Home
Creators
Search Recent Missing Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

[UNLOCKED] Episode 249 - I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It (w/ Norman Finkelstein) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-06 10:46:14
Imported:
2026-06
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Downloads

  • Episode 249.mp3

Missing 1 file, as this post has not yet been imported.

Content

Professor and iconoclast Norman Finkelstein's long-awaited book is finally out! He and Briahna discuss chapters on Ta-Nehisi Coates & Kimberlé Crenshaw in the wake of news that those authors and others have been omitted from the African American AP curriculum. Does the cancel culture critic have a defense of these figures being canceled despite his substantive agreement with them? Also, what does Norman, a staunch advocate of Palestinian rights, make of Ilhan Omar's ejection from the Foreign Affairs committee? The critic of identity politics weighs in on the choice to defend Ilhan as "a black woman." Finally, Norman gives his takes on the Bernie movement, the future of electoralism, and everyone's favorite topic -- Marianne 2024.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Comments

Anonymous

Just excellent. I thought I already had a Patron account for Briahna Joy Gray but if I did, I now have two.

Fahim Everyone's Dream

I think tonight's Callin should be titled "Cats In Hot Plates". Lol!!! I'd love to see the whole video though to see the facial reactions. They're always priceless.

Anonymous

Doing idpol is easy, especially among groups like the DSA. Actual working class politics is very difficult.

John H

Norm really outs himself at the end as being the same kind of asshole narcissist as every other old credentialed White man in academia complaining about trigger warnings (which are a good thing that doesn't restrict speech at all - don't SURPRISE students with things that are triggers for common forms of trauma, not donht ever expose students to a given topic) and natural social consequences (he framed this as protection from public opinion) of expressing bad opinions, telling racist jokes, and hitting on their students. He sounds like an authoritarisn monster as a teacher (one minute late is unacceptable, 3 hour classes with no breaks), and he's unhapoy about losing the privilege of a vaunted position and petty dictatorship of his classroom thanks to any sort of outside scrutiny and accountability.

John H
>>101372363

Like, public criticism is also speech that should be protected? There is no 'protection' from it - and, yeah, normative social forces are coercive. That's literally how a society works.

Monique Thigpen

Parts of this were a bit frustrating to listen to. I don’t know much abt the man or his career but he comes across as a very old, white and out of touch academic, and he’s a little too stuck on reminiscing about Bernie. I think he’s paternalistic toward black ppl and too dismissive toward contemporary black thinkers. However, I think he made some great points about the need for mass organizing, and political education for ordinary working ppl

Anonymous

Norm describes a concerted campaign to weaponize identity politics against Bernie's class politics and the conscription of Coates and Crenshaw into that campaign. And yet Coates endorsed Bernie. I share some of Norm's frustrations but it sounds like he's making some assumptions and accusations -- is there evidence for those accusations in his new book?

Eric Daniel Espinosa
>>101389387

Same w/ Angela Davis, whom he would likely agree with. He strikes me as someone who (despite the claim) hasn’t read those he’s criticizing

Anonymous

Yeah these are the kinda dense academic episodes that don’t appeal to the normmies.

Jonathan Levin
>>101387926

I cannot help but point out the beautiful irony of your comment criticizing him for being old or white or an academic instead of criticizing him for his politics, when the whole discussion was about the vacuity, distraction, and rhetorical weakness of identity politics. But how did you find him paternalistic toward black people? I think he shows sincere respect toward black thinkers. Just not the ones he thinks are hucksters. Edit: He clearly has a lot of respect for BJG, for example :)

Jonathan Levin
>>101387926

Since you mentioned you don't know much about his career: A common thread in his work is pointing out the ways that people exploit real or appropriated victimhood. His book The Holocaust Industry is a prime example, where he exposed how some Jewish organizations falsely accused German and Swiss banks of stealing money on a massive scale from victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Then once they succeeded in obtaining large settlements from these banks, they did not fairly compensate actual victims and their descendants, instead funneling the money into their own organizations. Lots of people criticized this book for supposedly being antisemitic, but that's a totally inaccurate reading. It's a book that clearly exposed how misused claims of victimhood further hurt the true victims of the Holocaust and their descendants (making them look greedy and dishonest to the public, cheating them out of compensation obtained in their name, etc.). It's been a while since I've read this so if I'm misremembering anything, I'm happy to be corrected. I think his criticism of identity politics is basically the same flavor as this. If someone dishonestly inflates and capitalizes on their claimed oppression, it weakens the cause of justice, because people won't take those claims seriously and will lose sympathy for those who are truly oppressed.

Jared

1:08:00 Norm is spot on

Jared
>>101389387

"It seems that Bernie does not have the vocabulary that allows him to acknowledge the role and the influence that racism has played historically," she added. "He thinks that economic justice will automatically lead us to racial justice." - Angela Davis

Anonymous

What Finkelstein is describing though isn't really intersectionality, (intersectionality in my view simply being a way to shoehorn [mostly] white woman, and, secondarily, non-ADOS into the social cache of having matriculated into an "Americanness" via Slavery and Jim Crow afterward). But I digress; the point is: Finkelstein admits there's "a recognition that class did not totally encompass certain kinds of oppression" when discussing the political urgency of the Jews, but somehow imagines it's "sinister" to critique Bernie's deficit of ADOS specific policy, i.e. reparations. Class politics doesn't address the economic position that ADOS is in as a result of ethnically targeted exclusion of, and theft from, that particularly group. That is to say, the racial wealth gap between ADOS and White America; the mass incarceration of ADOS black men; predatory lending to ADOS borrowers, are not simply incidental to the calcification of wealth to the top 1%, any more than the Holocaust is incidental to a prosperous 1940's Germany. That said, identity politics will fill the void of actual policy, especially where name recognition is at play. Had Bernie understood this, he wouldn't have been out flanked by Clyburn's fish-fry.

Anonymous

Can't wait to get into this one, based on all the comments.. It's spicy as usual with Norm. Love it

Anonymous

Bri is better at the practical application of what identity politics vs class means to the broader electorate, however, the most salient point made was by Norm: no matter what campaign Bernie ran or who he pandered to, the Establishment would never, under any circumstances let Bernie win. Truth is that electoral politics is dead and arguing what a better run campaign would do is useless because it will never happen (even if somehow the next generation could save us we don't have 20 years). The fact is climate catastrophe is inevitable and unless we unite as a working class movement that has set up a parallel government that actually helps and shows real material improvements to those people's lives, they will not commit to the Movement that will be the only chance for human beings to survive against the fascism that is the only logical conclusion to our current system. The system works, let's stop supporting it. Panther Party