Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Robert Evans here and welcome
Speaker 1: to it could happen here a podcast about how things
Speaker 1: are falling apart and how to maybe put them back together. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the biggest story probably in the world right now is
Speaker 1: the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In a major corollarrea of
Speaker 1: that story is how dramatically things in Russia have taken
Speaker 1: a turn for the totalitarian um. The country has become
Speaker 1: increasingly isolated from most of the global community. This is
Speaker 1: due to a mix of sanctions to a lot of
Speaker 1: businesses pulling out just because of the social consequences of
Speaker 1: not doing so, uh end of policies that have been
Speaker 1: put down by Putin's government in order to crack down
Speaker 1: on dissent and further remove Russia from any kind of
Speaker 1: contact with the West. UM. As a result, it's kind
Speaker 1: of difficult to get in touch with people who are
Speaker 1: resisting Putin's government from within Russia. UM anarchist activists in particular,
Speaker 1: UM are not easy people to reach. However, we did
Speaker 1: recently sit down with one of these individuals and talk
Speaker 1: to them, so this episode will both be an interview
Speaker 1: with that person and a bit of history about the
Speaker 1: anarchist movements within Russia. Russia has actually a very long
Speaker 1: history of anarchist organizing. Two of them in generally considered
Speaker 1: foundational thinkers and anarchists political theory. Mikhail Bakunin and Peter
Speaker 1: Kropotkin were both born in Russia. Both lived and agitated
Speaker 1: under the Tsars. Bakunan was an advocate and a major
Speaker 1: theorist of political terrorism. He fled the country, was returned,
Speaker 1: and ultimately spent like ten years in prison there. Kropotkin
Speaker 1: was the author of a seminal anarcho munist text titled
Speaker 1: The Conquest of Bread, and he was only able to
Speaker 1: return to Russia after the nineteen seventeen Revolution. He died
Speaker 1: there in nineteen twenty one. It's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: Peter Kropotkin is canonically the ancestor to Tommy Pickles of
Speaker 1: the rug Rats, but that's something you can look up
Speaker 1: on your own now. While some of the most influential
Speaker 1: anarchists in history were Russian and anarchist organizing was a
Speaker 1: potent part of pre nineteen seventeen Russian political history, the
Speaker 1: success of the Bolsheviks after nineteen seventeen led to the
Speaker 1: movements near annihilation. Um Emma Goldman was yet another major anarchist,
Speaker 1: activist and thinker who was born and educated in Russia.
Speaker 1: She immigrated to the United States in eighteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: where she promptly helped try to assassinate a steel magnate
Speaker 1: in revenge for his brutality against striking workers. Goldman grew
Speaker 1: to prominence as a labor activist and women's rights activist
Speaker 1: in the last decade of the eighteen hundreds. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o one, her work helped inspire Leon Chogosh to assassinate
Speaker 1: President William McKinley. While Emma Goldman had no direct connection
Speaker 1: to Chogash, she defended his actions by saying, as an anarchist,
Speaker 1: I am opposed to violence, but if the people want
Speaker 1: to do away with assassins. They must do away with
Speaker 1: the conditions which produced murderers. There's much more to say
Speaker 1: about him, Agoldman, but for our purposes, what matters is
Speaker 1: that she was arrested for opposing the draft in World
Speaker 1: War One and eventually deported back to Russia. Right after
Speaker 1: the revolution. Goldman was initially psyched that the czars had
Speaker 1: been deposed, but quickly became disillusioned by the violence of
Speaker 1: the forming totalitarian Soviet state. She considered this a betrayal
Speaker 1: of the revolution and wrote a series of articles for
Speaker 1: The New York World that have gone down as one
Speaker 1: of the first expose as of conditions in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: Goldman's work was criticized by many left wing intellectuals outside
Speaker 1: of Russia, but she was correct about political repression in
Speaker 1: the new Bolshevik workers paradise. Matters did not improve for
Speaker 1: anarchists in the first twenty years of the new regime.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty seven, in his History of Anarchism in Russia, E.
Speaker 1: Yorroslansky wrote, in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, at
Speaker 1: the present time, the anarchists no longer enjoy any influence
Speaker 1: over the masses. They are met with only as isolated individualists.
Speaker 1: The fall of the Soviet Union, the coming of democracy,
Speaker 1: and the slow rise to power of Vladimir Putin did
Speaker 1: not enormously alter this state of affairs. Russian anarchists still
Speaker 1: exercise relatively little influence over the masses. Most of them
Speaker 1: struggle towards autonomy as isolated individuals. In March of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, in the third week of the Russian invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine, I sat down with one of these people.
Speaker 1: We had been chatting online through Reddit for a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks, and the process of setting up a proper
Speaker 1: audio interview was difficult. To say the least repression of
Speaker 1: all political descent under Putin is extreme. More than thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand people were arrested at anti war protests in the
Speaker 1: first two weeks of the war, so you will understand
Speaker 1: why our source was paranoid about his identity. I had
Speaker 1: to download a secure app I'd never even heard of before,
Speaker 1: and he only agreed to speak with me while using
Speaker 1: a voice changing application to further disguise his identity. Due
Speaker 1: to the difficulties this created, I will be paraphrasing him
Speaker 1: and quoting his words myself at a couple of points
Speaker 1: here in order to make listening to this a more
Speaker 1: comfortable experience. But here he is okay, polytics or what
Speaker 1: years or so it's bicycle and into weak two years ago.
Speaker 1: Was so, just to make it clear, he's saying that
Speaker 1: he's been involved in anarchist organizing for more than a
Speaker 1: decade since around two thousand eleven. The initial cell he
Speaker 1: organized with was affiliated with an umbrella organization called Autonomous Action.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about them more in a minute, but it's
Speaker 1: important you understand his cell, at about fifty people strong,
Speaker 1: was considered quite large for Russia in Moscow inspects. I
Speaker 1: guess in the artists in links whatever, or they were
Speaker 1: worked for rent of course, and there were more or
Speaker 1: I wasn't considered even in two thousand eleven, organizing as
Speaker 1: an anarchist was rather risky. As a result, our source
Speaker 1: actually started his career in activism on his own. As
Speaker 1: a single protester. He would stand out in public places,
Speaker 1: sometimes during other protests, sometimes on his own, holding a
Speaker 1: sign that said in Russian peace to the world. Now
Speaker 1: I'm reading you the English translation of what he put
Speaker 1: the literal Russian words that he had on his sign
Speaker 1: were a reference to a famous Soviet slogan officially adopted
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty one. The phrase actually has a much
Speaker 1: older origin in the country, which begins under the Orthodox
Speaker 1: Church and grew more popular among revolutionaries after the February Revolution.
Speaker 1: The first leftist to use peace to the World as
Speaker 1: a slogan in Russia may have actually been a f Krinsky,
Speaker 1: who headed the brief democratic government that ran things after
Speaker 1: the czar stepped down. In our sources case, his sign
Speaker 1: was an act of protest against a number of things,
Speaker 1: including the recent Russian invasion of Georgia and Russian military
Speaker 1: operations in Syria. Oscar Pass questions against the stuff stuff
Speaker 1: uh almost or Winter sent home. After he'd been seen
Speaker 1: doing this for a while, members of a local anarchist
Speaker 1: self found this person and started asking them questions, Hey,
Speaker 1: who are you, what are you doing? What do you
Speaker 1: think of this? And that he was not specific about
Speaker 1: the individual political questions they answered, and we probably don't
Speaker 1: need to get into that. They invited him eventually to
Speaker 1: a building where a number of them tended to gather
Speaker 1: and prepare for actions. In short order, they started organizing together.
Speaker 1: At the time our source started organizing as an anarchist.
Speaker 1: The most notorious recent action was the Kimki forest conflict.
Speaker 1: In brief, Kimki is a forest with a long history
Speaker 1: as in nature preserve. It's kind of outside of Moscow.
Speaker 1: It's so densely forest that in the sixteen hundreds and
Speaker 1: then in the early eighteen hundreds, when the Russians were
Speaker 1: resisting Napoleon, it was used by partisans and insurgents as
Speaker 1: a base of operations. When the Bolsheviks took over, it
Speaker 1: was preserved to act as a sort of open air
Speaker 1: therapy center for tuberculosis patients. In the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: local city planners started to advocate for a toll road
Speaker 1: to be built through the middle of the forest. Their
Speaker 1: argument was that a large amount of traffic passed through
Speaker 1: the Leningrad Highway and that had caused huge amounts of
Speaker 1: air pollution in the city of Kimki. Since the forest
Speaker 1: was protected by national environmental codes, turning it into a
Speaker 1: road was a long political process. Activists protested, arguing that
Speaker 1: it would be an environmental disaster which spoilers. It was
Speaker 1: like anarchists in the United States in the period before
Speaker 1: the Green Scare, Russian anarchists carried out a series of
Speaker 1: occupation actions to try and protect the wild lands. So
Speaker 1: it was ver it was against lance podcast or inflection,
Speaker 1: oh fascists, the shield someone in the trains once in
Speaker 1: the end, it was in two twelve, shortly after our
Speaker 1: source began participating in anarchist demonstrations, the government carried out
Speaker 1: a major crackdown against certain anarchist activists. They focused primarily
Speaker 1: on groups and individuals who were doing things like making
Speaker 1: Molotov cocktails and engaging in property destruction. Now our source
Speaker 1: participated in food not bombs and other non aggressive types
Speaker 1: of direct action, most of which involved handing out food
Speaker 1: and supplies to people who are helping them to get resources.
Speaker 1: He did not disavow insurrectionary anarchists the kind of people
Speaker 1: who threw bombs, but that wasn't the kind of thing
Speaker 1: he did, and he didn't have a lot of connections
Speaker 1: with those people because roughly a year after he started
Speaker 1: organizing as an anarchist, most of them in his area
Speaker 1: at least got cracked down on and either killed, forced
Speaker 1: out of the country, or arrested by the government. This
Speaker 1: crackdown on insurrectionary Russian anarchists led to an even more
Speaker 1: paranoid security culture. Among those who remained. Our source and
Speaker 1: his comrades mostly distributed food, but they also provided support
Speaker 1: for a large number of children whose families had abandoned
Speaker 1: them due to crushing poverty. Even though these things were
Speaker 1: not illegal, they had to maintain intense security culture to
Speaker 1: avoid being part of future crackdowns. First, don't talk to
Speaker 1: anyone or special companization. No, don't care, don't get them.
Speaker 1: Infresition means no one. Long standing tradition among Russian anarchists
Speaker 1: was a sort of defensive isolation. People gave each other
Speaker 1: as little information as possible about their real identities. As
Speaker 1: a result, despite the fact that he has participated in
Speaker 1: multiple protests since the invasion of Ukraine and people have
Speaker 1: been arrested at those protests, our source insists that he
Speaker 1: doesn't know if any of his comrades have been taken
Speaker 1: into custody. Now. Some of this probably has to do
Speaker 1: with the fact that he's not organizing in a major city, um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of it probably has to do with
Speaker 1: the fact that he just doesn't particularly know any people
Speaker 1: by name. Polls, which are imperfect but cannot be entirely
Speaker 1: discounted suggest that most Russian civilians support the war and
Speaker 1: their military. Even so, the scope and scale of the
Speaker 1: anti war protests in Russia have beggared anything from recent memory.
Speaker 1: Our source says that this has actually helped to mitigate
Speaker 1: some of the despair you might expect Russian anarchists to feel,
Speaker 1: given the Titanic increase in state repression. From what I
Speaker 1: know from what I see, monitor uh Alsto came to
Speaker 1: get to get help at last. An artists there if
Speaker 1: maybe won't hear go or real they were just like, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, we can do it all everything and we'll
Speaker 1: just again the NFSP won't find us whatever. No, there
Speaker 1: is no despair at last, we don't see it. There
Speaker 1: are lots of action. There are lots of preparation from
Speaker 1: what I understand, or not only artists, but all the
Speaker 1: radical firms or gathering in Russia or in Moscow, in
Speaker 1: Saint Aspera obviously because the most epicenter of everything there
Speaker 1: not not on the ragons. I guess, oh yeah, soustraints.
Speaker 1: So it's probably time that we talk about autonomous action
Speaker 1: or a D. The Revolutionary Anarchist Federation that our friend
Speaker 1: and his comrades are affiliated with a D actually has
Speaker 1: members in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. It was founded in
Speaker 1: two thousand two and briefly had affiliates in Armenia before
Speaker 1: they disbanded in two thousand five. That's a story in
Speaker 1: and of itself. A D advocates direct action in order
Speaker 1: to quote create a tradition and basis for a new
Speaker 1: humanist culture, social self organization and radical resistance against militarism, capitalism, sexism,
Speaker 1: and fascism. They consider the existing government of Russia as
Speaker 1: entirely illegitimate. They refused to take part in Russian electoral politics,
Speaker 1: seeing even left wing opposition parties as essentially controlled by
Speaker 1: Putin and only existing to provide a sham vision of choice.
Speaker 1: A D activists called themselves the Autonomy and see their
Speaker 1: calling is twofold, to exist as autonomous, free individuals within
Speaker 1: an unfree system and to spread revolutionary sentiment and weaken
Speaker 1: the state. Much has been said in the West of
Speaker 1: Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician who, whatever else you
Speaker 1: might say about him, is certainly not controlled opposition. He
Speaker 1: has survived an assassination attempt by the Putin regime and
Speaker 1: is currently incarcerated after leaving his exile in the West
Speaker 1: to return to Russia and fight the sham case against
Speaker 1: him in court. No one can doubt that Navalny possesses
Speaker 1: significant physical courage, and it seems fair to say the
Speaker 1: man believes in what he says, AIDI Activists, from what
Speaker 1: I have seen, do not fault him in his willingness
Speaker 1: to suffer for his beliefs, but they believe that he
Speaker 1: is at the very least deeply misguided. Navalny, they say,
Speaker 1: holds to a fundamentally errant belief that Russia could ever
Speaker 1: be a parliamentary democracy in the Western tradition. Their argument
Speaker 1: is that corruption, investigations and electoralism are useless in Russia
Speaker 1: and always have been, and from a historical standpoint, it
Speaker 1: is difficult to argue with these claims. Autonomous Action members
Speaker 1: do not support the Ukrainian state, and I have read
Speaker 1: articles from them where they describe the conflict in the
Speaker 1: Dawn Bass, which simmered for eight years before exploding into
Speaker 1: the current conflagration, as two fascist paramilitary forces backed by
Speaker 1: two capitalist governments. However, they have been consistent for years
Speaker 1: that the proper stance of Russian anarchists is to support
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian people against aggression from the Russian state. Before
Speaker 1: Putin commenced his broader invasion. In February of this year,
Speaker 1: Autonomous Action published an article with the title why we
Speaker 1: should support Ukraine quote Putin is not just the gendarme
Speaker 1: of Europe, but the gendarme of the whole world, from
Speaker 1: Syria to Myanmar. Whenever a dictator tortures and kills thousands
Speaker 1: of his old people, Putin is there to support him.
Speaker 1: There are no elections in Russia anymore. Even the most
Speaker 1: moderate attempts to change something results in criminal cases and persecutions.
Speaker 1: I do not believe that the result of this yet
Speaker 1: another round of threatening declarations and building up pressure, is
Speaker 1: a full scale war, But as the conflict is not disappearing,
Speaker 1: a full scale war may start after five to ten years,
Speaker 1: even as a result of a cycle of escalation, even
Speaker 1: if no one really wants it. And in case of
Speaker 1: a full scale war, we should be on the Ukrainian side.
Speaker 1: As Mala Testa said, for me, there is no doubt
Speaker 1: that the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only
Speaker 1: from the educational point of view, then the best of
Speaker 1: dictatorships neutrality and a war between Ukraine and Russia would
Speaker 1: mean neutrality in an invasion of a democracy by a dictatorship.
Speaker 1: Now our source concurs with the extant evidence that Russian
Speaker 1: citizens still broadly support the war. As I stated earlier,
Speaker 1: nant attacking Russia with Nost don't know. He was certain
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that there's still a great deal of propaganda,
Speaker 1: largely pro NATO propaganda on the anti war side of things.
Speaker 1: Given the information situation within his country, he admitted that
Speaker 1: he'd had difficulty parsing some things out, while acknowledging that
Speaker 1: his side also lacked perfect information. He felt that their
Speaker 1: stance against the war was safe because in the end
Speaker 1: it opposed blood letting. We can claim on the kind
Speaker 1: of waganda or the West are crowing, sam If even
Speaker 1: if you're under some kind of waganda, even West Western
Speaker 1: is basically a case as well, you're still of this
Speaker 1: your side because you don't want to. He did admit
Speaker 1: that a number of people in his life, family and
Speaker 1: close friends, knew about his political sympathies, and he claims
Speaker 1: that the outbreak of war are in the massive futalitarian
Speaker 1: swing Putin has taken over the last month have caused
Speaker 1: some of these people to be more open to his beliefs.
Speaker 1: So I'm kind of open just on talking to one
Speaker 1: w one of the people much pants. Oh my friends,
Speaker 1: do you know what what kind of stuff what I'm
Speaker 1: into or the war or the just came to me. However, personally, Hey,
Speaker 1: you've been precurring for that, so for years you've been
Speaker 1: telling us, hold us for years. I thought you BERNOI
Speaker 1: and not understand. You're right, wander water. So we don't
Speaker 1: have people know about what gives no the picture At
Speaker 1: the moment. The political situation within Russia is tremendously uncertain.
Speaker 1: All manner of dubious sources have claimed that a palace
Speaker 1: coup is in the offering or has been attempted. Some
Speaker 1: have even spoken of the possibility of a revolution, or
Speaker 1: at least a massive protest campaign that forces Putin from office.
Speaker 1: Our source did not consider that likely in the unlikely
Speaker 1: event the government collapsed entirely. He was not particularly optimistic
Speaker 1: about what might result. You mentioned the central Wist governments
Speaker 1: and there is no they just just or oh, it's
Speaker 1: a science. He mentioned me that a number of his
Speaker 1: loved ones had come forward recently to ask what they
Speaker 1: ought to do. I asked how he responded it to
Speaker 1: that question. Right now, we try to organize and help
Speaker 1: you all because there is a there is a chance
Speaker 1: or currency local stuffing, and we'll just need to survive.
Speaker 1: That's the first thing. Quick, So organization and interactions are
Speaker 1: available than any currents or now for well, I see
Speaker 1: it with the way. Uh. Second thing is that we
Speaker 1: need to training or start. I guess there is there
Speaker 1: is a term in English case the very weak don't
Speaker 1: pour when you have all infrastructure. Basically, for now we
Speaker 1: need to have from enough folding of water points we
Speaker 1: all can train even with the form rooms people to
Speaker 1: cularly mentioned the revolutionary importance of finding some way to
Speaker 1: either smuggle or produce medical supplies and medications. He knows
Speaker 1: one person who already had to flee the country because
Speaker 1: his wife could no longer get the medicine she needed.
Speaker 1: He mentioned the sanctions levied against Russia as a major
Speaker 1: issue for regular working people, but when I asked what
Speaker 1: he felt Western countries could do in this conflict, he
Speaker 1: was actually quite focused on something else. Entirely. He believes
Speaker 1: the United States has access to high quality satellite images
Speaker 1: of what happened in the immediate lead up to the
Speaker 1: Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin's government justified much of their
Speaker 1: invasion on so called attacks from the Ukrainian government that
Speaker 1: they claim it escalated against the separatist regions. Our source
Speaker 1: believes his government is lying about this law or point
Speaker 1: many states, so here's the same thing, or yeah, we
Speaker 1: need to cover of course it's been goin So it's
Speaker 1: I don't believe that Ukraine or being with let's say,
Speaker 1: let's a military power compared to Russia or not. So
Speaker 1: she stuff yea, so we didn't need those things covered
Speaker 1: published at least maybe not as long as possibly canst
Speaker 1: still walking on would at least it's helpful people see
Speaker 1: you get there are points queer from crom It's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Since the invasion, it has gotten notably harder, but not
Speaker 1: impossibly hard for Russian citizens to get information about the
Speaker 1: conflict that does not come from the Kremlin. Our starts
Speaker 1: explained how he does it a combination of using VPNs
Speaker 1: and understanding the nature of authoritarian propaganda. In short, even
Speaker 1: when the government is lying to you, you can get
Speaker 1: an idea of what the truth is by understanding what
Speaker 1: they want you to believe, work stuff, all sources, what
Speaker 1: science I saw it, or Korean side, Russian side, great side.
Speaker 1: Oh so find and staff as well. I don't really
Speaker 1: believe me. Let's see firsts because they are past. They
Speaker 1: say what's goins? What's they're trying to contain to points?
Speaker 1: Or if you have a say okay, let's put this one. Uh.
Speaker 1: When Russian Ministry of Foreign offers selling or solution and
Speaker 1: at the same time we hear all the Syrians, Syrian
Speaker 1: or mercenaries are going to rail uh. For for me,
Speaker 1: it means one thing they want to us Paul or
Speaker 1: the pointing to get some time, so professional sources or
Speaker 1: council racially. He felt that one way US activists could
Speaker 1: be helpful to Russian activists was by continuing to document
Speaker 1: and study the different munitions and tactics used by police
Speaker 1: in cracking down on demonstrations. He noticed that Russian police
Speaker 1: used similar and sometimes even the same weapons to the
Speaker 1: ones that the US police used on out in protests.
Speaker 1: He believes the documentation done to study these weapons is
Speaker 1: helpful to people all around the world. He expressed some
Speaker 1: frustration at friends and colleagues of his who after years
Speaker 1: of failing to truly grapple with the degree to which
Speaker 1: Putin had centralized power. We're now fleeing Russia to avoid
Speaker 1: living under an increasingly totalitarian state. A swampoint colleagues, I
Speaker 1: guess of her radio whatever trying to support me like
Speaker 1: stuff scoring along the sports Russians. Yes, if that's for him,
Speaker 1: trying to blame him expence, And that's why against this,
Speaker 1: before against the commons, he has decided to stay and
Speaker 1: to resist. While he has admitted to now studying martial
Speaker 1: arts and military tactics, he did not have high hopes
Speaker 1: for any kind of confrontation with the Russian state, and
Speaker 1: as a generally peaceable person, he has decided that he
Speaker 1: will continue to resist in the way that makes the
Speaker 1: most sense to him, by helping people and providing them
Speaker 1: with things that they will increasingly need. Is the economic
Speaker 1: situation in Russia degrades further for me? How many people
Speaker 1: most kind of since constant sense of that's for at
Speaker 1: least six years or one. Uh. But then understood that
Speaker 1: once a thing about archists and wish I call myself
Speaker 1: and you before I call myself an larchists, then I
Speaker 1: should make once a thing. Oh we need to before
Speaker 1: it's all ah, welcome to it could happen here the
Speaker 1: podcast where this Today I sit down with my buddy
Speaker 1: Jake Hanrahan and we talk about Corsica Jake, are you
Speaker 1: how's the showy? How you how you feeling? Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: all right. Thanks. I got a bit of a flu,
Speaker 1: but otherwise everything's really good. One Yeah, um, we you
Speaker 1: just took a little reporting trip um down to the
Speaker 1: island of corsica Um, which is not a place I
Speaker 1: know much about, and I'm going to guess not a
Speaker 1: place most of our listeners know much about. So why
Speaker 1: don't you Why don't you start with kind of like
Speaker 1: what what brought you down there? Yeah? No, it's a
Speaker 1: really good point. A lot of people don't even know
Speaker 1: it exists. I sent the documentary made Um with Pular
Speaker 1: Front to a friend of mine today and he said, brother,
Speaker 1: that's the first time I've ever heard of Coursico. Like,
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't know about It's so it's
Speaker 1: a very old island, um. You know, in more than
Speaker 1: two hundred years people have inhabited the place, but generally
Speaker 1: for the last kind of two hundred years there's been
Speaker 1: an on again, off again independence movement. They're people that
Speaker 1: don't want to be under the control of France or whoever.
Speaker 1: They want control of their own island. Because Corsican is
Speaker 1: quite a specific culture. Um, it's very different to French culture,
Speaker 1: it's different to Italian culture. They even have their own
Speaker 1: language called course. Unfortunately, it's kind of dying out, as
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of languages do in kind of
Speaker 1: contested areas if you like. Um. But yeah, so so
Speaker 1: they've always kind of wanted to be independent in some way.
Speaker 1: Not everybody, not the whole place. I'm sure you'll find
Speaker 1: some course because that will say their course of Confrench.
Speaker 1: But generally the majority of people if you go there
Speaker 1: and say, well are you there to are you with Corsican?
Speaker 1: We're not French with Corsican. So in the nineties seventies,
Speaker 1: that kind of coalesced was rebirthed, if you like, with
Speaker 1: the backdrop of you know, guns, bombs and independence movements
Speaker 1: of course Europe and a group called the f l
Speaker 1: n C formed the Nationalist Liberation Front for Corsica and
Speaker 1: they arrived with twenty one bombs on the island in
Speaker 1: one night. I mean not arrived, you know, they were
Speaker 1: already there, of course, but they bombed twenty one times
Speaker 1: in one night, mostly French infrastructure, and they were all
Speaker 1: very very well armed. There was literally hundreds of members
Speaker 1: and at one point I have to I don't want
Speaker 1: to say this because it's been a while since I
Speaker 1: looked at the research, but if I'm right, at one
Speaker 1: point in the in the late seventies or early eighties,
Speaker 1: the Effllency was actually the most active militant or terrorist
Speaker 1: group in the whole of Europe, even even more active
Speaker 1: than the provision i RA now privileged IRA called a
Speaker 1: lot more people the FLNC. Their targets weren't really to
Speaker 1: kill people. They were to blow up holiday homes and
Speaker 1: blow up French infrastructure. They didn't have open gun battles,
Speaker 1: and they did assassinate the the highest ranking French officer
Speaker 1: on Corsica on the island eventually. But yeah, so so
Speaker 1: there was this real backdrop of very militant um independence.
Speaker 1: When I say nationalists, it's not it's not what we
Speaker 1: might associate with like far right nationalists. You know, when
Speaker 1: an independent movement doesn't have its own country, you know,
Speaker 1: the ultra nationalism in their sense comes out in a
Speaker 1: very different way. It's not we want to ban everybody
Speaker 1: else from here. It's simply we want our country, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. So when I say ultra nationalists,
Speaker 1: that's not to be confused with fascist ultra nationalist. It's
Speaker 1: very different. Not to say that couskins all believe in
Speaker 1: in leftist causes and that that wouldn't be true. A
Speaker 1: lot of them do. There's a big socialist element to
Speaker 1: to the cause, and there's also quite a right we
Speaker 1: element to the cause. But ultimately they all kind of
Speaker 1: want the same thing, autonomy or independence of Corsica. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So that that's the kind of history very briefly of
Speaker 1: militant independence movements in Corsica. FLNC put down their guns
Speaker 1: and recently one of the fln C was suspected FLNC
Speaker 1: militants who shot this this high ranking French official that
Speaker 1: I told you about. Um this this guy is called
Speaker 1: Evan Colina. He was arrested m after the shooting in
Speaker 1: the nineties and sent to a French prison for life.
Speaker 1: And on March the sixth, I believe it was, he
Speaker 1: was no very much. Second, he was attacked in a
Speaker 1: French prison by a Jahadic inmate and beaten into a
Speaker 1: coma yesterday or two days ago. Now he died of
Speaker 1: his injuries. Ever since he was beaten into this comma,
Speaker 1: the youth would just kind of lit the place on fire,
Speaker 1: you know. They were really clashing very violently. And for
Speaker 1: for the last kind of seven years, since there was
Speaker 1: as a was a relative calm on the island in
Speaker 1: terms of collectivism and militancy. The politicians, the more moderate
Speaker 1: parties have tried to do this politically and for the
Speaker 1: first time in a while, the youth have gone, no,
Speaker 1: fuck it, We're not playing that anymore. We're we're going
Speaker 1: to knock the place about. We're going to smash the
Speaker 1: shop up. And basically it's kind of worked, which we
Speaker 1: can go into. But yeah, so sorry to go on
Speaker 1: a lot, but there's quite a lot to it because obviously,
Speaker 1: like you said, a lot of people don't know. But
Speaker 1: one thing I always say is courtA is just one
Speaker 1: of the most beautiful places anybody will go to. Like objectively,
Speaker 1: it's idyllic. It's not really had this horrible holiday home
Speaker 1: vibe there because genuinely, when when some contractors tried to
Speaker 1: kind of gentrify a course to come and turn it
Speaker 1: into the next ib through. I believe one of the
Speaker 1: quotes was from one of the people doing this. The
Speaker 1: f l n C kind of waited for them to
Speaker 1: build their homes and then blew them all up and
Speaker 1: blew up all their hotels. So it was like they're like,
Speaker 1: you're not going to do that here. A lot of
Speaker 1: these companies were infringing on the environment, which is beautiful there.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so there's a lot more to it, but generally,
Speaker 1: you know, this all kind of revolves around militant independence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I mean, I I I think it's fascinating
Speaker 1: the idea of targeting, like the degree to which a
Speaker 1: lot of this seems to be focused on stopping this
Speaker 1: place from turning into another vacation destination or like rich
Speaker 1: people's second homes push out the population that's born there. Um.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of places that, like, uh,
Speaker 1: organizer complain about that sort of thing. Um, But I'm
Speaker 1: not aware of anyone who's gone to these kind of
Speaker 1: lengths to stop themselves from turning into another a visa. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And honestly, if you go to Corsica and see how
Speaker 1: beautiful it is, not just I mean, it's one of
Speaker 1: the few places in Europe where you can see the
Speaker 1: mountains from the beach. You know, it's the incredible island.
Speaker 1: I've been obsessed with this place since I was about
Speaker 1: twenty four years old, firstly from the nature and the
Speaker 1: beauty there, but secondly I was very interested in the
Speaker 1: militant group there, um because the culture there was so different.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you look at the place, you go
Speaker 1: there and you realize, like, right, this place is very
Speaker 1: much worth preserving. I don't want to act like there
Speaker 1: hasn't been businesses doing their thing there. There definitely is,
Speaker 1: but certainly it feels preserved. There's no high rises. All
Speaker 1: of the old buildings are still there and they're still intact.
Speaker 1: And you know when when these big businesses came in
Speaker 1: and a lot of these businessmen were almost showing off
Speaker 1: like yeah, we're gonna turn course of Carns waib Etha,
Speaker 1: which as a brit Um I would apologize to anyone
Speaker 1: living inever, you know, like having sex in the street
Speaker 1: and throwing up at bars and everything. Here you go there, Um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of been turned into one big not the
Speaker 1: great club, yeah yeah, not the great club definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so you know, it's it's one of these ones
Speaker 1: where it's like I could kind of understand. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying anyone should bomb anywhere, certainly not, but I do
Speaker 1: understand the sentiment there. And one of the one of
Speaker 1: my course and friends said, um, some people were calling
Speaker 1: it like the cold bed policy. So you come to
Speaker 1: our island, you buy a holiday home, and if you
Speaker 1: leave that bed cold as in you're not even living here,
Speaker 1: it's going to get blown up, you know if you like. So.
Speaker 1: Very militant, very violent, but effective. I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you have to agree with it, but no
Speaker 1: one can deny that it hasn't been effective. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, there's a very big mafia presence on
Speaker 1: the island as well, so that you know, it's not
Speaker 1: to say that everything is all for the people. I'm
Speaker 1: going to guess that the mafia is more or less
Speaker 1: on the side of, you know, turn this place into
Speaker 1: a vacation destination because that's where the money is. That
Speaker 1: that would be my essentially. Really that's interesting. No, so
Speaker 1: the unfortunately the independence movement, not all of them, but
Speaker 1: there is an element to it that is very hand
Speaker 1: in hand with the mafia. Most definitely. Perhaps some people
Speaker 1: that were independent militants are now mafia if you like. Um,
Speaker 1: and people have been killed on the island quite a lot.
Speaker 1: There's quite a lot of you know, unsold of murders
Speaker 1: that it's quite sad um. But no, they they were
Speaker 1: more for keeping their own interests. You know, Um, we
Speaker 1: have this island, we can run the docks, we can
Speaker 1: run this, we can run that. And whilst what you
Speaker 1: said like makes sense, right, you would think, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they'd be for this money. I think what they want.
Speaker 1: They're still nationalists. At the end of the day. They
Speaker 1: won't control, but they won't control in their own way.
Speaker 1: And the big business comes in and start saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're doing this and that and the other, and we're
Speaker 1: bringing all these people in by the docks. I guess
Speaker 1: they lose control of that essentially. So they were very
Speaker 1: much on the side of yeah, do what you like
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and I think fascinating, so very unique,
Speaker 1: very specific place. You mentioned that this action you shut
Speaker 1: up for people bombed twenty one targets in one night.
Speaker 1: In one night. Yeah, when you say bomb, are we
Speaker 1: talking like your standard malatabs or were they are? Were
Speaker 1: they kind of like more elaborate devices. Shall we say,
Speaker 1: how would you describe what they were using? Yeah, a
Speaker 1: good question. I mean when you think of twenty one
Speaker 1: in one night, you think, right like monotor small night,
Speaker 1: something simple. Yeah, yeah, no, No, there weren't even pipe wombs.
Speaker 1: You're talking fertilizer bombs. Yeah, like blowing the whole buildings,
Speaker 1: you know, not all of them, you know, there were
Speaker 1: some smaller ones, but some very significant ones um and
Speaker 1: very very big. The way of Corsica is the way
Speaker 1: it's laid out. Like I said, it's a small place.
Speaker 1: I think currently like three people lived there roughly, and
Speaker 1: there were mountains, there were beaches, there were very rural communities,
Speaker 1: eight's and islands. It's quite far away from France, actually,
Speaker 1: it's very close to Italy um and Sardinia is just
Speaker 1: to it south. And it's just for them. If you
Speaker 1: were you couldn't ask for a better location, if you
Speaker 1: wanted to be a kind of guerrilla group, you know,
Speaker 1: you really couldn't. It's kind of built for them. So
Speaker 1: they just got away with it, you know, farmers whatever,
Speaker 1: they went into the mountains, build bombs dropped them off.
Speaker 1: And not to say that everybody was for them, but
Speaker 1: there is some It wasn't just we want independence, there
Speaker 1: was there was subjugation by the French. You know. Firstly,
Speaker 1: they're like, we don't want to be a French colony
Speaker 1: or whatever you would call it anymore, which I think
Speaker 1: anybody that wants their determination to not be held by
Speaker 1: our former colonial power, it's fine, or current colonial power
Speaker 1: if you like, I think, yeah, fair play to them.
Speaker 1: But secondly, they're one of the most poorer regions, despite
Speaker 1: having all this holiday stuff, despite having a lot of produce,
Speaker 1: despite having a lot of reasons to be there. So
Speaker 1: there's definitely something. I won't claim to know too much
Speaker 1: about the law situation, and I'm sure a lot of
Speaker 1: French people get angry whatever, but it is genuinely doing
Speaker 1: very badly in many different aspects. Is that mismanagement by them?
Speaker 1: Is it because of the French? I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1: I don't know enough about it, but I certainly find
Speaker 1: it very weird that all of these beautiful things that
Speaker 1: happened on the island and they're they're constantly in you know,
Speaker 1: the lower bracket of situations economically, culturally, they're getting kind
Speaker 1: of sidelined a bit so I do. I do understand,
Speaker 1: and certainly when the clashes or even protests happen in
Speaker 1: the seventies, the police, you know, French police. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: but there's some of the worst fucking police ever, you know.
Speaker 1: And I've been in front of Turkish police, like French
Speaker 1: police are fucking up there. They're horrible, and they beat
Speaker 1: the ship out of a lot of people in Cortica
Speaker 1: just for peacefully protesting, you know. So it didn't come
Speaker 1: from nowhere, you know what I mean? There is there
Speaker 1: is more to it than just nationalism and independence. There's
Speaker 1: a lot more to it. They wanna, they want to
Speaker 1: they want to deal with their own affairs, a lot
Speaker 1: of them, you know, most people probably now want to
Speaker 1: do it democratically. But like I said, the youth were said,
Speaker 1: no funk, that we're not getting anywhere, and they've Actually
Speaker 1: it's actually worked because the day after the riots that
Speaker 1: we filmed on March thirteen, the Interior Minister of France
Speaker 1: basically said, right, we're willing to discuss this with you.
Speaker 1: We will go as far as autonomy. That's literally a
Speaker 1: quote he said, which is quite significant. Yeah, after seven
Speaker 1: years of basically stalemate through the politicians. So the youth
Speaker 1: in a way, one of the very few examples of this,
Speaker 1: specifically in Europe, the youth, what they're doing kind of worked,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like directly action got got
Speaker 1: some goods, started the process of getting the goods hopefully. Absolutely, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it has. And the thing about the course scan youth
Speaker 1: is they're very intelligent, they're very they're very authentic in
Speaker 1: their political activism in the sense of it's just they're
Speaker 1: born into it. It's in them, you know, from the
Speaker 1: age of like twelve thirteen, they're understanding it. They're getting
Speaker 1: told about the legends of blah blah, you know, um,
Speaker 1: there's there's militant group and whatever whatever. So there's very
Speaker 1: much in them in that sense, kind of in a
Speaker 1: you know, like the Kurds are kind of you know,
Speaker 1: not on the same level, but that kind of vibe.
Speaker 1: So when they go to students, when they go to
Speaker 1: UNI and they become students, they're not really forming their
Speaker 1: political opinions. They already have them, they already got them,
Speaker 1: and then they they sort of higher, they sort of
Speaker 1: germinate together. So that's from what I understood anyway, that's
Speaker 1: from what I gathered and you know, your average trendy
Speaker 1: young man and woman on the street there is very political.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like Greece in that sense, like it's
Speaker 1: cool to be political, but in the sense of not
Speaker 1: the kind not like um, you know, not not something
Speaker 1: you brought into as a teenager, something that was already
Speaker 1: there and then which which there is nothing wrong with it.
Speaker 1: You know, most people fall in their political opinions in
Speaker 1: unis or whatever, but for them, it's already in there,
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying. So they already have they're
Speaker 1: already united in that sense, you know. So when they
Speaker 1: get to the UNI, they get there it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we all want independence or autonomy, but then the
Speaker 1: other things are lesser, so you know, for that in
Speaker 1: that really, in that sense, I think that was quite interesting.
Speaker 1: And we saw eight thousand, nine thousand people marching maybe
Speaker 1: and then when the clashes started, you know, it is well,
Speaker 1: but like normally it's like what a hundred three people
Speaker 1: stay talking, like two thousand people help clashing, and men
Speaker 1: and women like young girls, young men, like many many,
Speaker 1: you know, So it was really I was like, wow, okay,
Speaker 1: and one one thing that I've never I have seen
Speaker 1: for a very long time. I've very rarely seen it. Normally,
Speaker 1: when the clash happens, everybody, you know, your grandma's, you're
Speaker 1: working man, you know, the people that support what's going
Speaker 1: on but are not able to clash or don't want
Speaker 1: to clash, they normally step back. In the Coursicum protests,
Speaker 1: everybody just stayed like we were getting tear gas next
Speaker 1: to like fifty lads with balaclabas on, next to like
Speaker 1: grandma or auntie, you know, and we're like helping people
Speaker 1: into the side street to get away from tear gas.
Speaker 1: It's very weird. They just didn't leave. They just were
Speaker 1: there the whole time. It's weird when you're talking about
Speaker 1: like tactically, what is this, How are these kind of
Speaker 1: bombings being pulled off? As so you've got like this
Speaker 1: huge crowd and they're just kind of like marching from
Speaker 1: target to target. Um. So the youth are not really
Speaker 1: I mean, they have some small kind of I D
Speaker 1: s you know what I'm saying, that youth student youth protesters,
Speaker 1: but generally it's Molotov's bricks, burning barricades. But they very
Speaker 1: clearly know the island inside out. They know their streets,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously because they lived there. And most of
Speaker 1: the police, from what I understand, are actually French called
Speaker 1: in from the island, from the mainland, sorry to the island.
Speaker 1: A lot of the CRS riot police, thousands of them
Speaker 1: were brought in. There was that they were actually completely outnumbered.
Speaker 1: They had to retreat at one point in in the
Speaker 1: evening to go back to the prefecture kind of cultural
Speaker 1: French administrative building where the main the main target of
Speaker 1: violence was. They had to retreat to get more ammunition
Speaker 1: because they just they just shot so much tiggas um.
Speaker 1: They just couldn't, you know, they couldn't do anything. There
Speaker 1: were some teams, like the youth. Some of them had
Speaker 1: green arm bands or green leg bands, so they were
Speaker 1: very clearly like a different unit, and they were very
Speaker 1: well organized. They didn't have walkie talkies, mind you normally
Speaker 1: that that shows a closer sign of organization. But some
Speaker 1: of them were like that. Some of them were just
Speaker 1: turned up to fight, and some of them were splitting
Speaker 1: off into different groups. You would see one come in,
Speaker 1: they'd fight, fight, fight, and then they'd leave and as
Speaker 1: they're leaving, another load would just come in the line.
Speaker 1: It was. It was really quite interesting. You know, they'd
Speaker 1: really thought about it. Um, it wasn't just a free
Speaker 1: for all, which it might look like. But you know,
Speaker 1: after a while of covering riots, there's certain things you
Speaker 1: notice where you're like, Okay, they're planning this, they're planning that,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So it's quite interesting in
Speaker 1: that sense. Um, but yeah, man, it's yeah, thousands of
Speaker 1: thousands of youth fighting. Um, it did get messy. I
Speaker 1: think forty four police were injured, thirteen protesters and one pedestrian.
Speaker 1: That was the official figures. I saw at least three
Speaker 1: pedestrians injured, and I think probably more protesters and definitely
Speaker 1: more cops, I would say. Yeah. I mean, obviously it
Speaker 1: also depends on like what you're raiding as an injury
Speaker 1: for that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, And a lot
Speaker 1: of folks probably are avoiding the hospitals and being dealt
Speaker 1: with at homes and whatnot because they were committing some crimes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like you know, at home with superglue in seat
Speaker 1: of stitches or whatever. Yeah. Do you have a sense
Speaker 1: of like how long? But the kind of the back
Speaker 1: end of this was the preparation process was for this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the classes have been ongoing before we got there
Speaker 1: for about a week. So even Colinar was beaten into
Speaker 1: this coma. He was he was attacked in prison. There's
Speaker 1: some rumors that he said some kind of Islamophobic thing
Speaker 1: to the inmate, and don't know how true that is,
Speaker 1: but all we know is the guy was actually, you know,
Speaker 1: convicted jahadist. It's not kind of hear say that the
Speaker 1: guy the inmate was a convicted jahadist because obviously even
Speaker 1: Colinar is in the type of prison where what the
Speaker 1: state says is terrorists are there, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: anybody terrorists is there, So it makes sense he's amongst
Speaker 1: these people. And I think he was attacked in the
Speaker 1: gym when he was on his own and he was strangled,
Speaker 1: and this this is where yeah, yeah, this is where
Speaker 1: there's a weird point of contention. He because of the
Speaker 1: special status he had as such a violent militant or whatever,
Speaker 1: he shouldn't have really been in on his own like that.
Speaker 1: And some people were speculating did something happen, But generally
Speaker 1: most people we spoke to were like it was probably
Speaker 1: just negligence, you know, They weren't very conspiratory. There was
Speaker 1: someone like, oh the French, the French plan is I
Speaker 1: doubt it. It doesn't make much sense to do this
Speaker 1: right now, Like you know, they would knew what would
Speaker 1: happen to be on calling to the people. Sorry if
Speaker 1: he've on Colling. I was hurt because he's a big
Speaker 1: you know, a big name there. There's also some you know,
Speaker 1: maybe interesting arguments around the case, the way he was arrested.
Speaker 1: Apparently the gun doesn't match up. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: didn't really get into that, but either way, he's like
Speaker 1: a you know, people they love him, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. He's like a matter for them, even though
Speaker 1: you know, he shot this guy in the back in
Speaker 1: in cold blood essentially, but for them that was a
Speaker 1: political assassination whatever. So so for about a week, the
Speaker 1: youth were fighting, and I saw a video and anything
Speaker 1: that happens in course, I'm like, right, I'm looking at it,
Speaker 1: and I was like, okay, this this is a little
Speaker 1: bit different. Okay, molotovs are out again. Hasn't haven't seen
Speaker 1: that for a while. And then the next day and
Speaker 1: then the next day, and then it spread one night
Speaker 1: to like five different cities or like sorry, three different cities,
Speaker 1: like big, big places, and then they burned like a
Speaker 1: very specific monument, so that was like, oh it's on.
Speaker 1: So for at least a week they were they were
Speaker 1: planning something, you know, and there was enough kind of
Speaker 1: um momentum there, I think for them to organize. Certainly,
Speaker 1: we know that there was people from a jat CEO
Speaker 1: of the capital city in Bastia where we filmed it,
Speaker 1: like a lot of people drove in, they came you know,
Speaker 1: specifically for this clash, so that was quite interesting. I
Speaker 1: think the youth movement have a very strong network there,
Speaker 1: and there's also quite a big football ultra scene there.
Speaker 1: So the day before the clashes, Bastia and the JATSO
Speaker 1: had a derby. So obviously I imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: the ultras, or at least I know a lot of
Speaker 1: the ultras were also part of the independence groupings and
Speaker 1: part of the clashes, so I imagine that a lot
Speaker 1: of the football ultras kind of organized you know, you know,
Speaker 1: the match the day before or at least a week before,
Speaker 1: so I think there was quite a lot of organization there.
Speaker 1: You know, what do you feel like is next? Is
Speaker 1: this the case? Do you get the sense that because
Speaker 1: the government has announced their willingness to sit down and talk,
Speaker 1: that maybe folks are going to wait to follow up
Speaker 1: this or do you get the sense that they're going
Speaker 1: to kind of keep the pressure on. Well, the thing is,
Speaker 1: there was one option before Evan Colonard died, and now
Speaker 1: there's a new option that he's died. You see what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Before, I think what you're saying would have
Speaker 1: would have happened, like I mean, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: I think that youth would have they would have held
Speaker 1: off the fact that the Interior Minister of France, who
Speaker 1: answers directly to mcron within one day or less than
Speaker 1: one day, said we're willing to go as far as
Speaker 1: autonomy in these discussions. Stop being violent. I think the
Speaker 1: youth was smart enough to realize, all right, let's stop,
Speaker 1: let's see what he's got to say. I'm sure if
Speaker 1: things faltered, if things didn't move quick enough, they would
Speaker 1: have very quickly stepped up the stepped up the violence again. However,
Speaker 1: now that even Colin has died, I don't think that
Speaker 1: they're just gonna wait now. From what I understand from
Speaker 1: speaking to contacts and friends in Corsica. There's a period
Speaker 1: of mourning right now. You know his funeral. He died
Speaker 1: in a prison in Marseille. He wasn't even transferred to
Speaker 1: to Corsica to die, So for a lot of them,
Speaker 1: that's incredibly offensive. That's the kind of spark that started
Speaker 1: these clashes. It's all about independence and autonomy on one level,
Speaker 1: but the thing that drove this and sparked it was
Speaker 1: even Colonize attack, and and the fact that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of course cam prison prisoners, which are political prisoners,
Speaker 1: are in prison in Frances at the Corsica anyway. So
Speaker 1: now that he has died, I really think that there
Speaker 1: will be a moment of calm due to the funeral
Speaker 1: and respect for even Colin arm whatever. Then I think
Speaker 1: maybe a week after this week, I think it's almost
Speaker 1: inevitable that we will see some form of violence again.
Speaker 1: I've spoken to some people that are maybe going a
Speaker 1: bit far, maybe being a bit dramatic. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but they speculate that there will be a little bit
Speaker 1: more than just clashes. One one person I know said,
Speaker 1: I think they're going to blow something up again. Do
Speaker 1: I think that, probably not, But certainly when we were
Speaker 1: in the streets they were using. There's there's photos of
Speaker 1: it as well. They were using very crude but very small,
Speaker 1: improvised explosive devices. Now, when a group even starts to
Speaker 1: do that, you know, okay, it's a very small device.
Speaker 1: It was in a kind of like a basically a
Speaker 1: tennis ball type thing with it with whatever in it.
Speaker 1: But it was fucking loud. It wouldn't really do much
Speaker 1: unless it probably blow up right next to your foot.
Speaker 1: But when they're even considering that, in my experience, that
Speaker 1: tells you that people are there's an element that are
Speaker 1: ready to go further up the ladder to the next level.
Speaker 1: Does that mean they're going to blow somewhere up. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't see it personally. You know, these
Speaker 1: these young people are very clever. I think that would
Speaker 1: be in an insane decision because it would France would
Speaker 1: have no option but to basically flood the island with
Speaker 1: a lot more police and maybe even military type police.
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe not, but but yeah, anyway, we'll
Speaker 1: see what happens. But again, my point is not not
Speaker 1: that I think this is gonna happen, But there's that
Speaker 1: talk which we haven't seen that kind of talk in
Speaker 1: Corsica for quite a while, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: And there's actually people now genuinely worried like Okay, where's
Speaker 1: this going to go? Which can never be a good thing.
Speaker 1: I guess the French state really has to be careful here,
Speaker 1: and I think the fact they've now said we're gonna
Speaker 1: go as far as autonomy, maybe they at the very
Speaker 1: least have to be shown to be doing that very quickly.
Speaker 1: I think, you know. Otherwise, for a lot of people
Speaker 1: in Corsica, it's like even Colin Colinar died in Vain,
Speaker 1: I guess, and it's not just the youth, it's everybody,
Speaker 1: even people that perhaps really don't like that the youth
Speaker 1: were fighting, really don't support that level of violence. They
Speaker 1: still support Evan Coliner and a very sad he's dead,
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying, and the way he died,
Speaker 1: And even even past DNFC, the football team and one
Speaker 1: of the main football teams in Courtsco, they said, are
Speaker 1: you know, we're very sad that he's dead. You know,
Speaker 1: hero has died that kind of thing, so he's a
Speaker 1: very He's seen as a Martineau definitely, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that's a predictable outcome from killing the guys in prison. Um, right, right, right, right,
Speaker 1: So we're kind of in this like waiting to see
Speaker 1: what the next step is. Then I guess, like the
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of this weird sort of like political
Speaker 1: liminal space. I guess where the next steps are. There's
Speaker 1: a number of things that could happen. Um, yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: it's this very everything's in transition. It's it's very it's
Speaker 1: it's either calm before the storm, or it's calm that
Speaker 1: turns into something positive. But I I just don't see,
Speaker 1: you know, after almost two weeks of extremely violent clashes,
Speaker 1: very well organized, after seeing them on the ground as well,
Speaker 1: these are brave lads, these and women as well. These
Speaker 1: are not your kind of average weekend warriors. They're very,
Speaker 1: very up for it. Um you know how people clash
Speaker 1: in Paris, like French people, they're very up. As soon
Speaker 1: as final they'll fight, you know. Um, it's like that
Speaker 1: times ten for from what I experienced, because it's got
Speaker 1: the the kind of incubated nationalist identity separate from France,
Speaker 1: but whilst also having kind of fiery French culture and
Speaker 1: fiery Italian culture influences and fiery Corsican culture. Um not
Speaker 1: to say that they're not very nice people. Everyone was
Speaker 1: absolutely lovely, very very friendly, but you can tell they're
Speaker 1: you know, there are fiery people. They're active, they're about it,
Speaker 1: they mean what they say. So I don't think that
Speaker 1: the youth will just go quietly from this essentially a
Speaker 1: political prisoner m A. Martin now and then for them
Speaker 1: to just go, Okay, we'll just relax now. I don't
Speaker 1: see it. You go. You're talking from like you know,
Speaker 1: probably in the full week of clashes, maybe four or
Speaker 1: five thousand people together throwing rocks, burning barricades, throwing small
Speaker 1: improvised devices at cops, to then just to go to
Speaker 1: nothing after even Colonarde dies, I would be very very surprised.
Speaker 1: I think the only way that that would happen would
Speaker 1: be for France to go, okay, here's your autonomy, and
Speaker 1: then that energy could be turned into a celebration. What
Speaker 1: I'm saying that should or shouldn't happen. I just think
Speaker 1: theoretically that's the only way that it could avoid violence,
Speaker 1: because the energy is there. Now, you see what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: not on like an essterry level, it's just the level
Speaker 1: of like they're revved up, they're ready, you know, in
Speaker 1: the attitude, the kind of it's in the air. It's
Speaker 1: in the air right now. So you published just a
Speaker 1: couple of days ago, your a little documentary like short
Speaker 1: documentary from Popular Front which footage a little dispatch which
Speaker 1: has footage from this um, which people should definitely check out,
Speaker 1: especially if they'd like to see some of the tactics
Speaker 1: that we've talked about UM on this this episode so far.
Speaker 1: Is there anywhere else you might recommend they go for
Speaker 1: further reading on this subject UM not not to be um,
Speaker 1: oh you're only Popular front um, but we we have.
Speaker 1: It's just something that I've just been specifically fascinating and
Speaker 1: obsessed with for a long time. So when the time came,
Speaker 1: I was very well prepared. Everyone has said like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is crazy, like, you know,
Speaker 1: how did you understand all of this so quickly, because
Speaker 1: I've been reading about it and and the problem with
Speaker 1: a lot of the French reporting is, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's naturally very fresh, skewed. It's a little bit sneary,
Speaker 1: like all the island people are kicking off again, whereas
Speaker 1: it's like, no, come on like this, it's an incredible,
Speaker 1: beautiful place. Of course they want to preserve it. Of
Speaker 1: course they want to control it in whatever way they
Speaker 1: want to. So again it's very difficult, but I will
Speaker 1: say that there are some really good reporters um there.
Speaker 1: There's a a friend of mine from Corsica, Lionel Doomus.
Speaker 1: He runs like a thing called um Corsican passport or
Speaker 1: were used to, which was kind of kind of humorous
Speaker 1: but at the same time in our news about kind
Speaker 1: of course and related um patriotic stuff. And then who
Speaker 1: we worked with, Jean Colinar. He's not related to m Yvonne.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's quite a you know, common COmON last name,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, yeah, so us it sounds quite you know, right,
Speaker 1: you must be related, but over there it's like not Smith,
Speaker 1: but you know it's quite common. Um, so yeah, Jean Colinar,
Speaker 1: he's great. And there's also the local papers in Corsica course, Mattin.
Speaker 1: They're really good. You might have to translate stuff, but
Speaker 1: they're very on the ball, you know what I mean
Speaker 1: that they're focused on everything. So if people are interested
Speaker 1: in it, honestly, I would say like seek out local
Speaker 1: French reporters. From what I gathered as well, there's there's
Speaker 1: a quiet, but really thriving kind of youth media. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say it's a it's a movement, but there's something
Speaker 1: growing there, you know. I spoke before I went out.
Speaker 1: I spoke to quite a few reporters, really nice people,
Speaker 1: really enthusiastic, really you know, love loving their island, but
Speaker 1: not full of hatred or anything like that. That that's
Speaker 1: something that I've seen a lot of French people say, oh,
Speaker 1: Corsicans are really full of hatred, their racist, They're blah blah.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I didn't experience that. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, it's like have you been to Paris, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like it's like the end of the day.
Speaker 1: I think the whole region probably has a has an
Speaker 1: issue with that, but certainly the youth are very open minded,
Speaker 1: very nice. Um And like I said, this isn't just
Speaker 1: me basing it off of one trip. I've been fascinated
Speaker 1: with this place for about six to eight years and
Speaker 1: I I have not experienced anything like that. Sure you'll
Speaker 1: hear the old comment like you know very yeah it's Europe,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, exactly Europe. Not to minimize it, but like
Speaker 1: it's just Corsica exactly whatever. Generally, you know, for a
Speaker 1: small island, it could be way worse. And so I
Speaker 1: had a lot of French people, like they're really nasty,
Speaker 1: they're really violent, and it's like they're not actually like
Speaker 1: they're very angry, but they don't hate. They don't hate
Speaker 1: the French in that sense of like, oh you're a
Speaker 1: French person, kill you. It's the same thing as we
Speaker 1: hate the state, you know. Like and at the same
Speaker 1: time they have a very quite a few people brought
Speaker 1: up Ireland and the Basque situation and Sardinia, and so
Speaker 1: they have this they have an internationalist mentality as well. Actually,
Speaker 1: and in fact, years ago there used to be a
Speaker 1: youth conference in Corsica hosted there. I don't think it
Speaker 1: goes on anymore, but it was hosted in Corsica by
Speaker 1: what was a very well organized radical socialist youth movement
Speaker 1: in Corsica, where people from northern Ireland, people from the
Speaker 1: Basque country, people from um, uh, what's the one in Barcelona, Oh, um, Calonia, Catalonia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people from there would come, you know, all people from
Speaker 1: different breakaway regions or whatever, and they would all come
Speaker 1: and they would all meet in courseco and they would
Speaker 1: talk about tactics and politics and whatever. So it's a
Speaker 1: very very interesting culture place, amazing history. Fucking the Poland
Speaker 1: is from Napoleon is from there. You know that's what
Speaker 1: you want. Um. So yeah, it's a really cool place.
Speaker 1: And you know, we only documented one side of it,
Speaker 1: a very radical side of it, because that's what was
Speaker 1: happening that weekend to dispatch. But there are a lot
Speaker 1: of moderates as well. There were a lot of like political,
Speaker 1: very smart political moderate moderates that are like, look, we
Speaker 1: don't want violence, but we do want autonomy, we want something.
Speaker 1: And they you know, they said, oh, you only showed
Speaker 1: the militant side of It's like, well, you weren't on
Speaker 1: the street that day, you know, these kids were, so
Speaker 1: obviously that's how it works. But yeah, I would to
Speaker 1: actually a question again. Sorry, I would say just if
Speaker 1: you're interested in the region, um check it out. And
Speaker 1: they're there's there's a film if you can find it
Speaker 1: in English subtitles, send it to me. But there's a
Speaker 1: fictionalized film about the effllency. I think it's called A
Speaker 1: Life of violence. Um, that's actually like quite good. It's
Speaker 1: a bit romantic size, but it's quite good in terms
Speaker 1: of explaining this situation there if you speak French. Checked
Speaker 1: out and just check out like course Martin and all
Speaker 1: these these other kind of local reporters there. People are like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's too hard to find them. It does feel like that,
Speaker 1: but once you find them, you find them all. So yeah, awesome. Well,
Speaker 1: Jake Canrahan, thank you so much. Check out the new
Speaker 1: Popular Front dispatch on Corsica. Um, by the way to YouTube. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so check out all the Popular Front stuff on YouTube.
Speaker 1: You've got a great documentary out also about the territorial
Speaker 1: defense militias in Ukraine that you're filmed right before ship went.
Speaker 1: Yeah you know where it is. Yeah, yeah, we're standing
Speaker 1: it because we're a bit like how do we yea,
Speaker 1: how do we make this most relevant? But it's it's
Speaker 1: coming that it's it will be quite interesting. Excited the
Speaker 1: perspective before. Yeah, the ship you're posting on Twitter was
Speaker 1: really interesting. Um, so yeah check that out when it's out.
Speaker 1: Check out all the Popular fronts other stuff. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you Jake. Let's uh, well we'll have you back
Speaker 1: on soon. All right, thank you very much. Welcome to
Speaker 1: it could happen here the podcast, the podcast, every episode.
Speaker 1: When you open too many podcasts, you you lose the
Speaker 1: ability to open podcasts anyway. Uh St Andrew, UM, this
Speaker 1: is your episode, so I'm gonna let you. Let you
Speaker 1: take it, take it away, take us on a journey. Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: good afternoon, and good night. UM. Today we just wanted
Speaker 1: to cover rather broad topic. I don't even know if
Speaker 1: it's gonna be released before the end of February, probably not,
Speaker 1: But in honor of Black History Month, I wanted to
Speaker 1: cover the history of Caribbean resistance to slavery and the
Speaker 1: different ways that manifested across the Caribbean. For those who
Speaker 1: don't know, UM, slavery in the Caribbean took place for
Speaker 1: several hundred years, beginning with the enslavement of the Amerindians
Speaker 1: the and continuing up until the abolition of slavery in
Speaker 1: three four, at least in British territories. UM. Before then,
Speaker 1: there were multiple struggles UM against the institution, both passive
Speaker 1: and active, and in every step of the process. UM.
Speaker 1: And then, of course post slavery, they were also multiple
Speaker 1: rebellions and insurrections and strikes that took place in the region.
Speaker 1: But I can't cover the well they about seven thousand
Speaker 1: islands in the Caribbean, give or take, but I can't
Speaker 1: cover the histories of all of those for the past
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years. But I will try to cover
Speaker 1: fairly generally the different forms of resistance that took place,
Speaker 1: starting with, of course, the resistances took place in Africa.
Speaker 1: I mean even before and state of people were put
Speaker 1: on these ships, even before they were captured. They were
Speaker 1: measures they were taken to protect themselves from enslavement. There
Speaker 1: was of course flight in the sense of running away um.
Speaker 1: But there was also evidence of Africans moving their villages
Speaker 1: to inaccessible areas like mountains or um or deeper into
Speaker 1: the forest were less accessible for enslaved people UM sorry
Speaker 1: for enslavers to try to capture their people. One of
Speaker 1: the more famous enslaved people um Luada Equino. He founded
Speaker 1: a society in Britain after being enslaved and taken to
Speaker 1: the Caribbean and eventually moving to Britain after becoming a
Speaker 1: freedman and starting the Sons of Africa abolitionist group. He
Speaker 1: had written his own autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the
Speaker 1: Life of Daquino, and he detailed some of the horrors
Speaker 1: of slavery from an enslaved person's perspective and to a
Speaker 1: lot of what we knew about slavery and how it
Speaker 1: could ah comes from his personal account, among others. Of course,
Speaker 1: so he spoke about some of the measures that were
Speaker 1: taken in his own village to defend against capture. But
Speaker 1: um he after being captured, of course, from the Kingdom
Speaker 1: of Indian around he ended up being taken on the
Speaker 1: slave ships, separated from his families and carried with four
Speaker 1: other people across the Atlantic to Barbados, and then eventually
Speaker 1: taken to Virginia, and then from Virginia being bought by
Speaker 1: a Royal Navy lieutenant and eventually being freed. During the
Speaker 1: voyages that it could, and they were multiple during the
Speaker 1: whole Triangle trade, it has been said that one in
Speaker 1: ten of all Atlantic crossings through the Middle prop passage
Speaker 1: had some kind of rebellion, whether it be through taking
Speaker 1: control of the ships and attempting to seal them back
Speaker 1: to Africa with the assistance of the crew without all
Speaker 1: of Africans battling against other ships um or in one
Speaker 1: case in Amistat, in some Africans were taken captive above
Speaker 1: aboard a cargo ship and they free themselves, killed the
Speaker 1: captain and the cook, and forced them to take them
Speaker 1: back to Sierra Leone, but instead the owners of the
Speaker 1: ship ended up taking them to the United States, where
Speaker 1: they were captured by the coast Guard. Jesus, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a lot um one slaveship surgeon guy named Alexander Falconbridge
Speaker 1: became an abolitionist because he's so well. The first of all,
Speaker 1: he saw the horrible conditions that were present on those
Speaker 1: ships in the Middle Passage, where you know, hundreds of
Speaker 1: people were shackled together and crammed into these tight enclosed, dark,
Speaker 1: wet infected spaces for weeks on anger being taken across,
Speaker 1: and of course a lot of the so called cargo,
Speaker 1: the people who were on route to be enslaved, were
Speaker 1: killed by the conditions presidents on those slave ships. However,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that you know, so many people were
Speaker 1: dying from the terrible conditions of the ships, the slave
Speaker 1: trade was so profitable for the enslavers and for the
Speaker 1: economies of the colonial nations that it was still there
Speaker 1: was still they were still not only able to break
Speaker 1: even but profit massively from the excursions. And even though
Speaker 1: the Middle Passage got more and more dangerous for cruise
Speaker 1: as rebellions became more and more expected, production for more shackles,
Speaker 1: more weaponry to keep captives secured a rose in England
Speaker 1: and helped to secure some of their travels. Of course,
Speaker 1: they were also times where Africans would burn the ships
Speaker 1: they were on, or where they would jump off of
Speaker 1: the ships. As I'm sure many people remember kill Monker's
Speaker 1: famous Final Woods in Black Panther. And from what I remember,
Speaker 1: the first and slaved people who arrived in Hispaniola immediately
Speaker 1: ran away and we're able to escape before being recaptured
Speaker 1: once Um and say people arrived in the horrible conditions
Speaker 1: at the various colonies in the Caribbean. One of the
Speaker 1: major projects of their colonial overlords was to convert them
Speaker 1: while in the process of you know, enslaving them. Of course,
Speaker 1: a lot of enslaved people were dying very rapidly due
Speaker 1: to the diseases and the terrible working conditions they had
Speaker 1: to endure. Right for those who did survive, Um separated
Speaker 1: from their families, from their ties to kinship, from really
Speaker 1: their home and everything that came along with it. As
Speaker 1: displaced indigenous people, they had to figure out ways to
Speaker 1: maintain and protect their cultures um from you know, naming conventions,
Speaker 1: to craftsmanship, to the language, to philosophy, to believes to
Speaker 1: music to dance. These are all elements of African cultures
Speaker 1: that would provide psychological support for captives. We need to
Speaker 1: resist the process of enslavement because enslavement is an act
Speaker 1: of breaking the will and erasing the humanity of the enslave.
Speaker 1: Practices like voodoo um in Heity or obia in Trinidad
Speaker 1: and Jamaica, we're able to strengthen the revolutionary efforts of
Speaker 1: rebellious Africans and so in the Haitian Revolution, you know,
Speaker 1: they were fueled by voodoo and the ceremonies that oc
Speaker 1: could then and we're able to eventually, you know, free
Speaker 1: the people of Haiti and established the first independent black
Speaker 1: republic in the New World. You need to know for
Speaker 1: so other forms of cultural resistance, and one of the
Speaker 1: main forms of culture resistance was the preservation of African
Speaker 1: culture through pre realization, through the melding and the hiding
Speaker 1: in some cases of elements of African culture with um
Speaker 1: European cultural forms to create these new cultures and new languages.
Speaker 1: Um Quol is one example, particularly Antilian Creole, which is
Speaker 1: related to Haitian Creole. These languages helped to maintain um
Speaker 1: some measure of identity for people who will be actively
Speaker 1: being stripped of it. Women in particular play a major
Speaker 1: role in this process of culture of resistance and cultural
Speaker 1: preservation because in African societies they were. African societies often
Speaker 1: made trilineal and mature, local and women played a key
Speaker 1: role in passing traditions onto their daughters and other young
Speaker 1: women and to the community at large through storytelling and
Speaker 1: through um the sharing of skills and beliefs and ideas,
Speaker 1: and so African women played a major rule in keeping
Speaker 1: the tradition going and at lineage going, maintaining the memory
Speaker 1: of people like a Nancy and Rare Rabbits and Mamadalu
Speaker 1: and Sukyans and all these other folkloric figures who bavy
Speaker 1: marks of African traditions. Women under slavery also had to
Speaker 1: do what they could to resist the consist consistent UM violence,
Speaker 1: sexual violence that was um being done to them. By
Speaker 1: their cool your masters, UM abortion and UM birth control,
Speaker 1: UM and other forms of resistance against sexual assault, resisting
Speaker 1: their masters, feeling illness. All these things worked too, not
Speaker 1: necessarily protect them, but two keep them going and try
Speaker 1: to steve off the worst elements of violence it was
Speaker 1: being done to them. As I mentioned the Haitian Revolution
Speaker 1: and being fueled by voodoo and whatnot. It really scared
Speaker 1: planters across the Cribban and across the world, really like
Speaker 1: this is the first time something I did sort of
Speaker 1: happened before. And I'm sure, uh the U s audience knew.
Speaker 1: Is a bit about the consequences in the US. How
Speaker 1: you know Southern slave masters were so terrified by the
Speaker 1: Asian Revolution, how France um imposed restrictions on heity, and
Speaker 1: how the US and other European powers were complicit in
Speaker 1: that attempts to strangle the first Black Republic. But there
Speaker 1: were cases in other parts of the Caribbean where planters
Speaker 1: um in their terror, used the Asian Revolution has an
Speaker 1: excuse to crackdown on the enslaved um, for example in
Speaker 1: Trenidad in the Christmas of eighteen o five. The Hassian
Speaker 1: Revolution ended in eighteen o four, so in Christmas of
Speaker 1: eighteen five, UM, the planters were so fraid and had
Speaker 1: really seen some acts of poisoning that we're occurring on
Speaker 1: some of the estates, because part of the cultural resistance
Speaker 1: involved the passing down of certain recipes and poisons and concoctions,
Speaker 1: and so many enslavers you know, fell victim couldn't quote
Speaker 1: to poisoners, and so they had to try to find
Speaker 1: a way to prevent what they saw was a planned uprising.
Speaker 1: They basically invented this idea of a conspiracy in their
Speaker 1: paranoia that was meant to wipe out this entire slave
Speaker 1: owning population during that in one go. So of course,
Speaker 1: as historians have uncovered, the conspiracy most likely didn't actually
Speaker 1: exist or maybe perhaps not today the scale that um
Speaker 1: the slave owners thought, but it was more so an
Speaker 1: attempt by the planters to impose greater authoritarian rule as
Speaker 1: Christmas Day needs, you know, five approached the details of
Speaker 1: this conspiracy, of this plot sorted to be uncovered by
Speaker 1: the planters. UM they thought that, you know, at this
Speaker 1: place called Chance Estate, enslaved people we're organizing to launch
Speaker 1: their revolution. And of course this terrified them because at
Speaker 1: that point in time, the enslaved population was somewhere around
Speaker 1: whereas the white slave owning class it was like half
Speaker 1: that number. And so the authorities declared martial law and
Speaker 1: apprehended those involved if they were even involved. Oftentimes they
Speaker 1: were not. But it does bring attention to an important
Speaker 1: part of enslave resistance, and that being the conspiracy and
Speaker 1: actual existence of slave secret societies. Secret societies are something that, ah,
Speaker 1: It's something that's common in the African Madan land where
Speaker 1: tribal rights and initiations and advancements through those rights um
Speaker 1: in secret groupings would occur um to sort of denote
Speaker 1: levels of ranco maturity and so in slave society, as
Speaker 1: different tribes mixed and mingled and plantations for security reasons.
Speaker 1: These secret societies continued but had assimilated some European systems
Speaker 1: of order and designation. So they gave themselves names like
Speaker 1: major or Captain and described their societies as regiments and
Speaker 1: the echoes the descendants of those societies still exists to
Speaker 1: this day in Trindad. They are highly obscured. I honestly
Speaker 1: don't know much details about them. I just know that
Speaker 1: I have some friends whose relatives um are involved in
Speaker 1: those secret societies, and in some places like for example
Speaker 1: Grancouver where and stay people seized the land and sort
Speaker 1: of held that land and kept it and passed it
Speaker 1: down across the generations. Um, such secret societies and membership
Speaker 1: in such secret societies is not unheard of. So is
Speaker 1: what the the modern ish versions of them do? Like
Speaker 1: what what what? What what are they doing? I guess
Speaker 1: like these days if if there's something that is, I
Speaker 1: don't know much about about them or how they operate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I don't think all the secret societies and
Speaker 1: turned at are descended from enslave serious societies like obviously not.
Speaker 1: There are other um secret societies, their societies of doctors
Speaker 1: and of lawyers and different treads um. There of course
Speaker 1: Mason groups as well, and I well, you know, the
Speaker 1: most um superficial details of most of these groups essentially
Speaker 1: thing that comes up a look that there there's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of like these sort of secret society groups
Speaker 1: that like wind up being part of an engine leven
Speaker 1: revolution in China, but they sort of, like most of them,
Speaker 1: kind of go bandit like after the revolution happens. And
Speaker 1: so it's just it's interesting to see I guess, like
Speaker 1: different contexts where they don't seem to have like just
Speaker 1: over itly turned into organized crime groups. Right, what's the
Speaker 1: like organized crime groups descended from secret societies in China,
Speaker 1: the Triads, for example. Yeah, I actually don't think the
Speaker 1: Triers send it from them. A couple of them joined
Speaker 1: the Communists, a lot of them kind of got wiped
Speaker 1: out in the sort of just general warlord fighting, and
Speaker 1: then some of them kind of got stumped up by
Speaker 1: the Communists because they were basically turned into organized their
Speaker 1: own organized crime things were sort of distinct from the
Speaker 1: other ones existed. But right, there were seven major rebellions
Speaker 1: in the Colony of Jamaica between sixteen seventy three and
Speaker 1: sixteen six, and several others in Antigua, in Nevus, in
Speaker 1: Fujian Islands, in you know, Barbados, in just across the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: There was continual African resistance and rebellion, and that really
Speaker 1: is what struck fair in these stave woulders at the time.
Speaker 1: In one case, um in seventeen thirty three, during the
Speaker 1: Amino Rebellion on St. John, which is part of the
Speaker 1: Danish Fusion Islands, or was part of the Danish Fusian Islands.
Speaker 1: The African inslusions to controlled the island for six months
Speaker 1: before being defeated, and the most slave rebellions really occurred
Speaker 1: in Jamaica, in fact, more than all the other colonies,
Speaker 1: more than all the other British colonies in the Caribbean combined.
Speaker 1: One of the most famous of the Jamaican rebellions was
Speaker 1: one of the Sudden seventeen six day by a man
Speaker 1: known as Tachi, had lasted for over a year before
Speaker 1: being suppressed by British colonial forces. Because Jamaica's population was
Speaker 1: massively overwhelmingly black in comparison to the very small minority
Speaker 1: of large slaveholding white, they were more likely to launch
Speaker 1: and more likely to succeed in slave refools. Um. Slave
Speaker 1: refolds are more likely to happen, of course, where slaves
Speaker 1: outnumber white, where masters are absent, where there's economic distress,
Speaker 1: where they are split within the ruling elite um, and
Speaker 1: when large numbers of Native one Africans from one area
Speaker 1: of brought in one time, which is why they often
Speaker 1: have to split up. There the people that they captured
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't be able to collaborate with their king.
Speaker 1: We often remember the flashy of forms of revolts such
Speaker 1: as the revolt in St. Joseph in seven led by Dagger,
Speaker 1: who is a former African chief in Guinea and the
Speaker 1: leader of the first British West India regiment Um. He
Speaker 1: mutinied along with two men, and although they were taken
Speaker 1: into custody and sentenced to death, they marked just one
Speaker 1: example of this sort of bold actions that were taken
Speaker 1: by in state of people in Tobago um in the
Speaker 1: year seventeen seventy. There were numerous armed the volts over
Speaker 1: the next eleven years, from seventy sev one, six armed revolts,
Speaker 1: one by led by an enslaveman named Sandy in seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy two in seventeen seventy one, one in June lyet
Speaker 1: in August one in seventeen seventy three, another in seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy four, another eighteen o one. And so these revolts
Speaker 1: to that constry didn't one specific year of the island.
Speaker 1: They would happened in some cases over the entire island.
Speaker 1: Tobago is of course separate from trained Dad until eight nine,
Speaker 1: where it became a ward of Trina Tobago. But and
Speaker 1: so their history is the history of Trian Island history
Speaker 1: of Tobago. We're separate, running separately for the first couple
Speaker 1: hundred years of the age of colonization, but Tobago's history
Speaker 1: of resistance is still connected in some ways to trend
Speaker 1: dads history of resistance in the sense of the bold
Speaker 1: actions that would taken by a slave people. Of course,
Speaker 1: not all resistance to slavery was so bold. Day to
Speaker 1: day resistance was by far the most common form of
Speaker 1: opposition to slavery, whether it be through feigning illness, staging slowdowns,
Speaker 1: pretending ignorance, deliver a carelessness, awsome sabotage, breaking tools. These
Speaker 1: sorts of expressions, while they reinforced previously held perceptions of
Speaker 1: enslaved Africans at the time, they also ways of enslaved
Speaker 1: people to express their alienation and to sort of corve
Speaker 1: some level of space or breathing room, or to give
Speaker 1: themselves some sense of catharsis in that brutal period. And
Speaker 1: so what we see is a sort of continuum of
Speaker 1: resistance from that sort of individual level of slowing down
Speaker 1: or failing ignorance or what or whatever, to the sort
Speaker 1: of broader cultural methods of passive resistance, such as you know,
Speaker 1: cultivating and passing down culture and cultural memories to the
Speaker 1: more bold aspects of resistance such as revolts and rebellions
Speaker 1: and revolutions. And of course there was the practice of maroonage,
Speaker 1: both petite and grand maroonage. Petite maroonage was an effort
Speaker 1: by individuals or groups of unstated people to escape from
Speaker 1: their plantations permanentally sometimes but usually for a limited amount
Speaker 1: of time, to escape mistreatment, to nick sheet better treatment,
Speaker 1: or it's even just catch a break honestly. Grand moonage
Speaker 1: is more commonly understood and recognized where communities of fugitive
Speaker 1: slaves would establish communities on the fringes in the swamps
Speaker 1: of Louisiana, for example, or in the mountains of Jamaica,
Speaker 1: and these moon communities have been established since the very beginning,
Speaker 1: since the early sixteenth century. When the fust and slave
Speaker 1: Africans are brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish, they
Speaker 1: would often unite with Amerindians, whether it be you know
Speaker 1: Tinos or Kalinago's, or go to base and unite with
Speaker 1: them in their resistance in carving out settlements or strongholds
Speaker 1: of safety. For example, in fifty forty six. In Hispaniola,
Speaker 1: there were over seven thousand Maroons among a slave population
Speaker 1: of eight thousands. After the island was split between the
Speaker 1: French santoming which is later which is now known as
Speaker 1: Haiti and the Spanish Santo Domingo, which is the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 1: In Maroons took advantage of the hostility between France and
Speaker 1: Spain to maintain settlements along the border between the two
Speaker 1: throughout the period of slavery. Addition, there were the Ruins
Speaker 1: in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and in some cases with
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico. Fugitive slaves from the Virgin Islands would literally
Speaker 1: set sail to Puerto Rico to settle and escape the
Speaker 1: enslavemands there. In Jamaica, of course, there are many ruined communities,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there is still an active Maroon community
Speaker 1: in Jamaica to this day that has persisted and maintained
Speaker 1: their traditions. Um Insane Kits in Antigua, in Barbados, in
Speaker 1: Martinique and Guada Loup. All of these islands have had
Speaker 1: Moon communities established um However, as European cultivation the islands increased.
Speaker 1: As Europeans ventured further and further into the islands, into
Speaker 1: the depths of the islands, it became more and more
Speaker 1: difficult to establish moon settlements because if you look at
Speaker 1: some of the smaller islands, it's kind of difficult to
Speaker 1: hide or to establish any sort of sustainable community on
Speaker 1: the fringes of an island that you could easily jog
Speaker 1: from one side to the other, or you know, walk
Speaker 1: from one side to the other. Of course, even on
Speaker 1: those smaller islands, there were still attempts to maintain moon settlements,
Speaker 1: such as in St. Vincent or Dominica. In St. Vincent,
Speaker 1: the Garifuna, which an indigenous group mixed who mixed with Africans,
Speaker 1: preserved they depend their independence against both French and the British,
Speaker 1: and they ended up spreading to um if I recall
Speaker 1: correctly Central America as well, and so the Garifona community
Speaker 1: is still very much alive and well to this day.
Speaker 1: In Jamaica and Cuba and Guadeloupe and Hispaniola, Marion communities
Speaker 1: were able to last longer because they had um more
Speaker 1: mountainous terrain to hide in, particularly in Jamaica. Um but
Speaker 1: they were also Maroon communities on the South American mainland.
Speaker 1: You know. In Brazil there was the famous Moroon community
Speaker 1: or quilombo known as pal Mares, which has existed for
Speaker 1: nearly years. From sixteen o five to six, there is
Speaker 1: a certain invasion by both the Dutch and Portuguese and
Speaker 1: had at least ten thousand organized UM members ready to
Speaker 1: defend their operation. They were governed by a king who
Speaker 1: used the political traditions drawn from Central Africa, but they
Speaker 1: unfortunately were eventually destroyed. In the Guyana's French Guyana UM,
Speaker 1: British Guyana which is now called Guyana UM Dutch Guyana
Speaker 1: which is now called surname. Marion communities were also able
Speaker 1: to establish themselves and they still persist to this day
Speaker 1: due to the um Amazon rainforest and the river wheels
Speaker 1: that allowed them to conceal themselves from colonial encroachment. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the US they were all Summaron communities, like the
Speaker 1: Black Seminoles of Florida or the Morion communities in Um
Speaker 1: I believe it was the Louisiana It's most places. Of course,
Speaker 1: Maroon communities were not very large UM or often did
Speaker 1: not last very long. They're usually small thriller bands led
Speaker 1: by an elected chief. But of course these smaller bands
Speaker 1: in there. Although they were small, that sort of protected
Speaker 1: them to some extent from detection and from recapture. In Cuba,
Speaker 1: for example, they were hundreds of small Maroon communities and
Speaker 1: they were guarded, and they were and they had their
Speaker 1: settlements guarded by ditches and steaks and secret paths, and
Speaker 1: these settlements communicated with each other while remaining isolated, so
Speaker 1: they could grow their own crops and hunt and fish
Speaker 1: and trade in peace, sometimes with other islands. In what's
Speaker 1: to prevent again capture and destruction. I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot that we can learn from the different forms of resistance,
Speaker 1: small and large that instead of people, and it took
Speaker 1: throughout the period of colonial settlements and expansion and enslavement,
Speaker 1: elements of their practices and I think could be applied
Speaker 1: to these struggles. Do you have any thoughts before the wrap? Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing I kind of want to plug is Russell
Speaker 1: Maroon showed wrote a really interesting I I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what the name for essay, I guess called the
Speaker 1: Dragon and the Hydra, which is a study. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called Dragon the Hydra study of historical study of
Speaker 1: organizational methods, and it's about basically a comparison of like
Speaker 1: different different kinds of resistance to colony Linsman Enslavement that
Speaker 1: talks a lot about the Roan movement, talks about sort
Speaker 1: of the problems that these sort of like highly centralized,
Speaker 1: top down movements ran into versus the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that the that these sort of more decentralized, less hierarchical
Speaker 1: momber movements face. And it's it's really interesting and it's
Speaker 1: pretty short, so everyone should just read it because it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He covers the us p T, Suriname and Jamaica, and
Speaker 1: you know how those different Moon communities dealt with their conditions.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure you brought this from prison too, if
Speaker 1: I'm remembering my timeline history correctly. Yes, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: folks without to read. I mean, I don't want to
Speaker 1: give the impression that Uron communities where these like valiant utopias.
Speaker 1: I mean, in some cases Mouron communities who manipulated UM
Speaker 1: against the other and often in exchange for maintaining the autonomy,
Speaker 1: they were made to sign treaties where they would have
Speaker 1: to turn in UM fugitives. So it was not, by
Speaker 1: any means are perfect situation to be in. But they
Speaker 1: were trying to cough out their survival. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: do you want to plug your stuff? So you can
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter, at on discore seeing True and
Speaker 1: on YouTube seem to on tourism, where I have lots
Speaker 1: of stuff. I mean, if you were interested in, for example,
Speaker 1: the details of how spirituality played a role in African resistance,
Speaker 1: I have a video on that. If you're interested in,
Speaker 1: you know, how Wada Equa New established the Sons of
Speaker 1: Africa group and how that was one of the foundations
Speaker 1: of what eventually became the Pan Afganist movement. I have
Speaker 1: a video on Pan Africanism that you could check out. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it for me. That was great. I didn't know
Speaker 1: there were still marine communities actually yeah, yeah, the one
Speaker 1: in Jamaica, the one in Suriname. They are still very
Speaker 1: much alive. And well, yeah, it's fascinating. Ah st Andrew,
Speaker 1: thank you for that. That was wonderful. And uh, that's
Speaker 1: that's our episode for today. So go home and doom
Speaker 1: scroll for several hours probably, or or do something productive
Speaker 1: or something. I had a cat, big some cookies, hand
Speaker 1: out food to people who were hungry, you know, big
Speaker 1: some cookies and then handled the cookies to people who
Speaker 1: need or doom scroll, you know, all productive things that
Speaker 1: are some significantly productive. Alright, friends, that's h that's the
Speaker 1: episode piece. Oh that's how you start a podcast. This
Speaker 1: is it could happen here. That's right. That's Robert talking.
Speaker 1: That's right. Also with us, Christopher Wong and Garrison Davis
Speaker 1: do your podcast. Yeah, So we're all gathering today on
Speaker 1: on the day after what I think we'll go down
Speaker 1: as the single most momentous moment in the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars.
Speaker 1: So the entire world has pivoted from obsession with the
Speaker 1: massive land war in Eastern Europe to discussing how Chris
Speaker 1: Rock getting slapped is like the massive land war in
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe or or eleven or nine eleven. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So it's a it's an amazing, like an unprecedentedly incredible
Speaker 1: time to be on on Twitter right now. That said,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about Nazi cat boys today. I've
Speaker 1: seen everyone's post on the subreddit being like, why aren't
Speaker 1: you guys giving blow by blows about the war in Ukraine?
Speaker 1: Then this is this is pressing topic, and we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about Nazi cat boys previous to the Chris
Speaker 1: Rock slap. This is the most pressing topic of the
Speaker 1: twenty one century. Um is why there's Nazi catboys? And
Speaker 1: now we're going to talk about it well, because I mean,
Speaker 1: the roots of the crisis in Ukraine are the different
Speaker 1: kinds of cat boys that Zelinsky and Putin are. Yes,
Speaker 1: Robert is fan art. Up, It's gonna be fine. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll find some horrible fan art. Yes, m yeah,
Speaker 1: we have. We have to figure out if if Putin's
Speaker 1: ever watched Helsing, and then we'll build to know. So
Speaker 1: I don't know what that means, but okay, you're you're
Speaker 1: about to find out. So great we we have. We
Speaker 1: have gathered here today to talk about to talk about
Speaker 1: the curious case of why there are Nazi capboys. Um
Speaker 1: throut through one TikTok and Twitter pushed from boys and
Speaker 1: cat boys into kind of the cultural mainstream, plunging these
Speaker 1: once much more niche subcultures out of the dark depths
Speaker 1: of fortune, Reddit, Tumbler and discord and uh the latest
Speaker 1: rebirth of these kind of gender bending communities. It's pretty
Speaker 1: socially progressive and affirming. Uh. Like generally most most fem
Speaker 1: boys catboys are are lefties. There's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: like Twitter communists. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: cat boys who like stalling or something. Um, but they're
Speaker 1: they're generally more generally more on the left. But but
Speaker 1: but for for those who've dug deeper into the history
Speaker 1: and origins of these Internet subcultures, you may have found
Speaker 1: a dark, racist, and hateful underbelly. So we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that today. I do have to note, Garrison,
Speaker 1: as soon as you said that, I found a Stalinist
Speaker 1: catboy the Twitter. It's an incredible account. So the their
Speaker 1: their background image for their Twitter account is a picture
Speaker 1: of Dang Xiaoping and the Ayatollah of Iran having a meeting.
Speaker 1: Their their PfP is a lavender haired Uh. It's like
Speaker 1: a it's like an anime pic here avatar cat boy, yeah,
Speaker 1: with like a Soviet hat and then Marxist Leninist bisexual
Speaker 1: catboy stalin did nothing wrong at North Korea. Stand incredible.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is why the Left will
Speaker 1: never win. That's perfect. I'm pretty sure this is like
Speaker 1: illegal in those countries. It's it would have had this
Speaker 1: person shot In the second someone tried to describe a
Speaker 1: catboy to Joseph Stalin, he would have had this person executed.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh wow, yeah, I see, I see it. Now,
Speaker 1: that is that is intense. You know. The thing is,
Speaker 1: this type of thing is not going to be uncommon.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be again, We're gonna be going into like
Speaker 1: actual fascists who are also cowboys, and obviously they would
Speaker 1: have been would have been killed for being degenerous as well.
Speaker 1: But now we're gonna kind of talk about how this
Speaker 1: how this kind of came to be. And I've been
Speaker 1: writing this for like over a year. Actually, I've interviewed
Speaker 1: a few people for this that I've kind of contributed
Speaker 1: to the script. And initially this was going to be
Speaker 1: conceived as a video. Um, and you can't really talk
Speaker 1: about these things in a video format without dressing up
Speaker 1: like a silly character. So I am. I'm wearing a
Speaker 1: very actually a very very high quality catboy outfend right now,
Speaker 1: which the audio will just have to you'll have to
Speaker 1: You'll have to see it through the audio, So good
Speaker 1: luck with that synesthesia. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you
Speaker 1: are at the same time, You've done that enough that
Speaker 1: I don't know that anyone really noticed. I've never dressed
Speaker 1: as a catboy for recording. Before you dress is something
Speaker 1: every other recording. That's true, I addrest as something I
Speaker 1: generally addresses something. So first section one, Section one, what
Speaker 1: is what is a cat boy? What? What is what
Speaker 1: is this? Um So? But first of all, of a
Speaker 1: few ground rules will be circling back too often. UM One,
Speaker 1: not all catboys and femboys identify as LGBT or queer.
Speaker 1: Um and two, gay people can still be racist. These
Speaker 1: are these, These are these, These are two points that
Speaker 1: we're gonna be coming back to over the course of
Speaker 1: these of these deep type episodes. So first things first,
Speaker 1: let's let's just define what a cat boy is for
Speaker 1: all of the boomers in the audience. Um And if
Speaker 1: you are, if you are a boomer listening to this,
Speaker 1: how why how did you find this? Why are why
Speaker 1: did you choose to listen to Garrison? The instant I
Speaker 1: became a boomer was the first time you tried to
Speaker 1: describe explain cat boys to me Like I I suddenly
Speaker 1: developed a strong opinion on hr Halderman because of because
Speaker 1: of me, you so administration Joe, but most simply, um,
Speaker 1: a cat boy. Is this what I'm doing right now?
Speaker 1: So someone who is kind of kind of boyish, who who? Who?
Speaker 1: Who sometimes enjoys dressing in cat like apparel? I guess
Speaker 1: it's like cat ears. It is different from furries from
Speaker 1: and we will we will get into this, um. I mean,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm definitely less boyish than I first was
Speaker 1: when I wrote this like a year ago, now that
Speaker 1: I'm on recreational estrogen. But nevertheless, someone who's a boyish
Speaker 1: and dresses or likes to dress in cat like kind
Speaker 1: of uh outfits generally on an anime trajectory of aesthetics. Uh.
Speaker 1: Now this is this is this is different from furries
Speaker 1: from multiple reasons. The physical cat like attributes on catboys
Speaker 1: are mostly confined to ears and pause sometimes with tails,
Speaker 1: but it's it's iffy um. Whereas you know, furries like
Speaker 1: to have like the full first suit thing going on,
Speaker 1: whereas catboys they still have like human faces and they
Speaker 1: wear like human clothes. So this is actually a very
Speaker 1: key difference, which will lots of made costumes like and
Speaker 1: yes a lot and the other other big kind of
Speaker 1: recurring trope um is that is that well they well
Speaker 1: catboys you usually wear clothes, is that they usually dress
Speaker 1: up in something similar to like a French made outfit
Speaker 1: um or or like different outfits like anime girls will
Speaker 1: where so like the tennis skirt thing, but generally on
Speaker 1: a made outfit to anime trajectory. So despite despite the
Speaker 1: animal ears, right, despite like the furry cat ears, the
Speaker 1: catboy or cat girls saying has much more in common
Speaker 1: with the fenboy community than the furry community and a
Speaker 1: lot of instances but more more more on that later.
Speaker 1: So after some initial research into the Nazi cat boy meme,
Speaker 1: I decided it would be useful for tracing back the
Speaker 1: roots of this kind of odd online phenomenon to broaden
Speaker 1: the scope of research to include fem boys as well,
Speaker 1: which is syccimctly just cat boys without the cat part.
Speaker 1: It's like boys who or generally male identifying people who
Speaker 1: dressed in like feminine ways. Um. Not a lot of
Speaker 1: fen boys will turn out to be trans and not
Speaker 1: all of them do a lot of fen boys and
Speaker 1: identify as straight. But you know, i'd like to wear
Speaker 1: you know, boys generally kind of in the twink of
Speaker 1: variety who likes to wear skirts, dresses, whatever. So I
Speaker 1: have a much of it a dissection to which gets
Speaker 1: a little bit more silly. Um but but yeah, so
Speaker 1: m boys, it's excited this. This doesn't get less silly
Speaker 1: as we go on. But but yeah, catboys, feen boys.
Speaker 1: Feen boys identify as male dress up in more stereotyptically
Speaker 1: feminine ways. There's a lot of similarity and crossover between
Speaker 1: fen boys and catboys. Um. But since fenboys have more
Speaker 1: of an established online history, uh, including them in the
Speaker 1: research seems like the best way to kind of dig
Speaker 1: into like the fascist femboy nazi catboy idea. So, speaking
Speaker 1: of section two, the racist femboy meme the past the
Speaker 1: past few years, there's been kind of a growing meme
Speaker 1: and perception across social media that fem boys are like
Speaker 1: really racist, um and just kind of pretty fashion in general, um,
Speaker 1: even really homophobic and transphobic and a lot of in
Speaker 1: a lot of senses, as much as a homophobic or
Speaker 1: transphobic femboy may see them contradictory at first. But again,
Speaker 1: more more on this later. Um. So when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about this going forward, I'm probably gonna be mixing words
Speaker 1: in terms like nazi and fascist all right or far right. Now,
Speaker 1: not not all of these racist femboys are what I
Speaker 1: would call Nazis by any means um and not not
Speaker 1: not all advocate for even joke about genocide, but there
Speaker 1: were absolutely recruitment attempts from self described Nazis. And you know,
Speaker 1: the line between jokes and actual beliefs is intentionally very
Speaker 1: foggy in this kind of internet subculture. So I'll kind
Speaker 1: of be lazily lumping together everything from racist to far
Speaker 1: far right wing folks for the sake of simplicity, because
Speaker 1: it's all like in the same spectrum. And like I
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning, not all femboys and cat boys
Speaker 1: identify as being queer, um, and gay people can still
Speaker 1: be racist. These there are these are points we're going
Speaker 1: to be circling back to a lot. So at this
Speaker 1: point the alright femboy meme has kind of actually overshadowed
Speaker 1: the actual phenomenon of it happening. Right in the past
Speaker 1: few years, the popularity of leftist fem boys has skyrocketed.
Speaker 1: Yet if you still do digging on like Twitter or Discord,
Speaker 1: you can indeed fed users who appear to be fem boys,
Speaker 1: but are also everything from racist to just openly fascist. Now, naturally,
Speaker 1: that leaves people wondering how can one have such a
Speaker 1: kind of contradictory lifestyle and belief system, which leads us
Speaker 1: to Section three. The Internet and that's it. That's kind
Speaker 1: of that's kind of the answer. We that's we can
Speaker 1: kind of pack it up here. Um, that's the answer.
Speaker 1: It's the Internet. That's that's why that that's why this
Speaker 1: has happened. That's what I'm getting out of this. Yeah, sure, whatever, whatever,
Speaker 1: it's it's Garrison. Are you are you are? Have you
Speaker 1: been caught up on why people say, I'll Gore invented
Speaker 1: the Internet? On where that joke came from? Are you? Oh? Boy,
Speaker 1: you have to you have to remember Chris Carrison's no
Speaker 1: was so there was like al Gore was among a
Speaker 1: bunch of different people who like voted to fund some
Speaker 1: of the different government kind of projects that became the Internet, right,
Speaker 1: like you had the rpnet and ship all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Like he was one of the people who like pushed
Speaker 1: that and then in the debate with George Bush while
Speaker 1: running for president in UH two thousand, he uh like
Speaker 1: basically made some claims that you could uncharitably translate as
Speaker 1: him saying that he invented the internet. Um, he didn't
Speaker 1: actually say that. It was more like he was saying, well, I,
Speaker 1: you know, supported from an early stage the development of
Speaker 1: the Internet. But it got turned into like al Gore
Speaker 1: claimed to have invented the Internet because it was funny.
Speaker 1: Ab yes, and and so now that's that's that's the
Speaker 1: joke is even though he didn't really, he just was
Speaker 1: not you know, but anyway there, so, well we can
Speaker 1: we can blame not the cap was on al Gore.
Speaker 1: Well that that does it for us today. Um, you
Speaker 1: can find us on Wait okay, we still have a
Speaker 1: we still have like half an episode to do. Alright,
Speaker 1: well here's here's speaking of of of al Gore and
Speaker 1: the Internet. Here's some ads brought to you by the Internet.
Speaker 1: Ah boy, those ads were so good they made me
Speaker 1: wanna be a cat. Okay, all right, wow, moving on. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you're in any way familiar with facism, you are
Speaker 1: probably aware that one of it's more consistent traits is
Speaker 1: that it's notoriously ideologically inconsistent. Um. So, for for this project,
Speaker 1: I interviewed multiple people who have a more personal history
Speaker 1: in the cat boy and femboy online communities than I do. UM.
Speaker 1: So those interviews plus my own online digging through like
Speaker 1: hundreds of threads from various form websites, I've I've literally
Speaker 1: looked through hundreds hundreds of the cat boy posts on Fortune.
Speaker 1: But doing doing all that has been very helpful for
Speaker 1: understanding kind of this intersection of politics and subculture. And
Speaker 1: since I did all this research, you don't need to,
Speaker 1: so there you go. Um. But one of the first
Speaker 1: kind of big takeaways I had after the research and
Speaker 1: interviews is that the nazi femboy catboy thing is not
Speaker 1: actually unique at all in terms of Internet radicalization. It
Speaker 1: just has some aesthetic abnormalities that can confuse on liquors
Speaker 1: or normal ease, which makes the internet phenomenon seen more
Speaker 1: outlandish than that actually is. But before we dig deeper
Speaker 1: into this litter box of hate, I would like to
Speaker 1: divide the femboy and catboy kind of racism spectrum into
Speaker 1: actually to two assistinct categories. First, um, we have we
Speaker 1: have type one, which I'm calling the fem fast people
Speaker 1: who are initially into the femboy community and aesthetic and
Speaker 1: then got introduced into far right politics online. And then
Speaker 1: we have type two, the fasci fem people who were
Speaker 1: already into far right politics and only then got introduced
Speaker 1: to the femboy community online. So I I usually break
Speaker 1: down lots of instances of fascists mixing with various subcultures
Speaker 1: into these like similar like to two categories of people
Speaker 1: starting off with politics and then getting into the culture,
Speaker 1: and the people starting off with the culture then getting
Speaker 1: into politics. I think it's actually kind it's useful for
Speaker 1: understanding a whole bunch of how there's like differences between
Speaker 1: different types of fascist people in various subcultures. So these
Speaker 1: two types I'm gonna I'm gonna be using to help
Speaker 1: to help talk about these different kind of strains of
Speaker 1: of the fascist femboy. For for now, we're gonna focus
Speaker 1: on the first one, the fem fast. So let's let's
Speaker 1: let's wind let's wind the clocks back. Let's say a decade. Broadly,
Speaker 1: gay people can't get married, and to most kids, trans
Speaker 1: people are ostensibly a myth um. So what kind of
Speaker 1: person is going to become a femboy in this in
Speaker 1: this type of in this type of environment. Simplest answer
Speaker 1: is like a certain sect of social outcasts and anime nerds,
Speaker 1: as well as some people who maybe don't consciously know
Speaker 1: or accept that they're queer yet. Really the only way
Speaker 1: to get initially exposed to the fembo aesthetic back then
Speaker 1: was via anime, manga, anti porn, and you know, select
Speaker 1: video games, specifically multiplayer games, and random and internet browsing.
Speaker 1: Right this, this is, this is how you're gonna get
Speaker 1: exposed to this type of aesthetic. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: the probably the old example of a Nazi catboy is
Speaker 1: from an anime called hell Singh where they had they
Speaker 1: had this Nazi catboy character who is the who was
Speaker 1: the source of a lot of Nazi catboy memes on
Speaker 1: fortune Like, it's a very very popular meme figure um,
Speaker 1: And this is I think a lot of where that
Speaker 1: aesthetic tied to fascism actually really starts from. But of
Speaker 1: course there's a lot of fascist fans of anime in general,
Speaker 1: so that the type of aesthetics that the type of
Speaker 1: aesthetics of femininity that anime kind of presents get used
Speaker 1: by fascism a lot. Even among like they're more like
Speaker 1: a cottage core styles, it's still a that very like
Speaker 1: patriarchal um type of inity that is popular among Japanese animation.
Speaker 1: So now, the reasons that someone might be drawn to
Speaker 1: this specific community can vary from person to person. Maybe
Speaker 1: they just don't feel as connected to like the hyper
Speaker 1: macho masculine style that American culture promotes. Maybe it's a
Speaker 1: way to get attention and validation, or maybe you just
Speaker 1: like wearing skirts or find it kind of hot. There's,
Speaker 1: but there's, and there's there's always the possibility that someone
Speaker 1: is transfer gain they just don't fully know it yet.
Speaker 1: This is the case with a lot of these people actually, Um,
Speaker 1: but some of some of you may be surprised to
Speaker 1: hear that before our modern TikTok femboy craze, most fem
Speaker 1: boys did self identify as straight ancests. Uh. There is
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons for this, including like increased omophobia
Speaker 1: and transphobia back then, plus like non binary was hardly
Speaker 1: even the thing like culturally at that at that point. UM.
Speaker 1: One of the people I interviewed for this project talked
Speaker 1: about how some of the cis straight fem boys he
Speaker 1: knew back then now do identify as trans or queer. Um,
Speaker 1: but back then that wasn't really the case. Um. The
Speaker 1: other person I interviewed before this called themselves asis gender
Speaker 1: femboy at the time of the interview, but has now
Speaker 1: since come out as trans. So, like it says, it
Speaker 1: is definitely a recurring pattern, but it's not a thing
Speaker 1: for everybody, Like there is definitely like a lot, like
Speaker 1: a lot of these people do call themselves straight even
Speaker 1: still now, UM, and that is something that a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of people don't have a don't have the
Speaker 1: easiest time kind of comprehending that's gonna what I'm gonna
Speaker 1: kind of try to get into. So let's let's let's
Speaker 1: say you're a kid, young teen and like eleven, you're
Speaker 1: getting into anime and video games. What kind of websites
Speaker 1: are you gonna gravitate to? Right, You're gonna gravitate to
Speaker 1: read It, You're gonna gravitate to four Chan, especially in right.
Speaker 1: These are the these are kind of the cultural mecchas
Speaker 1: of of those types of type type types of subcultures.
Speaker 1: So what is prelevant on these websites? Well, on four Chan,
Speaker 1: we have a slash B which is their random channel UM,
Speaker 1: which also has a not safe work designation, and it's
Speaker 1: was often flooded with femboy picks um, and since there
Speaker 1: are so few female users of that site, you see
Speaker 1: a lot of hentai and occasionally boys dressing up like
Speaker 1: not safe for work female anime characters, just because there's
Speaker 1: people still like femininity, but there's so few actual girls
Speaker 1: using those sites. At the femininity that you see is
Speaker 1: either through anime or it's through kind of cross dressing um.
Speaker 1: And then there's also the slash d page which is
Speaker 1: just completely dedicated to henta I. So you get a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of a lot of that type
Speaker 1: of like anime style of femininity through kind of that
Speaker 1: that type of appropriation and and fetishization on the slash
Speaker 1: d page. So there's there's a decent chance that anime
Speaker 1: and gaming nerds that browse their interests online will get
Speaker 1: exposed to fen boy staff at some point. Right nowadays,
Speaker 1: it's discord, used to be fortune and used to be
Speaker 1: read it. So it becomes this type of figure right
Speaker 1: infinity loop of people who are exposed to something and
Speaker 1: then start propagating it and get exposed to new people
Speaker 1: to it, And it's just like continuous cycle. Because if
Speaker 1: if you're a kid who discovers they kind of like
Speaker 1: the super niche almost taboo thing. Where are you going
Speaker 1: to go to find other like minded people? You're gonna
Speaker 1: go back to online multiplayer gaming, Reddit and four chane.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's it's all. It's all the same circles.
Speaker 1: So if if even if you don't get exposed to
Speaker 1: it in places like four chun, you're probably gonna end
Speaker 1: up there or somewhere similar regardless, and the other other
Speaker 1: and and the other thing that's important to talk about,
Speaker 1: which is going to talk about like how how the
Speaker 1: femboys start getting into politics is like who else is
Speaker 1: very prevalent and actively recruiting on these types of sites
Speaker 1: with on like on multiplayer gaming, on Reddit and four chan.
Speaker 1: It's it's nazis right that the people who are who
Speaker 1: are into very far right politics trying to mask trying
Speaker 1: to mask some of their beliefs initially in like humor
Speaker 1: and memes. You know, a lot of large, large part
Speaker 1: of an Internet radicalization is done through is done through memes,
Speaker 1: especially especially back in there's like so so many like memes.
Speaker 1: Memes as a social and recruitment tool, we're very very common,
Speaker 1: especially on like you know, if you're on like an
Speaker 1: image board. That that's the whole point is that you're
Speaker 1: sharing images. Um. So a big part of this overrepresentation
Speaker 1: of racists in the femboy community was simply the online
Speaker 1: proximity between these groups of people, between the femboys and
Speaker 1: then the fascists on four Chan or they read it
Speaker 1: in certain online games. Will it be like Second Life,
Speaker 1: whether it be like mms, you know, all these types
Speaker 1: of places and in any place that you can design
Speaker 1: your own character as well, You've got got a lot
Speaker 1: of this type of like anime femboy type thing, because
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of these games that are
Speaker 1: main in Japan can like give like more feminine options
Speaker 1: for like male characters, or just have like cowboy like
Speaker 1: years and stuff available as a cosmetic option. So a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of this fetish fetishization that we see
Speaker 1: on four Chan and on the and in the early
Speaker 1: two thousands and twentieens is now is now applied to Discord.
Speaker 1: Like this, you did kind of carry over four trans
Speaker 1: obviously not the kind of cultural behemoth that it used
Speaker 1: to be. A lot of this stuff just happens on
Speaker 1: Discord now, um, where you can kind of cultivate online
Speaker 1: communities that are more self contained. So throughout the entirety
Speaker 1: of the twenteen's, fascism was pretty successful infesting among nerd
Speaker 1: spaces right nerds and geeks of many types, whether that
Speaker 1: be gaming or anime or these more like esoteric communities
Speaker 1: esotericism like niche um. But these communities generally they attract
Speaker 1: people who are more disenfranchised right and them boys generally
Speaker 1: feel disenfranchised in one way or another, which just pushes
Speaker 1: them into these, you know, less mainstream subculture. At this point,
Speaker 1: they can be pretty easy targets for fascist recruiters to
Speaker 1: start suggesting that maybe some of their problems in the
Speaker 1: world are actually coming from feminism, immigrants, dealing jobs, affirmative action,
Speaker 1: and slowly leading into talk of like i Q and
Speaker 1: racism and anti semitism. So for those who found these
Speaker 1: ideas initially like abhorrent, uh, it can be explained at
Speaker 1: all this talk and simply edgy jokes in irony attempting
Speaker 1: to trigger the enormies, which is a big part of
Speaker 1: that type of propagation of this type of humor and
Speaker 1: then politics masses humor on these sites and on these
Speaker 1: like gaming chats. This isn't unique to fen Boys or
Speaker 1: cathboys in any way. Right, the more people I interviewed
Speaker 1: and the more kind of old forms that I read,
Speaker 1: I started to actually see stuff that seemed much more familiar. Um.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of parallels between this far right
Speaker 1: fenboy thing and the far right Fury phenomenon, which I
Speaker 1: know Robert and the Worst Year Ever podcast put together
Speaker 1: two episodes that do a great job kind of talking
Speaker 1: about the far right episode of the Worst Year Ever
Speaker 1: that we ever got to do. Yeah, yeah, it could
Speaker 1: do because I guess just briefly kind of talk about
Speaker 1: the furry the furry kind of thing and how that
Speaker 1: because there's there's a lot of there's Even though these
Speaker 1: cultures are different between fen boys and Furies, the tactics
Speaker 1: that fascists used to get into these communities is exactly
Speaker 1: the same. Um, and it kind of plays on the
Speaker 1: same same tropes. Yeah, it's weird, so you've got I
Speaker 1: think it kind of hearkens to the fact that like
Speaker 1: whenever you have a fandom, no matter kind of what
Speaker 1: the fandom is about or the message of the media
Speaker 1: it's about, you're going to have like Nazis in it. Um.
Speaker 1: And and that's obviously like Star Wars, right, where the
Speaker 1: point of Star Wars is Empire, bad empire. Basically space
Speaker 1: Nazis bad guys. And there's a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: who have just like made that into their life and
Speaker 1: get tattoos of the imperial sigil or whatever on their
Speaker 1: fucking chest. Or you've got like Disney movies where like
Speaker 1: there's these there's weirdos who will take far right nationalist
Speaker 1: messages at it, like every like everything everything has its Nazis.
Speaker 1: The punk community, right, punk music is supposed to be
Speaker 1: anti authoritarian um and kind of inherently left wing, but
Speaker 1: there's Nazi punks, so like it's all like every community
Speaker 1: has their Nazis, and the Furies are no different. One
Speaker 1: of the things that does make the Furies different is,
Speaker 1: I think because of how and this this is something
Speaker 1: probably you're a little too young, and I guess a
Speaker 1: lot of our audience may have missed out on aspects
Speaker 1: of but like early on in the Internet, and I'm
Speaker 1: talking like the first decade of actual Internet culture, from
Speaker 1: like ninety six to two five or six, which is
Speaker 1: really the first decade of like mass Internet culture. The
Speaker 1: punching bag of the entire Internet was was furries. Like
Speaker 1: they were the people that like it was the safest
Speaker 1: to make fun of, um, jokes about like killing them,
Speaker 1: all sorts of really fucked up shit. Um. And so
Speaker 1: I think they developed kind of this um very strong
Speaker 1: defensive impulse within the community. And so while every subculture
Speaker 1: has their Nazis, the Furies have gone kind of the
Speaker 1: furthest in documenting and um working to like ostracize those people.
Speaker 1: And they've done. They're on the level with like punks
Speaker 1: in terms of the degree to which they have Like
Speaker 1: that has become kind of a guided principle for a
Speaker 1: lot of Furies. Um. Yeah, is that kind of what
Speaker 1: you're looking for? Yeah, because a big a big and
Speaker 1: the thing you mentioned about like furries being such the
Speaker 1: punching bag, that's something that's that's something that Nazis even
Speaker 1: definitely kind of grasp onto as a way to do
Speaker 1: grooming and recruitment. Right is if if if, if, if
Speaker 1: fascists can present themselves as friends to these people who
Speaker 1: are always punched down upon, then they can kind of
Speaker 1: put them into their in groups, right, they can they
Speaker 1: can support them, give them, give them a sense of validation.
Speaker 1: And give them a sense of a community, tell them
Speaker 1: like they they they belong. You're you're, you're you're always
Speaker 1: going to be kicked out of like like real life
Speaker 1: social groups. Right, you can only exist here with us.
Speaker 1: We're gonna we understand you. Like right, they can. They
Speaker 1: can kind of foster this thing, even though obviously it's
Speaker 1: dealing with things that are not the most like not
Speaker 1: the most like systems straight thing in terms of like
Speaker 1: regular heterosexuality. Um like at a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of furries are straight, but like in terms of like
Speaker 1: the way they approach that is is definitely different than
Speaker 1: a lot of regular people. But they so white corom
Speaker 1: of systs and different fascists can like grasp onto this
Speaker 1: gr respond to this kind of disenfranchisement and offering this
Speaker 1: sense of community. Um be you know, be very friendly initially,
Speaker 1: be being very being very kind of open these people
Speaker 1: and start and start you know the term would be
Speaker 1: like red pilling them, right, um to talk about that
Speaker 1: a lot of their social issues are actually you know
Speaker 1: the fault of straws talking about these you know, all
Speaker 1: of these Jewish bankers. You know, it can start, you
Speaker 1: can start crafting the propaganda very carefully if you're friends
Speaker 1: with them first and then only starts slowly introducing them
Speaker 1: into your more extremist kind of view of politics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just no one's really surprised when an anime nerd
Speaker 1: or like a capital G gamer starts spewing far right
Speaker 1: talking points, but when a femboy does, that just seems
Speaker 1: off because like, aren't they also a degenerate right like
Speaker 1: like it's like what there is a bit of a
Speaker 1: cognitive distance there um and like yes and no, Right,
Speaker 1: you may be over estimating some people's commitment to the
Speaker 1: fascist cause here because an occurring pattern I found, we're
Speaker 1: talking to people with history in these communities, especially if
Speaker 1: they're more of like the fem fashion variety, right, starting
Speaker 1: up starting off with them boys headaches, then getting into
Speaker 1: being racist and and and like like pretty racist and
Speaker 1: then getting into fascism. Is that look looking back these
Speaker 1: people and they say, like themselves and others, all of
Speaker 1: their kind of parenting of racist and fascist talking points,
Speaker 1: especially online, was like they claim much more due to
Speaker 1: having to like fit in with these with these already
Speaker 1: pretty reactionary online spaces um and make friends at seemingly
Speaker 1: one of the few places that people with similar interests gather.
Speaker 1: You know, some people deep down don't really care about
Speaker 1: the political beliefs that much, and we're we're still looking
Speaker 1: for a community. And it just so happened that back then,
Speaker 1: in the early the places where these communities of outcast
Speaker 1: found each other were also places that other outcasts used
Speaker 1: racism as a lazy attention seeking shock comedy and like
Speaker 1: the triggering of normies, which was basically like a sport
Speaker 1: on these on on these forums. Now obviously this is
Speaker 1: not excusing any horn behavior and or horrible things, but
Speaker 1: that whole idea, plus the active like grooming and the
Speaker 1: active recruitment from Nazis made the nerdy outcast to fascist
Speaker 1: pipeline that we see today. That's really how it built
Speaker 1: up and became such a powerful tool, you know, in
Speaker 1: around um. But there is there is the other. All
Speaker 1: of this just generally more applies to the people who
Speaker 1: were into fen boys edicts and then got kind of
Speaker 1: railroaded into into nationalism and too fascism. Right, it's because
Speaker 1: they they're fem boys on these platforms. There's also racists
Speaker 1: on these platforms, so these things start to kind of mix,
Speaker 1: But there's still that other type of femboy nazi um,
Speaker 1: the one who started off online with far right views
Speaker 1: and then discovered fem boys and started to feel things
Speaker 1: when we're starting by talking about them next on on
Speaker 1: on part two. But I guess does anyone anyone have
Speaker 1: any any questions at least to close off part one
Speaker 1: about the more kind of fem fast variety of people
Speaker 1: who are generally kind of more regular politically, um, but
Speaker 1: are into into like femboy and cowboy kind of aesthetics
Speaker 1: and then and then get put into into into more
Speaker 1: reactionary ideas. Mm hmmm, uh stay off the internet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not a question, but yes, that is that is
Speaker 1: a that is a good uh, there's a good mission statement.
Speaker 1: But yeah, in terms of like, in terms of like
Speaker 1: the you know, this topic can whenever whenever I bring
Speaker 1: it up. I thought about this a lot when I've
Speaker 1: tried to explain it to people, there's always a bit
Speaker 1: of like that, how that doesn't make any sense? And
Speaker 1: I'll be gett into some of the more kind of
Speaker 1: semantics of it um in in part two, but at
Speaker 1: least at least for like the initial initial kind of
Speaker 1: dive into how the online community aspect is used as
Speaker 1: such a powerful tool for people who are feeling so
Speaker 1: alone that just the the idea of their being an
Speaker 1: online unity, whether it be racist or not, can is
Speaker 1: just super appealing. Because if if everyone thinks that you're
Speaker 1: weird in an outcast, if these other people who are
Speaker 1: also weird and outcasts start kind of trying to make
Speaker 1: friends with you, then it can be a very powerful
Speaker 1: like recruitment tool, um, which is then of course they'll
Speaker 1: they'll they'll be people, they'll be people who eventually try
Speaker 1: to like take them out of the whole femboy stetics
Speaker 1: in a lot of in a lot of ways, um.
Speaker 1: But a lot of fascists also get into the fen
Speaker 1: boy stetic because of the because of the proximity issue, right,
Speaker 1: because these things are so like next to each other.
Speaker 1: Well the thing you're the kind of important broader realization there.
Speaker 1: And this is something that a radicalization scholar named Scott
Speaker 1: Atran has been talking about for ten years now. Probably
Speaker 1: more is that people get radicalized in communities. People like
Speaker 1: when we talk about radicalization, like why Like I guess
Speaker 1: the other half of the explainer that I started this
Speaker 1: with being like, you know, every subculture has their Nazis.
Speaker 1: It's not because like the reason every subculture has their
Speaker 1: Nazis is that subcultures are like people get radicalized as
Speaker 1: part of communities, as part of subcultures. They don't get
Speaker 1: radicalized as individuals, just like people don't aren't just walking
Speaker 1: out in the world and decide to become a Nazi.
Speaker 1: They become a Nazi because a Nazi reaches them in
Speaker 1: something they're already into, right, Like that That's just the
Speaker 1: way it happens. Yeah, there's definitely a large part of
Speaker 1: this is like a group of like group dynamics, especially
Speaker 1: in places like forums where you're you know, trying to
Speaker 1: trying to get like this like a tension battle. Um
Speaker 1: And I guess the other other big part of about
Speaker 1: the femboy kind of idea, especially on image boards, is
Speaker 1: like it is such an attention seeking, in validation seeking
Speaker 1: place right you you want to you want to post
Speaker 1: things that gets you a lot of comments, likes, upboats, whatever.
Speaker 1: The kind of the metric is. Um, So people will
Speaker 1: do things that get them visibility. Even if even if
Speaker 1: half the people interacting with you are calling you a degenerate,
Speaker 1: at least there's people still looking at you at least
Speaker 1: you feel seen, um, and then the other half people
Speaker 1: will be like, no, it's actually fine. You know. So
Speaker 1: as long as there's that visibility, like that sense of community,
Speaker 1: than a lot of the more cognitive cognitive dissonance aspects
Speaker 1: can kind of be passed by. But we'll we'll we'll
Speaker 1: get into more of that for for for for part two. Um. Anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at to
Speaker 1: Happen Here podon Coole Zone Media, you can find me
Speaker 1: uh talking about catboys occasionally on Twitter at Hungry bow
Speaker 1: Tie and about it. Well it's you know, I've I've
Speaker 1: been I've been trying to edit down this episode because
Speaker 1: the script was way too long. I be trying to
Speaker 1: make it more siscinct the past few days. So my, my, my, my, my,
Speaker 1: I have. I am pretty excited to be to to
Speaker 1: to close this Google doc at the end of the day. Well,
Speaker 1: congratulations on all your hard work, Garrison and listeners at home.
Speaker 1: Go dress like a catboy. Yeah, and and don't be
Speaker 1: a Nazi. Yeah, I mean that's also important. Recording in progress.
Speaker 1: All right, Well that's my opening. Welcome to part two
Speaker 1: of Why They're Nazi Cowboys. Um, what is this podcast, Garrison,
Speaker 1: it could happen here talking about that together? The cowboys
Speaker 1: have Nazis? Which did which did actually happen here? They're
Speaker 1: actually we'll talk about how they actually happened. Um. But
Speaker 1: before we before we get into the topic of fascists
Speaker 1: becoming fem boys via exposure, because I do, We're gonna
Speaker 1: start off by talking about kind of well generally the
Speaker 1: book book the episodes can be talking about people who
Speaker 1: are fascists who then get in defend boys toepics. Right,
Speaker 1: last episode we talked about the fem fast, people who
Speaker 1: are fem boys who they get fascism. Now we're talking
Speaker 1: about the fascists who now getting defend boys. Um. But
Speaker 1: before we get real into that, I think it's gonna
Speaker 1: I think would be helpful to get a bit more
Speaker 1: into what these online communities were like in the um Now,
Speaker 1: all the infos like a combination of what I've gleaned
Speaker 1: from interviews, UH, direct messages, my own pulling up of
Speaker 1: old like four China Reddit threads. It may not necessarily
Speaker 1: reflect you on experiences perfectly. What is the most in
Speaker 1: depth I can do on an audio only medium? Um,
Speaker 1: some won't be thrilled about this, but we do need
Speaker 1: to discuss traps um at their place within the online
Speaker 1: community at the time. UM which means we must divine,
Speaker 1: which means before we first must to find another term
Speaker 1: for the blissfully unaware. So really heartbreaking because when I
Speaker 1: was a child, Garrison trap was was just a house
Speaker 1: where you hit your drugs. It is it is not
Speaker 1: a trap house. This is a different, different, different type
Speaker 1: of track. This is, this is this is before trap
Speaker 1: house turned into a PODCASTA and a bunch of people
Speaker 1: didn't know what a trap house was. Heartbreaking the term,
Speaker 1: but the term traps were using it here. UM, at
Speaker 1: least on the Internet, originates in the in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's on image boards UM specifically for Juan UM,
Speaker 1: and it got to be as as it got more
Speaker 1: popular as a term got more kind of widely recognized
Speaker 1: as a slur, specifically usually a slur against trans women
Speaker 1: UM or a slur for like any like feminine presenting
Speaker 1: person who was a signed mail at birth. So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's use and origins at least when the Internet
Speaker 1: comes from people posting pictures usually from anime very like
Speaker 1: feminine looking boys UM alongside the meme of Admiral Akbar
Speaker 1: saying it's a trap. Right, So this this is this
Speaker 1: is how this idea of the trap kind of started,
Speaker 1: at least online. I talked with some like other trans
Speaker 1: friends of mine. They say that it definitely they in
Speaker 1: their opinion, they remember it being a term even for
Speaker 1: the two thousands on the internet, of being kind of
Speaker 1: more of a slur towards trans women. Um. I can't
Speaker 1: find any kind of stuff online about that specific angle,
Speaker 1: but the term, the term may be older than that offline,
Speaker 1: but at least the online use of it really comes
Speaker 1: from the Admiral Actbar meme. Um. So, of course, the
Speaker 1: it's a trap idea kind of implies some form of
Speaker 1: deceptions at play, right with these drawings that are pure
Speaker 1: feminine but may actually be depicting adolescent males or you
Speaker 1: know worse trans sexuals right woo very scary. Um So
Speaker 1: this this soon got transferred over from being applied to
Speaker 1: anime drawings to being applied to pictures and then in
Speaker 1: person encounters of real fem boys or trans people. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's as in like if you found
Speaker 1: someone that looks female enough, as the meme would go, Um,
Speaker 1: if to be attractive and later found out that they
Speaker 1: were actually a boy or they were a trans woman.
Speaker 1: The idea was that, like, you were deceived, Thus you
Speaker 1: must be on the lookout for any kind of potential
Speaker 1: attractiveness of fem boys trans women, or else you two
Speaker 1: might be trapped. Um. So this again, this is it's
Speaker 1: it's it's often it's a very transphobic and it's like
Speaker 1: it's comparing fem boys to trans women because these are
Speaker 1: not the same thing. Um. Obviously, there's is very very
Speaker 1: hashtag problematic for a lot of reasons. Um. But there's
Speaker 1: also the the the meme the of our traps gay,
Speaker 1: which is referring to a kind of like satirical debate
Speaker 1: around whether or not it's gay defined a femboy, a
Speaker 1: male cross stresser, or even a trans woman attractive. Um.
Speaker 1: Now the meme does riff on the whole like fellas
Speaker 1: is it gay thing? Um? And gee whiz am I
Speaker 1: glad the fellas meme has surpassed the R traps gay meme. Uh. Obviously. Obviously,
Speaker 1: not only is the R traps gay thing pretty homophobic
Speaker 1: and transphobic, Um, it's also tied to a lot of
Speaker 1: like real world violence against trans women by men, all
Speaker 1: of the trans panic defense, right, the whole the whole
Speaker 1: trap idea kind of does tie you into the trans
Speaker 1: panic defense. A lot of you know, men who claim
Speaker 1: they simply had to attack or killed trans women once
Speaker 1: they found out that that she had a dick, right,
Speaker 1: or maybe used to have a dick, not even anymore, right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't even matter more commonly or commonly called the
Speaker 1: trans panic defense. Yeah, yeah, so, and like the mere
Speaker 1: thought of that was so scary that they just they
Speaker 1: use the trans panic defense in court when violence against
Speaker 1: trans women is enacted. Now, obviously this is also much
Speaker 1: more attacks against trans women in this vein are much
Speaker 1: more common on trans women of color than than than
Speaker 1: white trans woman. That's another that's another important thing to mention.
Speaker 1: But circling back to fortune Nazis and fem boys in
Speaker 1: the in the two thousands and tens, trap was almost
Speaker 1: like a badge of honor and self descriptor for many
Speaker 1: fem boys as well. Like being able to trap or
Speaker 1: like you know, pass for a woman while having a
Speaker 1: dick was like the highest level of femboy nous. It
Speaker 1: was like it was like hop shelf fem boy was
Speaker 1: being because was being able to to achieve this feat UM.
Speaker 1: Usually this was you know, for the purposes of taking
Speaker 1: like loot pictures of yourself and then having them be
Speaker 1: you know, well liked or spread across online forums. UM.
Speaker 1: In my interviews with people from these online spaces longer
Speaker 1: than I've been around, UM, it was it was like
Speaker 1: described to me by them that being like fem boys
Speaker 1: are just trying to look feminine, whereas traps are really
Speaker 1: trying to look like girls. And that is kind of
Speaker 1: like the distinction in these in these places at the time, UM. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, all while calling yourself trans was heavily discouraged
Speaker 1: and ridiculed. UM in two thousand and eleven, you know,
Speaker 1: four chun it was it was, it was. It was
Speaker 1: hard to be it was hard to even be openly gay, like,
Speaker 1: let alone transgender. So but being self described as the
Speaker 1: trap was much more accepted. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: would actually self describe as this or want to be
Speaker 1: self described as this, like want to be at the
Speaker 1: point where they feel like they could say this, UM.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting. It's like a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of the attraction to traps UM was in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways genuine, but also all wrapped in this
Speaker 1: like joking, ironic kind of exterior being like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: all like it, it's all like a bit that we're
Speaker 1: that we're all in on the joke for right. That
Speaker 1: that's kind of how this was explained away. Another quote
Speaker 1: from the interviews is like quote, if you actually admitted
Speaker 1: to being actually actually romantically attracted to traps or femboys,
Speaker 1: you would be heavily ostracized. People would say things like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, you actually did it, like you actually
Speaker 1: did the thing, um because it is it is. It
Speaker 1: was like wrapped in this sense of of of of
Speaker 1: like irony and and and any hint of sincere attraction
Speaker 1: was masked in this like ironic joke like facade. So
Speaker 1: at this point four chan is basically an amateur porn
Speaker 1: filled suesspool of anime h gaming, edgy jokes, and increasingly
Speaker 1: bad politics, with pole really taking the shape of like
Speaker 1: the Nazi machine that it is today. So close proximity
Speaker 1: and probability is all it's necessary to make these racist
Speaker 1: and fen boys have this you know, uncomfortable awakening once
Speaker 1: they start seeing a whole bunch of pictures with people's
Speaker 1: dicks wearing like made outfits. Um So, with with all
Speaker 1: these like edgy, ironic and not so ironic jokes, the
Speaker 1: racists populating these chans forums, online spaces, it's only a
Speaker 1: matter of time before they get exposed to boys posing
Speaker 1: in Japanese tennis skirts and pink wigs, which helps create
Speaker 1: this infinity loop idea of like fen boys to get
Speaker 1: into racism and then fascism, and then and fascists who
Speaker 1: discover they like dick girls and when boys were addresses,
Speaker 1: and then it's it's because they're because these things are
Speaker 1: happening right next to each other. It's this whole phenomenon
Speaker 1: of self contradiction that just keeps itself going. So we
Speaker 1: were now we were now done this section, thankfully, um
Speaker 1: I did not want to get into having to talk
Speaker 1: about all that stuff because I know it's not people
Speaker 1: don't like talking about it. It's pretty, it's pretty. It
Speaker 1: plays on a whole bunch of extremely like transphobic like tropes,
Speaker 1: but it is it is a big part of this,
Speaker 1: this this kind of phenomenon. Um So, now we're going
Speaker 1: to the next part, which is in cells, gamer gait
Speaker 1: and anti feminism. So I I'm I'm not going to
Speaker 1: focus a lot on the idea of repressed queerness here, right,
Speaker 1: the idea of like raging homophobes being secretly gay, because
Speaker 1: I think that idea gets a little too much attention
Speaker 1: when we talked about this sort of thing. Now, don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong, this absolutely does happen, but I generally
Speaker 1: view sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression as much more
Speaker 1: fluid attributes, even among people who consider themselves as systems straight.
Speaker 1: So I I don't like defaulting to this like explainer
Speaker 1: of being like, oh, they're homophobic, that means they're secretly gay,
Speaker 1: and like that's I think that's kind of lazy and stupid.
Speaker 1: But when when, when we're talking about the curious case
Speaker 1: of Nazi cowboys, most individuals involved not only identify as
Speaker 1: straight and sis gender, but are also very homophobic and
Speaker 1: very transphobic despite their overly like queer behavior here because
Speaker 1: it is it is like queer and like the original
Speaker 1: sense of the word um, And I think I think
Speaker 1: there's much more interesting ways to analyze this beyond the
Speaker 1: repressed gay trope we've already we've already already are talked
Speaker 1: about some femboys and femboy appreciators adopting reactionary and conservative
Speaker 1: social beliefs to fit into the larger culture around four
Speaker 1: Chune and parts of the online gaming community to find
Speaker 1: this sense of belonging and you know, shared shared community
Speaker 1: among other people. But in order for the fascist femboy
Speaker 1: to be such a lasting meme and trope in and
Speaker 1: of itself, in my mind, there needs to be a
Speaker 1: bit of a stronger justification for the inherent contradictions beyond
Speaker 1: just finding community itself. And we will we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that when we come back from from from our break.
Speaker 1: Here's here's some ads that that are hopefully about how
Speaker 1: you two can go on Amazon dot com and buy
Speaker 1: a made outfit and we're back. Okay, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about in cells. What of one of my yeah,
Speaker 1: uh um in cells or like can voluntarily celibrate people whatever.
Speaker 1: I assume people who are listening to this know what
Speaker 1: in cells are. Um. But the in cel movement gained
Speaker 1: traction in the mid twenty teens alongside gamer Gate and
Speaker 1: the growing kind of anti feminist and alongside of mass
Speaker 1: shooting there was there was there was also the Toronto
Speaker 1: attack when the in cell round over people in that
Speaker 1: van there's been multiple mass acts of islands tied to
Speaker 1: the in cell idea, and how they A lot of
Speaker 1: us just call them horny Isis I've never heard anyone
Speaker 1: call them that before. Well they are, I mean immediately.
Speaker 1: Also this is This is also the same period where
Speaker 1: just isis is on Twitter so cold they share where
Speaker 1: I really want Isis to chime in on the Will
Speaker 1: Smith to face No you don't. I would love that here. No,
Speaker 1: I'm waiting for the Taliban's take, no no, no no,
Speaker 1: no violence against his violence, Comedians is violenc comedians justified.
Speaker 1: The Taliban weighs in at six Taliban are you could
Speaker 1: get the Taliban arguing with isis K. By god, it
Speaker 1: could be done. What a what a what a better world? That?
Speaker 1: Especially if Trump was still on Twitter and conmdiate. Oh god,
Speaker 1: that would have been so funny. If Trump had been
Speaker 1: around on Twitter too. It's the only time I've missed him,
Speaker 1: just like, oh yeah, yeah, that would have been that,
Speaker 1: That would have been the good ship anyway. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: in cells there it's a pretty obstensibly violent movement because
Speaker 1: it's it's all about making young men disenfranchised about their future, right,
Speaker 1: It's this fatalistic idea that they were promised things and
Speaker 1: now those promises are no longer being kept by society,
Speaker 1: so you are kind of doomed to live a pathetic
Speaker 1: life forever. Right, So it is a very fatalist idea
Speaker 1: that really kind of encourages acts of violence. Um But
Speaker 1: the in the moment was gaining traction around this whole time,
Speaker 1: right right beside gammer Gate and the growing antifeminist movement.
Speaker 1: And I think the key to putting this puzzle together
Speaker 1: is in the hatred and resentment of women itself, um
Speaker 1: as like a thing. I think think this is actually
Speaker 1: a key part of why the femboy and femboy fascist
Speaker 1: thing kind of caught on. Most of the loose organizing
Speaker 1: of these movements were happening on four Chan and Reddit
Speaker 1: right eventually eventually discord as well. These were the same
Speaker 1: places that were home to the anime posting femboy amateur
Speaker 1: porn community, and one of the most common viewpoints at
Speaker 1: the time was that feminism is ruining women, right, that's
Speaker 1: it's it's disrupting the natural patriarchal order that many boys
Speaker 1: were taught existed, you know, with promises of girlfriends and
Speaker 1: wives that are like, rightfully, there's as some kind of
Speaker 1: like obligation. Yeah, I mean this is when we talked
Speaker 1: about like promise people being men being promised. Men were
Speaker 1: generally talking about like the way in which fiction kind
Speaker 1: of complicitly promises women as as a reward for heroics,
Speaker 1: org just being good. It's like it's it's just specifically
Speaker 1: like a cultural idea. That is probably the best example
Speaker 1: of this Star Wars, Luke Skywalker becomes a hero and
Speaker 1: gets to gets to kiss his sister, you know, yes,
Speaker 1: which is just the which is the driving driving motivation
Speaker 1: of many many in cells said they took in one
Speaker 1: day because their sister. Thank thank you Robert for that
Speaker 1: for that stinct analysis. I used to I used to
Speaker 1: be a film's reviewer, Garrison. So like if you're taught
Speaker 1: and raised like thinking that something like this exists, right
Speaker 1: like this this this this correct patriarchal order, like it's
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's almost it's almost like this like
Speaker 1: righteous truth. Um and you if you then discovery like
Speaker 1: that's kind of a lie, and that like women are
Speaker 1: actually individuals with value not tied to the ownership by
Speaker 1: man um. Some men have a very very unhealthy, often
Speaker 1: violatile reaction to this realization or confrontation. So some people
Speaker 1: then decide to do mass shootings. Some people, uh, kill people,
Speaker 1: some people just do you know, some people might just
Speaker 1: do you know, like um, intimate partner violence, right, say
Speaker 1: that they do get a partner at some point and
Speaker 1: it's not going the way they want and they just
Speaker 1: become abusive. Right. So there's a whole bunch of ways
Speaker 1: this this type of thing can manifest. Um. So, faced
Speaker 1: with the work of like not being a dick and
Speaker 1: trying to combat this ingrained misogyny and then having to
Speaker 1: like actually put effort into being attractive and desired, a
Speaker 1: lot of men instead opt to either like attack outwards
Speaker 1: or withdrawal inwards, and sometimes the mix of both. So
Speaker 1: with the with the fascist from boy thing, a lot
Speaker 1: of this is like withdrawing in words, right. A lot
Speaker 1: of these people are too introverted and to kind of
Speaker 1: cowardly to actually do like a mass shooting, which is
Speaker 1: like that's that's that's that's probably good. Um. But then
Speaker 1: them and drawing in words, we're gonna it's kind of
Speaker 1: manifest in this in this in this different way. So
Speaker 1: when dealing with this almost like misogynistic nihilism. A lot
Speaker 1: of dudes really lost hope in the prospect of a
Speaker 1: future romance with women. So instead of putting in effort
Speaker 1: to adjust their personality, adjust their behavior, change the partrict,
Speaker 1: change their patriarchal outlook, and improve their physical appearance, many
Speaker 1: guys insaide will retreat to their online communities full of
Speaker 1: other guys facing similar issues. All Right, it's easier to
Speaker 1: live in front of a screen and not have to
Speaker 1: face other humans in person. These these people don't really
Speaker 1: have much substantial experience in real life interacting with the
Speaker 1: opposite gender. Um. So these perhaps, you know, these these
Speaker 1: so called straight guys that were drawn to fend boys
Speaker 1: also may have had just had like bad experiences with women.
Speaker 1: They may have faced rejection, and that rejection may have
Speaker 1: really brought them down. Um, and then they assume that
Speaker 1: they're always going to be rejected by women because of
Speaker 1: like a few bad experiences and the kind of guys
Speaker 1: who are on these chans forums and at it online
Speaker 1: gaming they tend to be generally more socially outcast people
Speaker 1: who aren't necessarily super physically naturally like attractive and masculine. Right,
Speaker 1: you have to like people. Everyone, almost everyone can be attractive.
Speaker 1: You just have to like put in work if you
Speaker 1: if you just never do that, Like a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of boys are never taught how to actually make
Speaker 1: themselves look good, so they're just kind of like just like,
Speaker 1: like attractive isn't much like they if you go on
Speaker 1: these in cell forms, they'll focus a lot on like,
Speaker 1: well I have you know, there's these folds in the
Speaker 1: creases of my eyes, or like the way that my
Speaker 1: nose is very physically impossible for a woman to be
Speaker 1: into me. And it's like no, like more than people
Speaker 1: Like there's all sorts of different preferences people have for
Speaker 1: physical things, but overall, like the number one thing you
Speaker 1: can do to be attractive is to be a person
Speaker 1: that people like be confident their life if you have
Speaker 1: like have like a good personality, like learn how to
Speaker 1: do a variety of things and just like have have
Speaker 1: a life. Lot of the all these people like that
Speaker 1: seems neat They think that they can achieve, you know,
Speaker 1: they think that women should flock to them even if
Speaker 1: they put in like new effort at all, right, if
Speaker 1: they just do what they're doing, they feel like, why
Speaker 1: is this not working, or the effort they put in.
Speaker 1: It's like Ellie again, Eliot Rogers the perfect example of
Speaker 1: these kind of people. Like the effort that he put
Speaker 1: in was he like made his dad buy him a
Speaker 1: really nice car, and he dressed in expensive clothing. And
Speaker 1: it's like, well, that's actually very few people are attracted
Speaker 1: to that. And yes, the people who are attracted solely
Speaker 1: to someone having a nice car and clothing probably have
Speaker 1: really weird, specific like physical things. They're also only looking for, um,
Speaker 1: But that's because you were like like that, that's not
Speaker 1: making yourself attractive as opposed to I don't know, learning
Speaker 1: how to cook or or learning you know, a foreign language,
Speaker 1: or you know, being an emotionally available person who's not
Speaker 1: purely viewing relationships into transactional nature where you're you're paying
Speaker 1: for sex by being friendly. You know. But you know,
Speaker 1: you know what, but you know what's easier than doing
Speaker 1: all that is just hating women. That is, that's a
Speaker 1: much easier thing for these for these people to do
Speaker 1: default to this. So the Internet taught me one thing.
Speaker 1: It's that it's quite easy to hate women. So while
Speaker 1: these like all right, hell holes like four chune um
Speaker 1: and you know, read it online gaming, right, online gaming
Speaker 1: is full of misogyny. Um, all these all these places
Speaker 1: like really hate like actual women. It's they still heavily
Speaker 1: fetish size femininity, right, it's still viewed as this like glorious,
Speaker 1: like like thing that's put put put put put put
Speaker 1: on a pedestal, even though they hate like actual women themselves.
Speaker 1: So feminine dudes can be fem boys or cause play
Speaker 1: anime to garner attention or social praise, you know, amidst
Speaker 1: some you know standard you know, like people like oh
Speaker 1: your faguetes, you're disgusting comments, But you can then they
Speaker 1: can still like cause play and dress up and post
Speaker 1: pictures without being totally shunned by their fellow edgy writers
Speaker 1: because it's kind of funny and some of them may
Speaker 1: actually find it cute, even even though they may not
Speaker 1: admit it. Uh. Fem boys often do have you know,
Speaker 1: I generally think cute and effeminate features they can in
Speaker 1: For these people, a big part of the goal is
Speaker 1: to like trick the brain into thinking that you're just
Speaker 1: looking at a girl, um that might just so happen
Speaker 1: to have a penis. So therefore, when like viewing these pictures,
Speaker 1: these guys are also like getting a sense of familiarity
Speaker 1: with girl like imagery, um while thinking that like they
Speaker 1: also might have a shot and with interacting with this
Speaker 1: individual because they don't have a vagina, so that makes
Speaker 1: it makes interacting with them like easier because there's like
Speaker 1: more things to relate to. I guess, um, you would
Speaker 1: see a lot of like role playing and like role
Speaker 1: playing of sexting and like role playing of dating girls
Speaker 1: through this femboy framework just actually a really common occurrence
Speaker 1: as like and it was it was explained as like
Speaker 1: it's like a sort of practice for imagining their future
Speaker 1: of dating women. It was like it was like they're
Speaker 1: doing this to like practice interacting with women. Um, so
Speaker 1: they're just gonna be role playing dating fem boys while
Speaker 1: being Nazis. But they're doing it so that it's like
Speaker 1: a practice so that they will be better at dating
Speaker 1: women in the future. It's like so that that's that's
Speaker 1: actually a really common thing um or like yeah, like
Speaker 1: sexting as as as like yeah, I'm just doing this
Speaker 1: for practice, Like I'm not doing this so that I
Speaker 1: will be good at sexting in the future, just doing
Speaker 1: it with these fem boys on you know, discord on
Speaker 1: for chat whatever. Um, because like all of like the
Speaker 1: whole femboy thing is still dealing with the patriarchal views
Speaker 1: of beauty. Right. It's it's femininity as this sort of
Speaker 1: performance put on for the enjoyment of others. And because
Speaker 1: it's about that, like appreciating femininity itself, it's seen as
Speaker 1: a lot safer than full on homosexual attraction, right because
Speaker 1: it's it's allowed if if you're if you can appreciate
Speaker 1: the femininity, then that's allowed to propagate despite also kind
Speaker 1: being degenerate because the person generally fem boys usually self
Speaker 1: ideas male. But because it's wrapped in this feminine package,
Speaker 1: it's allowed to be appreciated. Um. And for the people
Speaker 1: that did eventually come to terms with their queerness, the
Speaker 1: four Chan femboy thing allowed them to safely dip their
Speaker 1: toes into exploring how like exploring homosexuality, bisexuality, exploring like
Speaker 1: gender bending without like abandoning the typical masculine feminine rules
Speaker 1: that were kind of raised to be comfortable with. Right.
Speaker 1: It's still in the regular masculine feminine like rule sets,
Speaker 1: but it's approachable because it's allowed to be done through
Speaker 1: this both both this like ironic joke, but then also
Speaker 1: it's still it's still based off these patriarchal views of
Speaker 1: feminine beauty. So it's it's it's it's a weird thing. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's that's a that's the other part of it
Speaker 1: that I like to explain to people because you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that is like trying to picture fascists fake dating each
Speaker 1: other online so that will be better at dating women
Speaker 1: in the future. It's just a very absurd idea. It's
Speaker 1: I it's fair. I'm actually fine with this, but like
Speaker 1: it makes like it makes sense, like it like it,
Speaker 1: like I understand it, and you can like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: get it. Um. And it did help a lot of
Speaker 1: people eventually realize maybe I'm not the straightest stick in
Speaker 1: the shed, or maybe not the straightest stick in the fascies. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean everyone needs a safe space to figure out
Speaker 1: what they are, and I guess that even includes fascists,
Speaker 1: maybe because like not because I want fascists to be fascists,
Speaker 1: but because maybe some of them, through this weird role
Speaker 1: playing role, will like get over some stuff absolutely recognize
Speaker 1: that like oh maybe maybe I'm just like gay and
Speaker 1: I need to like work on myself, like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree with all
Speaker 1: this Nazi stuff. Yeah, because like amidst like the gamer
Speaker 1: Gate and the height of the insult era, these guys
Speaker 1: felt more comfortable exploring their burgeoning sexuality in these male
Speaker 1: dominated online spaces right there. It's easier to relate to
Speaker 1: other males when they're when they're all like growing up
Speaker 1: coming of age, dealing with dealing with these like feelings
Speaker 1: of it like abandonment, loneliness. Right, they do this in
Speaker 1: these male spaces, they feel lot safer to express themselves, um,
Speaker 1: you know what, whether or not they're full of fascists
Speaker 1: or like other people who are like very like reactionary,
Speaker 1: because at least they can understand male desire um and
Speaker 1: that's they can relate to that and internact with people
Speaker 1: who are you know, they can eat in act easier
Speaker 1: with people with dicks while wrapped in this feminine package,
Speaker 1: which is so much easier than the much more scary
Speaker 1: and much more elusive of like females out there. Right
Speaker 1: It's it's that that's kind of the framework that this
Speaker 1: was propagated through. It's it's it's really interesting that it's
Speaker 1: like you have these people who like they're they're like
Speaker 1: they're they're they're transmisogyny is such that like they they've
Speaker 1: escalated to a point where it circles back around. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is so intense. It is such a it's there's
Speaker 1: so much going on. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's like
Speaker 1: it becomes this like like I don't know, it becomes
Speaker 1: like the fact that it's like conceptually impossible for them
Speaker 1: for just like a woman to have a dick like
Speaker 1: that has like circled back around and just completely come
Speaker 1: to define how they have gender in such a way
Speaker 1: that someone who is like just is performing gender like
Speaker 1: as a woman, like to the extent that like they're
Speaker 1: trying to like they're they're trying to have people use
Speaker 1: like to transcellors against them. Yeah, there's it's it's an
Speaker 1: interesting there's there's there's so much going on because yeah,
Speaker 1: it's routed in a whole bunch of it's people exploring
Speaker 1: gender in this weird way while also like relying on
Speaker 1: heavily like misogynistic, trans misogynistic, homophobic kind of ideas. But
Speaker 1: it's it's also it's like it's very queer in this
Speaker 1: and like the way in the way they're going about it,
Speaker 1: because it's a whole bunch of like self it's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of like self justification. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of like stuff around like what they view
Speaker 1: as feminine, what they've us masculine, what what they view
Speaker 1: like being a woman means, um it is it is
Speaker 1: it is. Uh, it's it's a lot yeah, like as
Speaker 1: as like a more as like a gender queer, transperson.
Speaker 1: I like, I like look at them go through all
Speaker 1: this work and like, wow, they could have bypassed a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of bullshit if they just like less of
Speaker 1: a like, if they're just less of if they work
Speaker 1: as horrible people, they could have experienced these same things.
Speaker 1: But again, like they were, they're in their own isolated communities,
Speaker 1: They're they're dealing with the same ingredients just from this
Speaker 1: weird backwards way. So like it's it's obviously very transphoblic
Speaker 1: and in a lot of senses, but a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of these pop will eventually realized, oh, maybe
Speaker 1: I've actually trends. So it's this it's like I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's obviously not great in a lot of ways, But
Speaker 1: I don't know how to discuss it when saying like, yes,
Speaker 1: it's obviously not great for how like trans misogynistic it is,
Speaker 1: but they're all working through some stuff. Yeah, well you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want The one thing I will say about
Speaker 1: this is like, yeah, like if kids were actually allowed
Speaker 1: to be queer normally, like this ship mostly would not happen,
Speaker 1: Like you, you wouldn't get so many people who get
Speaker 1: locked in these like who are queer, who get locked
Speaker 1: into these spaces. But then also like the only way
Speaker 1: that they could express themselves in these like narrow, isolated
Speaker 1: waping spaces is to like this ship or they're into
Speaker 1: the like just let people express themselves normally, and this
Speaker 1: this you can deny the fascist recruiting ground, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's interesting, Like it's like when all
Speaker 1: all these people are looking at interacting with them boys,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of those is why they they
Speaker 1: were able to play with these ingredients is that they
Speaker 1: did not experience the same like anxiety or like heightened
Speaker 1: stakes or neative or like negative connotations in their mind
Speaker 1: that that they normally do when thinking about women, because
Speaker 1: women are just so other so especially like if you
Speaker 1: can rationalize this this attraction defend boys as simply a
Speaker 1: prelude to dating like quote like real women in whatever
Speaker 1: like fantasy cottage core future they might imagine, then this
Speaker 1: idea is a way more approachable. You're gonna need to
Speaker 1: explain cottage core for the I am not. I already
Speaker 1: have we have we were having an add break I
Speaker 1: still in brief it is this like return to tradition obsession.
Speaker 1: You see among like chunks of the far right who
Speaker 1: were obsessed with the idea that if they if culture
Speaker 1: was the way it was in the fifties or in
Speaker 1: like the they would live on They would live on
Speaker 1: a small farm with their wife and children who would
Speaker 1: be utterly submissive to them, and everything would be perfect.
Speaker 1: But like, the only thing in between them and happiness
Speaker 1: is that they're not able to live in a in
Speaker 1: a in a small all like farm with a woman
Speaker 1: who they essentially own. That the gist, I will say
Speaker 1: a lot of college course are also used by liberals
Speaker 1: and people on the left as well. Just as like
Speaker 1: an aesthetic thing, we all want to live on a
Speaker 1: small farm in the world. That makes it the cottage
Speaker 1: core that we're talking about is specifically the idea of
Speaker 1: I want to own a woman and and own my
Speaker 1: children and have like no no power capable of like
Speaker 1: stopping me from yeah whatever, because like cottage cottage, corn
Speaker 1: TikTok is pretty sanitized and pretty much like more of
Speaker 1: an aesthetic thing, less tied to those patriarchal structures. But anyway,
Speaker 1: like everything we're talking about, there's the version that's Nazis,
Speaker 1: and there's the version that's, like, boy, it sucks living
Speaker 1: in a four thousand dollar a month apartment in New
Speaker 1: York City that I share with nine people. I sure
Speaker 1: would like to live on a cottage in the woods. Anyway,
Speaker 1: speaking of living in college in these woods, Um, if
Speaker 1: you buy these products, it'll get you closer to your
Speaker 1: college core lifestyle. So give it away. Sponsored entirely by
Speaker 1: the concept big cottage, big cottage, the cottage industrial complex. Alright,
Speaker 1: we are back, and now we're talking about the point
Speaker 1: of the Nazi cat boy debate that everyone I think
Speaker 1: who is familiar with the topic knew was coming. No,
Speaker 1: no breakdown of Nazi cat boys and the Nazi catboy
Speaker 1: phenomenon is complete without talking about Nick Flintez and Catboy Cammy.
Speaker 1: So Nick Flintes, Yeah, this is uh, this is this
Speaker 1: is part of the part of the show that ever
Speaker 1: that everyone's been waiting for. Um. I don't know that
Speaker 1: most people would know to be waiting for this, but
Speaker 1: broadly recognized by our audience. So in short, if George
Speaker 1: Lincoln Rockwell has the permanent body of a seventeen year
Speaker 1: old boy, um, that that's Nick Flintest as many if
Speaker 1: you know, Nick Flintes is a white nationalist livestreamer political
Speaker 1: activists that runs the Fascist America First organization. Uh. He's
Speaker 1: known for fostering a farther right conservative base than say
Speaker 1: and Shapiro or Turning Point USA. Um, and has pulled
Speaker 1: stunts like sending his fans called gropers to Turning Point
Speaker 1: USA events to take over the Q and A sections
Speaker 1: and basically asked Charlie Kirk why he isn't more fascist? Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so he runs this whole organization mostly known by
Speaker 1: doing his Daily Lives streams. He's been doing this since
Speaker 1: he's like sixteen or seventeen years old. Fucking nonsense. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of a running joke or widely acknowledged
Speaker 1: secret that Nick is kind of gay. Um. Based on
Speaker 1: the way he talks about women, and based on what
Speaker 1: he said about his own dating history and snide comments
Speaker 1: from fellow home Homo Nazi friends has led a lot,
Speaker 1: has led a lot of people to to this conclusion
Speaker 1: that Nick may not be again the straightest stick in
Speaker 1: the fascists. UM, thank you, thank you, thank you one.
Speaker 1: And as as a significant contributing factor to this like question,
Speaker 1: the nixt sexuality um is due to his catboy arc. Um.
Speaker 1: So so this this arc begins in January, UM, finally
Speaker 1: giving our audience the important important news. This is what
Speaker 1: you need to know people. That month, Nick created a
Speaker 1: catboy themed channel in his own America first Discord server
Speaker 1: with Nick, with Nick messaging post catboys in here, please
Speaker 1: with with weird capitalizations throughout the throughout the thing. So
Speaker 1: Nick cheered on along with other people, posting pictures of
Speaker 1: various cat boys from pop culture and cat boy edits
Speaker 1: of Nick Fintez himself. UM. One America First Server user
Speaker 1: posted cat boys are trad and which means like traditional
Speaker 1: list in kind of the sense that like Nazis are traditionalist.
Speaker 1: That's that's what that person is saying. He also posted
Speaker 1: very funny. He also posted cat boys were like cath boys.
Speaker 1: Oh god, so like again Yeah, yeah, so that's that's
Speaker 1: that's the that's the joke. I'm you're, you're, you're out
Speaker 1: of control right now. This is it is so I've
Speaker 1: I've looked through this discord. He's arguing, this isn't very funny.
Speaker 1: I've looked through this discord server multiple times for the
Speaker 1: for the screenshots when you have the cathboy channel, and
Speaker 1: it always makes me happy. It is. It's one of
Speaker 1: the most funny things I've ever seen. Yeah, as as
Speaker 1: your friend, I'm always warring between wanting you to be
Speaker 1: happy and worried that this is a cry for help,
Speaker 1: but please continue. Eventually, Nick faced some pushback from inside
Speaker 1: the server for fostering degeneracy um with with others with
Speaker 1: with others defending the Catboy channel by saying, brother, we
Speaker 1: love is Christian amazing and standing see this is this
Speaker 1: is this is exactly, this is the good ship. This
Speaker 1: is what we've been building towards as a civilization, right there, baby.
Speaker 1: Other people other people defended the Catboy channel by saying,
Speaker 1: women don't respect Christianity. Your tribes thoughttery always leaks out eventually.
Speaker 1: Good God, yes, that's that's that's the good stuff I got.
Speaker 1: I got no comment, just just perfect thank you. But
Speaker 1: but because Nick is fundamentally a coward, he did cave
Speaker 1: under pressure and deleted the catboy channel. Um, we we lost.
Speaker 1: I think the American First movement today could be so
Speaker 1: different if he kept this is this is why the
Speaker 1: cause of Americanism is doomed, this kind of cowardice. But
Speaker 1: but but as as we will see from Nick, oh
Speaker 1: absolutely this this whole, this whole sections about Nick Fintest
Speaker 1: being thoroughly cocked. But as as we will see, Nick
Speaker 1: continued to use um the exact rhetoric I laid out
Speaker 1: in my in Sales gammer Gate and antifeminist section while
Speaker 1: defending what he calls attraction to traps um and we can,
Speaker 1: of course, we can apply this this defense broadly to
Speaker 1: catboys and from boys, as Nick does. Um, I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to I'm going to try to play a
Speaker 1: video of about about Nick fuentas um our traps gay? Yeah,
Speaker 1: traps are gay. I've always maintained traps are gay. Of
Speaker 1: course you have sex with the man, it's gay. There's
Speaker 1: no getting around now. Now, that's said. That's said, Look,
Speaker 1: it's gay. I get it. I agree. Now that's said,
Speaker 1: it's you know, we're in times where the women are
Speaker 1: not really meeting their obligations. So I'm not saying you're not. Look,
Speaker 1: if you have sex with the trap, you're game, no
Speaker 1: doubt about that, and you should be ready killed, you
Speaker 1: should be made fun of. But it's a little bit
Speaker 1: different than if you did it like twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: That's all I'm saying. If you in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties were banging a trap, I would
Speaker 1: say what's wrong with you? Like I would say that now.
Speaker 1: I would say that now, I would say, well, you're
Speaker 1: some kind of sick freak. We have all these beautiful
Speaker 1: girls and they're normal, you know, and you have sex
Speaker 1: with a trap. What's wrong with you? But in nineteen
Speaker 1: it's like, well, it's it's different. It's a different circumstance,
Speaker 1: different options. There're still disavowed, I disavow, it's condemned, it's gay,
Speaker 1: it's all that. But you know, it's just different. I
Speaker 1: think everybody understands that. But I'm still listen to half
Speaker 1: a little just have to have a little nuance all right,
Speaker 1: it's just a little nuance different times to different times.
Speaker 1: It's I maintain strong disavowal, strong disavowal, do not do
Speaker 1: not do that. It's gay, it's immoral. You're going to hell,
Speaker 1: and it's weird and it's gross. Oh my god, what's
Speaker 1: wrong with you? Yeah, I haven't heard that one in
Speaker 1: a minute, person, I'm upset. That was horrible. You don't
Speaker 1: heard femoids since the David Sereni days, which looks at
Speaker 1: home if you don't, if you if you missed David Serene,
Speaker 1: you missed the one brief moment where the far right
Speaker 1: was purely funny. That was bad. So so being the worst.
Speaker 1: So yes, being being attracted to traps makes makes it gay,
Speaker 1: according to him, But not really, because the female race
Speaker 1: isn't carrying their burden like it once did back in
Speaker 1: the sixties. It's like back in back in back in
Speaker 1: the old days of the nineteen sixties. It's it's like
Speaker 1: they've almost gotten back to the like the I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it probably still sor but like the thing
Speaker 1: you got with that just sometimes where they were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I fucked, but I'm a top. So it's not gay.
Speaker 1: It's like like so close there, They're so close, and
Speaker 1: it's like it's not like Roy Cone kind of yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I think I think like I think once
Speaker 1: we get like just slightly like maybe like twenty more
Speaker 1: years out from like the evangelical evangelicalism as I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean maybe maybe maybe it's resurgen is gonna be
Speaker 1: like a big enough heyday thing. But it's like I think,
Speaker 1: if you had like twenty years with the right wasn't
Speaker 1: completely dominated by a certain evangelical homophobia, like I think
Speaker 1: you would just get back there and well, we're already
Speaker 1: on that way. And it's but the Nick Funt has
Speaker 1: kept by saga, let's not stop here. No no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no I am It is funny, maybe the wrong word,
Speaker 1: but fascinating that we are heading inevitably barreling towards this
Speaker 1: future where simultane neviously homophobia is still a massive part
Speaker 1: of conservative politics and conservatives are gay as hell. Like
Speaker 1: that's that's absolutely something where we are speeding towards like
Speaker 1: a drunken family on the back of a four wheeler
Speaker 1: about to break all of their necks at once and
Speaker 1: crash in the woods. So Nick Fuentes love tweeting about
Speaker 1: cat boys. He didn't a lot, And for a while,
Speaker 1: Nick's cat boy jokes and like a memory was tolerated
Speaker 1: under his banner of like irony poisoned reactionary comedy. But
Speaker 1: every ironic joke has a stipping point that makes that
Speaker 1: makes enough people wonder is this actually ironic? Uh? And
Speaker 1: for Fuentes, that moment came when he live streamed a
Speaker 1: ten hour date with a fellow fascist live streamer who
Speaker 1: went by the name cat Boy Cammy. Now, first let's
Speaker 1: let me explain who cat Boy Cammy wasn't at the time.
Speaker 1: Then we'll get into the date that that we'll get
Speaker 1: into Nick went as his brief altright cancelation, so Tour
Speaker 1: Brooks a k a. Cowboy Cammy, formerly going under the
Speaker 1: user name lolly Socks. So that's fun. Um is an
Speaker 1: Australian fascist live streamer who first came to prominence by
Speaker 1: uploading clips of himself harassing users on the popular video
Speaker 1: chatting site Oh mowgli Ogilby. I ever know how to
Speaker 1: say this? One mogul little emogli people here, people, people
Speaker 1: will know what I'm talking about. It's this it's this
Speaker 1: randomized chatting app that does video chatting with the randomized users.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's O M E G L E. I
Speaker 1: never know how to say it, but it's this. He
Speaker 1: would he would upload himself videos of him harassing people
Speaker 1: via via this chatting app. UM. In one of them,
Speaker 1: he dressed his up in black face and while brandishing
Speaker 1: guns and trying to he was trying to find like
Speaker 1: black black kids to taunt on this platform. Another one
Speaker 1: he dressed up as a policeman UM and kneels and
Speaker 1: an effigy he made likeness of George Floyd. Um, he
Speaker 1: it's it's he is, he is. He is pretty gross. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's he's a pretty horrible person. But for
Speaker 1: a long time, his bit was dressing up in anime
Speaker 1: costumes and dressing up as a catboy. Uh to then
Speaker 1: talk about like neo Nazi rhetoric. Well, dressed as a
Speaker 1: catboy and this this was his funny bit that he
Speaker 1: would do. UM. At one point he was streaming like
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day, uh, for ten days, for
Speaker 1: like for the for the days and days on end
Speaker 1: um and he was earning thousands of followers from places
Speaker 1: like US and Russia. Uh and he became the seventh
Speaker 1: highest earning streamer on d live and d live was
Speaker 1: a popular live streaming platform used by fascists um in
Speaker 1: and so in late twenty nineteen was when Cowboy Cammy
Speaker 1: popped up like in America, initially catching the attention of
Speaker 1: Nick Fuentez. Over over the course of a few months.
Speaker 1: UH he kind of made friends with various people in
Speaker 1: the American far right internet sphere, like Milo Richard Spencer
Speaker 1: Baked Alaska, but but Nick Fuentes was his original kind
Speaker 1: of entry point into this. Nick saw Nick saw his
Speaker 1: videos online and was interested in like what he was doing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Nick said that he had a good sense of humor,
Speaker 1: and he's good looking, and demonstrated and demonstrated his repeatability
Speaker 1: that he's able to achieve viral moments and retain a
Speaker 1: streaming audience. So Nick became friends with him because he
Speaker 1: thought Cowboy Camy would be like a growing internet presence.
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of move his his type of
Speaker 1: like his type of pretty like racist and horrible like
Speaker 1: joke pranks, and tried to give them more, give them
Speaker 1: more of a platform to kind of frontline reactionary ideologies. Um.
Speaker 1: So when when Nick was getting familiar with Kawboy Cammy
Speaker 1: Cammy on online activities were mainly consisting of dressing up
Speaker 1: as an ANIMI cowboy to do random like political debates
Speaker 1: or live streams or show it like anime conventions to
Speaker 1: harass people, um and doing like various gags and pranks.
Speaker 1: One of the most infamous incidents was when he was
Speaker 1: deep throating a massive horse cock dildo hooked up to
Speaker 1: a bucket of fake semen. Um good, okay, yeah, so
Speaker 1: in December, in December, Catboy Cammy flew from Australia to
Speaker 1: go visiton No, the semen was fake? It was? It
Speaker 1: was Oh okay, gotcha it was. It was a massive
Speaker 1: horse cock dildoo hooked up to a bucket of like
Speaker 1: fake semen. Right, okay, so just like corn starch and
Speaker 1: I'm happy. Yeah, if we want to go of a
Speaker 1: recipe's later, I'm sure we could make that a whole episode.
Speaker 1: But now I know how to make fake come. In December,
Speaker 1: Catboy Cavy flew from Australia to go visit Nick Fuentez
Speaker 1: and then just proceeded to live stream the ten hour
Speaker 1: totally straight hangout session with Catboy Camy dressed up as
Speaker 1: a cowboy the entire time. I mean, this does sound
Speaker 1: very straight to me. They go to they go to
Speaker 1: an arcade, they play games together, they get food and milkshakes.
Speaker 1: They go clothing shopping and try on matching outfits, um,
Speaker 1: all while laughing and giggling the entire time. Um well,
Speaker 1: while uh well, uh while driving and listening to extremely
Speaker 1: gay pop music. Catboy Cammy says to Nick that he
Speaker 1: reminds them of an X. It's great and by the
Speaker 1: end of the ten hour stream, it's implied that they
Speaker 1: it's it's the end of stream. It's implied that they
Speaker 1: share a room for the night. Um. Sure they did.
Speaker 1: And it's ten hours of pure horrible Nazi flirting and
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty. It's it's a thing. It exists. Um
Speaker 1: But as so as news and details of the live
Speaker 1: stream uh started to circulate, a wave of a wave
Speaker 1: of infighting among the alt right and the gropers spawned
Speaker 1: some amazing articles and headlines from neo Nazi news sites. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a headline from the Daily Stormer called the Rowing
Speaker 1: for a Revolution is canceled after Nick Fuentes reveals to
Speaker 1: be a catboy and gay Fayett. It's just pretty pretty astonishing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds that sounds about right. And other other great headlines.
Speaker 1: We have a Fuentes disavows catboy after a pressure from
Speaker 1: trad news. If you're if you're sitting down and for
Speaker 1: your movement that you want to take over the government
Speaker 1: typing down Fuentes disavows cat boy. Perhaps you need to
Speaker 1: think about some things. We got another headline as catboy
Speaker 1: Candy versus Richard Spencer because Richard Spencer trying to cancel
Speaker 1: Nick for this because Nick was getting more popular than him. Um.
Speaker 1: And we have then another great headline just a Nick
Speaker 1: Fuentes catboy BFF is a mockery to his sexuality anyway,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's pretty good. There's this this great this
Speaker 1: is this this great? Um. A bit from one of
Speaker 1: these articles, which which which which which I'll quote. So
Speaker 1: it starts to start off by saying, is Nick Fuente
Speaker 1: is attracted to women? If you trusted the plan, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't ask such questions. I will say that I don't
Speaker 1: think the ten hour live stream helps King Nick of
Speaker 1: the Grappers. At the moment he had a good thing
Speaker 1: going by trying to promote a more Christian and normal
Speaker 1: presenting nationalist movement and was getting a lot of traction
Speaker 1: until he ruined his image by associating it with this.
Speaker 1: None of his various enemies did this to him either.
Speaker 1: He did it entirely to himself. So yeah, um but like, obviously,
Speaker 1: like the point of this is not to like, not
Speaker 1: to like put Nick Fuentez's sexuality on blast, like I do,
Speaker 1: do not care one way or the other. Um, it's
Speaker 1: not a problem. The problem isn't is that. The problem
Speaker 1: isn't that Nick may find cat boys incredibly hot. Uh.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that he's like a Nazi and
Speaker 1: stuff and calls for the extermination of gay people while
Speaker 1: also doing all of this ship um and you know Nick,
Speaker 1: Nick still maintains that he isn't gay and gay people
Speaker 1: should be exiled from society and he would never associate
Speaker 1: with homosexuals blah blah blah blah blah, um, all while
Speaker 1: doing all this incredibly straight behavior. Um. Uh. For update
Speaker 1: on Catboy Cammy. Later, Catboy Cammy made multiple appearances That's
Speaker 1: Trump rallies and various other political events, going viral multiple
Speaker 1: times for screaming incredibly racist, anti Semitic and openly fascist rants. Um.
Speaker 1: You probably saw footage of catboy Cammy in Um. He
Speaker 1: was just just, he was just he was just dressed
Speaker 1: as like a regular person. But he there was a
Speaker 1: few clips of him at Trump rallies that went very
Speaker 1: very viral. Um and Nick even u disowned disavowed catboy
Speaker 1: camy for bad optics. Uh. During during during these incredibly
Speaker 1: racist rants, he would he would go on at at
Speaker 1: at Trump rallies. Um. And then of course we have
Speaker 1: a mayor America First and uh and and Nick Fuentez
Speaker 1: then being you know, an escalating part of the protests
Speaker 1: in d C leading to January six. Um, we have
Speaker 1: the person alleged to have stolen Nancy Polosi's laptop being
Speaker 1: in those America First discord servers and uh and grooming
Speaker 1: young boys by dressing up as a cat girl. Um
Speaker 1: So all part of all, part of this will get
Speaker 1: talked about later in like these articles and stuff. This
Speaker 1: has not been talked about. Some people already know about it.
Speaker 1: But but yes, um, so it's all part of this
Speaker 1: same like Nick Fuentez catboy sect of things of these
Speaker 1: these like people who who call themselves tread cats who
Speaker 1: then do all this weird cat boy shit. And yes,
Speaker 1: the the person who stole people laptop who was like
Speaker 1: an open Nazi, UM was was grooming like miners on
Speaker 1: on discord by dressing up this cat girl, by by
Speaker 1: dressing up with a cat girl. Um. Yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: a whole buch of this, this whole sphere of stuff.
Speaker 1: You can find some incredibly dark dark corners. Um. But nowadays, uh,
Speaker 1: in the Year of Our Lord, UH, fem boys are
Speaker 1: way more of like it's like generally acknowledged to be
Speaker 1: like a kind of like a leftist like communist thing
Speaker 1: almost um like and and I think the reason why
Speaker 1: this debate got so I think the reason why the
Speaker 1: fascist like the fascist femboy debate got so kind of
Speaker 1: heightened in the past few years, like ever since, like
Speaker 1: tumbler band porn, Uh, there's been a migration of tumbloy
Speaker 1: users onto Twitter, and a part of part a part
Speaker 1: of this migration is not sake for work users and
Speaker 1: content um, including fem boys and people who fetishize fem
Speaker 1: boys and even fetishized racist fem boys moving moving on
Speaker 1: to Twitter, right, Twitter has become the new has become
Speaker 1: the new de facto tumbler in a lot of senses.
Speaker 1: So the past three years, more and more normalies have
Speaker 1: been exposed to these types of like off the cuff people. Um. Then,
Speaker 1: of course TikTok has sent fem boys into the mainstream
Speaker 1: because TikTok is also it's not an image ward, but
Speaker 1: it is a visual medium right where you're posting small
Speaker 1: videos of yourselves. So a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: cat boy and fenboy content on TikTok. There's even this
Speaker 1: horrible article from two from August by Vice called introducing
Speaker 1: fem boys the most wholesome trend on TikTok, as if
Speaker 1: fenb boys were invented in mind boggling article of But yeah,
Speaker 1: fenboys are now much more. If you take the Vice
Speaker 1: article as an example, fen boys are now fully mainstreamed. Right.
Speaker 1: Fenboys used to be a small subculture, but among gen
Speaker 1: Z kind of culture as a whole. Now fen boys
Speaker 1: are very popular. They are they are kind of they
Speaker 1: are one of one of like one of like the
Speaker 1: hot new pokemons to collect um And I'm going to
Speaker 1: har that's cultural appropriation from millennials. You're not allowed to
Speaker 1: talk about pokemons. I don't I don't care. We we
Speaker 1: own those. I just just to talk about like scale
Speaker 1: of memes here. I have some Google have some like
Speaker 1: Google trends, um on like Nazi cat boys and not
Speaker 1: see fem boys. Uh, and we see the mass The biggest,
Speaker 1: biggest spike in Nazi femboy is January of one, which
Speaker 1: makes sense that that's when I started writing this this script. Actually, um,
Speaker 1: you say yeah for for Google trends, we got a
Speaker 1: massive spike in January one, and it's kind of been
Speaker 1: decreasing since then, but still still like it was. It
Speaker 1: was like you would see blips every once in a while,
Speaker 1: like there's a small blip of Nazi fem boys in
Speaker 1: a small blip in and then a small blip at
Speaker 1: the start of the pandemic in March because people are
Speaker 1: alone and isolated so they're doing this instead. Um. And
Speaker 1: then yeah, January one, massive massive spike. UM the same
Speaker 1: thing with a very similar to racist fem Boy. It's
Speaker 1: basically the same exact trajectory. We do get a pretty
Speaker 1: big spike and racist fem boy in June of um
Speaker 1: and then another big spike of actually of November one
Speaker 1: is the highest. The highest searches for racist FM boy.
Speaker 1: So it's still very much an ongoing meme of like
Speaker 1: a thing I'll being like, yeah, femboys are pretty racist.
Speaker 1: It's still completely completely ongoing. Oh thank god, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It's don't worries, it's not. It's not a closed case.
Speaker 1: And that's good. Garrison. I was really worried for a second.
Speaker 1: No people, people, and this, Like I think, I think
Speaker 1: if you're not extremely online, you probably even like you
Speaker 1: might not know about this, Like this is like this
Speaker 1: is an actual discourse on Twitter, like like this there
Speaker 1: will be like a week We're the only thing people
Speaker 1: argue about is whether fem boys are inherently racist, which
Speaker 1: obviously they're not. Like it's it's so. And the last
Speaker 1: thing I'm gonna mention here is enemy is in the
Speaker 1: Is it the unicorn riot discord leaks? When they leaked
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of information from lots of different fascist chattels.
Speaker 1: We have over a thousand mentions of cat boys inside
Speaker 1: that you know, couldn't riot fascist discord leaks? Garrison. I
Speaker 1: have a question for you, Yes, do you think God
Speaker 1: stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of
Speaker 1: what he's created here on Earth. So if you want
Speaker 1: to have a fun time, you can go to Discord,
Speaker 1: Leaks dot Unicorn, Riot dot Ninja, um slash Discord slash search,
Speaker 1: then put in, put in catboy and scrolls skulls scrolls
Speaker 1: through thousands of posts from these Nazi channels, not mend
Speaker 1: cat for here we got stuff from like sar god
Speaker 1: of a cod the We have the Discord channel, Domestic
Speaker 1: Terrorism Planning, Discord Catboy channel, we of course have we
Speaker 1: of course have Nick Fuentez. We got every whatever you
Speaker 1: would look for, you can find it here. Um. And
Speaker 1: that is that is the curious case of Nazi catboys.
Speaker 1: So there there you go. Any any questions, Class Garrison,
Speaker 1: why why did you do this to us? Because I
Speaker 1: thought it would be funny? It is on the on
Speaker 1: the inside, it's funny anyway, happy Well that is uh
Speaker 1: so yeah, Now I hope, I hope you all have
Speaker 1: a better look into why the fascist femboy meme exists
Speaker 1: and how people can have the cognitive distance in their
Speaker 1: own heads in terms of you know, fetishing, fetishizing feminine
Speaker 1: attributes while still hating women and then leading into the
Speaker 1: Nick Fuentez catboy craze that has swept the nation as
Speaker 1: a whole. So just okay, just just just be queer
Speaker 1: and a leftist. You don't have to do the ship.
Speaker 1: You do not have to wrap your brain in fucking
Speaker 1: seventeen layers of bullshit of like weird misogyny. You can
Speaker 1: just just be gay and a leftist and as as
Speaker 1: we as we showed you can, you can. You can
Speaker 1: be a leftist. You can love Stalin and be a catboy.
Speaker 1: It's totally fine. I think you can be anything and
Speaker 1: be a catboy. That's that's the main message of the
Speaker 1: twenty one century. Vladimir Putin is going to come out
Speaker 1: as a catboy when he releases his next unhinged rant
Speaker 1: and support of J. K Rowling. That's that's that's where
Speaker 1: the discourse is headed. It's inevitable, it can't be stopped.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be Nick Fintes and Vladimir Putin holds
Speaker 1: cans being a cat boy. All right, Well that's where
Speaker 1: we're going. That doesn't for us today, everybody. If you
Speaker 1: wanna follow the show, you can follow us on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Instagram, at happen here pod and cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: You can follow my catboy posting at Hungry bow tie. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah Hey. We'll be back Monday with more episodes every
Speaker 1: week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.