Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compiletion 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to It could happen here,
Speaker 1: the podcast where we spend all of our time talking
Speaker 1: about skincare now personally and a lot of people say
Speaker 1: this is a bad idea. I enjoy using concentrated chlorine
Speaker 1: with a little bit of ammonia. Um, it just cleans
Speaker 1: the pores, It cleans the grout, It gets all of
Speaker 1: that pesky code out of your lungs. Um. You know.
Speaker 1: An entire generation of British and German and French boys
Speaker 1: all agree chlorine gas does the trick. How are we doing?
Speaker 1: What's this episode about? Hi? Welcome Welcome to It could
Speaker 1: happen here? A podcasting about things falling apart and how
Speaker 1: we can maybe put them back together. I'm garrison, Um,
Speaker 1: I'll be I'll be leading leading this swed um with
Speaker 1: me is is is Chris? And uh this this random
Speaker 1: person that we brought on from the street named Robert
Speaker 1: Um and we'll be talking about some things that are
Speaker 1: not great and kind of current problems. So I I
Speaker 1: spent I spent a lot of my formative youth lurking,
Speaker 1: studying and kind of documenting some of the some of
Speaker 1: some of the bad places on the internet, you know,
Speaker 1: Nazi chat rooms, chance sites, Facebook, hate group you know whatever,
Speaker 1: all all of all the things, um. And you know,
Speaker 1: growing up in Portland, Oregon in like the twenty teens,
Speaker 1: this was this was something that felt kind of foisted
Speaker 1: upon me as as a kid discovering my own queerness
Speaker 1: and coming out of an extremely homophobic, like insular Christian community. Um.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile in Portland having you know, self described fascist march
Speaker 1: alongside gay hating Christians on my city streets, Nazis murdering
Speaker 1: people on our public transit. You know that. Uh, that
Speaker 1: that that that put a lot of fellow fellow scrawny
Speaker 1: gay kids, uh to put on black black hoodies and
Speaker 1: balla lavas to mason fight far right extremists that were
Speaker 1: like two or three times their size. Um. But the
Speaker 1: problem is, of course what what what one dred pound
Speaker 1: Depressed teens aren't aren't necessarily the best brawlers, um under
Speaker 1: under some circumstances, although they can handle uh the fire
Speaker 1: extinguisher filled with paint pretty well. That's true. But a
Speaker 1: lot of us also started doing like online research and
Speaker 1: stuff um to find like the names and dresses of
Speaker 1: like fascists and members of hate groups and all all
Speaker 1: that kind of all that kind of stuff. I still
Speaker 1: remember the kind of the the thrill and the buzz
Speaker 1: of my first like big find as as a as
Speaker 1: a baby online lurker. Um it was I think it was.
Speaker 1: It was the leader of the hell shaking Street Preachers
Speaker 1: who was living at the time, fucking prick that that was.
Speaker 1: That was the first guy I did UM. And I
Speaker 1: remember being very excited being because yeah he was he
Speaker 1: was a massive asshole of so yeah, he's he's like
Speaker 1: a you know, very extremely homophobics quote unquote street preacher,
Speaker 1: just a big old show. Yeah. But a lot of
Speaker 1: like this, like online research work wasn't wasn't just crush
Speaker 1: referencing social media posts with the White Pages, property records
Speaker 1: and voter registrations to send nice postcards to hate group members. UH.
Speaker 1: Time was often spent tracking the use of like memes
Speaker 1: and cataloging and sharing fascists plans for projects and events,
Speaker 1: keeping keeping tabs on like their current propaganda trends that
Speaker 1: online white supremacists were. We're trying to we're trying to
Speaker 1: push and UM. One of one of the things that
Speaker 1: I came across about about two years ago was called
Speaker 1: Operation Pridefall. This was this is one of the one
Speaker 1: of the one of one of these like. It was
Speaker 1: an organized campaign ran by people on Fortune, Discord, and Telegram.
Speaker 1: I I came across it a few a few days
Speaker 1: after the the plans were published online. And if you
Speaker 1: already know what Operation Pride Fall is or or heard
Speaker 1: that term before, UH. And if you're you know, like me,
Speaker 1: and we're on similar online spaces, you've you've probably found
Speaker 1: the past few months of antiqueer propaganda. The massive increase
Speaker 1: in the gay and transpeople are groomership and the shutters
Speaker 1: can get pride discourse to be all very very predictable,
Speaker 1: a strangely familiar, like the worst case of deja vu,
Speaker 1: and in large part of the result of years of
Speaker 1: work behind the scenes by social engineering online bigoted trolls
Speaker 1: and self described fascists. So we're gonna we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: today about kind of the overlap between this this thing
Speaker 1: called Operation pridefall uh, the Groomer discourse and how that
Speaker 1: kind of feeds into kink It Pride discourse. So three
Speaker 1: things that are not great, that don't go great but
Speaker 1: actually do kind of go great together. So a first,
Speaker 1: first of all, a little a little background on the
Speaker 1: whole recent Groomer thing, because we haven't actually discussed the
Speaker 1: Groomer stuff in depth on the pod yet. Sure haven't
Speaker 1: you know why we haven't. I'd be like, whenever like
Speaker 1: horrible things happen in the news, I try to push
Speaker 1: back on just releasing an episode immediately covering it in
Speaker 1: case we have something like actually good to say. Um.
Speaker 1: So we've kind of waited to talk about the group
Speaker 1: of discourse stuff for a long time. UM, And I
Speaker 1: think now is is totally is totally fine to do
Speaker 1: so because we've had we've had months to let it
Speaker 1: to let it simmer. Look at like the types of
Speaker 1: things they're encouraging, look at all of like the physical
Speaker 1: action they're trying to do, and with Pride Month approaching,
Speaker 1: we're going to see a resurgence of it in the
Speaker 1: next few weeks here. Um So, as mentioned in our
Speaker 1: in our week long War on Transpeople episodes which was
Speaker 1: released like right before the new wave of the groomer
Speaker 1: ship accelerated, but in those episodes, we talked about the
Speaker 1: long history of conservatives and evangelical organizations promoting the false
Speaker 1: narrative targeted at parents and like concerned citizens that gay people,
Speaker 1: especially gay men, are more likely to be child predators
Speaker 1: than their heterosexual counterparts, along with the idea that queer
Speaker 1: people are out to quote groom you're definitely on straight
Speaker 1: child into being gay, right, uh so in insinuating that
Speaker 1: that that they can then like have sex with them
Speaker 1: or something. Um, it's but yeah, they're trying to scare
Speaker 1: parents to be like gay people are out to get
Speaker 1: your kids. Um So, the actual like idea of what
Speaker 1: being a groomer means changes based on who you're talking to. Um.
Speaker 1: In part two, I'm gonna going to quote a conservative
Speaker 1: writer who like admits this as as such, but still
Speaker 1: defends the use of the term um Because at the
Speaker 1: very least, if they used grooming within the context of
Speaker 1: turning your again absolutely completely heterosexual child um into a
Speaker 1: gay person. Thus they would, you know, begin to hate
Speaker 1: you and resent you as a parent for your godly
Speaker 1: Christian values. They also consider that grooming. Um, it's not,
Speaker 1: it's not, it's not. Actually, just as a general rule,
Speaker 1: the attitude is if they do not turn out to
Speaker 1: be the exact kind of weirdo Christian as their parents,
Speaker 1: they were groomed by somebody, and it's merely a matter
Speaker 1: of picking the topic of the person to blame. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And all of that sort of rhetoric was extremely popular
Speaker 1: through like the eighties and nineties and the early two thousand's. Um.
Speaker 1: But then came the knots in the twenty teens and
Speaker 1: this this this kind of had an attitude shift and
Speaker 1: some of that started to go away. Got we got
Speaker 1: a queer eye, we got ellen uh. The rate of
Speaker 1: conversion therapy started to decline. It was getting banned in
Speaker 1: more states. There was more queer acceptance in certain in
Speaker 1: certain sects of the church. Even of course gay marriage
Speaker 1: went national in and eventually being like aggressively homophobic became
Speaker 1: like not a good look. It did. It was not
Speaker 1: you were not able to do that anymore, um, and
Speaker 1: still be able to have and and and and do
Speaker 1: it as like nonchalantly as you were as you used
Speaker 1: to be able to, whether that's in your like TV show,
Speaker 1: or whether that's you as a corporation UM, or you know,
Speaker 1: some random other sectors of public life. But then, of
Speaker 1: course Trump got elected year after gay marriage went national,
Speaker 1: and then there's this resurgence in far right extremism, and
Speaker 1: the more commonly accepted kind of nonchalant gay bashing of
Speaker 1: old gets passed down to the next freak down the line,
Speaker 1: which is trans people. So with that, the the adage
Speaker 1: of like the disgusting groomer freaks are going to turn
Speaker 1: your kids gay turns into the gender ideology freaks are
Speaker 1: going to turn your kids trans. It's all the same stuff,
Speaker 1: just passed on to the next to the next thing, um.
Speaker 1: And so we have that like anti trans and therefore
Speaker 1: anti queer hate festering for a few years, And this
Speaker 1: inevitably opens up the door just a revival of classic homophobia. Um.
Speaker 1: Even even liberals like Front of the Pot at J. K.
Speaker 1: Rowling um and lots of the original Turfs got to
Speaker 1: apply the same homophobic rhetoric to trans people, um and
Speaker 1: gender nonconforming folks, which then obviously results in that propaganda
Speaker 1: and rhetoric being used to attack LGBTQ people on a
Speaker 1: whole once again. So it's it's resurrecting these old homophobic
Speaker 1: tropes and just applying it to a new generation of
Speaker 1: queer people. Um and uh So for this next part,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're not gonna talk about lives of TikTok
Speaker 1: because they did play a big, big part in what's
Speaker 1: what's some current discourses today? And I promise we'll get
Speaker 1: to operation I'd fall here shortly, just just hanging there
Speaker 1: with me. But before we talk about again, other friend
Speaker 1: of the pod, lives of TikTok Um, do you know
Speaker 1: what else it wants to turn your kids gay? Oh?
Speaker 1: Are you talking about the Washington State Highway Patrol? Because yes,
Speaker 1: they absolutely do, Garrison. That's the one guarantee the Washington
Speaker 1: State Highway Patrol makes. They'll make your kids gay. Okay,
Speaker 1: Lives of TikTok joins the fight today, And I let's
Speaker 1: just take a moment to acknowledge how fucking frustrating it
Speaker 1: is that we have to discuss seriously TikTok that matters,
Speaker 1: like the worst. It's terrible. It's terrible. People always criticize
Speaker 1: the show for being like why do they talk about
Speaker 1: all these dumb social media things? So like, yes, I
Speaker 1: know that they're stupid, but the bad part is that
Speaker 1: they actually matter. Yeah, I mean maybe, Yeah, we talk
Speaker 1: about them because of the seventeen year old trans girl
Speaker 1: in Texas who just got assaulted by like five dudes.
Speaker 1: Is she was blamed on the shooting, and she was
Speaker 1: blamed for the shooting because in part of a lot
Speaker 1: of ship that Lives of TikTok helped to stir stir up,
Speaker 1: but because they proved there was a market for it
Speaker 1: that if you're like a right wing shit grifter, attacking
Speaker 1: trans people is a great way to get an engagement anyway, Sorry, Garrison. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: Lives of TikTok is a social media account turned to
Speaker 1: social media campaign started in April one by a Brooklyn
Speaker 1: area real estate agent named Chaia Chickum, who, by the way,
Speaker 1: attended the January six attempted fascist insurrection. Um when when
Speaker 1: when violence broke out that day at the Capitol, she
Speaker 1: actually tweeted a play by play on a previous Twitter
Speaker 1: account of hers uh, posting videos from the crowd and
Speaker 1: talking about tear gas and rubber bullets being like shot
Speaker 1: right next to her um. And then after she left
Speaker 1: the riot, she she tweeted on Twitter that that the
Speaker 1: the event was peaceful compared to a BLM protest. So
Speaker 1: that's yes, anyway, five five people died. You know, we
Speaker 1: we've we've we've now reached the part of we're now
Speaker 1: in tragedy of as farce of the thing that happens
Speaker 1: in every single state that goes fascist, where all the
Speaker 1: fascists trying to do a coup and it fails and
Speaker 1: then nothing happens and then they take over the state.
Speaker 1: Like seriously, our version of that instead of like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, weird fascist yakuza guys, it's the libs of TikTok.
Speaker 1: It is the limbs of TikTok. So the Limbs of
Speaker 1: TikTok was around like the third attempt by right check
Speaker 1: to start a vital social media account. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the saying third times the charm, but in this case
Speaker 1: it actually was. So the account's gimmick is reposting and
Speaker 1: often grossly misrepresenting select clips from quote unquote libs on TikTok,
Speaker 1: big big shocker, big big surprise. Uh, But more often
Speaker 1: than not, that really just means posting videos of queer
Speaker 1: kids and transpeople, uh, captioning it with something reactionary, and
Speaker 1: then leading a targeted harassment campaign against those individuals. On
Speaker 1: on May thirty one, so just about a year ago,
Speaker 1: she made her first grooming related post, just tweeting stop
Speaker 1: grooming kids and all caps. This is the first time
Speaker 1: she tweeted anything related to grooming. Um. The day before that,
Speaker 1: she tweeted a video of a transperson um alongside the
Speaker 1: vomit emoji and a caption that just says men should
Speaker 1: not wear dresses. You can't change my mind. Her first
Speaker 1: super viral video related to LGBTQ people was later in
Speaker 1: June next month during Pride, by posting a TikTok of
Speaker 1: a kid explaining the concept of gender fluidity. Pretty pretty
Speaker 1: basic concept, uh, but she lives lives a TikTok commented
Speaker 1: this is so messed up in so many ways. Her
Speaker 1: Her post racked up half a million views and indicated
Speaker 1: to her that the way to grow her little social
Speaker 1: media project into a right wing viral sensation was going
Speaker 1: to be with homophobia and transphobia. Uh that this is
Speaker 1: how she decided to continue her online career. Essentially, she
Speaker 1: called the prominent lgbt Q youth suicide prevention group the
Speaker 1: Trevor Project a grooming organization, and towards the end of
Speaker 1: two she kept using that term grooming groomer uh at
Speaker 1: a at an ever increasing rate. Right It's it starts
Speaker 1: starts in like May and June, continues throughout the summer
Speaker 1: and fall, and then in the fall and winter she
Speaker 1: starts really kicking up all of the stuff around around
Speaker 1: grooming and queer people. I mean, all of her posts
Speaker 1: are already mostly about trans people and like trans people
Speaker 1: at schools. Obviously she was a big part of like
Speaker 1: the the whole school board thing from last year. So,
Speaker 1: but towards the end one though, is when the groomer
Speaker 1: thing started becoming more of a recurring trend. Quoting quoting
Speaker 1: slate uh. Towards the end of one and into the
Speaker 1: new year, right check found her rhythm with memes and
Speaker 1: videos calling LGBTQ people and those who supported l g
Speaker 1: b t Q youth quote unquote groomers. She has even
Speaker 1: attempted to smear one of the most prominent gay men
Speaker 1: in the country as a groomer. In a deleted tweet,
Speaker 1: right checks account accused Transportation Secretary Secretary Pete Bud's husband Chastin,
Speaker 1: of grooming kids for his work at at supporting lgbt
Speaker 1: Q youth organizations. This isn't fair. But I hate that
Speaker 1: his name is Chastin. I know, I don't like I
Speaker 1: don't like that name. I don't like that name. I'm
Speaker 1: not a big I'm not a Chaston's stand either, but
Speaker 1: but but yeah, it's like finding the most prominent libby
Speaker 1: gay men and being like, hey, these people probably groom kids,
Speaker 1: and you know that that obviously riles up their base. Um.
Speaker 1: She's she's called for any teacher who comes out as
Speaker 1: gay to their students to be quote fired on the spot. Uh,
Speaker 1: which actually has happened since then. Uh has has has
Speaker 1: been multiple times since since since this account has been
Speaker 1: has been launched. Um. The account's popularity grew alongside last
Speaker 1: year's racist, homophobic, and transphobic attacks on school boards across
Speaker 1: the country. She would often posting videos of queer teachers
Speaker 1: and lying about them grooming kids into being gay or whatever.
Speaker 1: She was promoting organized harassment campaigns against those teachers, uh,
Speaker 1: interspersed with tweets and screenshots of news articles about teachers
Speaker 1: who sexually assaulted students, importantly not posting the article, but
Speaker 1: just like a screenshot of the headline, along with comments
Speaker 1: like funny, how this keeps happening, which is like neglects
Speaker 1: to mention that, like all these incidents are from heterosexual teachers, uh,
Speaker 1: or like that one story from last year of a
Speaker 1: cop and his wife who was a teacher working together
Speaker 1: to sexually abuse children, Like none of them are actually
Speaker 1: about gay people. It's all. I mean, I'm not certain
Speaker 1: if a school resource officer has ever stopped a mass shooting,
Speaker 1: but I know that something like fifty of them have
Speaker 1: been fired from a lesting kids. Yeah. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's really it's really insidious because she's she's posting all
Speaker 1: the stuff about you know, teachers grooming kids, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and into being like queer teachers grooming kids, like alongside
Speaker 1: headlines of teachers actually like sexually sexually assaulting kids. But
Speaker 1: those headlines are all of stories about heterosexual teachers. Like
Speaker 1: but you know, so she posts both of those things.
Speaker 1: So it's like to like to have this correlation for
Speaker 1: her audience, despite them not actually being related, because yeah,
Speaker 1: Lips of TikTok shore ain't posting about how cops should
Speaker 1: be kept away from kids for the safety of the children. Um,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're They're never going to post about how
Speaker 1: many people who grooping stuff have been arrested because like
Speaker 1: several of the organizers of of of this whole like
Speaker 1: gave people like grooming kids things like, have been arrested
Speaker 1: for child abuse since this started. Which yeah, no it's not,
Speaker 1: it's never it's ever gonna matter, but you know, posting
Speaker 1: and lying about queer teachers grooming children next to headlines
Speaker 1: about teachers sexually abusing kids to manufacture this correlation, which
Speaker 1: is of course false, but it's still highly effective. Now.
Speaker 1: Believe me, I would love to not talk about Twitter nonsense,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately to Witter, accounts like Lips of TikTok actually
Speaker 1: do play a massive role in shaping offline conservative politics.
Speaker 1: Lips of TikTok was very soon being interviewed by New
Speaker 1: York Post, being boosted by Joe Rogan going on Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 1: Other Fox News hosts like Jesse Waters began featuring content
Speaker 1: straight from the lips of TikTok twitter feed uh, and
Speaker 1: Tucker encouraged his viewers to follow the account before it's
Speaker 1: a band if you want to know quote what may
Speaker 1: be happening in your child's school lass March, when Lives
Speaker 1: of TikTok posted the video of a woman teaching sex
Speaker 1: ed to kids in Kentucky like you know, preteens or whatever,
Speaker 1: she called the woman a predator. In the next evening,
Speaker 1: the same clip was featured on Laura Ingram's Fox News program,
Speaker 1: with the host saying, when did our school, any of
Speaker 1: any schools become essential become what are essentially grooming centers
Speaker 1: for a gender identity radicals. Um so, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the content straight from Liza TikTok being put onto the
Speaker 1: most watched news programs in the world. Um and as
Speaker 1: we'll see, also being taken in by some of the
Speaker 1: most powerful conservative politicians. Mainstream conservative politicians quickly joined in
Speaker 1: in the tuting of the lips of TikTok grooming horn. Uh.
Speaker 1: Obviously around as Santis is a big, big part of this.
Speaker 1: Of one of Florida Governor Rhoda Santis's top aids and
Speaker 1: press secretary is a huge fan of Lips of TikTok
Speaker 1: Um and is in frequent communication with them. Quoting the
Speaker 1: Washington Post quote by March two, lips of TikTok was
Speaker 1: directly impacting legislation. Rhonda Santiss. Press Secretary Christina Pershaw credited
Speaker 1: the account with quote opening her eyes and informing her
Speaker 1: views on the state's restrictive legislation that bands discussion of
Speaker 1: sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Referred
Speaker 1: to critics as they don't say gay bill. The bill
Speaker 1: has been unquote. So this bill has has already been
Speaker 1: used to get middle school teachers fired for for for
Speaker 1: saying that they are not straight. Um. And you'll notice
Speaker 1: that middle school is not in kindergarten through third grade.
Speaker 1: Uh So, remember when we were all saying, hey, the
Speaker 1: actually it actually doesn't matter that the bill says it's
Speaker 1: only up for kindergarten through third grade. It's just gonna
Speaker 1: be applied for anyone. Yeah, it turns out we were right.
Speaker 1: Uh So it's this. The bill has already been specifically
Speaker 1: cited in the firing of multiple teachers from Florida for
Speaker 1: for just not not you know, conforming to the heterosexual
Speaker 1: Christian hegemonic worldview, and lips of TikTok is still currently
Speaker 1: among the most prominent influencers, affecting actual material conditions and
Speaker 1: shaping both the rhetoric and propaganda while impacting legislation. UM
Speaker 1: friend of lips of tick talk and descentences, Press Secretary
Speaker 1: Christina Preshaw has said, quote the bill that liberals inaccurately
Speaker 1: called Don't Say Gay would be more accurately described as
Speaker 1: an anti grooming bill. If you're against the anti grooming bill,
Speaker 1: you probably are a groomer, or at least you don't
Speaker 1: denounce the grooming of four to eight year old children.
Speaker 1: Silence is complicncy. This is how it works, democrats. This
Speaker 1: is how it works democrats. And I didn't make the rules.
Speaker 1: So yeah, see you see how we have. See how
Speaker 1: that works. You called you called the dope Say Gay
Speaker 1: bill a anti grooming bill, so than everyone anyone who
Speaker 1: criticizes it is now a groomer? Is it? Is it
Speaker 1: that a fun way to play with words? Isn't that nice?
Speaker 1: That is a fun way to play with words? Garrison
Speaker 1: love it. So the past few months we've seen this.
Speaker 1: You know, queer people are groomers meme reach seemingly never
Speaker 1: never before seen heights, and uh at least is and
Speaker 1: at the very least is the highest and most me
Speaker 1: medic has ever been in the past two decades. You know,
Speaker 1: It's it's really building off of all of the Killer
Speaker 1: Local pedophile ship, right it sure is. It's it's the
Speaker 1: Robert do you want to briefly, briefly talk about Killer Local.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a bunch of bumper stickers. It's a
Speaker 1: slogan like I know dudes who are not at all
Speaker 1: fascists and say that because they're like New Dad's and
Speaker 1: they're horrified at the But like the whole, like the
Speaker 1: core of it is this right wing and it kind
Speaker 1: of started off in like the sort of libertarian gun
Speaker 1: nut communities. But it's it's, it's it's really used a
Speaker 1: lot as sort of it's a group that you can
Speaker 1: talk about doing anything too. You can talk about killing,
Speaker 1: you can like fetishize murdering um. And if you can
Speaker 1: then like define other groups as inherently pedophilic, then you
Speaker 1: can do anything to them, right Like, that's the basic
Speaker 1: idea is if you can get people saying it's always
Speaker 1: okay to use vigilante violence against this group. Um, and
Speaker 1: obviously no one's gonna defend child molesters. But then you
Speaker 1: start making the case that people who are not in
Speaker 1: fact molesting children are somehow pedop files or you know,
Speaker 1: or somehow related to pedophiles, and then suddenly it's okay
Speaker 1: to kill them. It's okay to massive social groups like
Speaker 1: all of gay and trans people. So if you conflate
Speaker 1: these two things are able to make these things represent
Speaker 1: the same thing in someone's mind that makes homophobia now
Speaker 1: not a bad thing, but like a moral imperative, like
Speaker 1: you have to be homophobic because these people are grooming children, yep,
Speaker 1: And you can get you get this interesting thing to
Speaker 1: which like there are people who are like not quite
Speaker 1: as far in who will do who will say? I
Speaker 1: see things a lot where it's like someone's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I don't have a problem with gay people, but like
Speaker 1: they shouldn't groom kids, And it's like this is that's
Speaker 1: not what's happening, bro, Yeah no, do you know do
Speaker 1: you know what else doesn't groom kids? I mean, the
Speaker 1: Washington States definitely does. But let me tell you, if
Speaker 1: you want somebody to groom your children, the Washington Highways
Speaker 1: State Highway Patrol will do that. But you know what
Speaker 1: they won't do is protect those children in the event
Speaker 1: of danger because that might endanger them. So look, look,
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes right someone who's someone who's killing your kid
Speaker 1: and you need to get pepper sprayed, and when that
Speaker 1: time calls you, you will beg for the Washington Highway
Speaker 1: State Patrol. Well, you'll beg for a different police department.
Speaker 1: But when those police get in trouble because of their
Speaker 1: failure to act, than the Washington State Highway Patrol will
Speaker 1: show up to protect those cops. Anyway, here's here's the bads.
Speaker 1: We're back. Um. So as the queer people are Groomer's
Speaker 1: ship was reaching the most memetic and the highest rate
Speaker 1: of of of trending that it's has had in decades
Speaker 1: this past April, at the height of the recent increased
Speaker 1: wave of antiqueer legislation and anti lgbt Q rhetoric. Um.
Speaker 1: This this is when some terminally online teenagers tried to
Speaker 1: start kin get pride discourse once again. And I do
Speaker 1: not want to talk about this, but I've written stuff
Speaker 1: about it, so I'm going to this Legitimately, what I
Speaker 1: was like thinking about I realized I was gay, and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, I should come out.
Speaker 1: And then I would like. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I spent a long time thinking about was does this
Speaker 1: mean I have to do can't get pride discourse? And
Speaker 1: for a long time I would have said no, of
Speaker 1: course not, I'm never going to do this. Well, but
Speaker 1: here we are, so anyway, uh doing kick doing kink
Speaker 1: get pride discourse? Uh? Then, and even still now, while
Speaker 1: the antiqueer onslaught is accelerating at the highest pace it's
Speaker 1: had in years, sure seems to be like dumping fuel
Speaker 1: on the fire. Uh what's up with that? Kids? Why?
Speaker 1: So anyway? Uh, the discourse itself revolves around whether kink
Speaker 1: apparel or paraphernalia render the pride space unsafe for minors
Speaker 1: or quote unquote non consensual observers. Uh heavy heavy quotation
Speaker 1: marks there by the way. Uh. But also it is
Speaker 1: heavily rooted in assimilationist and respectability politics and a push
Speaker 1: for LGBTQ people to be seen as more acceptable or
Speaker 1: more normal while still existing in a heteronormative society. Um.
Speaker 1: And now, obviously I'm not a fan of this discourse
Speaker 1: happening in the first place, especially now, like why are
Speaker 1: you doing it now? During all the groomer stuff. Stop it,
Speaker 1: that's stop it, don't do that, quit it? Why are
Speaker 1: you doing this? Uh? But first of all, I also
Speaker 1: want to point out how this entire discourse runs on
Speaker 1: the same train of thought that fuels all of the
Speaker 1: groomer stuff in their first place. It's it's it's picking
Speaker 1: at the same part of human brains. So here's I'm
Speaker 1: going to read this post that went super vital about
Speaker 1: a month ago, that that's sparked, that sparked the new
Speaker 1: wave of this uh much much frustrated discourse. Quote l
Speaker 1: g B t Q, youth being uncomfortable with kinks at
Speaker 1: Pride is not homophobia. Kin set Pride might have been
Speaker 1: fine if this was still the nineteen hundreds or adults
Speaker 1: were the only ones attending Pride, but it's not the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds anymore, and now kids are way more involved
Speaker 1: in celebrating our identities. The celebrating our identities part there
Speaker 1: is really important, and we'll we'll talk about this more soon,
Speaker 1: but look, largely in the past like twenty years, there's
Speaker 1: been this shift with queerness and sexual orientation being less
Speaker 1: about who you fuck and more like a personality aspect
Speaker 1: or a social identity with a branded aesthetic. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's this, it's like it's it's which is in some
Speaker 1: ways good, like in some ways good that people are
Speaker 1: more able to express themselves however they want. But you know,
Speaker 1: kids at school aren't getting bullied for being gay anymore,
Speaker 1: which again is good, less than they were. They're they're
Speaker 1: getting bullied less somewhat depending on where you live. But
Speaker 1: it's also kind of it's made people forget the whole like, uh,
Speaker 1: like gaze bash back or gaze don't bash back, but
Speaker 1: shoot first. Like it's forgot, we don't have that. That's
Speaker 1: not as a core component of queerness anymore because queerness
Speaker 1: is now able to be kind of more safe and sanitized. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's it's a right, it's like it's and it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a personal identity in a way that it's
Speaker 1: not it's not just about who you fuck anymore. It's
Speaker 1: like this like personal identity aspect um, which I'm not
Speaker 1: saying is bad. It's just that there's this thing that's
Speaker 1: happened that's changed the way we talk about sexual orientation. Hey,
Speaker 1: quick pause, This is Garrison from the future here, just
Speaker 1: popping in to clarify a bit on what I mean
Speaker 1: regarding this note on identities and identifying as various shades
Speaker 1: of queer. What I'm getting at is that when observing
Speaker 1: some of the baby queers around my age or maybe
Speaker 1: a bit younger, queerness is seen as a more available
Speaker 1: option for young people when putting together their personality or
Speaker 1: sense of self, and more separated from the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: details of who you fuck. Now that queerness is generally
Speaker 1: more tolerated. Now, don't get me wrong, I do like
Speaker 1: the idea of being free to choose queerness. In many ways,
Speaker 1: I consider myself as having chosen to be gay. The
Speaker 1: thing about framing that as your quote unquote personal identity
Speaker 1: as opposed to simply choosing to be what you are,
Speaker 1: is that the former lets you wield that quote unquote
Speaker 1: identity against other people or other queer people that disagree
Speaker 1: with you. It's it's this thing where queerness is filtered
Speaker 1: through the lens of brands and like brand recognition, which
Speaker 1: is definitely made worse by social media, dating apps, personal profiles,
Speaker 1: and personal bios. And it's part of this cultural push
Speaker 1: to like have everyone create their own personal brand, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to identify as gender queer, I just
Speaker 1: am gender queer. I don't identify as gay. I just
Speaker 1: like catboys. Therefore I am gay. It's a different ontological
Speaker 1: framing and one that I think is less susceptible to
Speaker 1: heteronormative assimilationist ideas, and like the capitalist marketing to queerness
Speaker 1: as a brand or as a market demographic. If your
Speaker 1: queerness is a personal identity that's more sanitized, more approachable
Speaker 1: for a heateronormative society, then you get to use your
Speaker 1: identity to attack gay people whose queerness is more based
Speaker 1: in deviant sexuality and alternative communities. I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read the the follow up tweet to this, to this
Speaker 1: thing that sparked the new discourse quote. Not even all
Speaker 1: lgbt Q adults are comfortable with seeing kings at Pride.
Speaker 1: There's nothing from there's nothing stopping you guys from adjusting
Speaker 1: or having after events strictly for adults when they're partaken
Speaker 1: that y'all need to adjust that every lgbt Q person
Speaker 1: feels comfortable attending. So let's let's just do some like
Speaker 1: queer history here for a second. The first Pride was
Speaker 1: a riot um on on on on that night in
Speaker 1: June in the nineteen sixty nine nice Uh, the police
Speaker 1: raided the Stonewall in, one of the largest private private
Speaker 1: gate clubs in the US at the time. The patrons
Speaker 1: of the bar, you know, trans women of color, homeless,
Speaker 1: queer teens, drag queens, lesbians, and leather daddies fought back
Speaker 1: lots of trans teenagers through bricks at cops and like
Speaker 1: a fair number of those trans teenagers were also sex workers. Uh.
Speaker 1: Kink including you know, like leather daddies, and lots of
Speaker 1: aspects that are we now views as like kink or
Speaker 1: b d s M has been a part of Pride
Speaker 1: since it's literal inception, like way back in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Um And while like, while drag isn't considered king now
Speaker 1: in two it still is considered it's actually deviant. But
Speaker 1: back in like the twentieth century, uh in in nine,
Speaker 1: you know, in nine, New York City still had laws
Speaker 1: that prohibited cross dressing, So drag used to be way
Speaker 1: more kinky than it is now. Uh. And like basically
Speaker 1: all queer sex used to be unacceptable kink. It was
Speaker 1: literally a crime. It was a crime in Texas until, like,
Speaker 1: do you like? I think right around when I graduated
Speaker 1: high school two thousand three was when the Supreme Court also,
Speaker 1: it's no longer an enforceable laws and it's illegal. It's
Speaker 1: still illegal to own more than five dildos. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's five, but it might be six. So, like
Speaker 1: all queer sex used to be unacceptable, kink and many
Speaker 1: logistical aspects of gay fucking used to happen in public.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna quote an article from them dot
Speaker 1: us quote. For some people, gay rights and gay liberation
Speaker 1: do not hinge on particulars of sexual desire. For years,
Speaker 1: I've heard that we aren't just our irotic identities, but
Speaker 1: for many of us, it does begin there, and it
Speaker 1: does revolve around the ways we organize our erotic choices.
Speaker 1: Before lgbt Q plus people had pride parades, our community
Speaker 1: spaces were not just bars, but cruising spots like bathhouses, dungeons,
Speaker 1: and public restrooms. It should be no surprise that many
Speaker 1: queer folks find their sex lives and their sense of
Speaker 1: community to be intertwined. B D s M. Subversive sexuality
Speaker 1: and leather culture have enjoyed a long history within the
Speaker 1: lgbt Q rights movement. They are inherent expressions of queer
Speaker 1: culture and sexuality. Being free to signal your sexuality out
Speaker 1: in the open within a queer context is the entire
Speaker 1: point of pride unquote. So, like all of this discourse
Speaker 1: around pride and kink, it pride reflects a modern but
Speaker 1: regressive idea that sexuality is inherently damaging to see, experience,
Speaker 1: or think about in a public con text, especially if
Speaker 1: that sexuality is inherently queer. And there's this other idea
Speaker 1: that we see a lot of in this type of discourse,
Speaker 1: and it's mirrored a little bit with like the groomer
Speaker 1: stuff too, that if you see someone quote unquote engaging
Speaker 1: in kink, and like in the case of pride, that's
Speaker 1: like what wearing a collar, harness or a pop mask,
Speaker 1: that just the act of observation is somehow a violation
Speaker 1: of consent. And it's really frustrating because indication of sexuality
Speaker 1: in a non vanilla sense while in public is not
Speaker 1: a violation of consent. Like I didn't consent quote unquote
Speaker 1: consent to see the rainbow cops, right, But public indication
Speaker 1: of sexuality is not a consent of violation. And again,
Speaker 1: indicating sexuality is like the entire point of pride. Weaponizing
Speaker 1: quote unquote consent to call out people that we see
Speaker 1: but don't interact with, who are quote unquote dressed too
Speaker 1: sexual in our own mind is bad for multiple reasons.
Speaker 1: It also potentially dilutes legitimate claims of non consent in
Speaker 1: cases of actual sexual violence. And it's it's like this
Speaker 1: thing like if you look at someone in a pup mask,
Speaker 1: there is no consent violation there. That's a really weird
Speaker 1: thing that people that people talk about, and it's not
Speaker 1: It's not like I'm not trying to start fights on
Speaker 1: the internet with like these tender queer children, um, because
Speaker 1: like and I I don't want anyone to find like these,
Speaker 1: like you know, months old posts and start harassing these people.
Speaker 1: But that post has like over thirty thousand likes and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets, and it basically
Speaker 1: just repeats like old queer bashing talking points that conflate
Speaker 1: kink and queer visibility with public sex that endangerous children,
Speaker 1: and like conflating gays being visible and semi clothed with
Speaker 1: being like dangerous to children are the same talking points
Speaker 1: that it gets you used for book bands conversion therapy,
Speaker 1: and they don't say gay bills. Right. This idea that
Speaker 1: if you look at a gay person shirtless that's dangerous
Speaker 1: to a kid, that's the same, that's the same underlying
Speaker 1: motivation that fuels all of the screwbery discourse. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's the whole thing where it's like, I'm okay
Speaker 1: with gay people, I just don't want to see it. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like that that that that idea in and of
Speaker 1: itself is like is still like exists on that you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't consent to look at it type of thing.
Speaker 1: You know. This This is other other tweet from somebody
Speaker 1: being like forcing people to see kicky stuff without consent
Speaker 1: is really weird. I'm sorry, but I don't want pop
Speaker 1: masks at Pride events for families. I saw that ship
Speaker 1: in real life and it made me uncomfortable. Don't involve
Speaker 1: other people in their kinks. I if they don't consent,
Speaker 1: and like looking at someone in a mask, it'sn't involving
Speaker 1: you in any of these kinks. You're if you're looking
Speaker 1: at someone in an other mask, Like, if that makes
Speaker 1: you uncomfortable, that that's your problem. You don't have a
Speaker 1: right to not be uncomfortable with how people look or
Speaker 1: are in public. Look, every time I go out into
Speaker 1: the world, I see something that makes me uncomfortable. Um,
Speaker 1: I see a lot of people with children. Now do
Speaker 1: I think it should be legal to have children? Now?
Speaker 1: I do think that it should be. It should be illegal, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I like, look, we all have to deal with
Speaker 1: things that make us uncomfortable. Look like we have a
Speaker 1: clear solution here. The way to deal with events not
Speaker 1: being family friendly used to get rid of families. That's
Speaker 1: it's exactly right. We have to eliminate the concept of
Speaker 1: the family. Yeah, come on, come on, come, Communist manifesto?
Speaker 1: What this is? One oh one ship people? You were
Speaker 1: you were? You were quoting from the Communist manifesto. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. That's that's not where I got it from.
Speaker 1: But I I feel like I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of these people, many of them like young teens, who
Speaker 1: are complaining about being forced to look at unquote inappropriate
Speaker 1: things that pride. I've never actually been to a pride
Speaker 1: because most of most of modern pride is like really
Speaker 1: sanitized and chill like it's like it is. It is
Speaker 1: overrun with corporate sponsors, politicians and cops Like you are
Speaker 1: you you are way more likely to see armed police
Speaker 1: at like a Pride march then you're then you'll be
Speaker 1: likely to see like tits or like gags or whatever
Speaker 1: like most It's funny to me because like I started
Speaker 1: going to these and this is before the internet was
Speaker 1: what it was or moral panics were what they were.
Speaker 1: But like in Texas, I would go to these events
Speaker 1: where there would be people of all ages and families.
Speaker 1: These are like little burning regionals. People would be like
Speaker 1: at like on the big night when people are doing
Speaker 1: like the fire shows and the firework stuff, people would
Speaker 1: be like fucking and like manning flamethrowers, like while having sex.
Speaker 1: There there were like there was a whole chunk of
Speaker 1: it that was just like the kink row and you
Speaker 1: could walk down and watch people get like whipped and
Speaker 1: fuck a sibian and stuff. It was just like I
Speaker 1: don't remember any of this fucking. Like the only discourse
Speaker 1: was like, well, okay, we should probably like make sure
Speaker 1: that people know where that kind of stuff mainly happens
Speaker 1: so that like they don't have to walk around it
Speaker 1: if they don't want to. But like it was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like this idea that like not even full nudity,
Speaker 1: but like semi nudity within a queer context is inherently
Speaker 1: more dangerous to children if it's if it's in a
Speaker 1: queer context than a straight context. Right, we have all
Speaker 1: of these even like queer kids can like complaining online
Speaker 1: about being forced to see things at Pride just like
Speaker 1: they would see way more skinned if they went to
Speaker 1: like a beach in the summer. Like it's it's there's
Speaker 1: it revolves on the same homeophoblic idea that like if
Speaker 1: if you look at these things in a queer context
Speaker 1: that is like more adult than it looking at it
Speaker 1: within a straight context. Yes, Um, it's I don't know, frustrating,
Speaker 1: it's frustrating and like another another reason why that I
Speaker 1: think many of these like baby leftist tender queers are
Speaker 1: who are who are crusading against kink at Pride and
Speaker 1: complaining about like leather and or like sexy underwear. Um,
Speaker 1: lots of them even uh, first of all, most of them,
Speaker 1: I think lots of them haven't been to Pride because
Speaker 1: there hasn't really been Pride for the past two years,
Speaker 1: and lots of these people are like fifteen years old. Um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them also just like admit to
Speaker 1: never be going to Pride because they're too terrified to
Speaker 1: see a pop mask. Like they openly say, like I've
Speaker 1: never been because I don't want to see these things.
Speaker 1: Like sure, you're allowed to do that, but then don't
Speaker 1: make don't like, don't campaign against King Pride, which will
Speaker 1: result in your posts getting used by like homophobic trolls
Speaker 1: and bigots. I don't because I don't want to see
Speaker 1: a deep dish pizza, but I don't try to ban them,
Speaker 1: like I understand that that's the thing you people, like,
Speaker 1: Like the first time I saw pop mask was that
Speaker 1: fucking Comic Con. Like it's like like like it's not
Speaker 1: you don't see like band pup masks from comic con,
Speaker 1: Like what Like these these people, like these kids are
Speaker 1: are basing their fears off of like a few viral
Speaker 1: photos that are often shared in a disingenuous context. Now, well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about these photos in a bit, but you know,
Speaker 1: these these people are like fifteen years old, have never
Speaker 1: been to Pride, and are just like simply terrified of
Speaker 1: like actual sexuality, like they enjoy, they engage with queerness
Speaker 1: is like a personal identity and stuff. But once they
Speaker 1: get into like the nitty gritty of like sex, that
Speaker 1: makes them really uncomfortable because their teens, because their kids
Speaker 1: that that's okay. You can be uncomfortable with sex that
Speaker 1: makes sense, that is that it's appropriate for your age.
Speaker 1: But then don't make your entire online presence about trying
Speaker 1: to shut down this massive aspect of queer history. Um
Speaker 1: because like the kinky stuff that I've seen at Pride
Speaker 1: is yeah, on par with what you see at Comic Con.
Speaker 1: I often will see more more nudity at Portland's Comic
Speaker 1: Con than I than I will at any of the
Speaker 1: Pride events I've been to. Um, Like all of them
Speaker 1: more like openly like fetish folks or kinky folks are
Speaker 1: really responsible and act pretty appropriately at Pride, and and
Speaker 1: the people who like say otherwise online generally just have
Speaker 1: not actually been to Pride in their entire life. Um
Speaker 1: because like this complaining about quote unquote like inappropriate fetishes
Speaker 1: or like kinky conduct, it's basically code for I am
Speaker 1: uncomfortable with you being positive about the way you view sex,
Speaker 1: and I want you to not show it, and I
Speaker 1: want you to not and I want you to not
Speaker 1: talk about it, which is the same underlying thought process
Speaker 1: that people use to be homophobic. It's the it's the
Speaker 1: exact same thing. Um. Now, a lot of this discourse
Speaker 1: oversimplifies kink and b D S M. Um. Right, queerness
Speaker 1: can be about it can be about love, it can
Speaker 1: be about it can be about sexual attraction um and
Speaker 1: both uh or sometimes for like a sexual people in
Speaker 1: lacking one or the other um or both uh. But
Speaker 1: but by that same token, right, kink leatherin b D
Speaker 1: S M aren't all exclusively about sex to a large extent,
Speaker 1: they're also about community building. Um. And I just think
Speaker 1: these these like earnest think of the youth arguments are
Speaker 1: very silly because even when it comes to youth, because
Speaker 1: if you're uncomfortable things, that's totally fine. But in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, like queer teenagers also have sex generally
Speaker 1: with other career teenagers, sometimes even in a kinky context,
Speaker 1: and that's okay. Pride is about celebrating everyone's individual ability
Speaker 1: to do that. And I don't like it when when
Speaker 1: people just rehash old home of public talking points to
Speaker 1: to especially during during all of this, all of this
Speaker 1: groomer discourse, because a key key part of key part
Speaker 1: of kink, a key part of like queer sex, is consent.
Speaker 1: And once you're start you start complaining what consent is
Speaker 1: by saying that me looking at you wearing a collar
Speaker 1: is a violation of consent. Once you start undermining what
Speaker 1: consent actually means, that's like not a good thing. It's
Speaker 1: actually not that is actually a bad thing, especially right
Speaker 1: now during all of the during all of all of
Speaker 1: all of the grimmer stuff. So that is we are
Speaker 1: we've gone kind of over on on time here. Um,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna make We're gonna make this a two parter.
Speaker 1: In the next episode, we'll talk a bit more about
Speaker 1: like tender queers and we'll actually get into the plans
Speaker 1: of Operation Pride Fall and talk about how we kind
Speaker 1: of got to this point because man, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of kids sharing sharing pictures online and oh boy, do
Speaker 1: those pictures originate in some dubious, dubious places. Um, So
Speaker 1: that that that does it for us today. We will
Speaker 1: we will see you tomorrow. Um, Pride is fun. We
Speaker 1: should not police what other people do. So Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: Bye bye, Welcome back to get Happen here. This is
Speaker 1: part two of our discussion on Operation Pride Fall and
Speaker 1: they kick Get Kick Get Pride discourse and the grimmer
Speaker 1: stuff and how they all combine in the really horrifying,
Speaker 1: really the way that I wish they didn't because it's
Speaker 1: pretty frustrating. So, uh, last episode I talked towards the end,
Speaker 1: I talked to a decent amount about tender queers um,
Speaker 1: and I actually would like would like to define this
Speaker 1: term here um and kind of get into why these
Speaker 1: why these people are boosting these specific like talking points
Speaker 1: that are just kind of regurgitate old types of homophobic stuff.
Speaker 1: They claim it doesn't, but like it does. You're using
Speaker 1: this exact same logic, you're just kind of reframing it.
Speaker 1: So tender queers are this this the type of like
Speaker 1: there's kind of like an in joke for like the
Speaker 1: queer community of this personality type. Generally, the tender queers
Speaker 1: are like a you know, typically a gen Z or
Speaker 1: a millennial queer more likely to be like fem, whether
Speaker 1: that be like a woman non binary or fem person lesbians, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, fem bisexuals, pan sexuals or like queer soft
Speaker 1: boys kind of they feature this like combination of personality
Speaker 1: designation an aesthetic, and they're known for being especially adapt
Speaker 1: at using like watery language of therapy as a means
Speaker 1: to like get out of most things. Um Ever, everything's
Speaker 1: about like holding space and healing and intimacy, and it's
Speaker 1: like it's wrapped up in this like jovial pastel bubbly package. Right.
Speaker 1: If you throw in some astrology, some like corturoy overalls,
Speaker 1: shaved heads and round glasses, and you've got yourself like
Speaker 1: a basic tender queer. And a little quote here from
Speaker 1: an author named Daisy Jones from an article that they
Speaker 1: made quote just like the straight soft boy who uses
Speaker 1: performative sensitivity to get away with being a little shit,
Speaker 1: sometimes so does the tender queer. Tender queer generally refers
Speaker 1: to a trope in the queer community of a queer
Speaker 1: person who presents themselves as being sensitive, hyper vocal of
Speaker 1: their feelings, sometimes thought of as prioritizing feelings and hyper
Speaker 1: intentional language over their own harm and privilege. So they
Speaker 1: kind of use like identity politics to avoid accountability. There's
Speaker 1: like this um competitive oppression and self victimization. They center
Speaker 1: themselves and their feelings in social or political movements that
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily about them. They kind of they prioritize in
Speaker 1: effective methods of self care. They utilize like gaslighting and
Speaker 1: dumping the emotional labor of dealing with your own self
Speaker 1: onto onto others, like to Tender queers are kind of
Speaker 1: they're they're known to like mask toxicity and manipulativeness in
Speaker 1: the performative language and aesthetics of social justice. They have
Speaker 1: this like performative soft hypersensitivity and use identity politics to
Speaker 1: kind of call out or avoid things that make them
Speaker 1: uncomfortable and will like and will publicly declare those things
Speaker 1: as problematic and in an attempt to force others to
Speaker 1: conform with their own will. So that's why I describe
Speaker 1: a lot of these like younger younger teens um who
Speaker 1: who use these talking points against against quote unquote kink
Speaker 1: at pride as tender queers, because like, they're the people
Speaker 1: who are really sensitive about what makes them comfortable, and
Speaker 1: they avoid any they try to avoid or campaign against
Speaker 1: anything that makes them uncomfortable, and they use all these
Speaker 1: like performative turns of phrase and talking points to to
Speaker 1: avoid having actual discussions about it. It's just like weaponization
Speaker 1: of their marginalized identity as a shield to avoid accountability
Speaker 1: or to deflect against people challenging them for abusive behavior
Speaker 1: or in in the in the in like the Pride case,
Speaker 1: this like internalized homophobia. Uh there's there's the these little
Speaker 1: little tweet exchange for some from some people on the
Speaker 1: superviral kick a Pride post from a month ago. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm fourteen and I don't want to see a half
Speaker 1: naked person in leather straps and a gag and an event.
Speaker 1: I take my family too. And someone replied, like, try
Speaker 1: glancing Eddie Marty Gros or even a public beach before
Speaker 1: you apply homophobic double standards. And then they the poster replied,
Speaker 1: you think I'm homophobic, I'm literally a trans non binary lesbian.
Speaker 1: So again this is this is this is this is
Speaker 1: what I mean when I when when I when I
Speaker 1: talk about title queers. Right, there's someone's calling them out
Speaker 1: for applying this homophobic double standard on how they view
Speaker 1: like public semi unity, right, not even like full nunity,
Speaker 1: just like how they view public semi nudity like a
Speaker 1: bikini or something right, and then they respond by saying,
Speaker 1: I'm literally a trans done binary lesbian um and then
Speaker 1: went out to say also, people at those don't wear kinkshit,
Speaker 1: and that's why I don't go to Marty Gras or
Speaker 1: large public beaches. It makes me uncomfortable seeing a bunch
Speaker 1: of adults and kinkshit being sexual just physically makes me ill.
Speaker 1: People at Marty Garras and public beaches don't act sexual
Speaker 1: or wear kinkshit, And so like, I feel like you
Speaker 1: haven't been to Marty girls like you will see way
Speaker 1: more skinned at a public beach. Most kicks should require,
Speaker 1: like requires covering your body and a lot of extra stuff,
Speaker 1: Like if you're wearing a harness or like a latex
Speaker 1: full leather outfit, you're like showing way less skin than
Speaker 1: someone wearing a spido or a bikini. So maybe you're
Speaker 1: just uncomfortable with people expressing their sexuality, which, in case,
Speaker 1: don't go to Pride, because that's what Pride is all about.
Speaker 1: That's the entire poot. But yeah, little the whole, Like
Speaker 1: I'm literally a trans non binary lesbian. Like that's like
Speaker 1: such a perfect encapsulation of what the tender queer kind
Speaker 1: of trope is um and like not not not not
Speaker 1: Many people like self self identify as as Tinder queer
Speaker 1: as it's kind of this joke that the more kind
Speaker 1: of punky queer community has kind of it's like an
Speaker 1: we're putting a label on this, this behavioral trend that
Speaker 1: we've observed, and it's it's kind of a joke, Right,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to call out specific people. I'm not.
Speaker 1: If you're soft and emotional sensitive, cool, whatever, do whatever
Speaker 1: you want. I'm fine, Just don't don't use these things
Speaker 1: as a shield to justify forcing your will onto other people.
Speaker 1: It's cool to not It's totally fine to like not
Speaker 1: like people being publicly affectionate or like doing public like
Speaker 1: It's perfectly fine to be uncomfortable with that. It's perfectly like.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean anything bad. It doesn't mean you're a prude,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. But like,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with people wanting to be public with
Speaker 1: that at a public event, celebrating the fact that it's
Speaker 1: they are now less oppressed for doing that thing, like yeah,
Speaker 1: or a beach or Mardi Gras, and like, make sure
Speaker 1: you're cognizant if you're engaging in any kind of like
Speaker 1: socially normalized ideas of like straight stuff is inherently less
Speaker 1: sexual than gay stuff, right I always, I mean, I
Speaker 1: advocate people being able to like get into their own
Speaker 1: head and figure out why they think certain things like this.
Speaker 1: It's it's this idea of uh meta thought, trying trying
Speaker 1: to think about why you think about things. Um So,
Speaker 1: if you if you're if you're more uncomfortable with two
Speaker 1: men kissing then you are with than one man and
Speaker 1: a woman kissing, you should think about that. You should
Speaker 1: be like even even as like even as a trans
Speaker 1: non buyinary lesbian, if you if you if if you're
Speaker 1: more if you're more uncomfortable looking at two men kiss
Speaker 1: you should think about why, why, what social conditioning has
Speaker 1: caused this to happen, Because that's something that people have
Speaker 1: been pushing for a long time, is that, yeah, gay
Speaker 1: stuff is like more adult or more mature than queer stuff.
Speaker 1: I think that's a big part of of of these
Speaker 1: types of things being at prized like pushing back on
Speaker 1: that idea. Um So, like I think and the reason
Speaker 1: why we see more of these now is like there
Speaker 1: are these baby tender queers who grew up in a
Speaker 1: world where you were less likely to get fucking assaulted
Speaker 1: for being gay, while also growing up on the Internet
Speaker 1: in the age of Tumbler and Instagram. Right, these kids
Speaker 1: were able to construct their own comfortable, safe bubble the
Speaker 1: versions of reality online, only being exposed to what they
Speaker 1: want when they want, right they get they get to
Speaker 1: only view it things that they find esthetically pleasing, and
Speaker 1: the pandemic certainly heightened this right with people being forced
Speaker 1: to solely exist in their self catered online worlds. So
Speaker 1: now with the outside world opening up, some of these
Speaker 1: soft baby tender queers are going through puberty and are
Speaker 1: dealing with their quote unquote uncomfy feelings um and the
Speaker 1: added notion of being exposed to things that you have
Speaker 1: specifically not sought out like that that causes them to
Speaker 1: be uncomfortable. Right, if if you're if you're if you're
Speaker 1: a FEMI person who has just attracted to other FEMI people,
Speaker 1: having to having to look at dudes be affection. It
Speaker 1: may not be your cup of tea, but and you
Speaker 1: may not like enjoy it, but that's like it's just
Speaker 1: as queer as you are. So if you shouldn't you
Speaker 1: can't prioritize your queerness over somebody else's. Um it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's It's like there's this collection of baby
Speaker 1: gates that gets uncomfortable being reminded that people, like especially
Speaker 1: people whom they are not personally attracted to, have sex.
Speaker 1: It's like if they're reminded that this happens and they
Speaker 1: don't like it, Um, it's like it feels like they
Speaker 1: have this sort of like anxiety just about about just
Speaker 1: looking at something that they perceive as sexual in nature. Right,
Speaker 1: and for this for them, this includes other but two
Speaker 1: differently queer people wearing leather or being semi nude, like
Speaker 1: dudes being shirtless or women being shirtless, for like think
Speaker 1: that that's a whole other double standard that should be
Speaker 1: uh pushed back upon. Um. But like, again, it's pride.
Speaker 1: It's not any more naked than people at the beach. Uh,
Speaker 1: So you're not, it's not. Actually if they're very selective
Speaker 1: in the types of things that they that they will
Speaker 1: they that they will focus on, and it plays into
Speaker 1: this notion that's used by all like anti gay legislation,
Speaker 1: that gayness is inherently more sexual than being straight, Right,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's more sexual, it's more mature, it's
Speaker 1: more adult. Uh because for a long time, being gay
Speaker 1: was exclusively seen as like a hyper sexual dving act um.
Speaker 1: And now, especially among gen Z baby queers, being queer
Speaker 1: is now less tied to specifically the act of sex. Right.
Speaker 1: Queerness is much more of an like an overarching personal
Speaker 1: identity now, especially as like as an intersex with like
Speaker 1: gender and stuff, right, you know, whether that being on
Speaker 1: binary or this other stuff like pan sexual, bisexual, what
Speaker 1: have you. But to kind of circle back to the
Speaker 1: Kinker Pride stuff, people want us dead for being queer. Uh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't him mad if someone's parading around in a collar.
Speaker 1: If you're uncomfortable, you should maybe learned to fight, actually
Speaker 1: fight back into people who actually want to kill you.
Speaker 1: Like Pride was a riot, you should you should sort
Speaker 1: out your uncomfy feelings elsewhere or director or director uncomfy
Speaker 1: feelings that the people attacking us. So maybe maybe don't
Speaker 1: prop up can get pride discourse When accusations of queer
Speaker 1: people being all groomers is that is that an all
Speaker 1: time high and there's fascists organizing to like shoot us
Speaker 1: at Pride marches, So maybe consider that before you do
Speaker 1: discourse on Twitter dot com. I'm I'm gonna do one
Speaker 1: little quote and then we will have an ad break.
Speaker 1: Just gonna end this section with a quote from them
Speaker 1: dot com again quote. Kinks, sex and protests are all
Speaker 1: inherent parts of Pride. One of the core tenets of
Speaker 1: Pride is liberation and working against cultural shaming. Calling to
Speaker 1: quote not perform your kinks and fetishes at Pride because
Speaker 1: some miners are there and King can quote sexualize the
Speaker 1: event unquote uh implies that celebrating sexuality and kink is
Speaker 1: openly bad, and normalizing these things should be a goal
Speaker 1: of Pride. B D s M subversus sexuality and leather
Speaker 1: culture have enjoyed a long history within the lgbt Q
Speaker 1: rights movement, and such public space of sexuality are driven
Speaker 1: by much more than libido or countercultural impulses. They're an
Speaker 1: inherent expression of queer culture and queer sexuality, and as
Speaker 1: such deserve a place at Pride as much as anything else. Okay,
Speaker 1: and now it's time to actually get into what the
Speaker 1: title of these episodes is about. Uh, the Operation Pride
Speaker 1: Fell stuff. We're gonna talk about this thing that sucks. Um. So,
Speaker 1: whether you're looking at the conservative groomer discourse or the
Speaker 1: tender queer kink it Pride discourse, you'll see a lot
Speaker 1: of the same logic as well as a lot of
Speaker 1: the same photos. We've We've talked a lot about memes
Speaker 1: on the show, and I'm not gonna get I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna get into like the powder memes very much right now,
Speaker 1: but suffice to say that like a picture can stick
Speaker 1: in your head a lot easier than a bunch of
Speaker 1: words can. Um And throughout the Groomer and kick It
Speaker 1: Pride shit, there are a few select photos that people
Speaker 1: use to demonstrate their opinions on how gay people are
Speaker 1: a threat to children. Um. Either either there's just pictures
Speaker 1: of adults and like kink associated garb, usually like full
Speaker 1: latex body suits or pop masks UM or uh. And
Speaker 1: there's the specifically like uh. There's these two specific pictures
Speaker 1: of kids just like standing next to adults who are
Speaker 1: wearing pop masks that get used a lot. There's also
Speaker 1: there's also a lot of pictures of like drag queen
Speaker 1: story time and whenever, whenever I see any of these
Speaker 1: very specific pictures, I flashed back to when I first
Speaker 1: came across the original Operation Pride Fall four chune thread
Speaker 1: back in because these are actually all of all of
Speaker 1: the exact same pictures. Um so. Operation Pride Fall was
Speaker 1: a cyber harassment campaign started on Fortune, targeting the degeneracy
Speaker 1: of the LGBTQ community by attempting to sway public opinion
Speaker 1: against queer people by linking being gay to grooming and pedophilia.
Speaker 1: So checking back in two oh boy, Oh boy, has
Speaker 1: has things happened? So? Initially organized on Fortune, Discord and
Speaker 1: Telegram right before Pride Month, the campaign set out targets
Speaker 1: and methods to flood the social media platforms of gay venues,
Speaker 1: Pride sponsors, and LGBTQ people or supporters with spam and
Speaker 1: t game memes and media, usually photos intended to imply
Speaker 1: a link between being openly queer and the grooming of children,
Speaker 1: uh and operating online under the banner of Operation Pride Fall.
Speaker 1: The campaign started on May tense, when an anonymous four
Speaker 1: chan poster posted a thread on poll outlining Operation Pride Fall,
Speaker 1: which was pitching it as a crowdsourced campaign aimed at
Speaker 1: damaging the LGBTQ community during the month of June. The
Speaker 1: plans centered around quote unquote red pilling users in the
Speaker 1: commons sections of companies that support l lgbt Q causes
Speaker 1: on social media. The four Chan post read quote. Every June,
Speaker 1: hundreds of massive corporations banned together to smother social media
Speaker 1: in posts in flavor of Pride Month, a code word
Speaker 1: for the degeneracy that is lgbt activism. Many of these
Speaker 1: accounts are rather small and get very little engagement, yet
Speaker 1: they continue to post without backlashed beginning on June first.
Speaker 1: The goal of Operation Pride Fall is to get on Twitter, Instagram, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and drop a ship ton of disturbing red pills on
Speaker 1: homosexuality on the comments of the lesser known pages. The
Speaker 1: bigger pages are okay targets, but posts tend to get
Speaker 1: unnoticed in the sea of other comments. Commenting on smaller
Speaker 1: pages once with less than one hundred likes and so
Speaker 1: means anyone who've used it will see the posts and
Speaker 1: companies will reconsider their pro pride posts afterwards. Unquote. So
Speaker 1: if you scroll through the archived initial like Pride Fall thread,
Speaker 1: you'll see a crowdsourced collection of pictures that they intended
Speaker 1: to flood the internet with under in the comments section
Speaker 1: of posts discussing pride or discussing LGBTQ activism or whatever.
Speaker 1: Um So in this, in this like crowdsourced collection of photos,
Speaker 1: we see a lot of drag queen storytime stuff. But
Speaker 1: many of these pictures and memes are now the same
Speaker 1: ones used both in the recent Groomer thing and in
Speaker 1: the past two years of kin get Pride discourse. It's
Speaker 1: it's the exact it's the exact same photos. Um It's
Speaker 1: there's like, there's there's hundreds of them. There's hundreds of
Speaker 1: of photos of like you know, people in pop masks whatever,
Speaker 1: like waving waving pride flags. It's it's just there's a lot.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of them, and the specific ones get
Speaker 1: used for so much of the Groomer ship. Uh. And
Speaker 1: they really started to gain much more visibility during after
Speaker 1: the Opertion Pride Fall thing got launched. The Opertion Pride
Speaker 1: Fall four Times thread also instructed users and how to
Speaker 1: set up fake phone numbers to make burner accounts to
Speaker 1: to comment on these on these social media pages. Um
Speaker 1: There's another really interesting part that the Oppertion Pride Fall
Speaker 1: planning stuff detailed was on on on discord on the
Speaker 1: Opertion Pridefall servers and channels. The users were planning to
Speaker 1: repurpose cringe e TikTok videos while relabeling them with anti
Speaker 1: lgbt Q captions and hashtags. Uh, here's a here's a
Speaker 1: quote from there. From there, from their planning planning discord,
Speaker 1: an additional idea, we can read pool zoomers on TikTok
Speaker 1: and literally build a fucking puppet army to funk the
Speaker 1: ship out of millennials. We should expand this operation to
Speaker 1: as many social media outlets as possible in order to
Speaker 1: maximize effort. Let's operate like this on TikTok, convince any
Speaker 1: gen z sibling or relatives to do some kind of
Speaker 1: shitty jester charade slash horror dance, and then add lgbt
Speaker 1: Q critical captions on top of it and reposted under
Speaker 1: trending hashtags. So you see elements of this exact strategy
Speaker 1: mirrored one year later in lives of TikTok by getting
Speaker 1: videos of people being I don't know kids and like
Speaker 1: kind of cringe e because kids are kind of cringe E.
Speaker 1: But videos of kids on TikTok and mischaracterizing you know,
Speaker 1: TikTok videos and adding adding lgbt Q talking points on
Speaker 1: top of them. Uh, just sway the public opinion of
Speaker 1: queer people. It's the it's the exact same strategy as
Speaker 1: as a similar idea. It was also implemented alongside setting
Speaker 1: up fake dating apt profiles do not only spread their
Speaker 1: anti gay kind of grooming memes, but also to form
Speaker 1: vital content by catfishing gay people and getting them to
Speaker 1: like be an embarrassing interactions. Uh. Another quote on Tinder,
Speaker 1: Bumble and Grinder set up freak profiles with legit convincing
Speaker 1: images and descriptions that criticized lgbt So it's this, it's
Speaker 1: trying to catfish queer people and like, then I guess
Speaker 1: span them with pictures of these like grooming memes, um
Speaker 1: and see what their reaction is then post it. Right.
Speaker 1: It's so the whole operation private file strategy might appear
Speaker 1: pretty simple. Right, it's like basically glorified ship posting, setting
Speaker 1: up a bunch of fake accounts and demonizing queer people
Speaker 1: in the comment section of small corporations and influencers. There
Speaker 1: definitely is a lot more to it. Than that, right,
Speaker 1: there was there was this element of like planned escalation,
Speaker 1: starting off first as like appearing as a reasonable comments, right,
Speaker 1: acting in very good faith, just as somebody concerned by
Speaker 1: kids being exposed to to sexual materials would, whether that
Speaker 1: be you know, people in drag at a library reading
Speaker 1: books or people at a Pride parade. Right, So instead
Speaker 1: of immediately going on like full gay bashing, uh, saying
Speaker 1: that we should you know, kill all deviant trans people,
Speaker 1: which a lot of conservative common hitters just say now
Speaker 1: like Alijah Schaeffer who just posts memes about wanting to
Speaker 1: kill trans kids. Um, these these these board fascists on
Speaker 1: Fortune try to coordinate a slow, more insidious approach which
Speaker 1: they would hope would just gradually turn the tide of
Speaker 1: public opinion against queer people. Here's a here's the snippet
Speaker 1: from one of the Pride Fault organizing chats. Quote keep
Speaker 1: it normi, palatable and friendly. This means no Nazi or
Speaker 1: Hitler ship. The goal is to make them question whether
Speaker 1: what they're supporting is really the right thing. So as
Speaker 1: as as Pride progressed the the the Pride Fall participants
Speaker 1: coordinated on four Chune Discord and Telegram to slowly increase
Speaker 1: the frequency and intensity of the campaign. Another quote from
Speaker 1: the organizing chat quote, think about it as waves day
Speaker 1: one is simply questioning homosexuality, and then as the days
Speaker 1: goes on, it will get worse and worse until the
Speaker 1: end of Pride Month. So uh. In terms of physical
Speaker 1: things that actually had uh, I believe opportion. Pride Fall
Speaker 1: resulted in a few gay events getting shut down. There
Speaker 1: was like this event and I think it was it
Speaker 1: was like a like at a queer nightclub in the
Speaker 1: UK that that got shut down. There was a few
Speaker 1: other like like obviously like material results that that they
Speaker 1: had by doing this harassment campaign against venues and corporations.
Speaker 1: But I think there's they were more successful in first
Speaker 1: of all, spreading specific memetic images that are now commonly
Speaker 1: used in their grooming stuff and in the kink of
Speaker 1: Pride stuff some some of which these images were not
Speaker 1: really used in discourse before but now are common place.
Speaker 1: I think that's really where more of this idea succeeded.
Speaker 1: So over the course of the month, they will want
Speaker 1: to get more regular people to start associating members of
Speaker 1: the LGBTQ community with pedophilia and in order to do that.
Speaker 1: The way they see it is by just gradually shifting
Speaker 1: this discussion. Uh, and then as public opinion alters, they
Speaker 1: hope that brands will distance themselves from the LGBTQ community
Speaker 1: and stop doing more more pride shit. Um right, It's
Speaker 1: like that was that was another big part of what
Speaker 1: their intention was. And they may not have done all
Speaker 1: that stuff immediately, like they may not may not have
Speaker 1: succeeded in that, but they definitely did succeed in the
Speaker 1: prevalence of the images that they were trying to intentionally spread,
Speaker 1: because that absolutely has happened. Do you know who else
Speaker 1: loves implanting ideas into your brain? That's that's that's right.
Speaker 1: The products and services that sponsored this podcast, go go buy,
Speaker 1: go buy their product or get a job at one
Speaker 1: of the you know, you know that what I'm talking about. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's here's the ads and we are we are back.
Speaker 1: Wasn't wasn't it fun reading about Operation Pride Fall? Didn't
Speaker 1: that just bring bring joy to your ears? Me too? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, a big part of their attempts to
Speaker 1: sway public opinion, it's by spamming photos and memes that
Speaker 1: attempt to showcase just how dangerous gay people are to children,
Speaker 1: whether that be drag queens doing story time at the library,
Speaker 1: photos of gay people doing quote unquote can get Pride um.
Speaker 1: You know, basically basically they're trying to say, how could
Speaker 1: any reasonable person or corporation support pride. It's essentially a
Speaker 1: grooming parade, right that that's the that's the thing that
Speaker 1: they were trying to implant. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that Operation Pride Fell was successful in was popularizing a
Speaker 1: few of these can get Pride photos, many of which
Speaker 1: were then subsequently used last year during can Get Pride
Speaker 1: discourse um, and used this year as well. Uh, most
Speaker 1: mostly by some some like anti sex people on the left, um,
Speaker 1: and some of these young tender queers. Uh. And you
Speaker 1: know that this this the same photos are used in
Speaker 1: grooming stuff and in Pride Fall stuff and and can't
Speaker 1: Get Pride stuff, because it's the same based psychology at play, right,
Speaker 1: the idea that sexuality in a queer sense is dangerous
Speaker 1: and way more deviant than sexuality in a heterosexual context. Right,
Speaker 1: Like straight people kissing is rated, gay gay people kissing
Speaker 1: is rated PG or PG thirteen. Uh, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: that idea but accelerated. Another correlation between the openly homophobic
Speaker 1: groomer talking points and like the tender queer stuff is
Speaker 1: this is this idea that I'm only comfortable seeing expressions
Speaker 1: of sexuality that I can relate to or also find attractive.
Speaker 1: And another interesting thing about a lot of these photos
Speaker 1: is that a lot of these photos that they use
Speaker 1: aren't actually photos of Pride. A lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of the photos that they use are actually from the
Speaker 1: Fulsome Street Fair, which is like a kink festival. It
Speaker 1: takes place in San Francisco every year. Hard to exaggerate
Speaker 1: how horny the Fulsome Street fat. So it's very horny.
Speaker 1: But also, obviously because gay people have sex, gay people
Speaker 1: also exist at the Fulsome Street Fair. Um. They may
Speaker 1: even wave a Pride flag shocking. Um. So a lot
Speaker 1: of these photos that that that they use in the
Speaker 1: grooming stuff and the kink it Pride stuff are actually
Speaker 1: from the Fulsome Street Fair. There are actually photos of
Speaker 1: Pride parades, of it's and it's it's and of course
Speaker 1: anyone who's been to Pride we kind of know that
Speaker 1: because Pride is not like the Fulsome Street Fair, they
Speaker 1: are very different to vents. And that's another an indicator
Speaker 1: of how a lot of these people who prop up
Speaker 1: this discourse online have never been to Pride either, because
Speaker 1: they're sharing photos at the Fulsome Street Fair and saying
Speaker 1: it's Pride. Um. Obviously, lots of these Nazis on fourtune,
Speaker 1: I've never been to the Fulsome Street Fair or Pride. Uh.
Speaker 1: But they they also share these same photos because hey,
Speaker 1: it's it's people who look gay doing sexual things in public.
Speaker 1: That means it's at Pride and it's a danger to children,
Speaker 1: even though a lot of them are actually at the
Speaker 1: Fulsome Street Fair. Um. So if then, if if you're
Speaker 1: a queer person and you're reposting these fulsome Street Fair
Speaker 1: pictures and claiming to be from and claiming that they're
Speaker 1: from a Pride parade, uh to bash like kink it
Speaker 1: Pride stuff? Uh, reconsider that because you're basically just doing
Speaker 1: the work that neo Nazis wants to do. Uh. Just
Speaker 1: you're just doing it on your own time, right Like
Speaker 1: it's you're repurposing the exact same photos that they were
Speaker 1: that they were putting out there within this context and
Speaker 1: just not even not even knowing where these where. These
Speaker 1: where these pictures are from. Um so stop stop that
Speaker 1: I can consider not if if you have to, like
Speaker 1: if you're gonna go to all of this work to
Speaker 1: denounce queer people for like existing, maybe you should consider
Speaker 1: why you're doing that, because wow, that's that sucks. Because
Speaker 1: calling the fulsome street Fair a pride parade and then
Speaker 1: demonizing it because then then and then and then demonizing
Speaker 1: pride because there's people who act like pretty kinky is
Speaker 1: not not great because that's not what anything is happening.
Speaker 1: You're none of none, none of that is accurate. So
Speaker 1: that's it's really frustrating to look at to look at
Speaker 1: all of all of the ways these things, these things combined,
Speaker 1: because you get you get intender queers sharing fulsome street
Speaker 1: Fair pictures, you get conservative politicians sharing them all calling
Speaker 1: them pride stuff. To begin, like a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff you see there isn't even like a lot of
Speaker 1: them isn't like a lot of pictures don't even have
Speaker 1: like full nudity. Um so that's not necessarily like's not
Speaker 1: it's not even super important, but it's you're conflating these
Speaker 1: these things in a really disingenuous way, and you're just
Speaker 1: repeating the exact same things that Nazis have been trying
Speaker 1: to get you to repeat for years, and you should
Speaker 1: consider why that happens. So all of the grimming stuff
Speaker 1: obviously has gotten has gotten worse in the in the
Speaker 1: past few months. Uh definitely definitely ballooned around the around
Speaker 1: the don't say gay bill, and this got tied into
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of stuff happening in Florida with the
Speaker 1: Disney Corporation, and a lot of the grimming stuff got
Speaker 1: tied to conservatives attacking Disney now um and calling Disney
Speaker 1: a grooming organization. We've had We've had far right candidates
Speaker 1: show up in front of in front of Disney World
Speaker 1: to do protests. We've had Nazis show up in front
Speaker 1: of Disney World to do protests. You've seen a lot
Speaker 1: of mega people show up at Disney World to do protests, UM,
Speaker 1: all against Disney's grooming of children by including anything not
Speaker 1: street in any of their materials, which has already like
Speaker 1: so little um, which is also just extremely funny. I
Speaker 1: like imagining you bring Walt Disney, Disney come on, like
Speaker 1: it's all on the same side here, Like yeah, and
Speaker 1: like I don't know like do you I don't know
Speaker 1: if I really actually think that, like do you do
Speaker 1: all these all these people actually think that millions of teachers, democrats,
Speaker 1: corporate entertainment creators are all complicit and it's in a
Speaker 1: long term planning of like to to sexually groom miners.
Speaker 1: Some some might believe that, right, that that kind of
Speaker 1: that kind of overlaps with some to and on stuff
Speaker 1: in the paranoia around like child trafficking. But I think
Speaker 1: others understand that they're kind of being hyperbolic and they're
Speaker 1: being inflammatory to get people angry and to get people
Speaker 1: like very very like active in their in their hatred
Speaker 1: of gay people. Right. They needs to old school homophobia
Speaker 1: kind of became a bad look. They need to find
Speaker 1: a new way to rebrand it. And now it's with
Speaker 1: this groomer stuff and like a gay teachers, trans teachers, right,
Speaker 1: gender identity stuff, right, a lot of it is now
Speaker 1: wrapped up in like trans issues. Um, But I I
Speaker 1: want to read this quote by a right wing writer
Speaker 1: named Rod Dreer. It was it was, it was. It
Speaker 1: was cited in the Atlantic, and I think it's actually
Speaker 1: a really good look at how the people who are
Speaker 1: smart on the right, Um, how that they are intentionally
Speaker 1: using this grooming label. Quote about the term groomers, it's
Speaker 1: usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids
Speaker 1: for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have
Speaker 1: a somewhat broader meaning an adult who wants to separate
Speaker 1: children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire
Speaker 1: confusion in them and to turn them against their parents
Speaker 1: and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It
Speaker 1: may not be specifically to groom them for sexual activity,
Speaker 1: but it is certainly to groom them to take them
Speaker 1: on a sexual slash gender identity at odds with the
Speaker 1: norm which really I think that that quote, that quote
Speaker 1: really showcases what's going on in their brains there. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and this is something I think like Drere, like Rob
Speaker 1: Drear in particular, doing this, I think it's a really
Speaker 1: bad sign because there's people who don't know who Rob
Speaker 1: Drere is. He's like a weirdo Catholic guy. He's been
Speaker 1: like a right wing like Catholic. I think he's a
Speaker 1: roving Catholic calumnist for a long time. And like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you go back to like two seventeen. His big
Speaker 1: thing was his whope was a thing called the Benedict option,
Speaker 1: which was basically like, okay, so like secular society has
Speaker 1: become corrupted, like Christians should just pull out of it,
Speaker 1: right and go live with their own communities that can
Speaker 1: be sort of like like you know, we we like
Speaker 1: we we we we've we've lost this world. We have
Speaker 1: to like create a new world which we can live
Speaker 1: around and sort of like Christian truth or whatever. And
Speaker 1: he he was in this long running kind of like
Speaker 1: battle with a sort of like I guess like openly
Speaker 1: philangious kind of like openly fascists, I mean, not quite
Speaker 1: openly fascist, but like people people who are reading uh,
Speaker 1: like what's his name, people who are reading Schmidt, and
Speaker 1: like the Nazi lawyers who were like, okay, well we
Speaker 1: you know, instead of as opposed to this thing of
Speaker 1: like word Catholics, we're going to pull back from the world,
Speaker 1: their thing was we're going to use We're going to
Speaker 1: use like the states to enforce Christian doctrine. And Drere
Speaker 1: had sort of like fought that. And the fact that
Speaker 1: Drere is now just full on in this grooming ship,
Speaker 1: right that is really bad. Yep. And and looking again,
Speaker 1: you know if even if you want to go back
Speaker 1: into his history, right, like, this is this is the
Speaker 1: kind of flip that happened that brought the evangelicals into
Speaker 1: the political scene, right, Like, you have this flip from
Speaker 1: like people being like while the raptures coming insidees and
Speaker 1: peers who are not gonna become be politically engaged too.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, look we can use the state to just
Speaker 1: like destroyer, pull lenemies and create the kingdom of Heaven
Speaker 1: on earth. And yeah, this is this is not good.
Speaker 1: This is yeah. But I think specifically that quotes a
Speaker 1: really good insight the smart conservatives who know what they're doing,
Speaker 1: Like they know it's not actual grooming, but it's if
Speaker 1: they can if they can use that word within the
Speaker 1: context to being like it's about getting it's about getting
Speaker 1: kids to adopt a non normative sexual identity. Again, it's
Speaker 1: like non normative, right, It's it's confusion in them turning
Speaker 1: them against the institutions in society. Right, all of all
Speaker 1: of these things that is that is mirrored across lots
Speaker 1: of the groom discourse, the Kinker pride discourse, all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff it's it's it's the same, it's the
Speaker 1: same thing. It's like a non normative sexuality is more
Speaker 1: sexual than a normative sexuality. It's this whole idea, man,
Speaker 1: And it's not great because it's not going to stop
Speaker 1: with kids either. Uh, it's not gonna we we I
Speaker 1: talked about talk with this a lot. How how once
Speaker 1: they ban you know, trans health care for miners, they're
Speaker 1: gonna bump it up to then they're gonna bump it
Speaker 1: up to no one has it at all. And I have,
Speaker 1: I got, I got an update on that front. Um. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, for a recent legislation, there's the Alabama
Speaker 1: Felony Healthcare Band for Trans Youth, which forcibly detransitions teams
Speaker 1: across the state. UM. That that that that that that's
Speaker 1: gonna enacted. And in Missouri there's a similar bill in
Speaker 1: the works, officially titled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act um.
Speaker 1: And it applies to into individuals younger than nineteen years old. UM.
Speaker 1: And it would it would inhibit Missouri UH physicians and
Speaker 1: healthcare providers and prevent them from providing gender affirming healthcare
Speaker 1: to patients. And it turns out Missouri la Is lawmakers
Speaker 1: a few weeks ago, we're debating the bill seeking to
Speaker 1: restrict access to gender firm and care for miners and
Speaker 1: and they also suggested that access to medical interventions like
Speaker 1: hormones be withheld from transgender and non binary individuals until
Speaker 1: at least their twenty fifth birthday. During public in Missouri's
Speaker 1: for House Bill to six four nine, Lorie Haynes, a psychologist,
Speaker 1: testified that she believes young adults under the age of
Speaker 1: twenty five are unable to fully comprehend the dramatic and
Speaker 1: drastic and irreparable changes their body will go under if
Speaker 1: they receive gender affirming medical treatments like commaunity blockers or
Speaker 1: hormone therapies. Hayes also said that she's supported getting conversion
Speaker 1: therapy for trans kids. Yeah, I'll bet she thinks that
Speaker 1: eighteen year old should be able to buy join the military,
Speaker 1: join the So it's already happening. We already have lawmakers
Speaker 1: and we have psychologists being brought in to testify that
Speaker 1: this is the case. People they want that this is
Speaker 1: there going to be the next thing. They want this
Speaker 1: to happen. Um, now I'm just gonna say, obviously, uh,
Speaker 1: recent started You, published in the Journal of America in
Speaker 1: the Journal of the American Medical Association found that receiving
Speaker 1: gender affirm and care including beauty blockers and hormones between
Speaker 1: the ages thirteen and twenty associated with six lower odds
Speaker 1: of moderate or severe depression and seventy lower are odds
Speaker 1: of suicidality. Another study published late last year by the
Speaker 1: Trevor Project found that among transgender and non binary miners,
Speaker 1: hormone therapy was associated with nearly lower odds of recent
Speaker 1: depression or a suicide attempt over the last year, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the effects of permitty blockers and even
Speaker 1: hormonal placement therapy actually are reversible and are not damaging.
Speaker 1: Um So, I mean, but we we all know that
Speaker 1: there's that horrible uh Matt Walsh trans documentary coming out soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you definitely I know. In the trailer he says that, uh,
Speaker 1: one of the drugs used to give puberty blockers to
Speaker 1: miners is also used as a chemical cast racian for
Speaker 1: sexual assault perpetrators, UH, which is kind of true. But
Speaker 1: it's castration in the sense that you need to take
Speaker 1: the drug always for its to work. It's like it's
Speaker 1: a hormone blocker. It's tops the sausterone from from being produced.
Speaker 1: If you go off of it, it's gonna happen again.
Speaker 1: It's not a permanent castration. It's gonna suppress testosterone. You know,
Speaker 1: a popular medication for people with heart problems is also
Speaker 1: a highly explosive compound. Oh no, can be used in
Speaker 1: different ways. It's yeah, like like cancer victims are found
Speaker 1: with dihydrogen monooxide in their system. Like so, but yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: we're gonna see a lot of We're gonna see a
Speaker 1: lot of lives about HRT coming up soon because that
Speaker 1: this Matt Walsh talking about is going to be stupid.
Speaker 1: But again he doesn't understand the science. Obviously, he's a propagandist. Um.
Speaker 1: But the last thing I want to talk about, here's
Speaker 1: what's gonna be happening in cord Aline Idaho. Um So,
Speaker 1: taking taking their cue from the I'm gonna be I'm quoting,
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote an article here by by Daily Costs. Uh.
Speaker 1: They did a really a really really good write up.
Speaker 1: David new Wars wrote it. David David NewART for the record,
Speaker 1: Like the thing that he has been this beat that
Speaker 1: that we're in like writing about these people. David's been
Speaker 1: doing it for like thirty years. He's he's amazing, He's incredible.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna I'm gonna qute from him here. This
Speaker 1: is the last thing we'll We'll close with UM taking
Speaker 1: a queue from the incoming tide of far right fearmongering
Speaker 1: about grooming and an lgbt Q agenda in schools and libraries.
Speaker 1: A group of Idaho biker militiamen are planning to show
Speaker 1: up to confront people celebrating pride at an event in
Speaker 1: downtown Quarta Lane, Idaho, and in a public park next month.
Speaker 1: Two men from the leadership of Panhandle Patriots, a militia
Speaker 1: oriented bikers club but east to northern Idaho. Justin Allen,
Speaker 1: the group's vice president, and Jeff White, it's sergeant at arms,
Speaker 1: told a recent gathering at a church hosted by Republican
Speaker 1: state house member Heather Scott that they plan to have
Speaker 1: a gun driven event next month in Courtly in Idaho,
Speaker 1: the same day as this city's pride celebration at a
Speaker 1: park less than a mile away, and they planned a confrontation. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm going to play a clip of them announcing this,
Speaker 1: uh and yeah, give it a listen. These parades or
Speaker 1: government funded many of them. You aren't aware. Right now,
Speaker 1: in court Alayne, on the tenth of June, there is
Speaker 1: Family Day, and in Family Day they are promoting family values,
Speaker 1: activities and everything. The very following day they're having Gay
Speaker 1: Pride Day in the very same park the very next day,
Speaker 1: where they will be allowed to parade through all of
Speaker 1: Court Alaine, drag, queen dancers, education, our making all this
Speaker 1: material available for all the kids in a park that
Speaker 1: is designed for kids. We are having an event the
Speaker 1: very same day, that very same day, we actually intend
Speaker 1: to go head to head with these people. A line
Speaker 1: must be drawn in the sand. Good people need to
Speaker 1: stand up. As she was talking about the repercussions, we say,
Speaker 1: damn the repercussions. Stand up, take it to the head,
Speaker 1: Go to the fight if you can possibly. We know
Speaker 1: a lot of you are monitored. We live in Bonter County.
Speaker 1: We are fighting in multiple counties. We are asking for
Speaker 1: all of you to come stand with us. Our event
Speaker 1: is advertised as gun to Lane because it's an anniversary
Speaker 1: of when we stood to protect our community. We're standing
Speaker 1: again to protect our community. We shifted our date to
Speaker 1: be available to go head to head with these people.
Speaker 1: They are trying to take your children. This fight is
Speaker 1: not just paper, it's not just words, it's not just politicians.
Speaker 1: They have to see people standing in there facing no more. So. Wow,
Speaker 1: that sucked, uh and is entirely entirely expected. Um so.
Speaker 1: The the meeting at this at this church, read by
Speaker 1: a Republican House member, was titled the Game Plan to
Speaker 1: Remove Inappropriate Materials in our Schools and Libraries. It was
Speaker 1: It was held at a Calvary chapel in a small
Speaker 1: town north of Sandpoint, Idaho. Scott is a long history
Speaker 1: associations and identifications with the far right patriot movement, specifically
Speaker 1: in Idaho. And it was bad. Um. Heather Scott, the
Speaker 1: Republican state house member. About an hour into the night, Uh,
Speaker 1: Scott invited the tumblsh of dudes up to the podium
Speaker 1: to speak and they said that so yeah, it's in.
Speaker 1: In a flyer posted by the Panhandle Patriots advertising their
Speaker 1: planned conversation at at at at Pride at at a
Speaker 1: flyer that they made shows shows a drag queen reading
Speaker 1: at a public library and urges people to join in
Speaker 1: and standing up against the indoctrination and grooming of our children.
Speaker 1: And if you don't protect children, you are part of
Speaker 1: the problem. So yeah, they're planning to take a hole
Speaker 1: bunch of guns the same day as a Pride parade,
Speaker 1: and we'll see what happens. Um. I love that. That's that.
Speaker 1: We're just going to see what happens. And I genuine
Speaker 1: very incredibly deeply hope we're not reporting on the result
Speaker 1: of that because yep, ye. So anyway, before you share
Speaker 1: king at Pride discourse, I think this is what happens.
Speaker 1: This is what happens when you engage this in this
Speaker 1: type of rhetoric, that career sexuality is inherently more dangerous
Speaker 1: to kids. Because anyway, I'm sad. Now, yeah, this isn't
Speaker 1: really an upper of an episode. Um, you don't say,
Speaker 1: but it's it is important to talk about. Um. So
Speaker 1: if you're going to Pride this year, please be careful
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of a lot of worsening attacks
Speaker 1: on queer people. Bring an iffac. You shouldn't have to
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have to do this, but this is anyway,
Speaker 1: well that doesn't for us today. It could happen here.
Speaker 1: Hopefully it doesn't happen here. Um, but it could. Welcome
Speaker 1: to to make it happen here a podcast about something
Speaker 1: that did happen that sucked enormously. Um. I'm Christopher Wall
Speaker 1: I'm the host. Also with me is Garrison and Sophie. Hello,
Speaker 1: were just in the morning, just really starting off positive
Speaker 1: there it's look, it's it's this episode in the next episode.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess this episode kind of ends in
Speaker 1: a high note. But that's great to hear. I'm so happy.
Speaker 1: I totally believe you. It kind of does, all right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Sharene is also here. Hello, Hi, Sorry my fault. Keep going.
Speaker 1: So this is this is the thirty third anniversary of
Speaker 1: the Caamon Square massacre. UM. Tomorrow's episode, I think we'll
Speaker 1: actually be going out on I guess the day that
Speaker 1: it started kind of starts like the night of like
Speaker 1: June three. Um, and okay, I'm curious what you twoose
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like received like cultural memory of
Speaker 1: Channeman is because I don't know. I think I got
Speaker 1: a kind of weird one, like being from a Chinese family,
Speaker 1: but as a white Canadian, I have zero amount of
Speaker 1: my knowledge about the tam Tannaman Square massacre not really
Speaker 1: about Tanneman. Uh, it's just yeah, that is something I
Speaker 1: never never have really learned about. Yeah, I know that
Speaker 1: it happened in that's that's the American Uh lesson we
Speaker 1: got on the history of that massacre, that it happened
Speaker 1: in nineteen really mediocre. Yeah, Okay, Well today and tomorrow
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna go, well, we're gonna talk. I
Speaker 1: think less about what happens there specifically and more about
Speaker 1: the sort of broad at history that's in. But I
Speaker 1: guess I'll start out so in sometimes there's there's really
Speaker 1: three Channeman's. Um, there's there's the student protests that's inside
Speaker 1: Tianamon Square itself. There's this part of Beijing like around
Speaker 1: the squares, like a bunch of blocks are taken over
Speaker 1: by workers. And then there's a bunch of protests in
Speaker 1: other cities. And unfortunately we're not gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: the Protestant the other cities because like basically nothing is
Speaker 1: known about them other than that like they happened, but
Speaker 1: the people who would know aren't talking so for some
Speaker 1: somewhat obvious reasons. Um, yeah, and the students themselves, I think,
Speaker 1: like the normal version of tianament is is like these
Speaker 1: there's the students and they're like protomocracy protesters, right, but
Speaker 1: they're way weirder than that. There's there's like this weird
Speaker 1: ideological grab bag thing going on. Um, they're they're they're
Speaker 1: basically what they're piste off about is that this thing
Speaker 1: is called the perform and opening like isn't going fast enough?
Speaker 1: We should talk about what that sort of is. So
Speaker 1: performing opening is it's this period in China and sort
Speaker 1: of the eighties and songs of the nineties. Um. And
Speaker 1: on the one hand, you have these sort of steps
Speaker 1: to like ease restrictions on speech and like rehability to
Speaker 1: intellectuals and like allow for a broader public discourse. But
Speaker 1: the other half of it is that like they're they're
Speaker 1: being they're basically they're bringing markets back to China, right,
Speaker 1: And this this is a ship show in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. If you want to hear about like the
Speaker 1: CCP reinventing debt ponage in about five years, um, go
Speaker 1: listen to my Baschard's episode and the poison Milk scandal.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a trip. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you have you know, so you have kind of like
Speaker 1: opening up, right, you you have just more discourse. You're
Speaker 1: they're not persecuting intellectuals again, sort of that there, they're
Speaker 1: they're they're de persecuting the intellectuals that they had persecuted. Um.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, you get this absolutely draconian
Speaker 1: sort of like a set of crackdowns on the social sphere.
Speaker 1: You have the one child policy, you have this like
Speaker 1: really powerful tightening of one man rule in the factory,
Speaker 1: and you have the sort of the destruction of these
Speaker 1: for what we'll get into this more later, but like
Speaker 1: the the sort of limited decision making capacity that workers
Speaker 1: have had in the factories, um, just is sort of dismantled.
Speaker 1: And so you see these sort of gaps beginning to
Speaker 1: form here, right, Like, on the one hand, you have
Speaker 1: these students who want market reforms to go faster, and
Speaker 1: they want more freedom of speech, They like kind of
Speaker 1: want democracy, but like mostly what they want is to
Speaker 1: be in charge of the party so they can crush
Speaker 1: the sort of like bureaucracy they see as holding market
Speaker 1: reforms back. And it's worth noting that like a lot
Speaker 1: of these students are involved in what becomes known as
Speaker 1: neo authoritarianism, which is the sort of ideology that holds
Speaker 1: that like the strong central party should take full control
Speaker 1: of society and destroy the factions in the bureaucracy and
Speaker 1: so you know, and then that that's how you can
Speaker 1: lead development and this stuff like that stuff like ne
Speaker 1: authoritarianism survives the protests and goes on to become like
Speaker 1: a pretty major faction in the CCP itself, and then
Speaker 1: now US in two thousands, and you know, this is
Speaker 1: this is where things just get weird, right, Um, the
Speaker 1: student movement itself is very hierarchical, and it gets to
Speaker 1: the point where like but by by by the end
Speaker 1: of the student movement, there these the student leaders are
Speaker 1: like kidnapping each other over like who has control of
Speaker 1: the microphones and like the stages in the square it is.
Speaker 1: It is extremely bizarre. And you know, and in terms
Speaker 1: of like the protests actually like if what their torches
Speaker 1: are trying to do is you're trying to influence this
Speaker 1: factional fight inside the CCP over like the speed at
Speaker 1: which reformers are going to go, and this it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: It's like stunningly ineffectual. The guy they're trying to defend,
Speaker 1: like winds up getting outed and put in her house
Speaker 1: to the rest of the rest of his life. So
Speaker 1: because so those are the student protesters. But the part
Speaker 1: and that that's the student protesters are the part of
Speaker 1: this that like everyone knows, partly because some of those
Speaker 1: people escape to Hong Kong and you know that they're
Speaker 1: very influential sort of shaping the memory there. But there's
Speaker 1: also the workers that I mentioned earlier, and the students
Speaker 1: basically like hate the workers, um for for for most
Speaker 1: of the time this protest is going on, and this
Speaker 1: is the this is months, right. They literally will they
Speaker 1: will not let any of the workers go into the
Speaker 1: into tenement square like that they have. They have this
Speaker 1: whole system and like in order to get into like
Speaker 1: increasing like like closer to the center of the square,
Speaker 1: you have to be a student and then you need
Speaker 1: to get to the senator of the squere you have
Speaker 1: to be like a member of the leadership. It's very weird,
Speaker 1: and you know, and like one of the things that
Speaker 1: workers are trying to do is they want to carry
Speaker 1: out a general strike and the students are like, no,
Speaker 1: absolutely not, do not do a general strike because largely
Speaker 1: because okay, so if these people start doing a general strike,
Speaker 1: like that's not something that's not under our control, and
Speaker 1: you know, okay, So this raises the question like if
Speaker 1: the relationship between the students who are at tenement and
Speaker 1: the workers at Genemen are this bad, like why are
Speaker 1: the workers even there? Um? And And there's a few
Speaker 1: answers to this question that the sort of the simplest
Speaker 1: and most immediate one is that like the workers are
Speaker 1: initially they come out because they're pissed. They see how
Speaker 1: badly like the cops in sort of like the party
Speaker 1: is is treating the students in the square, so they
Speaker 1: get mad. But but but there's there's other stuff going
Speaker 1: on to the late eighties is the ladies in China
Speaker 1: is sort of a mess economically that there's rampant inflation
Speaker 1: and the sort of rapid increase in prices is a
Speaker 1: threat to you know, the sort of like cheap supply grain,
Speaker 1: which is like the sort of main subsidy that if
Speaker 1: you're an urban worker that you get. And meanwhile, you know,
Speaker 1: you have marketization happening, so at the same time that
Speaker 1: every prices are increasing for everyone and they can't get
Speaker 1: access the stuff that they need. You have just like
Speaker 1: CCP princelings like racing down the street and imputed sports
Speaker 1: cars and like these are like the only these are
Speaker 1: the only cars, right like people people I don't know,
Speaker 1: like like people are starting to get bicycles and mass
Speaker 1: sort of in this period. But then you know, I
Speaker 1: was like, hey, here's here's this like party boss guy
Speaker 1: who was a sports car. They're like spending years salaries
Speaker 1: like umbling at race tracks and people just get piste off.
Speaker 1: So they they start organizing. And I'm going to read
Speaker 1: from a section of a piece by JOHANNS Jong about
Speaker 1: what what they were doing. Um During the struggle to
Speaker 1: obstruct the military, workers started to realize the power of
Speaker 1: their spontaneous organization and action. This was self liberation on
Speaker 1: an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self organization ensued
Speaker 1: the Beijing Works Autonomous Federations. Membership grew exponentially in other
Speaker 1: workers organizations both within and across workplaces mushrooms. The development
Speaker 1: of organizations led to a radicalization of action. Workers started
Speaker 1: organizing self armed quasi militias such as picket cores and
Speaker 1: dat or Die brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts.
Speaker 1: These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order
Speaker 1: so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention.
Speaker 1: In a sense, Beijing became a city self managed by workers.
Speaker 1: It was reminiscent of petrograds self farmed workers organized in
Speaker 1: the Soviets in the months but beween Russia's February and
Speaker 1: October revolutions. At the same time, Beijian workers built many
Speaker 1: more barricades and fortifications and on the street in many
Speaker 1: factories that organized strikes and slowdowns. A possible general strike
Speaker 1: was put on the table as well. Many workers started
Speaker 1: to build connections between factories prepare for a general strike.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like this is the part of it that
Speaker 1: like people don't talk about because it wasn't in the square.
Speaker 1: And I mean the other part of the other faction,
Speaker 1: like the fact that that's going on here is that
Speaker 1: like so the press Corps is like sitting in the square,
Speaker 1: and this is why Channa ministers this sort like this
Speaker 1: is massive spectacle, right because all of this, everything that's
Speaker 1: happening here inside the square was happening like in front
Speaker 1: of the entire Western Press Court and like people are like,
Speaker 1: you know, like people are just like pointing cameras at
Speaker 1: their window, right, and you know, but on the other hand,
Speaker 1: the people outside of the square, like the workers outside
Speaker 1: of the square are the workers are getting more organized
Speaker 1: and this is like, this is absolutely unacceptable to the party.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, on on on night of June three,
Speaker 1: the army just starts killing them. Um they There have
Speaker 1: been a couple of attempts earlier to clear to to
Speaker 1: to clear the sort of fortifications, and it hadn't really worked.
Speaker 1: But this time, like they they they're they're able to
Speaker 1: bring in builtering units that aren't from Beijing or like
Speaker 1: aren't from around the area, and they kill an enormous
Speaker 1: number of people. Um yeah, And and I think it's
Speaker 1: I think it's important to note that, like both in
Speaker 1: terms of the killings that happened immediately and the political
Speaker 1: persecution like after that, it's it's mostly the workers bearing this,
Speaker 1: especially in the initial massacre. Most of the killing happens
Speaker 1: as the armies like fighting its way into the square.
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean they kill people in the
Speaker 1: square too, but you know, and eventually they get into
Speaker 1: the square, and this is where you get like tank
Speaker 1: man and like the sort of the famous account of
Speaker 1: the massacre. But like but that, but it's basically over right,
Speaker 1: because one of the other things has happened is that
Speaker 1: over the course of this protest, a lot of the
Speaker 1: students have left because they sort of they sort of
Speaker 1: gave up after the like factional conflict like stopped. But
Speaker 1: so so most of the people like who are there,
Speaker 1: are are are on the outs, are like other workers
Speaker 1: on the outside of this car, trying to defend it.
Speaker 1: And when those people get killed and the art the
Speaker 1: army gets the build the square, it's it's the whole
Speaker 1: things are ready over and you know, these protests get
Speaker 1: crushed and you know, but before the last bullet has
Speaker 1: been fired, everyone everyone left standing is trying to create
Speaker 1: their own narratives. But what just happened? Um, the most
Speaker 1: common one is that Chinaman is this like clash between
Speaker 1: democracy and authoritarianism, and like, okay, to some extent, that's
Speaker 1: not wrong, although I mean, you know, we've already mentioned
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of new authoritarian students there.
Speaker 1: I but like, you know, okay, this is this is
Speaker 1: kind of a fair interpretation of what's going on. Like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other protomocracy movements in this period,
Speaker 1: like the region, most famously there's Tawan and Korean Um.
Speaker 1: But the actual question of what's happening here is is
Speaker 1: really a question of what kind of democracy there's You
Speaker 1: know that that these people are fighting for the students
Speaker 1: at Tianamens. You know to the extent that their democratic
Speaker 1: principles are sincere and not a cover for a sort
Speaker 1: of like deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that's you know,
Speaker 1: demanded by like in the sort of new class of
Speaker 1: intellectual so evercing market reforms to the extent that they like,
Speaker 1: they actually believe in this right. They believe in a
Speaker 1: very narrow conception of political democracy. And you know this
Speaker 1: this democracy is sort of political democracy operates the level
Speaker 1: of the state. Right, It's based on free citizens who
Speaker 1: are equal before the law, participating in elections. The chief representatives,
Speaker 1: you like, past laws and you know, oversee and manages
Speaker 1: state bureaucracy. But you know that this model of political democracy,
Speaker 1: which is this is the one that we live under, right,
Speaker 1: It really gets the workplace to a a separate economic
Speaker 1: sphere into which democracy doesn't extend. The capitalist firm or
Speaker 1: its state owned equivalent remains the absolute dictatorship of capitalists
Speaker 1: and the banagerial flunkeys, and even even the sort of
Speaker 1: progressive wings of the pro democracy movement in like Taiwuana,
Speaker 1: South Korea, like maintain this private, this private dictatorships. You know,
Speaker 1: if if, if, if you're a worker in one of
Speaker 1: these states, right, you get rights, you get you know,
Speaker 1: you get the ability to form unions, you get access
Speaker 1: to the welfare state, you get these sort of limited
Speaker 1: protections from the worst like physical and psychological abuses that
Speaker 1: your bosses can inflict. But no, no matter how progressive
Speaker 1: the pro democracy movements actually are the legitimate Jesus sorry,
Speaker 1: the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses, which was
Speaker 1: not up for dispute, you know, to to to to
Speaker 1: these sort of protmocracy movements, right, like democracy means a
Speaker 1: democratic state and not a democratic workplace. And this is
Speaker 1: this is the huge divide between what's happening at Tianeman
Speaker 1: and what's happening like everywhere else in the world. The
Speaker 1: workers a Tienemen are the only people left in this
Speaker 1: entire sort of like run of protmocracy movements that disagree.
Speaker 1: They are standing against not only that like every there's
Speaker 1: stending not only against their own governments against a lot
Speaker 1: of the students who are who are also like at
Speaker 1: these protests, they are standing against literally the entire type
Speaker 1: of history itself bye bye bye, you know, by by
Speaker 1: applying the principles of the protomocracy movements like their own concerns, right,
Speaker 1: which is skyrocketing inflation, mounting debts like rampant corruption to
Speaker 1: government officials like spy, rocketing and spiraling inequality and petty
Speaker 1: bureaucratic oppression. Beijing's working class had reinvented a old and
Speaker 1: now like largely forgotten tradition of democracy and the factory
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna I'm calling it democratic worker self management
Speaker 1: because there's no good name for it, and they're all
Speaker 1: kind of clunky. Fair. I mean, this is based on
Speaker 1: who these people were at the tide of the because
Speaker 1: said all of their names for things were pretty clinky. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is that they don't name like like this.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the things about Okay. One
Speaker 1: of the real problems with studying chairman, right, is that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so we have really good accounts from the students, right,
Speaker 1: because some of the students flee and they're able to
Speaker 1: make it out. We have like jack shit basically from
Speaker 1: the workers we have. But what we do have is
Speaker 1: we have some of the we have some of the
Speaker 1: documents they produced, and we have a lot of interviews
Speaker 1: that we're done with with people there, and they I
Speaker 1: don't know that they have very very idiosyncratic ways of
Speaker 1: expressing what they believe, and so you know, you'll get
Speaker 1: things where like Okay, they're like, okay, wait, we we
Speaker 1: believe in the rule of law, right, and then the
Speaker 1: next sentence will be like, uh, we we we have
Speaker 1: calculated the exact amount of surplus value that has been
Speaker 1: distracted from us according to marks. And it's like what
Speaker 1: because Yeah, the thing that they're doing is like that
Speaker 1: they're they're they're synchronizing this new they're synchronizing sort of
Speaker 1: like a political tendency that's trying to address the sort
Speaker 1: of duel to Kadiships are dealing with right like there,
Speaker 1: because they're they're dealing at the same time with like
Speaker 1: this political to Katishi at the party has and also
Speaker 1: the fact that their bosses now like completely control everything
Speaker 1: that they do. And because of this, they you know,
Speaker 1: they they wind up being like the last or I
Speaker 1: guess technically second to last because Argentina happens, although that
Speaker 1: that's sort of convoluted method itself. But they're they're in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, like they are the last people who
Speaker 1: are fighting for democracy in the factory. And this, like
Speaker 1: to a large state, is what Tiannem is actually about.
Speaker 1: It's it's the culmination of a century and a half
Speaker 1: long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers
Speaker 1: upment and like every single other ideology that exists, and
Speaker 1: these guys over over that century and a half long span,
Speaker 1: they're going to fight communists, are going to fight capitalistic,
Speaker 1: going to fight liberals and fascists and monarchies and republics
Speaker 1: and social democracies and theocracies, and at Tieneman are going
Speaker 1: to lose one more time. And that defeat, the fact
Speaker 1: that they lose here, the fact that these people get slaughtered,
Speaker 1: the fact that like their crushed so effectively that no
Speaker 1: one even remembers what they were, don't even remembers they
Speaker 1: exist or like much less like what they were fighting for.
Speaker 1: This defeat is the origin of the modern world. That
Speaker 1: one man ruling the factory, like the the individual single
Speaker 1: boss who has total control and power over you, is
Speaker 1: in in its sort of thousand forms is the author
Speaker 1: of the hell that is twenty one century. And when
Speaker 1: we come back from this commercial break, we are going
Speaker 1: to look at the international part of the struggle that
Speaker 1: Chanaman is sort of like the conclusion of. So here's
Speaker 1: some ads. Maybe here the job working at their distribution
Speaker 1: center paying gig, and we're back to look at why
Speaker 1: you two also must live in the the the absolutely
Speaker 1: one man dictatorship in the factory. So it's it's not
Speaker 1: not not not not as much on man, it's the
Speaker 1: one algorithm you have to you have to listen to
Speaker 1: what your iPad tells you when you're walking through the
Speaker 1: Amazon distribution center. That's true. Yeah, they have. It is
Speaker 1: funny because it's like they've somehow made a worse version
Speaker 1: of it. It was like okay, yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's like okay, now, now now you were
Speaker 1: ruled by a computer whose whose job it is to
Speaker 1: make one person an extremely large amount of money. It's
Speaker 1: even for further like depersonalized and further disjointed from actually
Speaker 1: being a human. Yeah, it's it's I don't know that
Speaker 1: there's there's there's some metaphor here which if I wasn't
Speaker 1: like sick out of my mind about how like power depersonalizes,
Speaker 1: the dehumanizes you until the point where you replaced with
Speaker 1: the machine that you can make here. But I I
Speaker 1: don't know one in one in every two days the
Speaker 1: room or randomly starts binding on me. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't actually't do that. The lesson here, The lesson here
Speaker 1: is is that when you're thinking about factories and how
Speaker 1: bosses suck and how it's not great to work at
Speaker 1: a factory, just have a boss that tells you what
Speaker 1: to do. The lesson is that it can always get
Speaker 1: worse because it could always be a computer. Yeah, anyway, continue,
Speaker 1: So okay, So to get a sense of like what
Speaker 1: this fight is and like how how we got to Tiana, men,
Speaker 1: we need to go back to the Revolutions of eight,
Speaker 1: which is at first glance not like not an incredibly
Speaker 1: obvious place to start. Um. Okay, if if you want
Speaker 1: like a really detailed, like blow for blow account of
Speaker 1: the Revolutions of eight, go listen to the Revolutions podcast.
Speaker 1: It it's good. I am not gonna do it here
Speaker 1: because oh my god, there's so much stuff. But the
Speaker 1: very short version is that so in Atean forty eight.
Speaker 1: Across Europe, there's a bunch of revolutions that are collectively
Speaker 1: known while sometimes known as like the Springtime of the
Speaker 1: People's and this is this is the first revolence. This
Speaker 1: is the first wave revolutions where socialists are like a
Speaker 1: real thing. Um like Frederick angles, like if that angles
Speaker 1: like the marks and angles Angles is like on a
Speaker 1: barricade with a rifle. Fighting in Prussia, there's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna sadly, I can't get into Augusva willage here,
Speaker 1: but like go go, go go google Augustva Village's he's wild.
Speaker 1: There's a huge revolution in France where they like that
Speaker 1: they finally deposed the king and you know this, there's
Speaker 1: this question here and as these revolutions look like they're winning,
Speaker 1: there's this question of how far democracy is going to
Speaker 1: go and what it's going to mean? Um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: you have a large thing you have in this This
Speaker 1: is in a lot of voice, very similar to what
Speaker 1: you're dealing with with in in China. In the nine
Speaker 1: Inside of France, you have to split, right, you have
Speaker 1: the split between you know, like the people who are
Speaker 1: like who are like French radicals, but in the sense
Speaker 1: of like the original French Revolution, who are you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: they want like they want an elected democracy. They absolutely
Speaker 1: do not want to like deal with the fact that
Speaker 1: that the workplace is not a democracy. And then you know,
Speaker 1: and you have you have a bunch of socialists, and
Speaker 1: the socialists are like, hey, can we do something about
Speaker 1: like property relations and like the fact that there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of poor people with no jobs, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the socialists gets slaughtered, but you know, they don't die.
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, you just said they Okay, so a
Speaker 1: lot of these people get horribly slaughtered, but a lot
Speaker 1: of them escape and like and and a lot of
Speaker 1: the lead well, I mean there's an interesting story here,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of the leaders like live on. A
Speaker 1: lot of these people, like, for example, a bunch of
Speaker 1: people flee to the US and they wind up being
Speaker 1: like the like a lot of the officer core of
Speaker 1: the Union Army and in the Civil War is made
Speaker 1: up by these by these socialists who like had to
Speaker 1: flee after the revolutions failed and like Prussia and stuff.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so but many of them do in fact
Speaker 1: die die. Yeah, it doesn't go great for them. And
Speaker 1: and you know, and you get to see one of
Speaker 1: the other things that's going to happen a lot, which
Speaker 1: is that. Okay, so like the the sort of like
Speaker 1: the French like like the French radicals who are like
Speaker 1: pro capitalism but also pro democracy, like allied with the
Speaker 1: conservative factions. And then they also all get killed when Napoleon,
Speaker 1: Napoleon the Third takes power. But man, it's it's really
Speaker 1: it's really it's really hard to root for someone here
Speaker 1: and that yeah, I know, it's those it's like and
Speaker 1: then this is really like like the revolution produces his
Speaker 1: own grave diggers ship, Like, oh, hey, what did you
Speaker 1: expect was going to happen when you allied with like
Speaker 1: the Landlord's end I Napoleon English, this good thing, this
Speaker 1: mistake will never made again. No good good thing. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: pay no mind to the rest of the episode anyway. Continue. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have the split between people who want electoral democracy
Speaker 1: but you know, doctorships in the workplace and these people
Speaker 1: who want like democracy in the workplace. And this also
Speaker 1: prefigures to split inside of socialism itself, um for for
Speaker 1: you know, for for for the and this isn't even
Speaker 1: I I like in my script, I say, like for
Speaker 1: for for the most radical factions of socialism, you know,
Speaker 1: like in control over the means of production, which is
Speaker 1: like the thing that you want. Means that like production
Speaker 1: is controlled either by like free associations and workers like
Speaker 1: you know, direct democratic unions. This is later called syndicalism
Speaker 1: or like workers councils, and that that's you know, I say,
Speaker 1: it's the most radical faction like that. That's a very
Speaker 1: popular conception of like what this is going to be.
Speaker 1: Like if you read marks like Mars is like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: free associations a workers. Sure. But you know, as as
Speaker 1: the sort of like eighteen footies roll into the eighteen
Speaker 1: sixties and the eighteen seventies, there's this faction of the
Speaker 1: movement that becomes just like obsessed with with the bureaucratic
Speaker 1: technologies of the states, and you know, like they they
Speaker 1: they they watch the state really get involved in the
Speaker 1: economy in a way that it like kind of hasn't before.
Speaker 1: Then they they over the course of sort of industrialization,
Speaker 1: they watch with like incredible envy as they see like
Speaker 1: these incredibly elaborate like planning schemes. They see the state
Speaker 1: building roads and canals and railroads and then entire cities
Speaker 1: with these like complex electrical grids and like gas lions
Speaker 1: and plumbing systems, and especially trains, like specifically trains. This
Speaker 1: drives them all completely insane, and they become they begin
Speaker 1: to believe that like a single centralized planning body, like
Speaker 1: non amercrat association of workers, like a single centralized state
Speaker 1: planning body can like you know, bring about the long
Speaker 1: saw after like cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and all all
Speaker 1: these people get they get obsessed with like such a
Speaker 1: planning right, and this becomes this starts to sort of
Speaker 1: like consume more and more of the left um in Germany,
Speaker 1: which is home to like the powerful German Social Democratic Party,
Speaker 1: which is like probably the most powerful socialist part in
Speaker 1: the world. This point, the socialists become divided into two camps.
Speaker 1: There there's the revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who like
Speaker 1: he like renounces Marxism and revolution and like entirely in
Speaker 1: favor of performing capitalism in the state from like within.
Speaker 1: And then you know, you have these orthodox Marxists that
Speaker 1: are like led by Kola Kotski, whose whole thing is
Speaker 1: that he hates Bernstein and like the only thing that
Speaker 1: these two people, that these two groups agree on is that,
Speaker 1: I the only thing they agree on is the bureaucratic
Speaker 1: state planning is the thing you're supposed to be fighting
Speaker 1: for and not like democratic workplaces. And this leads the
Speaker 1: STP to like they they do a lot of things
Speaker 1: that are like disastrous. Um, one of the things that
Speaker 1: they wind up doing a lot is like actively working
Speaker 1: with the bosses to like destroy the like workplace autonomy
Speaker 1: for their own unions. So like they'll there'll be things
Speaker 1: where it's like like there's like there's a famous examples,
Speaker 1: Like there's like a like a I think they're like
Speaker 1: an they're on beta workers and I think they make
Speaker 1: knives or something. And they have a lot of control
Speaker 1: of the production process, right, they can control like how
Speaker 1: much life gets produced the process like how it works,
Speaker 1: like what they're actually doing. And the STP is like, no,
Speaker 1: this is bad because it's inefficient, and so they like
Speaker 1: basically crush their own union and this this goes in
Speaker 1: really disastrous directions. But we're still the single person who
Speaker 1: becomes like the most obsessed with like the potential of
Speaker 1: bureautic state planning is uh one, very very very obscure
Speaker 1: guy named Vladimir Elias Lenin, who I don't expect anyone
Speaker 1: to have heard of front of the Pod. I just
Speaker 1: had len Oh, that's funny. Yeah. So, as David Gravord
Speaker 1: points out, Lennon's obsession with like the German postal Service
Speaker 1: is such that like, okay, so he writes a very
Speaker 1: famous book about like what a future social state is
Speaker 1: going to be, called State and Revolution, and like almost
Speaker 1: all of it is a lie. But he also says
Speaker 1: this in it Um. A witty German social democrat of
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies called the postal service an example of
Speaker 1: the socialist economic system. This is very true. At present.
Speaker 1: The postal service is a business organized along the lines
Speaker 1: of a state capitalist monopoly. Bab the imperially, this is
Speaker 1: the whole thing about imperialism is making everything off of this.
Speaker 1: But so to organize the whole national economy on the
Speaker 1: lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foreim
Speaker 1: and bookkeepers, as well as all officials that received no
Speaker 1: salaries higher than a workman's wage, all under the control
Speaker 1: and leadership of the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim.
Speaker 1: And if you think about what this means for about
Speaker 1: five seconds, right, what he's saying is that socialism is
Speaker 1: the entire economy being planned by a bureacratic state. And
Speaker 1: you know this this like this sits off this like
Speaker 1: massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers
Speaker 1: movement who you know, like what to control the work
Speaker 1: that they do, and you know, like like make I'm
Speaker 1: like you know that the people who like who think
Speaker 1: that like the revolution means that they're actually going to
Speaker 1: be able to make decision over their work and not
Speaker 1: you know, just like work for like a slightly different
Speaker 1: set of bureaucrats. And this struggle between you know this
Speaker 1: the sort of like new socialist bureaucrats and like democracy
Speaker 1: and the workers movement is you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: an enormous part of the struggle that happens here. And
Speaker 1: there's there's like another version of it happening between the
Speaker 1: workers movement itself and the capitalist state like in the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, um, the workers movements in like in Italy
Speaker 1: and Germany and like Frances that's the extent that they have.
Speaker 1: These they form these parties that are called like states
Speaker 1: within a state, and you know, these things are these
Speaker 1: massive networks of these workers institutions. They have like free schools,
Speaker 1: they have workers associations, they have like friendly societies, they
Speaker 1: have libraries, they have theaters, they have like unions, have
Speaker 1: co ops, they have like neighborhood associations, they have tenant unions,
Speaker 1: initial aids societies, and you know, and these things are
Speaker 1: all run democratically by like by by the workers who
Speaker 1: formed the associations, and you know, and like the people
Speaker 1: who are doing this are like you know, the hope
Speaker 1: is that like this is going to be the basis
Speaker 1: for the new social society. Right, It's like, okay, we
Speaker 1: we can just come together and like do this stuff.
Speaker 1: We can do it democratically, and we can administer this
Speaker 1: stuff ourselves and the and these things are enormously popular. Um,
Speaker 1: and you know, and this like terrifies the sort of
Speaker 1: old ruling class. Um. And Otto von Bismarck, who's the
Speaker 1: guy basically running the German state in this period, like
Speaker 1: his solution to this is to create like bureaucratic state
Speaker 1: run versions of like all of these things. So he
Speaker 1: creates like state run library, state run theaters, like state
Speaker 1: run welfare services, and he's using these as as like
Speaker 1: a replacement to the sort of workers institutions. And he
Speaker 1: has this great line where he tells an American observer quote,
Speaker 1: my idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall
Speaker 1: I say, to win them over, to regard the state
Speaker 1: as a social institution existing for their own sake and
Speaker 1: invested in and interested in their welfare. And like this works.
Speaker 1: This is this is an enormous success. This is one
Speaker 1: of the greatest propagandic ures ever because like it's it's
Speaker 1: so successful in convincing people that the thing that they're
Speaker 1: fighting for is like the state bureacratic version of this thing,
Speaker 1: and not the version where they do it themselves. That
Speaker 1: like when when the socialists like take power, they confuse Bismarcks,
Speaker 1: like literally the welfare state bribe thing that he liked
Speaker 1: made to buy off the movements, Like they confused that
Speaker 1: with socialism itself. And like to this day everyone believes this.
Speaker 1: It's like it's it's I don't know, I lose my
Speaker 1: mind constantly over this because all of these things that
Speaker 1: bisinbarg developed like specifically to destroy the socialist movement. Everyone
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, this is socialism. It's like no, no,
Speaker 1: please stop. And you know, and this is really effective,
Speaker 1: particularly on the leadership of the movement. But like the
Speaker 1: actual like people in these parties, like in these movements,
Speaker 1: don't forget it. And and as as the sort of
Speaker 1: like twenty cent drawstore closed and you get like the
Speaker 1: so as as the nineteenth century draws too closed, and
Speaker 1: you get like the twentieth century. The workers who are
Speaker 1: like doing the uprisings are are not sort of like
Speaker 1: like the you know, the workers who are doing the
Speaker 1: uprisings haven't like drinking the kool aid. And the thing
Speaker 1: that they do immediately when they start doing uprisings is
Speaker 1: they start building these democratic institutions, but particularly workers councils
Speaker 1: um the most famous of these are like other workers
Speaker 1: councils that form sort of spontaneously in the Russian revolutions
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventeen. These are like this is actually like
Speaker 1: this is what like the they're called soviets because soviet
Speaker 1: is just like the word for council in Russian. And
Speaker 1: these things are originally these like ad hoc strike committees,
Speaker 1: and then they eventually become these like formalized elect like
Speaker 1: elected bodies of representatives from like the various factories who
Speaker 1: are like coordinating a strike and okay, so not you know,
Speaker 1: five they lose and they all die, but inteventeen, uh,
Speaker 1: they do this again and they form the Soviets again,
Speaker 1: and this time the councils start to take like a
Speaker 1: larger role in coordinating production directly and you know, coordinating
Speaker 1: between different factories and industries, and they they turn into
Speaker 1: this sort of like counterpower thing to the new government.
Speaker 1: And this kicks off this open period of warfare that
Speaker 1: stretches like literally from Italy to Argentina between the different
Speaker 1: socialist factions who like people like the different factions of
Speaker 1: this movement who want democracy in the factory. And this
Speaker 1: like a lot newly formed like anti democratic alliance of
Speaker 1: like social Democrats, Bolsheviks and capitalists who like you know,
Speaker 1: are like okay, well some of them are in favor
Speaker 1: of like you can have Okay, there's a whole range
Speaker 1: of this thing, right, Like. The thing that unites all
Speaker 1: of these movements, the social Democrats, that Bolsheviks, the capitalists
Speaker 1: and later the fascist is that they like emphatically like
Speaker 1: do not want democracy in the factory, and they're willing
Speaker 1: to put aside their differences to make sure it doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's still there's still a huge fight
Speaker 1: that happens to between between nineteen y you get works
Speaker 1: councils in we get workers councils in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine,
Speaker 1: Ireland and Ireland. There's there's these like two giant revolts
Speaker 1: by synthicalist workers unions in Brazilian Argentina, and these all
Speaker 1: get crushed um in Italy. Italy has like one of
Speaker 1: the most intense conflicts between these like a lot of
Speaker 1: cynicalis in the Italian state, and they have this this
Speaker 1: really famous like set of factory occupations where instead of
Speaker 1: like so like before those people would go on strike, right,
Speaker 1: you go on strike and you leave your factory. And
Speaker 1: in Italy they were like, okay, well what if we
Speaker 1: just stayed in the factory and took it over so
Speaker 1: that they couldn't like just like a restarted production with scabs,
Speaker 1: and we now control the factory. And there's this huge
Speaker 1: wave of it in in Italy in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: writeen like teens and twenties, and you know, it looks
Speaker 1: like for a little for like a bit like it
Speaker 1: really looks like they're going to bring down the government,
Speaker 1: but the factory occupations get crushed. But they don't. They
Speaker 1: don't get crushed by the government. They get crushed by
Speaker 1: the Italian Socialist Party and like their union, the General
Speaker 1: Confederation of Labor, and like this is how fascistm wins
Speaker 1: in Italy, like to a large extent. It's that like
Speaker 1: when when like you know, and it happens in Germany too,
Speaker 1: It's like when and when when the sort of the
Speaker 1: social democrats and the capitalists are faced with this possibility
Speaker 1: that like workers could take over the factories, the social
Speaker 1: Democrats turn on them and just kill them all. And
Speaker 1: the problem with that is that like okay, well who
Speaker 1: who who who do you do the killing with the
Speaker 1: answer is the fascists, and then the social Democrats like
Speaker 1: themselves all get exterminated by the fascist It's it's just
Speaker 1: like you know, it is it is a is A
Speaker 1: is a terrible cycle that we're going to see like
Speaker 1: literally over and over and over again. Um yeah it's bad.
Speaker 1: Um that sounds not great? Yeah yeah, do do do
Speaker 1: you know who else will slaughter your your factory council? Oh? Oh,
Speaker 1: I actually know this one. M alright, Carrison, go, we
Speaker 1: have a few options here. There is are our good
Speaker 1: friends at the Washington State Patrol. Um, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to set up a highway business next to the highway
Speaker 1: and run run video workers, cancel State Patrol come up,
Speaker 1: be like not on this highway. You're done. Um probably
Speaker 1: also like Amazon or something, who knows, and we're back
Speaker 1: to see you know, okay, okay, well we are back
Speaker 1: to see like the worst defeats that they're going to have,
Speaker 1: that that like the people who want like a factory
Speaker 1: council are going to have in this period, which for
Speaker 1: once actually has nothing to do with Amazon or the
Speaker 1: capitalists whatsoever, which is that like the worst balling they're
Speaker 1: gonna get is from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who I
Speaker 1: don't know how many people sort of like know the
Speaker 1: history of Russian Revolution, but like the factory councils are
Speaker 1: the people who like basically put the Bolsheviks in power
Speaker 1: in the first place, like to a large extents, like
Speaker 1: they're there's a there are the people who like were
Speaker 1: the shock troops of this and like literally the moment
Speaker 1: Lendin takes power, she starts under buying the Soviets. Um
Speaker 1: he publishes this thing like like like three or four
Speaker 1: days after that trial revolution, he publishes this thing called
Speaker 1: the draft to cree on workers control, which is like,
Speaker 1: you know, he he basically is like he's he's trying
Speaker 1: to like shift power from these councils to the bullshit
Speaker 1: party in the state. And this doesn't really work initially
Speaker 1: because these groups are like pretty powerful. But in you know,
Speaker 1: he publicly Lenin's like, no, we draw drive power from
Speaker 1: the Soviets, like where where where the people who support
Speaker 1: these councils, But then like Lennon's, he's like shipping away
Speaker 1: from them. And then in en he writes this thing.
Speaker 1: He writes this this this paragraph from the Immediate Task
Speaker 1: the Soviet Government, which is like one of the wildest
Speaker 1: things I've ever read in my life. I was just
Speaker 1: saying a lot, it's it's wild, it is She's okay.
Speaker 1: Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for
Speaker 1: the success of labor processes that are based on large
Speaker 1: scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands and the interests
Speaker 1: of socialism that the masses, unquestioning lee obey the single
Speaker 1: will of the leaders of the labor process, which is
Speaker 1: like what what how how about you explain to our
Speaker 1: good viewers why that is so bonkers, Like okay, some
Speaker 1: of them might just hear that and be like, oh
Speaker 1: leftist words cool, moving on, even just the first two
Speaker 1: words unquestioning, Yeah, makes me like that, but like a
Speaker 1: questioning submission. The whole thing about like the masses must
Speaker 1: unquestionably obey the will of the single leader. Like what
Speaker 1: this is like, like what is happening? This is you know,
Speaker 1: and the thing that's happening here is that Lennon. Lennon
Speaker 1: is being really candid about what it means for there
Speaker 1: to be a boss, Like what it means for there
Speaker 1: to be someone who's position is above you that can
Speaker 1: order you to do literally whatever they want, and if
Speaker 1: you don't obey them, like bad things happen and you
Speaker 1: start or get shot. Yeah, she's she's she's incredible candid
Speaker 1: about this, right like this, this, this, this is what
Speaker 1: like having a boss means. It means like questioning submission
Speaker 1: to the single will of the leader. This, which is
Speaker 1: like this, this is how I talked about Sophie all
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah, well, shaking her head, I'm with you,
Speaker 1: Sophie campaign scare that Yeah, You're welcome, whatever you say, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Thanks scare God. I'm thinking about this. There's this line, um,
Speaker 1: it's sort of sent actually related to the story I
Speaker 1: read this thing once about so the workers who took
Speaker 1: over the surban actually think it was the students shore
Speaker 1: of a bunch of students like take over this uh,
Speaker 1: like like the like the like the big academy in
Speaker 1: in Paris, and they send this like I think it's
Speaker 1: a telegram to like the Chinese embassy, and like the
Speaker 1: end of it is I think if I'm remembering the
Speaker 1: exact words correctly, it's uh, the revolution will not be
Speaker 1: complete until the revolution will not be complete until the
Speaker 1: last capitalist is hung with the entrails of the last
Speaker 1: bureaucrat predibly hot yet was wild. That's that's the thing
Speaker 1: this brought to mind for some reason. But you know,
Speaker 1: I mean going back to sort of Lenin and his
Speaker 1: like unquestioning like submission to the single word, like he's
Speaker 1: more candid about what like one man rule in the
Speaker 1: factory or like having a boss you have to obey
Speaker 1: like means, but the system is describing like isn't different
Speaker 1: than any other political system, like Bolshevik rule in the
Speaker 1: factory like isn't really different than capital, social democratic or
Speaker 1: fascist rule. And you know, the movement for democracy and
Speaker 1: the factory as you know, as as as these people
Speaker 1: are crossed, especially in Cross the Nation twenty one, like
Speaker 1: from for Democracy in the Factory is faced by four
Speaker 1: implacable enemies who are willing to put aside all those
Speaker 1: their ideological differences to ensure that like no one ever
Speaker 1: like gets to control their workplace. And you know, and
Speaker 1: as as the twenties blend into early nine thirties, like
Speaker 1: the movement seemed to have disappeared, but they didn't. They
Speaker 1: absolutely didn't even know even though they got murdered by
Speaker 1: the fascist, the communist, social democrats and the capitalists, they're
Speaker 1: gonna be back next episode to do like twelve more
Speaker 1: revolutions and yeah that that that's that that that that
Speaker 1: that come come come back tomorrow for us talking about
Speaker 1: like why these revolutions happens, what the ruling class did
Speaker 1: to stop them. And then yeah, the lead up to
Speaker 1: Tianamen Square to see the sort of like the the
Speaker 1: final standard of Chinese working class and yeah, like get
Speaker 1: to what Tianeman actually was. What a Cliff Sanker pod cast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that counts as an intro. Look, yes, we've we've
Speaker 1: we've now started the podcast. The podcast that we are
Speaker 1: starting is it could happen here. And I it's me
Speaker 1: because for long I'm I'm doing I'm doing the host thing,
Speaker 1: and I have a bunch of other people with me
Speaker 1: who do a lot of things. I have Garrison, Yes,
Speaker 1: I have suren Yes, and I have Sophie, our lovely boss.
Speaker 1: Sophie lictor bed all phrase on high your words, not mine,
Speaker 1: so weird. I did not enjoy that at all my takeover.
Speaker 1: So so Sophie unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately lacks to sheer ruthlessness
Speaker 1: to crush the workers movement. Well we will see. Yeah
Speaker 1: that relates to be determined. I don't buy it, so Sophie,
Speaker 1: Sophie is very sad. I'm sorry, Sophie. Um So, when
Speaker 1: when we last left off Lennon, Lennon has, like in theory,
Speaker 1: crushed last sort of remaining factions of like the workers
Speaker 1: but who want democracy the factories. But unfortunately for the
Speaker 1: Leninist like literally no many how no matter how many
Speaker 1: workers they kill, and they are going to kill enormous
Speaker 1: numbers of workers. The demand for democracy and the factory
Speaker 1: like just refuses to die. But for over a hundred years,
Speaker 1: the development of the sort of mass factory system and
Speaker 1: logistical infrastructure that you need to support it, maybe most
Speaker 1: importantly coal mines and railroads that use the transport stuff
Speaker 1: generate this incredibly militant working class that sees you know,
Speaker 1: democratic control over the workplaces like the fundamental aspect of
Speaker 1: its liberation. Um. Ideologically, this is you know, this is
Speaker 1: this is manifested in like a series of interlocking beliefs
Speaker 1: about like the nature of the working class and like
Speaker 1: what class society is um, all of which are sort
Speaker 1: of necessary components of this. Like it becomes this like
Speaker 1: incredibly like this like instinctive formation of workers council at
Speaker 1: the moment like an uprising happens. And this is something
Speaker 1: that that's very interesting about about the twentieth century. Is it,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, like what when whenever there's like a crisis,
Speaker 1: someone someone like like everyone in the factory is like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're we we've taken control of the factory now like
Speaker 1: we we were forming a council, were forming a giant assembly,
Speaker 1: and like we don't do this anymore, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: come back to like why we don't do this anymore?
Speaker 1: But like this hasn't happened, Like the last time it
Speaker 1: happened was like in Argentine and two dozen't one and
Speaker 1: I don't even know if Garrison Garrison might have been
Speaker 1: alive for that, thanks, But like it's well, I will say.
Speaker 1: The other time it does happen is when after after
Speaker 1: a recording session, when our boss Sophie leaves me, me
Speaker 1: and Chris will stay on the line to talk, usually
Speaker 1: about Star Wars, and that in a way kind of
Speaker 1: is a workers council just for the factory of podcasting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we talked about Star Wars in front of me. I
Speaker 1: feel so bad for next next next time, puppy face,
Speaker 1: it's okay, featuring your petite borshebat tactics won't work on me.
Speaker 1: Oh god, we all all the people on the separddit
Speaker 1: who think that we hate Sophie or going to just
Speaker 1: have a field day with this episode. Concy is my
Speaker 1: favorite recurring conspiracy. That's a real conspiracy. O. Man, wow,
Speaker 1: I have a lot of cutry up on to you.
Speaker 1: You do not know, you do not because it's not true.
Speaker 1: Run away. So meanwhile, meanwhile, so in the period when
Speaker 1: people actually like did this seriously, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of ideological things that come together to
Speaker 1: make it so that when people like you know, like
Speaker 1: when when bread prices increased too much, this is what
Speaker 1: people do. Um. And a lot of this has to
Speaker 1: do with the physical experience of what being a worker
Speaker 1: is in like you know, the centuries, like you have
Speaker 1: these like these these these these incredibly rapid like technological expansions,
Speaker 1: and you know, the people who are who are doing
Speaker 1: this stuff like see themselves as the creators of the
Speaker 1: new world, right like. And this is like literally this
Speaker 1: is sounding like these are the people who are literally
Speaker 1: like they are building the cities, right like, all all
Speaker 1: of the sort of the infrastructure of the modern world
Speaker 1: is physically being created by them. And this creates this
Speaker 1: you know, like if you're the person who is like
Speaker 1: who has transformed like this fishing village into this giant
Speaker 1: industrial city, right um, you know you you you see
Speaker 1: yourselves as the creator, like literally physically the creator of
Speaker 1: this new world is being developed. And then the second
Speaker 1: belief that that it produces that drives this movement is
Speaker 1: that the people who produce this world should be as
Speaker 1: inheritors and so and this this, this sort of this
Speaker 1: is what drives the workers movement in this period, which
Speaker 1: is that like, okay, so if if you if you
Speaker 1: are literally physically creating the new world, and you think
Speaker 1: that because you have created it, it should be yours. Uh,
Speaker 1: the next that the thing that you do because it's
Speaker 1: not yours, right, like you don't like yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: like the people who build cities are not the people
Speaker 1: who owned the cities. And you know if you see this, yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah, okay, like in the city is actually owned
Speaker 1: by like three real estate speculators and like a bunch
Speaker 1: of cops, and more applicable examples like the people who
Speaker 1: build the cup podcast is not own the podcast. Yeah no,
Speaker 1: we don't own the podcast. Like we we are exactly
Speaker 1: a plicable result that you know, that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: everyone understands that example. Yeah, every we I actually don't
Speaker 1: think the people understand that we don't own the podcast.
Speaker 1: It's actually unclear to be I. I people people have
Speaker 1: weird things about how podcasting works. But yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: own the podcast. We just create it and we do
Speaker 1: all the work. And then Sophie sits in her leather
Speaker 1: chair looking to out at the leather chair chair over.
Speaker 1: I think it's all my podcast creations I have created
Speaker 1: and then usually so bad. How could you think I
Speaker 1: could sit here on an eight five degree day in
Speaker 1: a leather chair going to sulpie. At least get your
Speaker 1: facts right, my word a chair? Continue, Chris. Okay, So
Speaker 1: for the people who are like actually watching their boss,
Speaker 1: like sitting around smoking a giant cigar in a factory
Speaker 1: while they pound like hammers, or like work at a
Speaker 1: hospital and get a watch like just started a massive
Speaker 1: cigar and a comically large to give to prop. But
Speaker 1: because for the record, whenever I do hang out with
Speaker 1: my other boss, Robert, he often does in some chair
Speaker 1: smoking a cigar, and I do think it is in
Speaker 1: fact leather. Okay, So we're describing Robert before me, the
Speaker 1: slave away in my laptop writing scripts and yeah, work
Speaker 1: in the podcast minds. Yeah, it's it's it is. It
Speaker 1: is really hard out there and continue. So okay, So,
Speaker 1: like the belief that you produced the world and that
Speaker 1: if you produce you should own it is like this
Speaker 1: This is not unique to the part of the workers
Speaker 1: movement that like, you know, thinks that also you should
Speaker 1: like have a democracy and the factory and like you
Speaker 1: should have the autonomy to decide how you do your
Speaker 1: work and what needs to be done. Uh that those
Speaker 1: beliefs like broadly comprise the ideology of like the entire
Speaker 1: workers movement, and by you know, by by the century,
Speaker 1: the workers movement is really really broad, right, I mean
Speaker 1: it stretches from sort of like really mild social democratic
Speaker 1: trade unionists to like the intellectual heads of these like
Speaker 1: Leninist vanguard parties. But what makes the democratic wing unique
Speaker 1: is that the r concern is the fundamental alienation of
Speaker 1: factory life. And and this this is I mean, originally
Speaker 1: like it is very much factory life, but like this
Speaker 1: this gets expanded out as this goes on into sort
Speaker 1: of the like the fundamental alienation of labor itself, which
Speaker 1: is just this condition of being reduced to an object
Speaker 1: by bosses who use you as a tool to do something.
Speaker 1: And you know, and this this is a concern for
Speaker 1: everyone in some sense, but but for the Lenins and
Speaker 1: social democrats, alienation is just like a product of ownership
Speaker 1: or distribution. Right. So you know, if if that's what
Speaker 1: you believe, the way you defeat alienation is through the
Speaker 1: working class of productive capacity, not in it, not in
Speaker 1: sort of like any kind of like innate human like
Speaker 1: humanity or creativity. Like all you have to do is like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: you flip a switch, right, and the factory is now
Speaker 1: owned by the state instead of being owned by like
Speaker 1: JP Morgan or something like, Now your alienation is gone.
Speaker 1: That's how it works. Yeah, Or and and your social democracy.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, okay, so you you you, you flip
Speaker 1: a whitch and taxes get higher, and now you have
Speaker 1: a union, but you're still working for gold You're still
Speaker 1: working for the Goldman Sachs. But you know, but for
Speaker 1: for for for for the wing of the workers movements
Speaker 1: that you know actually cares about democracy. This doesn't solve anything, right, Like,
Speaker 1: as long as the fundamental relation of being the like
Speaker 1: of being an object rights. As long as like you,
Speaker 1: fundamentally the worker are not are not a human being
Speaker 1: who has agency and control and autonomy over their life.
Speaker 1: As long as you're just an object that you know,
Speaker 1: like you're you're like you, you you're a living human
Speaker 1: tool that the one man ruler of the factory can
Speaker 1: like you know, can can wield around to do whatever
Speaker 1: they want. As as long as that persists, changes in
Speaker 1: ownership structure and need like health benefits missed the entire point.
Speaker 1: And this kind of the degradation that comes from just
Speaker 1: being a tool can only be solved by returning agency
Speaker 1: and autonomy to the working class. And that means like
Speaker 1: actually giving the class control over the production process. And
Speaker 1: you know, in in in notty six and Spain, workers
Speaker 1: are like funk this and decided to take the entire
Speaker 1: thing into their own hands. And they do this by
Speaker 1: just seizing their workplaces and mass and this becomes known
Speaker 1: as a Spanish revolution um and it is one of
Speaker 1: the most extensive sort of experiments. And like workers democratic
Speaker 1: self managements or like whatever whatever you want to call
Speaker 1: people making their own decisions in the workplace like that
Speaker 1: has ever happened, like especially in the modern era. Like
Speaker 1: everything from like public utilities to like bakeries to hospitals
Speaker 1: to shoe factories like falls under the direct control of
Speaker 1: these like democratic unions. And once their bosses have been
Speaker 1: like you know, chased from the premises and like flee
Speaker 1: and terror uh, these workers set about like transforming the
Speaker 1: entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines. Like they pulled
Speaker 1: their resources together collectively and they allocate them democratically for
Speaker 1: the benefit of like siety as a whole, and for
Speaker 1: a brief moment this works. They have this incredible, like
Speaker 1: this triumphant experiment democratic self managements, and output increases dramatically
Speaker 1: and social services are expanded, and like in in In
Speaker 1: in the span of two years in the middle of
Speaker 1: a civil war, like the workers of Spain are able
Speaker 1: to create a universal health care system that expands karento
Speaker 1: like like rural areas of Spain where like you couldn't
Speaker 1: get it before. But you know, the problem is once
Speaker 1: again is that this is happening to the civil war
Speaker 1: and and a lot like you know, and using sort
Speaker 1: of like nominally anti fascism like as as they're sort
Speaker 1: of like you know, they're using the threat of the
Speaker 1: NIED too post fascism as as a sort of front
Speaker 1: like a French for what they're actually doing. You get
Speaker 1: this alliance of liberals, liberal socialists and Stalinists who just
Speaker 1: like brutally stamp out any attempt that you democratic self
Speaker 1: management and like you have like Soviet cadreastion like NKVD,
Speaker 1: like Soviet secret police guys like literally leading armies into
Speaker 1: into these cities and like like killing like killing the
Speaker 1: workers and then physically like taking control of these factories
Speaker 1: that people had sees and giving them back to the bosses,
Speaker 1: which is you know, this is this is great. This
Speaker 1: is a great communist stuff. And yeah, the you know,
Speaker 1: and this this this ends exactly how you would expect
Speaker 1: it to end with. Yeah, like this this the Stalinists
Speaker 1: get everything they want. They murder all of the people
Speaker 1: who want like a factory council, and then they all
Speaker 1: get killed by Franco. But you know, undeterred by sort
Speaker 1: of the casualty tolls of these like massacres by people
Speaker 1: who want bosses. Uh, this just keeps happening, and you know,
Speaker 1: by the time you get to the sties, like all
Speaker 1: this stuff is back. Like there there's there's factory councils
Speaker 1: again in Hungary, you get them, in Italy and France
Speaker 1: and the Chichoslovakia N eight there's like like they're there there. There,
Speaker 1: there's councils being like there, there's there's communes being formed
Speaker 1: in like Vietnam. There's like they're that We've talked about
Speaker 1: the cordonation UH in Chile on this show before like
Speaker 1: these things are happening everywhere, and I think Hungary in
Speaker 1: particular is a really interesting one because so there's a
Speaker 1: revolution in Hungary against sort of the Soviets in six
Speaker 1: that's it gets a lot of the same liberal mythologizing
Speaker 1: that you get with Tenemen, but like kind of more
Speaker 1: egregious here. So I don't know, I think, like I
Speaker 1: I got taught this revolution in schools is like one
Speaker 1: of the few ones that we actually get and they
Speaker 1: taught it as this like this is like the Hungarian
Speaker 1: revolution was just like kind of nationalists, like liberal democratic
Speaker 1: revolution for people who wanted like democracy and freedom and
Speaker 1: like free markets. And then like you know, if you
Speaker 1: go read about what the people were at but people
Speaker 1: actually doing the revolution we're saying, you get quotes like this,
Speaker 1: this is a direct quote from a member of one
Speaker 1: of the Hungarian workers councils. The time when the boss
Speaker 1: is decided, our fate is over, and it's like these
Speaker 1: these guys, these guys do not seem like I don't know,
Speaker 1: these guys don't seem like liberal democrats. Something weird is
Speaker 1: happening here. That's something that's actually happening, is that like
Speaker 1: Hungarian workers like sees control of their factories and like
Speaker 1: the workplaces, and they formed workers councils the overs of
Speaker 1: the government, and then the Russian slaughter them all. But
Speaker 1: you know, like this is not liberal democratic revolution at all,
Speaker 1: that this is a revolt against the tatorship in the workplace,
Speaker 1: and there's an identical revolts breakout across both the capitalist
Speaker 1: world and the communist world, and in the newly de
Speaker 1: colonized society start seeing them too, and you know, and
Speaker 1: to the sort of like dismay of both the communists
Speaker 1: and the capitalists who are both like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: why is and we keep holming workers councils like this
Speaker 1: solution to alienation, Like it's not like an ideological thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's not that there's like a group of
Speaker 1: people who are like secretly infiltrating these countries and being like, okay,
Speaker 1: you needful workers councils. This this is this stuff is
Speaker 1: happening in places where there's just like none of that.
Speaker 1: So like one of one of the sort of like
Speaker 1: movements that that does stuff like this is is the
Speaker 1: revolution in Algeria. Um, you know, and they're like they're
Speaker 1: they're there are like Algeria like does have a pretty
Speaker 1: high level of political education, but the political education they're
Speaker 1: getting is from like it's it's from the National Liberation Front,
Speaker 1: which is like asofar As, it's any one thing. It's
Speaker 1: like it's a nationalist vankard this movements, which is you
Speaker 1: know that they're the people who like fight the French
Speaker 1: colonizers and beat them and their ideology like asofar As,
Speaker 1: you can describe one out the Allo egion. Like the
Speaker 1: thing that they want is like the state having this
Speaker 1: decisive role of national development. But you know, immediately it's
Speaker 1: taking power off. And BenBella, who's Algeria's first president, like
Speaker 1: discovers that, you know, he's not actually going to be
Speaker 1: the one like making the decision about what the country's
Speaker 1: economic structure is going to be because he takes power
Speaker 1: and a whole bunch of like French people who lived
Speaker 1: in Algeria of flee, and basically what happens immediately after
Speaker 1: is that all of like all of these this property
Speaker 1: that have been originally like held by by by French
Speaker 1: sort of like colonists, like it gets immediately seized by
Speaker 1: the Algerian working class and you know, they build their
Speaker 1: own workers councils, and you know, BenBella is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess I guess we have like workers councils now,
Speaker 1: like I guess I guess we have sort of like
Speaker 1: autonomous democratic production and BenBella is like kind of trying
Speaker 1: to undermine them. But he doesn't really get a chance
Speaker 1: to because once again there's a military coup and Bembella
Speaker 1: like he I think he escapes and doesn't die. But
Speaker 1: like the fact that the council's all sort of get
Speaker 1: dismantled again. But like the number of times this has
Speaker 1: happened is getting just like completely out of hand, and
Speaker 1: it's like yeah, okay, the it's like yeah, okay, so
Speaker 1: every time this happens, they murder everyone. But like you know,
Speaker 1: the revolutions keep happening, and they keep happening, and they
Speaker 1: keep happening, and you know, even even as late as
Speaker 1: like the late seventies, like it's not clear that that
Speaker 1: that like it's it's not clear that the people who
Speaker 1: want one man role in the factory are gonna win.
Speaker 1: Like there's this moment in Italy nineteen seventy seven where
Speaker 1: it's like this just like giant student student and worker
Speaker 1: coalition almost takes power. Um, Like in Spain even after
Speaker 1: like fifty years of of like Franco and like the
Speaker 1: fascist octatorship, like the c n T, which is the
Speaker 1: anarchist union that had done the revolution like reappears in
Speaker 1: the seventies again even though everyone thought it was gone,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, this is a real this is
Speaker 1: a real source of strife for especially the sort of
Speaker 1: capitalist managerial elite. Who are you know they this stuff
Speaker 1: keeps happening. It's like okay, like it is an unacceptable
Speaker 1: risk that one of the one day one of these
Speaker 1: groups is going to win. And so they start looking
Speaker 1: for a way to like dismantle this sort of like
Speaker 1: systemic things that like create that that caused people to
Speaker 1: do this. But you know, but they're but they're trying
Speaker 1: to do it in a way that doesn't involve the
Speaker 1: giving up their power. Um. So Yeah, as Vicky austen
Speaker 1: Whild points out, this sort of like this like instinctive
Speaker 1: embrace of like democracy in the factory, like as a
Speaker 1: political program, it's only possible as long as factories, as
Speaker 1: long as like the factory functions is the point of
Speaker 1: encounter her. I think it was her term for was
Speaker 1: She calls it a darker Gora, which is like, so
Speaker 1: Gore is like like the sort of like the Greek
Speaker 1: marketplace in the center of town. Everyone goes there and
Speaker 1: you like talk about things, right, and the factory serves
Speaker 1: as this kind of like it's this sort of like
Speaker 1: dark version of it. Were Like, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: you know, it facilitates these interactions that allow people to
Speaker 1: sort of like identify with each other and like you know,
Speaker 1: create collective meaning by like interacting with each other. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it exists to exploit you, and
Speaker 1: it's like terrible and you're just getting you know, you're
Speaker 1: getting physically and socially destroyed like every moment you're in it.
Speaker 1: But you know it's it's still is a place where
Speaker 1: you can like assemble an identity as like like you
Speaker 1: and a bunch of the people around you can go like, hey,
Speaker 1: like we are workers, right, like we are the working class,
Speaker 1: and this this is like a shared political identity that
Speaker 1: you have that allows you to do things. And so
Speaker 1: the thrust of sort of the attack against this takes
Speaker 1: the form of this attack on like the shop floor
Speaker 1: as like a side of like formation of identities that
Speaker 1: that can allow you to mobilize stuff. And so this
Speaker 1: takes like a number of forms. Um most famously, there's
Speaker 1: there's it's the industrialization and this sort of like spatial
Speaker 1: relocation of factories. So like like part of what's going
Speaker 1: on right is that you have a you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who work in a factory, and then
Speaker 1: they live like around like right around the factories. Right
Speaker 1: were they work in a coal mine and everyone lives
Speaker 1: in a town around the coal mine. And this means
Speaker 1: that everyone sees each other constantly, and they're like constantly
Speaker 1: like running into each other and like physically talking to
Speaker 1: each other. And you know, this is a really good
Speaker 1: way to create radical politics. So what what happens is
Speaker 1: you these factories get sent out to the suburbs, and
Speaker 1: this allows you to to create places where you know,
Speaker 1: workers are isolated from each other and you know, and
Speaker 1: the other thing you can do is you turn workers
Speaker 1: into homeowners and you sort of like buy them off
Speaker 1: with this combination of like cheap credit and this promise
Speaker 1: that like their houses would not be a financial asset.
Speaker 1: And so as the sort of eighties rolls on, the
Speaker 1: sort of the the like the herald of democratization of
Speaker 1: finance or places democratization, and the factory is sort of
Speaker 1: the capitalist class. Like the other thing they do that's
Speaker 1: like really insidious. They they tied like the remaining union
Speaker 1: pensions into the stock market. This is stuff like you
Speaker 1: see today with like four o one case, and it
Speaker 1: means that like if you want to like have a retirement,
Speaker 1: you are like physically literally invested in the stock market,
Speaker 1: which ties you know, which ties everyone sort of like
Speaker 1: into the system. And corporations start to turn workplaces into
Speaker 1: these like enormous propaganda apparatus. Is you get like like
Speaker 1: Walmart in particular, has these like like these vast ideological
Speaker 1: like programming things that they run that are designed to
Speaker 1: sort of like get you to identify with the corporation
Speaker 1: itself and not with like the other people you're you know,
Speaker 1: like the other people you're within the class as a whole,
Speaker 1: and you know, and like the other thing that they're
Speaker 1: able to do is the fact that capital is mobile
Speaker 1: and workers like aren't allows you know, combined with logistics advances,
Speaker 1: and it means that like if workers ever start getting
Speaker 1: in upper hands somewhere, capitalist can just leave and the
Speaker 1: process that you see, is that as the sort of
Speaker 1: the total number of people working in the like in
Speaker 1: industrial work keeps decreasing, as a center of the population
Speaker 1: that keeps decreasing. And as this happens, capitalists are just like, okay, skirt,
Speaker 1: we're gon, we're gonna, we're gonna pick up our tools
Speaker 1: and leave. And this spits out like enormous populations who
Speaker 1: are just like kicked out of atitional workforce entirely. And
Speaker 1: these developments, this is what actually like eventually destroys the
Speaker 1: classical workers t mouvement is the abilability to leave from
Speaker 1: the sort of destruction of the factory is like a
Speaker 1: site of stuff. But in order for this to work,
Speaker 1: the one thing they need is a place to move
Speaker 1: to write. They need somewhere with this large exploitable labor
Speaker 1: supply that has been like crushed enough that it won't
Speaker 1: revolt against them. And the capitalist class finds that in
Speaker 1: our products and services, and we're we're we're back, We're
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're we're back to China. And Okay,
Speaker 1: so I've been talking about the way this sort of
Speaker 1: like this this whole system, like this whole factory system
Speaker 1: mass production stuff like develops. But China is weird because
Speaker 1: this is the one place where the fact your system
Speaker 1: works like really differently than everywhere else. Um, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons for this, one of which is it
Speaker 1: like so change like stayed on firms. It's like almost
Speaker 1: impossible for them to fire someone because I mean there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons for this, and one of them
Speaker 1: is that like people's entire sort of social sphere is
Speaker 1: built around their work unit. And like their work unit
Speaker 1: is like it is the is the company you work for,
Speaker 1: and there's this whole sort of like legal apparatus built
Speaker 1: around it, and its like you know, and like this
Speaker 1: like unit gives you everything from like your retirement, like
Speaker 1: it like feeds you, like there's often entertainment stuff like
Speaker 1: tied into it, Like you get healthcare, you get like
Speaker 1: childcare from it. And the CP also gets rid of
Speaker 1: the peace rate system, which is just like this is
Speaker 1: this thing that like I mean, it's so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of capitalist places to work with this word's like okay,
Speaker 1: so the peace rate system is you pay people for
Speaker 1: like every unit of something they produce, so like you
Speaker 1: get paid by like I don't know like how many
Speaker 1: like how many pounds of like cherities you can pick.
Speaker 1: And so the USSR brings this back because the USSR
Speaker 1: and the US are really not that different. But China
Speaker 1: is like, nah, this like sucks. This is capitalism and
Speaker 1: you know, okay, like I'm not gonna say the Chinese
Speaker 1: factory system is great, but like because they don't have
Speaker 1: the peace ray system is because they can't fire people.
Speaker 1: You get this very you get this weird thing where
Speaker 1: it's like the people who run the factories like don't
Speaker 1: have very good ways to force people to work. And
Speaker 1: because of this, they like they sort of like have
Speaker 1: to allow this degree of participation in the worker process,
Speaker 1: like in the labor process that like you don't really
Speaker 1: see most of the places and the everything they have
Speaker 1: that I luckily Garrison and I also have this is
Speaker 1: we have the ability to criticize our bosses. Although we
Speaker 1: we have more of this these guys. But one day ahead,
Speaker 1: one one okay, we we we've got it. We don't,
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't have our big character poster yet,
Speaker 1: but like one day Garrison and I are going to
Speaker 1: show up to the office with like giant big character
Speaker 1: post with your faces on it. They like have specifically,
Speaker 1: Roberts are gonna have a list of crimes on it.
Speaker 1: My favorite part of like big labor protests when they
Speaker 1: make those giant like puppets. If we just make a
Speaker 1: giant's tech puppet version of Robert and Sophie that we
Speaker 1: just prayed around the office, that's long as mind's bigger
Speaker 1: than Robert's, that's fine, we can do that, right, full support.
Speaker 1: So we were got to do this in China, It's
Speaker 1: it's weird, like you have the ability to do this,
Speaker 1: but like it's like run to the party and so
Speaker 1: if someone gets unpopular enough, like the party will like
Speaker 1: start a campaign about how bad like that one boss is,
Speaker 1: and then you can show up to like the meeting
Speaker 1: and go like, hey, I hate my boss. This guy sucks.
Speaker 1: But they're just replacing with like another boss, right, So
Speaker 1: it's not like it's not actually a democratic system really,
Speaker 1: but the way that it works ensures that like the
Speaker 1: people who are managed years are like pretty popular at
Speaker 1: least to some extents, like are popular and people don't
Speaker 1: like really hate them. And this means that, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's all of this stuff that makes the Chinese
Speaker 1: factories different from like the other systems, and also because
Speaker 1: of like structural stuff in Maoism that I mean, I
Speaker 1: could talk about that, but I don't like talking about Maoism.
Speaker 1: But basically the product of this is that like you
Speaker 1: have in China during this period, a lot of demands
Speaker 1: for democracy, but they're really they're not they're not tied
Speaker 1: to the workplace at all. They're they're they're mostly like
Speaker 1: political demands for like democracy in the party or stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And that means, like you know, at least
Speaker 1: in the cities, this system like kind of works okayish
Speaker 1: until the Cultural Revolution where everything falls apart. And this
Speaker 1: means that it is at long last time for me
Speaker 1: to do the cultural revolution rant, which is something I
Speaker 1: have been planning for, Like, yeah, I excited about this.
Speaker 1: I've been waiting for an excuse and I finally have one. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the cultural revolution rant is that everyone gets the
Speaker 1: cultural revolution completely wrong, Like everyone every like it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's one of the rare events where like it's
Speaker 1: misinterpreted in like exactly the same way by both people
Speaker 1: who support it and the people who oppose it. Um
Speaker 1: And Okay, the first thing to understand about this, right
Speaker 1: is like Okay, So the the initial the very very
Speaker 1: beginning of the culture revolution, like it's basically a bunch
Speaker 1: of like teenagers kind of like it's like middle schoolers essentially,
Speaker 1: and they're attacking these they're attacking like other kids at
Speaker 1: their school. And these kids are kids who have what's
Speaker 1: called a black blood background, like black blood, which means
Speaker 1: that like they're they're the children of people who were
Speaker 1: from like quote unquote bad class backgrounds. And this is
Speaker 1: really weird for a number of reasons. One because you
Speaker 1: have you have a sort of like a pseudo class
Speaker 1: system based on like who your parents were, right, you
Speaker 1: have people who have red blood who had like good
Speaker 1: class backgrounds, like your parents are workers, or your parents
Speaker 1: worked with the Party or something. And then you have
Speaker 1: people who are from like bad class backgrounds quote unquote,
Speaker 1: who like are persecuted and like, okay, like I don't
Speaker 1: really care that much if you're like persecuting like a
Speaker 1: Shanghai oligarch who like collaborated with the French and Japanese
Speaker 1: imperialists or whatever. But like a this extends to like
Speaker 1: the children of these people, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: children these people weren't even alive when their parents were
Speaker 1: like you know, like doing stuff that was bad. And
Speaker 1: the other thing is that like the term bad class
Speaker 1: background this is really loose. Like I I know people
Speaker 1: whose families were declared like declared like black class backgrounds,
Speaker 1: who have black blood and like you know, they're they
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to hold in the government position. And the
Speaker 1: reason that this happened to them was that her dad
Speaker 1: had made bird feeders before the revolution and they considered
Speaker 1: that like petite bourgeois. And it's like this is like
Speaker 1: this is like like what, like what what are you doing?
Speaker 1: Like you you you reproduced, like you've turned class into
Speaker 1: like a pseudo race thing that's like her like you
Speaker 1: like inherit from your parents, even though like their parents
Speaker 1: don't own property anymore. Because it's it's really bizarre and
Speaker 1: and and what's what's happening here is the kids from
Speaker 1: the red class backgrounds are are are you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're the kids of the new of the new Chinese elite,
Speaker 1: and they're just like picking on attacking the kids who
Speaker 1: are like now this this sort of like like my
Speaker 1: minority class. And so what it amounts to at the
Speaker 1: beginning of this is a bunch of privileged rich kids
Speaker 1: who are like attacking the bunch of kids who are
Speaker 1: being persecuted for stuff. It's like not their fault at all.
Speaker 1: And you know, part and the other, the other part
Speaker 1: of this, like this is the part of the people.
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, it's like Mao is trying to like
Speaker 1: play power game inside the party blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: But you know, things get more and more chaotic, and
Speaker 1: you get you get circuiting his attacks on like CCP,
Speaker 1: bereaucrats and cadres and stuff, because ma was trying to
Speaker 1: like male was trying to solidify his place in the
Speaker 1: party and he's blah blah blah. There's other stuff that's happening.
Speaker 1: Um but then it gets really interesting. Um. So, so
Speaker 1: this starts in six right, and at the very beginning
Speaker 1: of six seven, there's something there's something called the January Storm,
Speaker 1: which is where a bunch of rebel workers just seize
Speaker 1: control of Shanghai and like they run the party out,
Speaker 1: they run the other they run I think they run
Speaker 1: the army out too, and you know, and now like
Speaker 1: they they control the city of Shanghai. And this is
Speaker 1: like an oh funk moment from Mao because you know,
Speaker 1: now he has to like deal with this city that
Speaker 1: has been taking over by its own working class. And
Speaker 1: I found this this incredible line from Joe and Lai
Speaker 1: who's having a meeting with Mao and they're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do about the fact that like this, this, this,
Speaker 1: like that Shanghai has been seized by by these workers
Speaker 1: and I'm just gonna read this. When asked whether the
Speaker 1: new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Joel
Speaker 1: replied bluntly that quote, anarchism is bound to develop if
Speaker 1: we immediately implement direct elections of the Paris Commune type.
Speaker 1: And I think this is like this is this really incredible,
Speaker 1: like like the thing you can find right, because it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: there's two things that can happen here. One is either like, okay,
Speaker 1: you you you you give these people democracy and the
Speaker 1: ability to vote, right, and Joe and Lyon Matt look
Speaker 1: at this, and you're like, that would be anarchist if
Speaker 1: we can't do that. And the second thing is you
Speaker 1: don't do that, and you oppressed them, and they take
Speaker 1: the second line, and you know, okay, like it takes
Speaker 1: them a bit to get this ramped up, right, It
Speaker 1: takes them a bit to get the sort of kind
Speaker 1: of revolution thing they're doing to like stop all of
Speaker 1: this rebel stuff that they've they've started to to get
Speaker 1: it takes them about a year. But but by the
Speaker 1: students and the workers who had like you know, done
Speaker 1: done this sort of uprising stuff so are getting slaughtered,
Speaker 1: like just mastered, killed on an unimaginable scale. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is this is where everyone gets the Culture Revolution completely wrong,
Speaker 1: because everyone the entire memory of the Cultural Revolution is
Speaker 1: from basically the first two years of it, right, which
Speaker 1: is like all the stuff about like like you know,
Speaker 1: like professors being marched out onto the street and dunce
Speaker 1: caps and like students like humiliating the professors and like
Speaker 1: like party officials being like marched around with like placards
Speaker 1: on them, and like people like that's something like the
Speaker 1: chaos of the revolution. Like that's that's stuff everyone remembers.
Speaker 1: That's the first two years of this. There's still like
Speaker 1: I mean, you can are like there's there's there's the
Speaker 1: short the short quote unquote short culture Revolution, which is
Speaker 1: like the high point of the activity goes from nineteen
Speaker 1: six nine, and then there's like a longer one that
Speaker 1: goes to like the death of Mao, depending on how
Speaker 1: you want to count it. But almost all of the
Speaker 1: actual violence in this period happens in this in in
Speaker 1: in the third phase, which is the so the first
Speaker 1: phase of the Didicial uprising, and then the rebel groups
Speaker 1: start fighting each other. But then phase three is when
Speaker 1: the state like cracks down on like start starts like
Speaker 1: starts trying to crush this like rebel student factions. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read from Walder who did ah, so
Speaker 1: is the guy in Walder who who went to He
Speaker 1: did a bunch of work in the Chinese archives, which
Speaker 1: he like went and like found the death tolls. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read like he like he go hells a
Speaker 1: bunch of archives. He goes to a bunch of state archives,
Speaker 1: and he like like tracks down the death certificates and
Speaker 1: tracks down like who died where? And this this is
Speaker 1: what he wrote about it. More than three four of
Speaker 1: all documented deaths and local animals are due to the
Speaker 1: actions of authorities in the in this third phase, and
Speaker 1: then more than of those persecuted for alleged political crimes.
Speaker 1: So what are he's saying here is that seventy five
Speaker 1: percent of all of the deaths the entire Culture Revolution
Speaker 1: weren't done by like the revolution parts. They were done
Speaker 1: by the state, murdering the workers faction, the rebel factions.
Speaker 1: And not only that, nine of of the actual political
Speaker 1: persecution was done by the states and not by the rebels.
Speaker 1: And when when when when you actually look at what
Speaker 1: this means, Like this means everything everything anyone ever talks
Speaker 1: about the Culture Revolution is completely wrong. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: the thing had happened to the Cultural Revolution. Wasn't that
Speaker 1: sort of student radicalism got out of control and they
Speaker 1: started killing everyone that preaches all this violence. The thing
Speaker 1: that actually happens is that there's a student like uprising, right,
Speaker 1: But what happens is that the sort of conservative and
Speaker 1: state factions just slaughter them. And I Walt Walter estimates
Speaker 1: that the total number of people dead, it's somewhere between
Speaker 1: one point one and one point six million people. And again,
Speaker 1: like seventy five percent, and I think it's actually slightly
Speaker 1: higher from that, like percent of the people who were
Speaker 1: killed in this are killed by the state. And you
Speaker 1: know this, this has an enormous effect on I mean
Speaker 1: just everything that happens in China and Chinese society from
Speaker 1: then on, because on the one hand, the popular memory
Speaker 1: of the Cultural Revolution persists as this thing that was, like,
Speaker 1: this is what happens if you like if people outside
Speaker 1: the party and like students in radicals like start like
Speaker 1: making trouble, is that you get all these people dead.
Speaker 1: But then you know, you have the people inside the
Speaker 1: state who like know how many people they had to
Speaker 1: kill in order to hold on to power, right, they
Speaker 1: kill they kill probably more people than like that, you know,
Speaker 1: they're there's there's there's a very famous massacre of like
Speaker 1: communists or like suspected communist Indonesia that it doesn't get
Speaker 1: called a genocide because it was technically on political lines,
Speaker 1: but like it was one of the worst anti communist
Speaker 1: massacres in history, and they killed more people from that
Speaker 1: during this period, and that like that level of violence
Speaker 1: and the fact that the people running the state understand
Speaker 1: what they had to do, it means you get you
Speaker 1: get an elite that's incredibly paranoid about like anything that
Speaker 1: like smells like organizing happening outside the party. And the
Speaker 1: other thing happens is that like the most radical students
Speaker 1: and workers of this period, just get that they're all dead, right,
Speaker 1: they killed, they killed like they they killed like a
Speaker 1: million people the you know, for for for for for
Speaker 1: every one person who got killed, there's about nineteen people
Speaker 1: who were like persecuted in a lot of way. And
Speaker 1: that's like a lot of people are tortured. A lot
Speaker 1: of these people are like sent to prisons. They're like
Speaker 1: like really horrible stuff happens to people. And this process
Speaker 1: keeps going like through through the seven Like there there's
Speaker 1: a huge spike in like state killings nineteen seventy, and
Speaker 1: by by the end of the seventies, like anything that's
Speaker 1: sort of like could have cohered into into like a
Speaker 1: movement that like wants democraty in the workplace, for example,
Speaker 1: it's just gone. Because all of all of the radicals,
Speaker 1: like and anyone, anyone who wanted anyone who wanted democraty
Speaker 1: in factory, any of the people who were like even
Speaker 1: sort of like just like sort of rebellious, like these
Speaker 1: people have all been killed. And the consequence of this
Speaker 1: is that throughout the through the eighties, he gets politics
Speaker 1: that's driven by this like sort of like intellectual liberal
Speaker 1: like liberal democratic politics that ignores completely ignores work lass entirely,
Speaker 1: and you know, and these these people start to take
Speaker 1: power and you get Dansha paying well, I think I
Speaker 1: think it's it's like right before he takes power, but
Speaker 1: Danjo ping wise up implementing the one child policy, which
Speaker 1: is this like incredibly draconian and really success still attempts
Speaker 1: just like re established the states like patriarchal control over
Speaker 1: the household and strips like hundreds of millions of women
Speaker 1: from like like of of of autonomy over their own bodies,
Speaker 1: and you know, and and and and and it really
Speaker 1: looks like through through the through through through like the
Speaker 1: late seventies and the eighties, it looks like like the
Speaker 1: Chinese ruling classes succeeded, right like they finally destroyed that
Speaker 1: they finally destroyed like any opposition to them. But then
Speaker 1: you know, things get very weird, which is that Setiman happens,
Speaker 1: and you know, but by by nine, like the whole
Speaker 1: like like as as a rule, like in general everywhere
Speaker 1: the sort of classical workers neo meant that was like
Speaker 1: at demanding tomoxy the factory, like they're basically done and
Speaker 1: so they're they're unable to sort of do their own revolutions.
Speaker 1: Now the only thing they can do is sort of
Speaker 1: like latch onto other stuff. But the problem that the
Speaker 1: party has is that so they've had a lot of
Speaker 1: measures in place to to make sure that you've never
Speaker 1: got these kind of movements in China, and they kind
Speaker 1: of worked. But when it went through the nighties, like
Speaker 1: China starts implementing a market economy, right, they start, they
Speaker 1: started they started like cutting this the welfare state. They
Speaker 1: start like destroying the sort of like limited control that
Speaker 1: works has had in the factories, and they kind of
Speaker 1: like unknowingly reproduced the conditions that have been producing these
Speaker 1: revolutions in every other country. And you know, as this
Speaker 1: massive inflation wave hits, they turned China into this powdern
Speaker 1: keg and this, you know, and this combined with sort
Speaker 1: of like the liberal democratic students moving gets you this
Speaker 1: really interesting and weird ideology that these workers happen. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read it from from an interview with with
Speaker 1: with one of the workers, who was that gentleman, Why
Speaker 1: do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom
Speaker 1: in the workshops? Does what the workers say count or
Speaker 1: what leader says? We later talked about it in the factory,
Speaker 1: the dictatorship. Sorry, in the factory, the director is a dictator.
Speaker 1: What one man says goes. If you view the state
Speaker 1: through the factory, it's about the same one man rule.
Speaker 1: Our objective is not very high. We just want workers
Speaker 1: to have their own independent organizations in work units. It's
Speaker 1: personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs,
Speaker 1: the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought
Speaker 1: to go home at five at five pm, but he
Speaker 1: tells me to work over time for two hours and
Speaker 1: if I don't cut my bonus, this is a personal rule.
Speaker 1: A factory should have a system. If workers wants to
Speaker 1: change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules
Speaker 1: to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should
Speaker 1: be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who
Speaker 1: violates it will be punished according to the rules. This
Speaker 1: is rule by law. Now, we don't have this kind
Speaker 1: of legal system. And Okay, that's a really like I
Speaker 1: don't know, I think it's a really interesting sort of
Speaker 1: like fusion of a whole bunch of stuff, right because
Speaker 1: on the one hand, like the sort of like ruling
Speaker 1: discourse that's happening the things as you're talking about it
Speaker 1: is like that we need the democracy, read the rule
Speaker 1: of law. And but you know, the workers in these
Speaker 1: factories are looking at are looking at like the situation
Speaker 1: they're facing, and they're like, ha, we don't have a
Speaker 1: democracy like here either, right, And so you get this,
Speaker 1: you get what's a really conservative framing of the sort
Speaker 1: of a very sort of very classical like critique of
Speaker 1: woman rule in the factory that has been happening for like,
Speaker 1: you know, like a hundred years. But what she's just
Speaker 1: think about this is that like any actual attempt to
Speaker 1: like do this right, get gets you to workers control,
Speaker 1: like democratic workers control in the factory. And as Walder
Speaker 1: who well, Walder also wrote another like he's a guy
Speaker 1: who went and interviewed a bunch of the people who
Speaker 1: have been a workers who have been involved with this
Speaker 1: and as as they point out, like this unlike really
Speaker 1: like any other time in Chinese history, like the it
Speaker 1: the people who are part of like the Beijing Autonomous
Speaker 1: Workers Autonomous Federation, are you know that they don't they
Speaker 1: don't have an intellectual class like this. These are these
Speaker 1: are just a bunch of workers and they have very
Speaker 1: little connection like they don't they they have very little
Speaker 1: like political connections, right, like beforehand, like to to the
Speaker 1: lberal circles are just sort of hearing what they're reading.
Speaker 1: And this is this means like what you have here
Speaker 1: is like it's not like an intellectraal like this is.
Speaker 1: This is just a bunch of workers and for you know,
Speaker 1: for for for like one final time, their instinct when
Speaker 1: they when the revolution sort of like starts, is the
Speaker 1: demand democracy in the factory. And this demand, like above
Speaker 1: all others, is completely politically unacceptable. And you know, and
Speaker 1: when when the army markers on Beijing, it's it's these
Speaker 1: workers that they wipe out, and they wipe them out
Speaker 1: so thoroughly that the fact that this is what these
Speaker 1: people were fighting for is it's it's scrubbed for the
Speaker 1: record of the CCP, it's scrubbed like the protomocracy move
Speaker 1: but doesn't remember it, even though their entire thing is memory.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and this this ensures that the meeting of
Speaker 1: these actual events, what the people were fighting for, what
Speaker 1: they were trying to do, has been almost completely lost.
Speaker 1: And I think at this point we can finally ask
Speaker 1: what what what actually was tianaman Um And in some
Speaker 1: sense in the in the Chinese context itself it's a
Speaker 1: transition between two different Chinese working classes. These protests are
Speaker 1: sort of like this is the last like political sort
Speaker 1: of like mobilization of like the of the old Chinese
Speaker 1: working class, which has been these people who had been
Speaker 1: in the cities, who had been like they had been
Speaker 1: the beneficiaries of this old sort of like socialist period
Speaker 1: welfare state, and these people in in the street around channemen,
Speaker 1: they mount the last attack of the of the classical
Speaker 1: workers studments. And when they lose, this entire class like this,
Speaker 1: this this entire urban working class that had been around
Speaker 1: since like the twenties, that have been sort of the
Speaker 1: driver of Chinese radical politics, that had been like that
Speaker 1: have been have been fighting and striking for like seventy
Speaker 1: eighty years. They they're they're gone. They're completely destroyed, and
Speaker 1: over the course of the economical structure in the nineties
Speaker 1: there they ceased to exist as a class, and they're
Speaker 1: replaced by a new Chinese working class, which is drawn
Speaker 1: from sort of these rural and sort of semi urban
Speaker 1: underclasses of the old social system who are like dragged
Speaker 1: into who are dragging the cities from from their villages,
Speaker 1: from their towns, and who now fill Actually, well I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know what the numbers are today because
Speaker 1: it's weird because of COVID. But like there were two
Speaker 1: and seventy seven billion of these people of this enormous
Speaker 1: market worker like force who formed the backbone of like
Speaker 1: the entire Chinese working class. And these people who they
Speaker 1: have rural house registrations, and this means that they don't
Speaker 1: get any of the benefits, like the sort of like
Speaker 1: welfare benefits that you would get from living in a city.
Speaker 1: And this means that they're you know, the they they
Speaker 1: constitute like an entirely new class of of workers. And
Speaker 1: instead of you know, like whatever sort of privileges that
Speaker 1: had been like carved out by the old working class,
Speaker 1: this one gets nothing. And the other thing that they
Speaker 1: get is this entire raft to sort of capitalist ideology
Speaker 1: that's based into like every aspect of the workplace culture.
Speaker 1: This this is massive attempt in China to get people
Speaker 1: to buy homes and you know, the like when where
Speaker 1: the old working class could at least like positive the
Speaker 1: factory is like a place where you could have democracy,
Speaker 1: where like life could be improved by like different controlled factories,
Speaker 1: Like this new working class like the thing that they
Speaker 1: want the most is to leave the factory and become
Speaker 1: a business owner. And you know, like this this probably
Speaker 1: sounds familiar to like us, right, like this is this
Speaker 1: is the old joke about like about the about the
Speaker 1: American working class, which is that everyone sees themselves as
Speaker 1: temporarily temporarily embarrassed millionaires and like, yeah, you know, in
Speaker 1: modern China, it's like yeah, okay, it's like people consider
Speaker 1: themselves to be like temporarily embarrassed small business owners and
Speaker 1: this stuff. This, this this ideological self conception of like
Speaker 1: I'm going to work in the factory, that I'm gonna
Speaker 1: becme a some business owner is completely inimical to the
Speaker 1: formation of like the classical or reservement. And there hasn't
Speaker 1: been that kind of formation in China sense. And this
Speaker 1: this is not really unique thing, right that the death
Speaker 1: of that workers movement has seen a sort of like
Speaker 1: complete and total collapse of the demand for like democratic
Speaker 1: self management like everywhere across the entire world. And you know,
Speaker 1: incredibly stubborn lee like the working class like refuses to
Speaker 1: sort of cohare itself in the factory. And so in
Speaker 1: this sense, China is really just sort of late to
Speaker 1: the game. They they they got slightly early, they got
Speaker 1: they got slightly later to the point that we're at now.
Speaker 1: You said there was gonna be a happier ending that
Speaker 1: they had. The happy ending was last episode. Uh, this
Speaker 1: episode is this episode ending is really depressing? Well, I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: they're there, there, there there, Okay, there's a slightly less
Speaker 1: depressing note kind of Okay. The thing that's less depressing
Speaker 1: here is that for my entire literally my entire lifetime
Speaker 1: has been the US learning from one economic lapse so
Speaker 1: another and the world, the world like the international economic system.
Speaker 1: Like I think I was born in like the middle
Speaker 1: of like the dot com collapse, and then I got
Speaker 1: two eight, and then like there's been a bunch of
Speaker 1: economic classes in the last like three years, and you know,
Speaker 1: the whole systems like learned from crisis to crisis to crisis.
Speaker 1: And that means that there's been an incredible, just like
Speaker 1: a rapidly increasing number of revolutions everywhere, even though the
Speaker 1: sort of like darker gore of the factory like has
Speaker 1: ceased to be this thing that like creates the working
Speaker 1: like the identity of the working class. And this means
Speaker 1: that you know, Okay, so in order to have some
Speaker 1: kind of mass move but you needs some kind of
Speaker 1: collective identity to to mobilize around. And you know, if
Speaker 1: if you can't make this in the factory, the place
Speaker 1: where it's going to be made instead is the street.
Speaker 1: And this means in the last you know, like twenty
Speaker 1: yees years, like with with without the sort of positive
Speaker 1: identity in the workplace to to to to hear itself around,
Speaker 1: workers are really only able to sort of mobilize on
Speaker 1: a mass basis, like indirect opposition to a threat that
Speaker 1: can that can that can confront like everyone at the
Speaker 1: same time. And this is the only thing I can do.
Speaker 1: This is really the state. And you know, the state
Speaker 1: has the ability to to increase the price that basic
Speaker 1: commodities and slash welfare benefits, and that becomes the only
Speaker 1: available enemy. And so yeah, if if you look at
Speaker 1: what revolutions have been in the last twenty years, it's
Speaker 1: a constant fight against the police, because fighting the police
Speaker 1: is the only thing that can that can allow you
Speaker 1: to create a new social identity, like a sort of
Speaker 1: sort of collective identification. And you know, and so this
Speaker 1: means that collected like modern revolts. Like everything we've seen
Speaker 1: over the last like four years. The four him that
Speaker 1: it takes is mass street movements and you know, continuous
Speaker 1: confrontation with the police. And you get to literally see
Speaker 1: this with with occupy, right. Occupied was originally like the
Speaker 1: like the slogan occupy was about the Dargentina in factory
Speaker 1: occupations and in two one, but then you know that stops,
Speaker 1: like that's the end, like just one like that that
Speaker 1: that's that's the end of the whole cycle. There's there's
Speaker 1: no more factory occupations actual astitude. You get one in
Speaker 1: Bosnia has A Govia, which is funny because it's like
Speaker 1: they occupy a bunch of factories, but like they don't
Speaker 1: know what to do with them, and so you get
Speaker 1: just like a regular like occupy, like like in the
Speaker 1: sort of like score occupation you'd get in like New
Speaker 1: York or whatever, where everyone's sort of like sitting in
Speaker 1: a circle talking about stuff, but it's happening in a factory.
Speaker 1: But but they're not like trying to run production, they're
Speaker 1: not trying to do any of that stuff. They're just
Speaker 1: sort of like they're in the factory. Isn't is no
Speaker 1: longer this sort of like space of like creation and
Speaker 1: possibility that could be turned into something new. It's just
Speaker 1: like a place where you go that's like indistinguishable from
Speaker 1: like a square. And you know, the last ten years
Speaker 1: it's like people people. Originally it was like it doesn't
Speaker 1: left right, everyone's everyone's occupying squares. But you know, by
Speaker 1: by about a dozen fourteen, people have figured out that
Speaker 1: you can't, like it's it's almost impossible to hold a
Speaker 1: square if the police attempt to run you out. And
Speaker 1: so this gets your place with running street flights with
Speaker 1: the police. But this, you know, this places everyone who's
Speaker 1: trying to do this in this incredibly dangerous bind because
Speaker 1: you know, the like the old workers councils were able
Speaker 1: to bring down states, like largely they got crushed by
Speaker 1: outside militaries, but they were able to bring down states
Speaker 1: because you know, there is an enormous amount of power
Speaker 1: in being able to control production. But the problem is
Speaker 1: that like you know, if you're in a square, right, like,
Speaker 1: you don't have the ability to do that. And with
Speaker 1: without the sort of without the factory occupations alongside them,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of general strikes in the last
Speaker 1: four years there's want of peruse one in France, there's
Speaker 1: someone in Hong Kong and Soudan, and every single one
Speaker 1: of them has been crushed. But you know, but but
Speaker 1: this is a real problem, right, because the current labor
Speaker 1: conditions aren't going to produce another way of factory occupations,
Speaker 1: and so the way forward for anyone who, like you know,
Speaker 1: wants to have a democracy in the workplace is completely unclear.
Speaker 1: And I think I think that's the actual legacy of Tianamen.
Speaker 1: The workers who are assembled outside Tianamen Square had already
Speaker 1: left their factories, and you know, for for for all
Speaker 1: that they spoke the language of the old workers movements, right,
Speaker 1: they spoke a democracy in the factory and one man rule.
Speaker 1: They stood and fought and died like we do in
Speaker 1: the streets. There's this bridge between sort of the classical
Speaker 1: workers movements and us, and you know, they face the
Speaker 1: same revolutionary crisis that we face, the crisis of Popula
Speaker 1: and Palestine, Columbia, Iran and Myanmar, Hong Kong. Of this,
Speaker 1: this crisis of victory that's just beyond the horizon can't
Speaker 1: be grasped. You know, I don't think the people at
Speaker 1: Tienamen have any answers to give us like, I don't
Speaker 1: think they do. I think they rent. They headlong into
Speaker 1: the crisis that we ran into, and they all died. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think expecting answers from the dead is demanding too
Speaker 1: much of those who before and after us died finding
Speaker 1: for liberation and all we can really do now is
Speaker 1: find our own way when, with the names of the
Speaker 1: dead in our lips, build the world they died fighting for. Hey,
Speaker 1: we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.