Valuetainment - March 11, 2026


“Is Islamism The New Communism？” - Rita Panahi Debates Which Ideology Is More Dangerous

Topics
voting requirements in Australia
Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Earl Browder Karl Marx Stalin Menexa Lenin
“Trump's NEXT Target” - Mojtaba Khamenei Takes POWER As Iran’s NEW Supreme Leader “Consequences Are CATASTROPHIC” - Rita Panahi PRAISES Brave Iranians Protesting Sharia Law

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

161.52

Word count

2,178

Sentence count

97

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the rise of the far-left in the modern world, and the impact it has had on the way we think about the past and present. We also discuss the threat of Islamic extremism, and whether it is more dangerous than communism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 What do you think is a bigger thing that they fought against?
00:00:02.220 Because back in the days, my mother, my mother's side,
00:00:05.220 many of the members, they were part of the two-day party.
00:00:08.120 I don't know if you remember the two-day party or not in Iran.
00:00:10.480 It was a communist party in Iran.
00:00:11.900 That's where a lot of, if you ask your mother, she'll tell you about it.
00:00:15.280 Two-day party was, these are guys that were the communists,
00:00:19.560 you know, they loved what Stalin, Lenin, you know, Karl Marx,
00:00:23.560 this was their Bible, two-day party of Iran.
00:00:25.740 and there was a fear of communism getting bigger to spread around the world and possibly making it
00:00:35.580 to the countries you know to the states to u.s to other places and in schools they got into
00:00:40.480 universities they did such a great job going and brainwashing american kids in schools
00:00:45.500 no it is the most noble thing professors all started giving the kids you should read communist
00:00:51.300 Manifesto. You should read Communist Manifesto. And then fast forward today, Rob, how big is the,
00:00:57.620 how many members of the Communist Party are there in America right now? If you,
00:01:02.200 if you do Communist Party membership in U.S., 70,000 members, no, that's 1930s.
00:01:11.800 They were peaking. If you go to charts, 20,000 right there, 20,000 membership 2024. Okay. Can
00:01:19.060 you ask when was the peak 1941 so go back to that right there rob where you were at 1941
00:01:25.460 fervently supporting the war effort the popular front era of cpusa lasted until 1945 where earl
00:01:32.940 browder was ousted from the party and replaced by a new guy yeah at one point these guys were
00:01:37.980 getting a lot of momentum the question i got for you is what do you think is you you think what's
00:01:44.060 happening with islamists and it's spreading around the world you think that's more dangerous than 1.00
00:01:51.020 communist party or equivalent less what do you think about because it seems like what president 0.99
00:01:55.920 trump is doing and he's been saying since 2015 when he said i would bomb the shit out of iran 0.97
00:02:01.040 those are his words on what he said rubio has been saying this since 2015 do you think this 0.97
00:02:05.280 is a bigger threat than communism was back in the days islamism um that's a big call to make 1.00
00:02:14.840 i think islamism's um spread through the west is more certain than communism ever was because it's 0.99
00:02:23.520 a demographic thing ultimately and once it starts it's very hard to pull back um you see that
00:02:30.320 example in France where they've got you know certain demographic issues and they've got so
00:02:36.140 many people now on their terror watch list that they can't actually watch them so once you get
00:02:41.360 over a certain percentage then you've got issues and just so but to me they're two sides of the
00:02:51.600 same coin that what they share in common is a hatred of western values and a determination
00:02:58.040 to undo the West.
00:02:59.900 They think we are all illegitimate countries on stolen land.
00:03:05.140 All that sort of rhetoric is designed to demoralise the population
00:03:11.160 and I think the leftists, maybe not the communists,
00:03:15.120 but it's all one movement to me, have been the most successful
00:03:19.680 in advancing their ideology.
00:03:23.080 The march through the institutions, as they called it,
00:03:26.160 it started with academia but it's everywhere now this leftist mindset it's it's in the corporate
00:03:33.400 world i mean we saw that during the blm riots the summer of love where every corporate big
00:03:40.180 corporate was coming out with some pro blm um stance and you know you saw the the influence
00:03:50.340 the normalisation of what was a neo and is a neo-Marxist group vehemently anti-Western values
00:03:58.080 so to me there's the two sides of the same coin they share a common goal and that's why they
00:04:05.280 work together even though they really don't share too many other values but it's everywhere it's no
00:04:12.960 longer just schools it's in the corporate world the HR departments have been taken over by this
00:04:18.080 sort of ideology um and people are self-censoring in Australia there are so many people who
00:04:27.380 come up to me and say you know I want to say what I think but I'm too scared they're even too scared
00:04:32.660 to post it on their own Facebook page because you know their green-haired niece might you know
00:04:38.820 abuse them or not show up to Christmas dinner so we had how nasty is it over there how is it
00:04:44.200 walking on actuals it is it is a little bit because our caliber of our politicians is is
00:04:50.440 different so we've had what you would call rhinos or in in the uk the tories who governed like they
00:04:58.880 were in the labor party we've had that sort of conservative for a long time so just in the last
00:05:04.840 few months in australia we've had the really the main streaming of a group called one nation who
00:05:11.600 have been a political party for decades but always a very small vote sort of under 10 percent around
00:05:17.480 five six seven percent now in some of our polls they're winning the polling they're coming in
00:05:22.940 ahead of labor and the coalition which is the liberal and nationals who are supposed to be the
00:05:28.440 right side of the political spectrum and that's because people are just so sick of these you know
00:05:35.420 conservative in name only who don't actually stand for anything who make a few noises and then
00:05:41.560 when they get into power they let the bureaucracy run rampant and the swamp as you call it and
00:05:46.900 just implement leftist policies so that's why one nation has had this enormous surge it's a
00:05:54.180 really fascinating time in australia for politics to see if that's just going to fracture the right
00:06:00.700 vote and keep the left in power or whether those forces come together and actually
00:06:07.640 win government we've got preferential voting in Australia which is also fairly unique it's not
00:06:14.320 something so you don't just vote one for your choice you number them so if you've got eight
00:06:19.940 candidates in your seat you'll number one from eight yeah I just put one or I have no you have 0.99
00:06:26.040 to number them it's actually a fairly idiotic system when I think of it I used to think you 0.97
00:06:33.020 had its benefits but it actually is is not a great system you'd much rather have a first 0.96
00:06:38.380 pass the post system like the uk does so yeah so you have to number them so if i vote for an
00:06:46.040 independent as my first vote and they don't get up then my second preference my vote goes into my
00:06:52.100 to that into their bundle and and so on so it's it's a complicated system but who else uses that
00:07:00.280 system i can't even tell you who else uses it could be a uniquely australian flavor i'm sure
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00:08:08.900 Interesting.
00:08:09.800 Not only do we have a preferential system, get this,
00:08:12.460 we have compulsory voting.
00:08:14.540 You will be fined if you don't vote.
00:08:17.560 So you have to participate in elections,
00:08:20.720 whether they're at the federal level, state, or local government.
00:08:26.180 So we've got three levels of government and you are obliged by law
00:08:30.860 to participate in it.
00:08:33.360 You will be fined if you do.
00:08:34.580 You will be fined, yes.
00:08:36.080 I've had fines I've had to write in and say.
00:08:37.980 I wasn't in the country.
00:08:38.960 Give me a break.
00:08:39.780 How much are fines?
00:08:40.540 What kind of fines is it?
00:08:41.520 Oh, it's not crippling fines, but it'll be like around $100, I think.
00:08:45.540 They fine you if you don't vote.
00:08:47.340 Yeah.
00:08:48.060 What percentage?
00:08:48.800 Three elections we have to vote in too.
00:08:50.560 It's not just the one election.
00:08:51.920 We've got state, federal, and local government.
00:08:55.000 Each of the elections you don't vote for, you get fined.
00:08:57.780 Yep.
00:09:00.080 And the elections are at different times.
00:09:02.020 So the federal election, obviously, is the whole country,
00:09:04.640 and then we will have state elections and local elections,
00:09:09.660 which are the local government.
00:09:11.900 And, again, there was a period where I thought,
00:09:16.000 oh, that's not so bad because it gets people involved
00:09:18.780 and you have greater participation rates
00:09:21.160 and perhaps the government is more reflective of the population
00:09:25.240 because everyone's voting so you get a more representative.
00:09:28.860 No, that's actually not the case because you've got people voting
00:09:31.700 only because of the fear of the fines.
00:09:34.540 So they're not actually, you know, they have no knowledge.
00:09:38.400 And we have something called the donkey vote
00:09:40.300 where people will just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 on their ballot.
00:09:45.200 So it's, you know, very advantageous to be the number one on the first name 0.91
00:09:49.480 because you get the benefit of the donkey vote.
00:09:51.940 You get the people who go one, two, three, four, five, yeah.
00:09:54.380 Just to do it quickly, just so I'm going to be... 0.93
00:09:56.760 That's the donkey vote, yeah. 0.96
00:09:58.760 What percentage do the donkey vote? 0.99
00:10:00.060 I don't know. 0.63
00:10:00.500 It wouldn't be that much.
00:10:01.360 Probably be five, ten percent, but that would be enough for some elections, I would imagine.
00:10:05.020 So you have to vote for three elections per year?
00:10:07.960 Not per year.
00:10:09.460 Federal elections, Victoria, where I'm from,
00:10:12.820 We have state elections every four years and then federal elections are normally around every three years and then you've got the local ones as well.
00:10:20.680 The local ones I think are the worst to participate in because at least with your federal and state elections, you've got some knowledge of who you're voting for and the policies to advocate.
00:10:34.640 The local government elections, even I'm pretty politically engaged.
00:10:41.180 Half the time, I don't know the names on the ballot for the local government or who they are, what they stand for.
00:10:46.320 So it's completely an absurd thing to require me to vote, but it is what it is.
00:10:52.940 So, yeah, we have freedom in Australia, but not freedom to refuse to vote.
00:10:57.760 You have to vote.
00:10:58.960 That's interesting.
00:11:01.140 Do you require IDs when you go to vote?
00:11:04.080 How easy is it to vote?
00:11:05.280 Is there voter fraud in Australia?
00:11:06.900 How does that work?
00:11:08.020 I think it's pretty good.
00:11:09.180 You could commit voter fraud if you went to multiple polling booths and gave the same name because they cross off your name.
00:11:18.860 But, you know, there should be checks and balances to see if the same name's been crossed off.
00:11:23.700 But I do wonder how thorough those checks and balances is.
00:11:27.500 So it could happen, but it's, I think, unlikely.
00:11:32.120 Yeah, we don't have – it's a much simpler system.
00:11:34.840 And the Australian Electoral Commission is pretty sound in policing it.
00:11:40.580 There has been some accusations of them becoming politicized with a couple of different things over the years.
00:11:45.880 But overall, they're pretty sound and there's high confidence that the elections are free and fair,
00:11:53.000 that we're not having the sort of issues you have here.
00:11:57.260 Is this true, Rob?
00:11:58.700 It says in federal elections in Australia, voters generally do not need to show photo.
00:12:03.520 You need to give your name, and they've got to vote a role with the names of people who are in that electorate.
00:12:10.940 But not an ID needed.
00:12:12.120 No.
00:12:12.500 And if you're voting in a – if you're an absentee voter, I guess it's called, when you're voting in a polling booth that's not your electorate, then you go to a different section and you – it's a little bit more involved.
00:12:26.360 Interesting.
00:12:27.020 Yeah.
00:12:27.440 Yeah, they're trying to do voter ID here.
00:12:29.060 I think you need it here because you've got all sorts of issues here, particularly post-COVID, where you have the mass mail-in voting that isn't so much of an issue in many other countries.
00:12:41.600 For some of you that are watching it, that are fans, she's officially on Menexa.
00:12:44.720 If you want to Menexa and ask her questions, you can.
00:12:47.140 I think her QR code is going to be somewhere below here.
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00:12:59.060 Thank you.