception management and believed that a lot of the counter-emergency policies under Bush would be opposed by Europeans, but more well known not just by liberals in the United States, but with the appeal law to European elites. So I have a quote from this document. The prospect of the Taliban rolling back hard-won progress, some girls' education, could provoke French indignation, become a rallying point for France's largely secular public, and give voters a reason to support good and necessary cause despite the casualties. So that brings us to the question, not only of this use of women's rights, which I want to hear Rania talk about, since you last year released a short video calling out what you described as imperial feminism. I'd like you to break that down for us, but I'd also like to hear what all of you make of the withdrawal from Afghanistan for the promised withdrawal. Is this intended to please the aggressive youth in the Democratic Party, or is this a way of dressing up American defeat? So to the question of imperial feminism, maybe much like woke imperialism, imperial feminism is just the idea of invoking feminism and invoking women's rights and women's livelihoods to justify imperialist policies, to justify bombing and invading countries in ways that actually harm women dramatically. And we saw this most, I mean, it's good you mentioned Afghanistan because this was a dominant theme in 2001 on top of 9-11 to justify the war in Afghanistan was we have to go save the women from the Taliban. Of course, what doesn't get discussed is who are the Taliban? Where do they come from? Well, it's an interesting topic because if you go back to the 1980s, we know that the U.S. was involved in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and in order to try to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, the U.S. in 1979 started arming and funding and one of its biggest covert operations that was very similar to Syria started arming and funding the Mujahideen, this collection of Islamist groups in Afghanistan to try to overthrow the Soviet-backed communist government there. And this of course ended up with the Soviets coming in and invading Afghanistan to prop up the government they were supporting and led to 10 years of brutal fighting that destroyed the country. But ultimately, as the Soviet Union collapsed, led to the Mujahideen, these Islamist groups taking over and I would just like to say one of the CIA's most important assets in this war was a man named Golbuddin Haqmariar who was actually infamous for throwing acid in the faces of women at Kabul University. So these are the kinds of characters that the U.S. was arming and funding in this war, in their Cold War against the Soviet Union was this really regressive movement of misogynists. But this is not who the Taliban is. The Taliban comes from these refugees that were on the border, these Afghan refugees that were living on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan had fled the fighting and they were going to these schools that were funded by Pakistan, by Saudi Arabia, the GCC states that actually had books that were published by the United States, by the USAID. So they were indoctrinated in this very Salafi jihadi style education that was very anti-communist, anti-Cold War. And so after the Mujahideen took over Afghanistan, the country was a mess. It was just run by this different collection of warlords. It was very unstable. And in the mid-90s, the Taliban, as they're called, who were the students from these refugee schools, came in and swept through the country and took over. And this is how the Taliban became in charge of Afghanistan. It's direct result of a chain of events that started with the U.S.'s covert dirty war in Afghanistan that also, of course, led to the rise of al-Qaeda ultimately because al-Qaeda was organized by these Afghan Arabs who had fought in the Mujahideen that the U.S. had funded. But anyways, my point to bring this very brief history up is just to point out the contradictory nature of U.S. imperialism, right? On the one hand, we're funding and arming the people who want to take women's rights back to the Stone Age and our policies are empowering people who are even worse than that on women's rights. And on the other hand, suddenly we want to go into Afghanistan to save the women. And so the people, the generals who are going on American television and making this argument that we have to stay to save the women are completely disingenuous. A lot of the same generals wanted to put what was effectively the Taliban in charge of Syria. They didn't mind that that was going to take women's rights back. So it's just an argument that shouldn't be taken seriously by the people who are promoting it. That said, yes, the U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan but this withdrawal has been gradual and actually been taking place for the past 10 years. At its height, there was 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Now we have 2,500 soldiers there and if this withdrawal goes through, those soldiers will retreat by September. So it's already been a slow motion withdrawal but it's important to recognize that, you know, the U.S. kind of lit a fire on the way into Afghanistan and on its way out, it's also lighting a fire because after 20 years of supposedly being there to fight the Taliban, the U.S. is kind of handing the country in some ways over to the Taliban. And I don't think there's any right or wrong answer here in terms of what to do because there isn't a right answer. There isn't anything that can be done. Afghanistan's tragedy is going to continue whether the U.S. stays or leaves. So the U.S. needs to leave no matter what but and I don't think this is Biden throwing crumbs, by the way, to the progressives at home. I think this, like I said, it's been a gradual retreat for the past 10 years. I think that there is a faction in the U.S. government that genuinely believes that this war has no purpose. It hasn't had a purpose in a long time. The U.S. as an imperial power has nothing to gain from it and as we've seen and, you know, Pentagon paper after Pentagon paper, they see the war on terror as being the old war and the new war is this great power competition with China and Russia, particularly China. And so people like Bill Biden, and he even said it in his speech, announcing the U.S. withdrawal, he mentioned that we need to divert resources away from this useless war in Afghanistan and towards this new challenge we face from China. And so that's, I think, what this is about. It's from moving away from the war on terror and moving towards this new war with China. And Max Boot was concerned about women, what was going to happen to women in Afghanistan. So I suggest he go there to protect them. I support that. I support air dropping, a GoFundMe to fund air dropping, Max Boot and Jeff. Drop the boot, yeah. People of Afghanistan don't deserve that. And there's always a catch. There's always a catch, right? We don't know how many contractors will be left behind in the CIA and special forces. Well, actually, actually, they won't be because most of the contractors that are there will actually be, would actually only be there to basically serve the troops there. And if NATO troops and US troops are leaving, they won't have any security to stay there and they won't have a purpose of staying there. But though Biden did say the U.S. can continue to have sort of shadowy special operations forces continuing they do there and also some CIA assets and the CIA itself will continue to conduct operations in Afghanistan. They're also going to continue to fund the Afghan government, the Afghan police, the Afghan army. So the U.S. isn't really, the U.S. never really leaves. I mean, it just stays everywhere. Yeah, we've also said that before, right? We've said we would leave before and haven't. In this case, though, I think it will happen because it's such a small number of troops that are even left there. But I mean, we'll see. Either way for Afghanistan, it's going to suck. Staying there and leaving. It's the war will continue there no matter what. I'd rather an interview by Katie's partner in Useful Idiots or Partner of Crime, an interview of an Afghan, sorry, an American soldier inside the occupation machinery in Afghanistan who admitted perhaps in a break with his toxic masculinity. He admitted it may have been slightly hysterical of him that he began weeping when he saw women wearing blue jeans and Kabul. Of course, I don't want to mark this excessively, but there's a quick video that our techie, that I think Astro, will show us now what's your comments on this. What time's up means to me is at the end of the patriarchy. It's time's up in the end of the patriarchy and what they want to have is a fundamental shift in the power dynamics in society. And so I think you have the time's up movement. You have what I call the resistance. And then I think you have Tom Steyer's impeach the president. I think those three elements are kind of the enthusiasm on the... Time's up. So you say challenge the patriarchy, given the history of gender relations in this country and around the world and the desire for gender equality. Isn't that a good thing to revise the patriarchy as you put it? My oldest daughter is a West Point graduate that served with the 101st Airway. We have a picture here on the mantle right there, sitting on a throne of Saddam Hussein in her uniform with the 101st Airborne. You know, I'm a huge believer in equality, right? And my daughters, I think, are living proof of that and the rest of my family. So no, I'm a huge believer in that. I think there's some justice involved. But I think in the time's up movement as a subset of that, some of the things that go on as sexual harassment, particularly in the media companies that have not been vetted with the executives is something that really needs to be done. And so, yeah, I think I'm not 100% with the time's up movement, but I can see it's a very powerful political force. I was the one that said, I think, something like, oh, for Winfrey, we'll come out of that movement. It could be actually a win the Democratic nomination. I can't quite tell you what your comments please on this. When is that firm? Is he a feminist? Is that what's happening? An Leninist. And oh, he did say that, which apparently is anti-Semitic code. That he's a Leninist? Yeah, when you say you're a Leninist, it's like you're dropping marks. Oh, yeah. Well, Katie, you have the most experience with time's up in the stories you've covered. Yeah, yeah, time's up. Yeah, if you don't go to them, if you have an allegation against Joe Biden, they're not going to help you. And Anita Dunn is working behind the scenes with Biden. And she, of course, was, she also, she's at time's up. And or the company that time's up is part of. And she famously offered some pro bono help to Harvey Wonseen, which I think is actually worse than doing it for a fee. But yeah, I mean, I don't honestly, I don't, I didn't get the context of what Bannon was saying there. But he was, I couldn't figure out what side he was coming down on with me, with the time's up. Well, this was... When was this from? This video with Ari Melbour? It's an old interview related to the scandals surrounding Trump. But because Bannon talks with such pride about his daughter being risen in the hierarchy of the U.S. Surveillance, he sits in, as he calls it, the throne of Saddam. He's saying it was just more of a chair. I thought it was a tie into the... I mean, it was grotesque. And I'm sorry to upset your future. Your appetite. But this is the tie into the subject of imperial feminism. Right, the book washing of... Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe he just wants to bring times up to Afghanistan. Yeah. Is that what he's trying to do? Yeah, time's up, yeah. Time's up, Melvin. Well, I shouldn't have expected that to inspire all that much. So I have a question about McCarthyism. So many of you have been involved in challenging the Russia-gate narrative and therefore have ended up hounded by what some parts of the left have begun to refer to as a new form of McCarthyism revived long since the time, the House of Un-American Activities Committee. But then Trump or the advisor, whispering in his ear, also used the term McCarthyism. How then to make a solid argument from the left against this new McCarthyism when Republicans also want to appropriate this term as if they are the sole victims of the council culture and censorship industry? As if they weren't for McCarthyism. But sorry, Aaron, yeah. Well, I'm really glad you raised this because I think Russia-gate is a great example of woke imperialism, what we're talking about. Because what happened in 2016? On the campaign trail, Trump sometimes sounded like an anti-imperialist. Sometimes he acknowledged the truth about the war in Syria and the dirty war, sorry, the war on Libya and the dirty war in Syria. And he talked about it as if he was going to roll all that back. Now, of course, it was a complete scam. I think he had his finger on the pulse of the electorate, and so he was speaking to what they wanted to hear. But in terms of who he is himself, I don't think he ever had any intention of doing any of this. And of course, as soon as he came to office, he just oversaw an extreme version of the neocon agenda. I mean, Mike Pompeo is the secretary of state. He brings in John Bolton, Elliot Abrams. I mean, it's a complete, the exact opposite of what he claimed to be against on the campaign trail. So what happens though in response to him talking about criticizing the dirty war in Syria, acknowledging the realities of it, how we helped empower al-Qaeda and ISIS, things like that, him talking about how I want to cooperate with Russia. I don't see Russia as an enemy. I want to get along. What happens? He gets bombarded with this massive propaganda operation, disinformation, banditry, really a puppet of them. And there's even an investigation that gets formed around it. And they don't even hide the fact that if you read the reporting on it from the New York Times, they say that one of the things that unnerved FBI officials was Trump being friendly to Vladimir Putin on the campaign trail and him talking about cooperating with Russia, that that was part of the reason that motivated an investigation of a presidential candidate who then becomes the president. And so I think that was done because, well, for many reasons, one, I mean, they wanted to basically stigmatize what Trump was saying rhetorically. Not that I think they actually thought that he would do anything that he was saying, but I think the fact that his message caught on to enough of the electorate and enough people rejected Hillary Clinton, who is like the embodiment of this like liberal interventionist attitude towards the world. That was scary. And so Russia gate was used as a way to stigmatize all of this, both rhetorically, because you say all this is just the work of Russian propaganda. And even as like a criminal matter, because there might have been some kind of secret Russian conspiracy that we have to now investigate. And that redundant elsewhere. So like, you know, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, she was investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee for collusion with the Russians, Tulsi Gabbard, the one politician in Congress who's willing to criticize the dirty war in Syria forcefully. She was stigmatized as a Russian asset. And meanwhile, who are we being told are the heroes in this story and like the people who are going to stand up to Trump and bring them down. It's the CIA. It's the CIA and the FBI, the traditional institutions that have waged war on progressive movements in the U.S. and around the world. But now all of a sudden, they're rebranded as as heroes. And so this this was an op to basically entrench the bipartisan foreign policy consensus from the threat that Trump posed, not because he actually was going to deviate and policy wise, but because of his rhetoric on the campaign trail and because he's such a clown that he's not a very good steward of the U.S. war machine. So this was really used very effectively to stigmatize all that. And of course, the biggest victims are going to be on the left, the people who actually believe in anti-interventionism and anti-imperialism. And so, you know, when when Republicans now claim that they're against McCarthyism and, you know, the key is just not to cater to that to the extent it's being used for partisan reasons. Because of course, they all support the same things too. They just don't support it when it's being turned against them. And but look, it's it's why, you know, some of us were so against Russia, because we saw how it was moving the left even more to the right. It was making being on the left synonymous with being a Cold War fanatic who worships the CIA. And there's nothing progressive about that. Of course, conservatives have their own networks to rely upon. And those networks have different criteria for expulsion. So it's often the left that gets the real authentic left or the ballsy left that gets wiped out by this conservative industry. Yeah, it's it is funny, though, hearing them decry McCarthyism when they usually are fine with it and engage in it. Also, there there's this funny thing that happened because of all this McCarthyism that you could call it that that was used against the Republicans, right? Like you're all in bed with Putin, even though as, you know, Aaron reported at the time, the policies under Donald Trump actually were more hawkish towards Russia than even under Barack Obama. And they've continued to, you know, go on that hawkish trajectory under Biden. But now we have the situation where the Republicans say that the Democrats are in bed with China. And the Democrats say that the Republicans are in bed with Russia. And it's like Jesus Christ, can this please like, it's just like a stupid conversation, because they all have the same policies at the end of the day. And it's just the McCarthyism on all sides. And of course, the left just ended up getting called all of those things. Like we're all in bed with China and Putin, because we're like, we don't want escalation with anyone. Right? Of course, Western corporations are also in bed with China, because we are no longer in the Cold War, where there was a trade embargo between the liberal West and the socialist countries. So these factories are joint owns between the Chinese state and Western corporations. Exactly. And then you have this attempt by, you have this attempt by the political class in the US to try and explain away this offshoring of jobs, which wasn't just to China, but there was a lot of offshoring to China, obviously, for cheaper labor. But to try and blame China for it, rather than, well, no, American corporations with the help and encouragement of the US political class did this for cheaper labor. And now you're trying to put it on another country when you're the ones at fault. Like your neoliberal trade policies are the reasons American jobs have gone to Mexico and to China and to Bangladesh and whatever other country, you know, cheap labor can be used. But of course, you also have this situation where there's this kind of like friction between certain corporations and US political elites because of the Cold War on China, where certain US corporations don't want to go full Cold War, because China is a huge market for them. It's over a billion people. And there are a lot of them are rising middle class, they can afford to consume products. So it's this Cold War is not going to be Sorry. No, I was going to say this Cold War is not going to be so easy for America. It's not going to be like the last one. It's it's definitely they have a real challenger in China. And a lot of it is the result of like their own policies, trying to incorporate. I mean, their whole idea was we want to incorporate if we just incorporate China into the global economic order, we'll just become capitalists just like us and become like, you know, our style of whatever it is you want to call America, sort of like neoliberal bourgeoisie democracy, that feels a lot more like a dictatorship sometimes, but we'll just become like us. But rather than that happening, China did incorporate itself into the global economy, but they became a real challenger and very powerful to the supply chain of the world to, I mean, we saw it all through COVID when things started to shut down, how important China is and like making masks, just like basic things like that. And let me just say, yeah, I want to say to making Trump the work of Vladimir Putin was just such a brilliant propaganda move because anything done the name of countering quote unquote Putin, you know, not actually the real Putin, but the mythical Putin who controls everything according to Russia gate propaganda, it just gets liberals on board for all the most, you know, reactionary dangerous policies, you know, arming this proxy war in Ukraine, like that's what we impeach Trump over not over like the Muslim ban or supporting genocide in Yemen, but because he briefly paused some weapon sales to Ukraine. And it just everything became what can be done to contain Putin. And so basically, the people behind Russia gate took advantage of the trauma of Trump's election and how scared people were of him. It made everything just about counter it made everything, everyone's fears about Trump personified in Putin to the point where the biggest protest, I say this a lot, but I love saying it, the biggest protests against Trump were not against his tax heist, you know, the biggest upward transfer of wealth in US history, not against his efforts to undermine Obamacare, not against even the Muslim ban or anything else. They were protests in opposition to him firing Jeff Sessions, a racist, a racist Republican, because there was this fear that that was going to maybe imperil the Mueller investigation. It was just so brilliant. And of course, what happened in the end, when Bernie Sanders was surging in the primary, it got used against Bernie because of course, the real aim was not really to challenge Trump. It was to undermine any kind of challenge to the like, you know, neocon liberal foreign policy consensus. You know, and also pointed out how much an undermined I mean, you talked about Russia gate as a privilege protection racket, right? So you talk about how, well, the book Shatter talks about had the night that Hillary lost over pizza. They're like, we're going to put this on Russia. Then it became a self, you know, protection thing because none of the consultants had to blame take any of the blame. And then you also point out that that the Russia focus really undermined a much more important resistance. Like you you've argued that, you know, as people focus on the Russia stuff more, they were no longer protesting about the Muslim ban. So it was terrible. Everyone just watched MSNBC, like your job as a resistance liberal was just to watch MSNBC and CNN watch Rachel Maddow. And that's that's what became that's what became progressive liberal politics under this radical far right administration. It also did something very negative to which plays which ties into what you're saying, which is like, okay, Donald Trump won an election because you have a lot of Americans disaffected with the current political system. And that was to them that was like giving the middle finger to the establishment, whether it worked out that way or not. And rather than ask why is there so much solution meant across America? Why is there so much anger and hatred? Instead of asking those super important questions that would lead to an explanation that is about our very unequal and corrupt system. This was a way of absolving absolving the system of its responsibility for leading to the election of Donald Trump. I mean, it is these kinds of you see a lot of this in the UK as well, this conversation around Brexit, like blaming other things besides what's actually it's a blame. It really did absolve a very corrupt system of any blame for this rise of like a far right in America. And till this day, we haven't a national conversation about it. It just blame Russia blame or anything anytime anything happens, even with the George Floyd protests, right? Yes. You had told us you had news and rice on television, the former national security advisor to Obama on television, try to suggest the George Floyd protests were being incited to some degree by the Russians and the Chinese. Rather than just I didn't know I she might have okay, you might be right. I might be like exaggerating. It probably was just a Russian. He's a good. We don't want to misrepresent although you know, her son, this is a totally side note her son and her son was a Trump, a Trump activist. Yeah, I know. Could you imagine being a Democrat raised and you raise your son and he becomes like a pro-Trump anyways, is that this the Russian it definitely this like blaming Russia for everything on so many levels definitely was a way for liberals to not have to talk about what was actually responsible for all of these real domestic problems we have in America. So I have a question now that might be the closing question about cyberbullies. Many of us have them. Cyberbullying in the greatest in the large scale sense censorship. Last year, French court finally ruled in favor of a school teacher who was censored from Silicon Valley by Facebook for posting the painting by Kurobe, the origin of the world. David will put the techie will put the painting. No, that's not it. That's not the painting. That was crazy. That was a crazy image you just showed though. But that's a great that's a great example. The image you showed of how woke imperialism is not is this so actually overtly anti-woke where this this Russia Gate images used it's you know to push Russia Gate is outright homophobic. Yeah, there's not even what Trump is supposed to be pregnant with. What was he supposed to be? Putin's baby. Oh, wow. So Trump is trans? Oh, no, it's not that. I don't understand what you're saying. You know, they're a mix of images. No, not that. That's mine. Did you throw that? Yes. Yes, that's that that image is of Biden as in the room, the doctor and anatomy lesson, the Rembrandt painting, doing surgery on Juliana Sange. But anyhow, the origin of the world is a famous painting by the French painter Kurobe painted was one of the first of his generation or friend in the history of French art to paint a woman's genitals. They called this title list the origin of the world. Apparently, the painting has been lost in our in our backup. So I thought you're not like lost to the world. I was like, wow, no, you know, lost by our technician. I was gonna say, men do have a problem tracking that down sometimes. Apparently, yes. So, well, my apologies for the absence of the painting. So a court battle was settled that raged for eight years. Because Facebook Silicon Valley or someone there, someone Facebook engineer had removed had censored the painting from a French Facebook account. And I would have used that painting to the problem that we is now on the horizon of the reality SAR. So Biden, the Biden administration has nominated Timothy who Columbia law professor to a position that will give him authority to to regulates the internet. And what is considered inappropriate contents or offensive contents. And who has said that his goal is to return the country to the media landscape that prevailed in the 1950s. Of course, for those who have some sense of history, 1950s, in fact, McCarthy, before the 60s social revolution, and yet who profiles as as a progressive. So he was also Zephyr Tchatz running maintenance around for government. Yeah. How are you guys racing for this? I should mention also that that what he says is the regulation of internet for the country also implicates the world for us. The internet is global. So I find it sounded quite ominous. And I'm wondering how you guys as independent alternative media outlets are racing for that. Well, just want to say Matt Taibbi wrote a good piece on that our sub stack. And then we actually interviewed Matt Stoller about it. With whom I disagree on many things. But that was, you know, about the but in this case, you know, I do think it's very scary. There are a couple tendencies. One is like, Oh, Facebook, you really need to do more content moderation because Facebook, you're so evil. So we want you to have more power to do the things that we're saying you do. I mean, that it's just a very inconsistent incoherent argument. And tech pros will not save us and neither will, you know, realities are. And one of the biggest problems I actually think with the realities are system isn't even what it says about the allegedly false stories. It's actually, I think just as damaging is the suggestion, the kind of implicit statements that things that aren't pointed out are true. So it gives like stories that aren't labeled as false. It gives them this impromptu imprimatur of official news, right? And then you don't have to question it. So, you know, look at how this would be applied, would have been applied to the Iraq war. Look how it'd be applied to Syria, right? You then you don't have to worry about it. You're like, Okay, if this is fake news, we're going to know about it. No, you're not going to. So I think that when it comes to this sort of thing, this kind of like censorship, I think there's a couple things going on here that are really, really troubling. One is empowering these tech oligarchs to decide what constitutes good and bad speech. And if you look at what's happening now, they are being advised by groups like the Atlantic Council. Now the Atlantic Council is this huge think tank in the US that is funded by a collection of weapons companies, oil companies, the US State Department, NATO, various Gulf monarchies, the Turkish government, like they receive funding from all these different actors. So they clearly have an agenda and they get to advise Facebook and Twitter on what constitutes disinformation and what constitutes hate speech as well as the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, which is essentially just a glorified Israel lobby. So what you end up having is the you're basically empowering these tech oligarchs to under the guise of fighting disinformation and hate speech and bad, things online shutting down the left. And that's what we're seeing happen. It's the left that's getting targeted with this. So there's that aspect to it that's very dangerous having these private companies decide what's good and bad speech. The other aspect to it is, okay, I also wouldn't be okay if the state was responsible for that. I do think that at this point, the social media giants should be considered public utilities because we all use them to communicate. That said, we have a right wing capitalist state. Do we really want to give a right wing capitalist state the power to decide what constitutes good and bad speech? Incitement to violence is one thing. But when you let them decide what hate speech is, hate speech very quickly becomes anti-war speech. Very quickly becomes anything that challenges the establishment. Very quickly comes Aaron Mate exposing this attempt to shut down whistleblowers at the OPCW. Very quickly will become Katie Halper's show is very bad and teaching people hateful ideas because they're leftist ideas. And very quickly become anything Ronny and Palick says is, has an agenda to support Putin behind it or something crazy like that. So I just, I don't trust, I think it's a very slippery slope and I find it really disturbing that the left is so conflicted on this issue in the US. I don't know what this conversation in Europe is like, but the US left is very much conflicted on this issue. You know, a certain segment of the left believes, yes, we should let Twitter and Facebook shut down Nazis. And while I love the idea of shutting down Nazis, I don't trust tech oligarchs or the US government that actively works with Nazis in Ukraine to shut down Nazis. And they haven't shown that they'll do it. They don't have a record of doing it. Their record is shutting down the left. Right? Yeah. And they exploit Trump so beautifully. So, you know, because Trump is this, you know, wellspring of misinformation and fake news, we have to fact check him constantly. We have to protect the people from his lies. Instead of just letting the people decide for themselves what's true or not and evaluate on their own. Which is hard in America because we don't have media literacy and the mainstream media lies so much. Like they lie as much as Trump does. Yeah. And people think that they're telling the truth. That's the danger of it. And also like now what the Washington Post, they just got rid of their fact checking thing. So now we don't worry. Yeah, and also like Glenn Kessler. I mean, the thing about the Sanders, you know, both Sanders primers, they just laid so bare just how invested and unbiased and impartial the media is. I mean, you this Glenn Kessler is a fact check of the Washington Post with like hated Sanders and was always like making things up about what he was making up. And it's just, you know, there's, again, this is like, I prefer the like rabid right wing, obvious op-ed pieces to the allegedly objective Washington Post New York Times reported pieces. And it's gotten it's gotten it's gotten the point to her any kind of discussion of democratic elite corruption. So Hillary Clinton 2016, the Bidens now in 2020. Now you just label it Russian disinformation. Now you label it Russian disinformation. Right. Before the election, like Hunter Biden's laptop emerges in the news. And some former CIA officials say that it might be Russian disinformation. It could be a part of our so boom, then we're that now all of a sudden we can't even share the article on social media. Yeah. And then of course, we all forget about it because we're supposed to just accept the censorship and move on to the stories that we're allowed to read. A fan of Hunter Biden's addiction memoirs, by the way, was very concerned about this show and about the guests on Twitter at least. Oh no, we don't want to upset those people. Really? A fan of Hunter Biden's addiction memoir was upset about this thing. Yes. A person who also mentioned diamonds are rewing to upper class Westerners. I don't know if this is about the Lebanese in the West, presumably being rich or this is about you and Katie. I'm not sure which one. Well, listen, let me pull rank. Let me let me pull rank actually. Let me let me actually pull rank. I'm sorry to do this, but this person should know that and not that it really means anything to me, but Hunter Biden was very much helped by my father's work on addiction. And my father, I can tell you approves of my work. So I just would like this person to I'm sorry to pull this rank here, but if they're upset, then they're upset, then they're also exactly. Yeah, they should be thanking the Maté family. Yeah, seriously. You know what? We accept your apology. We accept your apology. I as a friend of the Maté family accept your apology, which you can add to the comments or on Twitter. I don't know what you're afraid of. I actually think that Hunter Biden is a pretty compelling guy. I feel bad for him. I mean, I think I would rather that Biden, Joe Biden have the empathy that he has towards his crack addict son. I'd like him to apply that to people who smoke marijuana, for instance, right? You want to get fired by Biden. But if you want to get a good job hook up, just make sure that you attend strip clubs and, you know, deny the paternity or the father of their kid and do coke. Sorry. It's poetic justice in a sense because of course, Biden, when he was proposing these crime bills that were so dangerous, he and Clinton eagerly stereotyped black people as crack users. And now it turns out the sun, and Ukraine, of course, in a way, maybe it's karma, well deserved. Now, our technicians at risk of provoking the Twitterverse and also our technician expressed some concern that the painting that was censored might be censored by YouTube or might be flagged by YouTube, but this painting was shared on Facebook by Durand, a certain high school teacher in France, and this led to an eight year court case against Bon Valley, which was won last year. This would have been all the news had it not been for the coronavirus. Wow. Well, I got to say that I'm Rose McGowan. I'm going to just give away a secret. Sunday night, I'm having on Rose McGowan on my laptop. That's exciting. Yeah, very exciting. And she, you know, she got deactivated or because she posted a photo of an art piece that shows Bill Clinton getting a massage from a young woman. On Twitter or where? Yeah, that's yeah. So they deactivated her or locked her locked her out. You know, they're always suppressing her on social media. But because she posted this really great Jack, what is their last name, Jack Allison Jackson or Allison Johnson, a British artist who who does these great, great photos. So Rose McGowan posted this photo of a fake Clinton getting a massage. And she did that because Bill Clinton, appropriately enough, of course, did an event with Kamala Harris about women about empowering women and girls, which is very appropriate for a Clinton to do. This is Sunday night on the on the Katie Helper show. Yes. Yeah, I can't wait. Yeah, 7pm Sunday on the Katie Helper show. Yeah, which is youtube.com slash the Katie Helper show. Yeah. And tonight we're having Kshama Soant and Adolf Reed. Kshama Soant, interestingly, interestingly, it's so funny that that Kshama Soant who's on the Seattle city council, it's the Seattle city council that right now is taking the leadership in the US to try to get Biden to waive the like to waive the patent rights for the coronavirus vaccine. And this is not coming from Congress. It's coming from the Seattle city council that is like trying to trying to push that through. And so thank you to Kshama Soant for doing that. And where's the leadership in DC following her lead? Yeah, here in Latin America, Biden administration has been discouraging countries for importing the school to the vaccine. Yeah, it's really disgusting. Yeah, like Brazil, right? Yes, if that's not like a sign of pathological capitalism that like, don't you get that you can get COVID when more people have it? Like, don't we want everyone vaccinated? Even, you know, exactly, there's a serious, there's a serious issue of vaccine apartheid vaccine equality taking place around the world that's being led by big pharma and these like global north imperialist countries like the US. And then with Brazil, the US government even pressured the Brazilian government not to buy this botanical vaccine. But they also won't waive US pharmaceutical patent rights. And I would be, I have to plug this now, Breakthrough News also has a live from this evening all about vaccine apartheid with some excellent guests discussing the Cold War aspect of this, the big pharma aspect of it and the fact that it's actually super dangerous, because as this disease is spreading across India and Brazil, the more people who get it, the more likely there are to be these vaccine resistant, more contagious variants. And then of course, this will require the pandemic to prolong the pandemic and then require more vaccines. So Pfizer and Moderna can make more money making a new vaccine. It's just completely outrageous. You literally have capitalism prolonging the pandemic. Thank you. Many thanks, Rania, Aaron, and Katie for beginning to open Pandora's box here on the channel of DM 25, the Democracy in Europe movement. I saw them debut at the Sanders Institute. Ah, yeah. That's cool. Well, we hope to meet again. It sounds like a band. It does actually. It's a good name for a band. We hope for future reunions. And now I must tank up all of you, as well as the graphic and design team surrounding Max Gehner, the social media production team surrounding David Castro, who hopes that Katie has the original t-shirts of DM 25, the Progressive International, a bit of merchandising. The press team around Claudia Trapp, volunteers in the translation team, Ivan and another which, as well as everyone, in the alternative Security Council team, which successfully discouraged and postponed this year's Munich Security Conference. Well, thanks to all of them. And this was a real thrill to be a partner. So thank you for having me. Great conversation. And thanks to the trolls out there, by the way, who make me know that I'm in good company when they come after me with these guys. We feed off the hate. Bring it on. And if that's how you want to spend your life replying on Twitter to people who host us on platforms and making insane allegations about us that you can't support, that's fine. You spend your life that way. We'll take it. They say they are fighting hate. Yes, of course, they do. That's fine. I can hear. The slogan of the people on Twitter fights hate. Oh, fight hate. Well, bring it on, guys. Fight us all you want. You're just giving us more views, honestly. Yeah, I would rather we can absorb your pathology better than other people in your life. So if we can take that instead of people who know you in real life. Yeah, have you like yelling at your wife for your kids? Yeah, we don't want you to put that toxic energy out there and people who you actually bring it on. Yeah, we'll deal with it. You're welcome, family members and friends of these people. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you.