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Head to our homepage for the brand new part 2 of our 2-hour interview with Norman Finkelstein.
If you heard the free version of Part 1 on Nov 11, the interview continues at 28:50.
In Part 2 of the interview, Norman X Finkelstein previews his new book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It," which unleashes his fiery analysis on identity politics and President Obama. To write it, he first had to do some mandatory reading from the experts in those fields.
“I felt in order to write [the book],” Norm tells us, already exasperated, “I should sit down and read this new leftist cancel culture. So I sat down, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates, I read Kimberley Crenshaw, I read Ibram X Kendi, I read Robin DiAngelo, and it’s impossible not to conclude that this stuff is intellectually vacuous and worthless.”
But it isn’t meaningless in today’s politics. Far from it: “My conclusion was that identity politics is fundamentally a weapon of the Democratic party to derail, deflect, and diffuse a radical class-based politics.”
Norm, a classical scholar who understands Left history like the back of his hand, shares proof of his analysis when he quotes Leon Trotsky, who “talked about all these people who pretend to be radical, but when a moment of truth comes, you see their real colors.”
“I felt that moment of truth came with the Bernie Sanders campaign. Crenshaw, Coates, Angela Davis, all these people went out and started to attack Bernie Sanders. They all, in the moment of truth, backed the Democratic party establishment and sought to derail and discredit the Bernie Sanders candidacy.”
He goes on, even more fired up here, to take down the one politician who is so brazen to flaunt that he won an election by standing for nothing, the “hollow vessel” known as Barack Obama. Norm’s taking no prisoners, and you’re not going to want to miss it.
It’s Part 2 of Norm Finkelstein on Useful Idiots. Check it out.
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