The depravity of the "radical progressive Marxist" Zionist
How Sam Kriss got over his teenage "Hezbollah tankie" rebellious phase and came back into the Zionist fold
Most of you are probably unfamiliar with Sam Kriss. He was a writer who got outed as a sex pest and then dropped off the face of the earth, right as he was about to make it big as one of the UK "left's" main voices in the Corbyn era. He had become friends with Owen Jones and was just starting to dip his toes into writing for mainstream publications like the Guardian. A lucrative career awaited him, and as he advanced, his politics went from what would be decried hysterically as "tankie far left crank communism" to the typical progressive Bernie AOC soc dem trash that is deemed acceptable by their liberal masters who hire them at these outlets.
But he fucked up. He got outed as a sex pest, and decided to leave the internet. Then over the next year or so he started writing again for obscure online rags that typically publish "heterodox right" garbage, the whole anti-woke grift, and he realized he could make some money jumping on that trend, and he did it with glee. And his politics went in that direction, the whole "anti-woke actual left" brand, which is quite lucrative because right-wingers love that stuff. Peter Thiel has created an entire online industry of grifters who do nothing but tap-dance for his money by churning out that trash.
Another fact about Sam Kriss is that he used to be an anti-Zionist Jew of the Norman Finkelstein kind, the kind who praised Hezbollah and Hamas to be edgy. He's the "edgy tankie", remember, before his move to the big leagues with Owen Jones (a person he used to mock on his blog before befriending him).
But then since October 7 Sam Kriss began crying hysterically about "tankie leftists" who "glorify Hamas", and he hasn't stopped since. I haven't been following his trajectory closely since the sex pest reveal, and he's a totally irrelevant marginal nobody that has a small online niche cult that sustains him, but I did come across his constant whining about "the tankies" being repeated by that faction of the Western left who loves nothing more than to pretend like Stalinist Hamas supporters are on the verge of taking power in Washington DC, London, Paris and Berlin. The most deranged lunacy imaginable because they turn figures they see on their twitter feeds into more important and powerful voices than the New York Times, BBC and Guardian combined.
In his latest screed Sam Kriss decides to devote again thousand of words to the "red triangle tankie Hamas lovers", and what is his argument when you clear it of the sophomoric pseudo-intellectual prose that he copy-pastes from sci-fi and gothic novels he read as a teenager?
"Uh, killing is bad, and Hamas kills and they're doing it without reason, and it doesn't lead to anything, so it's bad, and they should have just shut the fuck up and stayed in their concentration camp. Also Netanyahu secretly loves Hamas so they're actually working together, dialectically this is true, I am doing dialectics, this is Marxist and edgy and radical, I am repeating Hillary Clinton lines to you as a Marxist. Believe it now."
Well, but I don't believe it, not when Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Keir Starmer say it, nor when you say it, you grifter piece of shit scumbag.
Your fake moralizing, where you also include a deranged line about "babies being decapitated" by the "Palestinian resistance", a nice nod to the genocidal atrocity propaganda being used to genocide Gaza, could be and was actually applied to every resistance struggle that dared use violence against their occupying oppressors, from Algeria to Vietnam to Lebanon and elsewhere. "What is the point of resisting? You're only killing yourselves, your children, who get no say in it, so you're killing your own children, by daring to attack US troops in South Vietnam. Why are you doing this? This is evil, you are evil. Also those in the West who dare support you are just doing hobbyism and they are also evil."
Those are the actual "arguments" he makes for opposing violent resistance by Palestinians by the way.
Sam Kriss, in the span of just a few years, has transformed into one of the most grotesque genocidal scumbag cunts alive, and he did it for two reasons.
He did it obviously for money, because his online niche grift audience pays him for having those views, and not other views. As a person who used to make this materialist point his former self would agree with this.
The second reason is that Sam Kriss went on birthright to Israel, and was raised in a Zionist household, and traces of that Zionism never left him even as he was larping as a "Hezbollah tankie" for a bit in his later teenage years doing his own little rebellion act against his parents. That was always meant to just be a phase that adolescents go through and then turn into stories to tell over London dinner-parties, as he's doing now. He has become a Zionist, but a “radical progressive Marxist” one, one who cites the Grundrisse and has a certain affinity for Trotsky and Lenin.
Back to the trash.
I thought he was being ironic, no?
Good points, Zei. I appreciate your work in exposing who these people really are.
Today I was reading twitter feeds of "intellectuals" similar to Sam Kriss (i.e. neoliberal grfiters and lying propagandists posing as "rational, sensible leftists" while doing what they can to smear and vilify students protesting against Israel's Genocide and american imperialism. And I stulmbled upon Noah Smith's blog post.
I realise that you know how much of a scumbag he is, but reading this blog post of his I just could not believe it. It was the most depraved piece of liberal propaganda I have seen recently (and there is a ton of it).
Title of this text is "Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left" (just looking at this title you can guess where this is going) I have the access to the full text and can e-mail it to you. Let me know If you are interested.
(And just FYI I have not paid any money to Noah Smith in order to gain access to this text, someone on twitter sent me the whole text)