Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 28

Episode Date: April 2, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Robert Evans here, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how things are falling apart and how to maybe put them back together. Obviously the biggest story probably in the world right now is the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. And a major corollary of that story is how dramatically things in Russia have taken a turn for the totalitarian.

The country has become increasingly isolated from most of the global community. This is due to a mix of sanctions to a lot of businesses pulling out just because of the social consequences of not doing so. And of policies that have been put down by Putin's government in order to crack down on dissent and further remove Russia from any kind of contact with the West. As a result, it's kind of difficult to get in touch with people who are resisting Putin's government from within Russia. Anarchist activists in particular are not easy people to reach. However, we did recently sit down with one of these individuals and talk to them. So this episode will both be an interview with that person and a bit of history about the anarchist movements within Russia.

Russia has actually a very long history of anarchist organizing. Two of them in generally considered foundational thinkers in anarchist political theory, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were both born in Russia. Both lived and agitated under the czars. Bakunin was an advocate and a major theorist of political terrorism. He fled the country, was returned, and ultimately spent like 10 years in prison there. Kropotkin was the author of a seminal anarcho-communist text titled The Conquest of Bread, and he was only able to return to Russia after the 1917 revolution.

He died there in 1921. It's also worth noting that Peter Kropotkin is canonically the ancestor to Tommy Pickles of the Rugrats, but that's something you can look up on your own. Now, while some of the most influential anarchists in history were Russian, and anarchist organizing was a potent part of pre-1917 Russian political history, the success of the Bolsheviks after 1917 led to the movements near annihilation. Emma Goldman was yet another major anarchist activist and thinker who was born and educated in Russia. She immigrated to the United States in 1885,

where she promptly helped try to assassinate a steel magnate in revenge for his brutality against striking workers. Goldman grew to prominence as a labor activist and women's rights activist in the last decade of the 1800s. In 1901, her work helped inspire Leon Chogosh to assassinate President William McKinley. While Emma Goldman had no direct connection to Chogosh, she defended his actions by saying, as an anarchist, I am opposed to violence, but if the people want to do away with assassins, they must do away with the conditions which produce murderers. There's much more to say about Emma Goldman,

but for our purposes what matters is that she was arrested for opposing the draft in World War I and eventually deported back to Russia right after the revolution. Goldman was initially psyched that the Czars had been deposed, but quickly became disillusioned by the violence of the forming totalitarian Soviet state. She considered this a betrayal of the revolution and wrote a series of articles for the New York world that have gone down as one of the first exposés of conditions in the Soviet Union. Goldman's work was criticized by many left-wing intellectuals outside of Russia, but she was correct about political repression in the new Bolshevik workers' paradise. Matters did not improve for anarchists in the first 20 years of the new regime.

In 1937, in his History of Anarchism in Russia, E. Joroslonsky wrote, in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics at the present time, the anarchists no longer enjoy any influence over the masses. They are met with only as isolated individualists. The fall of the Soviet Union, the coming of democracy, and the slow rise to power of Vladimir Putin did not enormously alter this state of affairs. Russian anarchists still exercise relatively little influence over the masses. Most of them struggle towards autonomy as isolated individuals.

In March of 2022, in the third week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I sat down with one of these people. We had been chatting online through Reddit for a couple of weeks, and the process of setting up a proper audio interview was difficult to say the least. Repression of all political dissent under Putin is extreme. More than 13,000 people were arrested at anti-war protests in the first two weeks of the war, so you will understand why our source was paranoid about his identity. I had to download a secure app I had never even heard of before, and he only agreed to speak with me while using a voice-changing application to further disguise his identity.

Due to the difficulties this created, I will be paraphrasing him and quoting his words myself a couple of points here in order to make listening to this a more comfortable experience. But here he is. So just to make it clear, he's saying that he's been involved in anarchist organizing for more than a decade since around 2011. The initial cell he organized with was affiliated with an umbrella organization called Autonomous Action. We'll talk about them more in a minute, but it's important you understand that his cell, at about 50 people strong, was considered quite large for Russia. So, except for Moscow, in a similar way, there were several groups, I guess,

in protests, in meetings, etc., like pickets, whatever, there were like 400 or something like that, Marchi, but of course, in the whole city, there were a lot of people there, but from the initial cell, almost for 50 people, it was considered quite large. Even in 2011, organizing as an anarchist was rather risky. As a result, our source actually started his career in activism on his own as a single protester. He would stand out in public places sometimes during other protests, sometimes on his own, holding a sign that said, in Russian, peace to the world.

Now, I'm reading you the English translation of what he put down. The literal Russian words that he had on his sign were a reference to a famous Soviet slogan, officially adopted in 1951. The phrase actually has a much older origin in the country, which begins under the Orthodox Church and grew more popular among revolutionaries after the February Revolution. The first leftist to use peace to the world as a slogan in Russia may have actually been A.F. Karinsky, who headed the brief democratic government that ran things after the Tsar stepped down. In our source's case, his sign was an act of protest against a number of things,

including the recent Russian invasion of Georgia and Russian military operations in Syria. I was kind of a Soviet and I was just pretty, you know, pushing for, I'm promising for the court against all the ill stuff, all the bad stuff. It was lots of enthusiasm and almost nothing in effectiveness or organization or whatever, but somehow we managed to do it, not until winter or in the rain, but for a couple of weeks at least. Okay, we're doing this if we want to correctly. And then, before it's hot somehow, that's it. After he'd been seen doing this for a while,

members of a local anarchist cell found this person and started asking them questions. Hey, who are you? What are you doing? What do you think of this and that? He was not specific about the individual political questions they answered, and we probably don't need to get into that. They invited him eventually to a building where a number of them tended to gather and prepare for actions. In short order, they started organizing together. At the time our source started organizing as an anarchist, the most notorious recent action was the Khimki Forest Conflict.

In brief, Khimki is a forest with a long history as a nature preserve, it's kind of outside of Moscow. It's so densely forested that in the 1600s and then in the early 1800s when the Russians were resisting Napoleon, it was used by partisans and insurgents as a base of operations. When the Bolsheviks took over, it was preserved to act as a sort of open-air therapy center for tuberculosis patients. In the early 2000s, local city planners started to advocate for a toll road to be built through the middle of the forest. Their argument was that a large amount of traffic passed through the Leningrad Highway, and that had caused huge amounts of air pollution in the city of Khimki. Since the forest was protected by national environmental codes, turning it into a road was a long political process.

Activists protested, arguing that it would be an environmental disaster, which spoilers it was. Like anarchists in the United States in the period before the Greenscare, Russian anarchists carried out a series of occupation actions to try and protect the wild lands. So, from what I understand, it was before I joined the social worker. From what I understand, it was when the government was trying to get a toll, it was illegal, ecologists were against it, activists were against it. And from what I mean, it was violent, dire selection with fascists who were really beating the shit out of everyone who was trying to get there to do their job like us.

There was betrays and stuff. But in the end, it was like the government's win anyway. In 2012, shortly after our source began participating in anarchist demonstrations, the government carried out a major crackdown against certain anarchist activists. They focused primarily on groups and individuals who were doing things like making Molotov cocktails and engaging in property destruction. Now, our source participated in food not bombs and other non-aggressive types of direct action, most of which involved handing out food and supplies to people or helping them to get resources.

He did not disavow insurrectionary anarchists, the kind of people who threw bombs. But that wasn't the kind of thing he did and he didn't have a lot of connections with those people because roughly a year after he started organizing as an anarchist, most of them in his area at least got cracked down on and either killed, forced out of the country, or arrested by the government. This crackdown on insurrectionary Russian anarchists led to an even more paranoid security culture among those who remained. Our source and his comrades mostly distributed food, but they also provided support for a large number of children whose families had abandoned them due to crushing poverty.

Even though these things were not illegal, they had to maintain intense security culture to avoid being part of future crackdowns. Do you remember one of the leaders who said, please, don't talk to anyone, about the structure of the organization and stuff? What's that? We can communicate with people, but don't care for the information. Don't give them information who they need to know. One long-standing tradition among Russian anarchists was a sort of defensive isolation. People gave each other as little information as possible about their real identities. As a result, despite the fact that he has participated in multiple protests since the invasion of Ukraine

and people have been arrested at those protests, our source insists that he doesn't know if any of his comrades have been taken into custody. Now, some of this probably has to do with the fact that he's not organizing in a major city, but a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that he just doesn't particularly know any people by name. Polls, which are imperfect but cannot be entirely discounted, suggest that most Russian civilians support the war and their military. Even so, the scope and scale of the anti-war protests in Russia have beggared anything from recent memory. Our source says that this has actually helped to mitigate some of the despair you might expect Russian anarchists to feel, given the titanic increase in state repression.

From what I know, from what I see in the monitor, people start to get the hope. Is there still a better case there? If maybe one year ago it broke, they were just like, come on, we can do it. Everything will just go again and if it's going to find us, whatever. There is no despair in the place we don't see it. There are lots of action to understand, not only anarchists, but also radical attempts to organize in Russia, in Moscow, in St. Petersburg.

It's just like, I don't know if everything will be there, I don't know if it's like this. Some even authority orders in the streets. So, it's probably time that we talk about autonomous action, or AD. The Revolutionary Anarchist Federation that our friend and his comrades are affiliated with. AD actually has members in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was founded in 2002 and briefly had affiliates in Armenia before they disbanded in 2005. AD advocates direct action in order to, quote,

create a tradition and basis for a new humanist culture, social self-organization, and radical resistance against militarism, capitalism, sexism, and fascism. They consider the existing government of Russia as entirely illegitimate. They refuse to take part in Russian electoral politics, seeing even left-wing opposition parties as essentially controlled by Putin and only existing to provide a sham vision of choice. AD activists call themselves the autonomy and see their calling as twofold, to exist as autonomous free individuals within an unfree system, and to spread revolutionary sentiment and weaken the state.

Much has been said in the West of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician, who, whatever else you might say about him, is certainly not controlled opposition. He has survived an assassination attempt by the Putin regime and is currently incarcerated after leaving his exile in the West to return to Russia and fight the sham case against him in court. No one can doubt that Navalny possesses significant physical courage, and it seems fair to say the man believes in what he says. AD activists, from what I have seen, do not fault him and his willingness to suffer for his beliefs, but they believe that he is, at the very least, deeply misguided.

Navalny, they say, holds to a fundamentally errant belief that Russia could ever be a parliamentary democracy in the Western tradition. Their argument is that corruption investigations and electoralism are useless in Russia and always have been. And from a historical standpoint, it is difficult to argue with these claims. Autonomous action members do not support the Ukrainian state, and I have read articles from them where they describe the conflict in the Donbass, which simmered for eight years before exploding into the current configuration, as two fascist paramilitary forces backed by two capitalist governments.

However, they have been consistent for years that the proper stance of Russian anarchists is to support the Ukrainian people against aggression from the Russian state. Before Putin commenced his broader invasion in February of this year, Autonomous Action published an article with the title, Why We Should Support Ukraine. Quote, Putin is not just the gendarme of Europe, but the gendarme of the whole world, from Syria to Myanmar. Whenever a dictator tortures and kills thousands of his old people,

Putin is there to support him. There are no elections in Russia anymore. Even the most moderate attempts to change something results in criminal cases and persecutions. I do not believe that the result of this, yet another round of threatening declarations and building up pressure is a full-scale war. But as the conflict is not disappearing, a full-scale war may start after five to ten years, even as a result of a cycle of escalation, even if no one really wants it. And in case of a full-scale war, we should be on the Ukrainian side.

As Malatesta said, For me, there is no doubt that the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only from the educational point of view, than the best of dictatorships. Neutrality in a war between Ukraine and Russia would mean neutrality in an invasion of a democracy by a dictatorship. Now, our source concurs with the extant evidence that Russian citizens still broadly support the war, as I stated earlier. He was certain to acknowledge that there is still a great deal of propaganda,

largely pro-NATO propaganda, on the anti-war side of things. Given the information situation within his country, he admitted that he'd had difficulty parsing some things out. While acknowledging that his side also lacked perfect information, he felt that their stance against the war was safe, because in the end, it opposed bloodletting. If we can claim each other under some kind of propaganda, or at the western cramwings, whatever, even if you're under some kind of propaganda,

in the western, it's basically a case as well, you still have this reality on your side, that you don't want to go to war. He did admit that a number of people in his life, family and close friends, knew about his political sympathies, and he claims that the outbreak of war and the massive totalitarian swing Putin has taken over the last month have caused some of these people to be more open to his beliefs.

So I'm kind of thinking that I'm just thinking about life, I'm just thinking about what kind of stuff I'm into, after the war has started, and now I understand you're right. At the moment, the political situation within Russia is tremendously uncertain. All manner of dubious sources have claimed that a palace coup is in the offing, or has been attempted. Some have even spoken of the possibility of a revolution, or at least a massive protest campaign that forces Putin from office.

Our source did not consider that likely. In the unlikely event the government collapsed entirely, he was not particularly optimistic about what might result. Imagine a centralized government has failed, and there is no big winner. He mentioned to me that a number of his loved ones had come forward recently to ask what they ought to do. I asked how he responded to that question. Right now, we try to organize and help each other,

because there is a chance that our real currency will cost nothing, and we just need to survive. That's the first thing. Some formalization and interactions are more valuable than any currency right now. I see it that way. The second thing is that we need to start training, or start, I guess there is a term in English, or in English, when you have all the infrastructure.

Basically, for now, we need to have enough, what do you call it? And we always work and train. Yeah, works. He particularly mentioned the revolutionary importance of finding some way to either smuggle or produce medical supplies and medications. He knows one person who already had to flee the country, because his wife could no longer get the medicine she needed. He mentioned the sanctions levied against Russia as a major issue for regular working people.

But when I asked what he felt Western countries could do in this conflict, he was actually quite focused on something else entirely. He believes the United States has access to high quality satellite images of what happened in the immediate lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin's government justified much of their invasion on so-called attacks from the Ukrainian government that they claim had escalated against the separatist regions. Our source believes his government is lying about this. I think they know that Russia is not hostile to it, because you're waking in a fast-forward law.

It was done by many states. So here's the same thing. I don't believe that Ukraine has always, let's say, always some military. But compared to Russia, not so much any stuff. Maybe not as soon as possible, because it's still going on. At least it's going to help people to get their minds clear from the Kremlin's propaganda. Since the invasion, it has gotten notably harder, but not impossibly hard, for Russian citizens to get information about the conflict that does not come from the Kremlin.

Our source explained how he does it, a combination of using VPNs and understanding the nature of authoritarian propaganda. In short, even when the government is lying to you, you can get an idea of what the truth is by understanding what they want you to believe. Here's what I have in my VPN. I don't have any official messages, because at the very best they say what's going to, what's they trying to get into, but if you have enough, I'll say. When Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is selling us down in order to get a peaceful solution,

then at the same time, we hear that Syrian personnel are going to rail. For me, it means one thing. They want to postpone the fighting to get some time. He felt that one way U.S. activists could be helpful to Russian activists was by continuing to document and study the different munitions and tactics used by police in cracking down on demonstrations. He noticed that Russian police use similar and sometimes even the same weapons to the ones that the U.S. police used on crowds in the 2020 protests.

He believes the documentation done to study these weapons is helpful to people all around the world. He expressed some frustration at friends and colleagues of his who, after years of failing to truly grapple with the degree to which Putin had centralized power, were now fleeing Russia to avoid living under an increasingly totalitarian state. That's one of my colleagues going to, I guess, a video talking, whatever, just trying to support me like, you know, so weird stuff is going on in this political situation. He has decided to stay and to resist. While he has admitted to now studying martial arts and military tactics,

he did not have high hopes for any kind of confrontation with the Russian state. And as a generally peaceable person, he has decided that he will continue to resist in the way that makes the most sense to him by helping people and providing them with things that they will increasingly need as the economic situation in Russia degrades further. For me, helping people was kind of a life-sense concept. I've been struggling with that for at least six years. I wouldn't say it was depression, but it was heavenly.

But then I understood that, you know, one simple thing about anarchists and why should I call myself an alien? Okay, if I call myself an anarchist, then I should make one simple thing. I need to know if I'm human. If I call myself an anarchist, then I should make one simple thing. Ah, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where this today, I sit down with my buddy Jake Hanrahan and we talk about Corsica. Jake, how are you doing? How's the show? How are you feeling? Yeah, I'm all right, thanks. I got a bit of a flu, but otherwise everything's really good, man.

Yeah, you just took a little reporting trip down to the island of Corsica, which is not a place I know much about, and I'm going to guess not a place most of our listeners know much about. So why don't you start with kind of like what brought you down there? Yeah, no, that's a really good point. A lot of people don't even know it exists. I sent the documentary made with Popular Front to a friend of mine today, and he said, bro, that's the first time I've ever heard of Corsica. I was like, yeah, like a lot of people don't know about it. So it's a very old island, you know, more than 200 years, people have inhabited the place,

but generally for the last kind of 200 years, there's been an on again, off again, independence movement there. People that don't want to be under the control of France or whoever, they want control of their own island because Corsican is quite a specific culture. It's very different to French culture. It's different to Italian culture. They even have their own language called course. Unfortunately, it's kind of dying out as, you know, a lot of languages do in kind of contested areas, if you like. But yeah, so they've always kind of wanted to be independent in some way, not everybody, not the whole place. I'm sure you'll find some Corsicans that will say they're Corsican French, but generally the majority of people, if you go there and say, what are you, they'll tell you we're Corsican, we're not French, we're Corsican.

So in the 1970s, that kind of coalesced was rebirthed, if you like, with the backdrop of, you know, guns, bombs and independence movements across Europe, and a group called the FLNC formed the Nationalist Liberation Front for Corsica. And they arrived with 21 bombs on the island in one night. I mean, not arrived, you know, they were already there, of course. But they bombed 21 times in one night, mostly French infrastructure, and they were all very, very well armed. There was literally hundreds of members. And at one point, I have to, I don't want to say this 100%, because it's been a while since I looked at the research. But if I'm right, at one point in the in the late 70s or early 80s, the FLNC was actually the most active militant or terrorist group in the whole of Europe, even more active than the Provisional IRA.

Now, the Provisional IRA killed a lot more people. And see their targets weren't really to kill people, they were to blow up holiday homes and blow up French infrastructure. They did have open gun battles, and they did assassinate the highest ranking French officer on Corsica, on the island eventually. But yeah, so there was this real backdrop of very militant independence. When I say nationalist, it's not, it's not what we might associate with like far right nationalist, you know, when an independent movement doesn't have its own country. You know, the ultra nationalism in their sense comes out in a very different way. It's not we want to ban everybody else from here. It's simply we want our country, you know what I mean. So when I say ultra nationalist, that's not to be confused with fascist ultra nationalist is very different.

Not to say that course can do believe in in leftist causes. That that wouldn't be true. A lot of them do there's a big socialist element to the cause and there's also quite a right wing element to the cause. But ultimately, they all kind of want the same thing autonomy or independence for Corsica. So yeah, so that's the kind of history very briefly of militant independence movements in Corsica in 2014 the FLNC put down their guns. And recently, one of the FLNC was suspected FLNC militants who shot this this high ranking French official that I told you about this. This this guy is called Ivan Kolina. He was arrested after the shooting in the 90s and sent to a French prison for life. And on March the 6th, I believe it was he was no sorry much second. He was attacked in a French prison by a jihadist inmate and beaten into a coma yesterday or two days ago now he died of his injuries.

Ever since he was beaten into this coma, the youth would just kind of lit the place on fire, you know, they were really clashing very violently. And for the last kind of seven years since there was a was a was a relative calm on the island in terms of political activism and militancy. The politicians, the more moderate parties have tried to do this politically and for the first time in a while, the youth have gone, no, fuck it, we're not playing that anymore. We're going to knock the place about we're going to smash the shop up. And basically, it's kind of worked which we can go into but yeah, sorry to go on a lot, but there's quite a lot to it because obviously like you said a lot of people don't know. But one thing I will say is Corsica is just one of the most beautiful places anybody will go to like objectively it's idyllic. It's not really had this horrible holiday home vibe there because genuinely when when some contractors tried to kind of gentrify course to come and turn it into the next I B through I believe one of the quotes was from one of the people doing this, they kind of waited for them to build their homes and then blew them all up and blew up all their hotels.

So it was like they're like you're not going to do that here. Yeah, these companies were infringing on the environment, which is beautiful there and yeah so there's a lot more to it. But generally, you know, this all kind of revolves around militant independence. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think it's fascinating the idea of targeting like the degree to which a lot of this seems to be focused on stopping this place from turning into another vacation destination where like rich people second homes push out the population that's born there. I think there's a lot of places that like organize your complaint about that sort of thing. But I'm not aware of anyone who's gone to these kind of links to stop themselves from turning into another abyss. Yeah, yeah. And honestly, if you go to Corsica and see how beautiful it is not just I mean it's one of the few places in Europe where you can see the mountains from the beach. You know, yeah, incredible island. I've been obsessed with this place since I was about 24 years old. Firstly from the nature and the beauty there but secondly I was very interested in the militant group there. Because the culture there is so different. But yeah, if you look at the place you go there you realize like right this place is very much worth preserving.

Like there hasn't been businesses doing their thing there. They definitely is but certainly it feels preserved. There's no high rises. All of the old buildings are still there. They're still intact. And, you know, when these big businesses came in and a lot of these business men will almost showing off like yeah we're going to turn Corsica into Ibiza, which as a Brit, I will apologize to anyone living in Ibiza because we're one of the worst export ever. You know, like having sex in the street and throwing up at bars and everything when we go there. Yeah, it's kind of been turned into one big, not the great club. Yeah, yeah, not the great club, definitely. So, you know, it's one of these ones where it's like I kind of understand. I'm not saying anyone should bomb anywhere, certainly not. But I do understand the sentiment there. And one of the one of my close friends said some people were calling it like the cold bed policy. So you come to our island, you buy a holiday home and if you leave that bed cold, as in you're not even living here, it's going to get blown up, you know, Yeah, if you like. So very militant, very violent, but effective. I mean, it doesn't mean that you have to agree with it, but no one can deny that it hasn't been effective. But at the same time, there's a very big mafia presence on the island as well. So that, you know, it's not to say that everything is all for the people.

I'm going to guess that the mafia is more or less on the side of, you know, turn this place into a vacation destination, because that's where the money is. That would be my assumption. Really, that's interesting. No, so unfortunately, the independence movement, not all of them, but there is an element to it that is very hand in hand with the mafia, most definitely. Interesting. Perhaps some people that were independent militants are now mafia, if you like. And people have been killed on the island quite a lot. There's quite a lot of, you know, unsolved murders there. It's quite sad. But no, they were more for keeping their own interests, you know, we have this island, we can run the docks, we can run this, we can run that. And whilst what you said, like, makes sense, right, you would think, oh, no, they'd be for this money. I think what they want, they're still nationalists at the end of the day. They won't control, but they won't control in their own way. And if a big business comes in and starts saying, oh, yeah, we're doing this and that and the other, and we're bringing all these people in via the docks, I guess they lose control of that, essentially. So they were very much on the side of, yeah, do what you like sort of thing.

That's fascinating. And I think we'll find a lot of it. Yeah. So yeah, very unique, very specific place. You mentioned at this action you showed up for people bombed 21 targets. Was it 21? 21 in one night, yeah. In one night, yeah. When you say bomb, are we talking like your standard molotovs or were they kind of like more elaborate devices, shall we say?

How would you describe what they were using? Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, when you think of 21 in one night, you think, right, like molotovs, small... Right, something simple, yeah. Yeah, no, no, there weren't even pipe bombs, you're talking fertilizer bombs. Oh, wow. Yeah, like blowing up whole buildings, you know. Not all of them, you know, there were some smaller ones, but some very significant ones and very, very big.

The way Corsica is, the way it's laid out, like I said, it's a small place. I think only like 300,000 people live there roughly. And there are mountains, there are beaches, there are very rural communities. It's an island, it's quite far away from France, actually, it's very close to Italy and Sardinia is just to itself. And it's just for them, if you were, you couldn't ask for a better location if you wanted to be a kind of guerrilla group, you know, you really couldn't. Yeah. It's kind of built for them. So they just got away with it, you know, farmers, whatever, they went into the mountains, build bombs, drop them off.

And not to say that everybody was for them, but there is some, it wasn't just we want independence. There was subjugation by the French, you know. Firstly, they're like, we don't want to be a French colony or whatever you would call it anymore, which I think anybody that wants their determination to not be held by a former colonial power is fine or current colonial power, if you like. For sure. I think, yeah, fair play to them. But secondly, they're one of the most poorer regions, despite having all this holiday stuff, despite having a lot of produce, despite having a lot of reasons to be there. So there's definitely something I won't claim to know too much about the law situation, and I'm sure a lot of French people get angry, whatever, but it is genuinely doing very badly in many different aspects. Is that mismanagement by them?

Is it because of the French? I couldn't tell you, I don't know enough about it, but I certainly find it very weird that all of these beautiful things that are happening on the island and they're constantly in, you know, the lower bracket of situations economically, culturally, they're getting kind of sidelined a bit. So I do understand, and certainly when the clashes or even protests happen in the 70s, the police, you know, French police, I'm sorry, but there's some of the worst fucking police ever. Oh, yeah. You know, I've been in front of Turkish police, like French police are fucking up there. They're horrible. And they beat the shit out of a lot of people in Corsica just for peacefully protesting, you know. So it didn't come from nowhere, you know what I mean?

There is more to it than just nationalism and independence. There's a lot more to it. They want to, they want to, they want to deal with their own affairs, a lot of them, you know, most people probably now want to do it democratically. But like I said, the youth were said, no, fuck that, we're not getting anywhere. And they've actually, it's actually worked because the day after the riots that we filmed on March 13, the interior minister of France basically said, right, we're willing to discuss this with you. We will go as far as autonomy. That's literally a quote he said, which is quite significant. Yeah, after seven years of basically stalemate through the politicians.

So the youth in a way, one of the very few examples of this, specifically in Europe, the youth, what they're doing kind of worked. You know what I mean? Yeah, direct action got some goods. It's got some results right now. It started the process of getting the goods, hopefully. Absolutely. Yeah, it has. And the thing about the Corsican youth is they're very intelligent.

They're very, they're very authentic in their political activism in the sense of it's just they're born into it. It's in them, you know, from the age of like 12, 13, they're understanding it. They're getting told about the legends of blah, blah, you know, there's this militant group and whatever, whatever. So there's very much in them in that sense, kind of in a, you know, like the Kurds are kind of, you know, not the same level, but that kind of vibe. So when they go to students, when they go to uni and they become students, they're not really forming their political opinions. They already have them. They already got them. And then they, they sort of hire, they sort of germinate together.

So that's from what I understood anyway, that's from what I gathered. And, you know, your average trendy young man and woman on the street there is very political. It's kind of like Greece in that sense. Like it's cool to be political, but in the sense of not the kind, not like, you know, not, not something you bought into as a teenager, something that was already there. And then which, which there's nothing wrong with it, you know, most people form their political opinions in unis or whatever. But for them, it's already in them. You see what I'm saying? Yeah.

So they already have, they're already united in that sense. You know, so when they get to the uni, they get there. It's like, okay, well, we all want independence or autonomy, but then the other things are lesser. So, you know, for the, in that reason, in that sense, I think that was quite interesting. And we saw like 8,000, 9,000 people marching, maybe. And then when the clashes started, you know, Israel, but like normally it's like, what, 100, 300 people stay. He's talking like 2,000 people. Wow.

Full clashing and men and women, like young girls, young men, like many, many, you know, so it was really, I was like, wow, okay. And one thing that I've never, I haven't seen for a very long time, I've very rarely seen it. Normally, when the clash happens, everybody, you know, your grandmas, your working man, you know, the people that support what's going on, but not able to clash or don't want to clash, they normally step back. In the Corsican protests, everybody just stayed. Like we were getting tear gas next to like 50 lads with balaclavas on, next to like grandma or auntie, you know, we were like helping people into the side street to get away from tear gas. It was very weird. They just didn't leave. They just were there the whole time.

Wow. Yeah, it's weird. When you're talking about like tactically, what is this, how are these kind of bombings being pulled off as you. So you've got like this huge crowd and they're just kind of like marching from target to target. So the youth are not really, I mean, they have some small kind of IDs. You know what I'm saying, the youth student, the youth protesters, but generally it's Molotovs, Bricks, burning barricades, but they very clearly know the island inside out. They know their streets, you know, obviously because they live there. And most of the police from what I understand are actually French called in from the island, from the mainland, sorry, to the island.

A lot of the CRS riot police, thousands of them were brought in. There was that they were actually completely outnumbered. They had to retreat at one point in the evening to go back to the prefecture, the kind of cultural French administrative building where the main target of violence was they had to retreat to get more ammunition because they just shot so much tear gas. They just couldn't, you know, they couldn't do anything. There were some teams like the youth, some of them had green armbands or green leg bands. So they were very clearly like a different unit and they were very well organized. They didn't have walkie-talkies, mind you, normally that that shows a closer sign of organization, but some of them were like that. Some of them were just turned up to fight and some of them were splitting off into different groups.

You would see one come in, they'd fight, fight, fight and then they'd leave and as they leave in another load would just come in in a line. It was, it was really quite interesting, you know, they'd really thought about it. It wasn't just a free for all, which it might look like, but, you know, after a while of covering riots, there's certain things you notice where you're like, ah, okay, they're planning this, they're planning that. You know what I'm saying? So it's quite interesting in that sense. But yeah, man, it's yeah, thousands of thousands of youth fighting. It did get messy. I think 44 police were injured, 13 protesters and one pedestrian. That was the official figures. I saw at least three pedestrians injured and I think probably more protesters and definitely more cops, I would say.

Yeah. I mean, obviously it also depends on like what your rating is an injury for that sort of thing. Yeah. And a lot of folks probably are avoiding the hospitals and being dealt with at homes and whatnot because they were committing some crimes. Yeah. Just like, you know, at home with super glue instead of sticks or whatever. Yeah. Do you have a sense of like how long what the kind of the back end of this was the preparation process was for this? Yeah. So the classes have been ongoing before we got there for about a week. So even colonel was beaten into this coma.

He was he was attacked in prison. There's some rumors that he said some kind of Islamophobic thing to the inmate and don't know how true that is. But all we know is the guy was actually a convicted jihadist. It's not kind of hearsay. The guy, the inmate was a convicted jihadist because obviously even colonel is in the type of prison where what the state says is terrorists are there. You know what I mean? Anybody terrorist is there. So it makes sense. He's amongst these people. I think he was attacked in the gym when he was on his own and he was strangled and this is where. Yeah. Yeah. This is where there's a weird point of contention.

He because of the special status he had as such a violent militant, whatever, he shouldn't have really been on his own like that. People speculating did something happen. But generally, most people we spoke to were like, it was probably just negligence, you know, they weren't very conspiratorial. There was someone like, oh, the French, the French plan this. I doubt it doesn't make much sense to do this right now. Like, you know, they would knew what would happen to even colonel to the people. Sorry if even colonel was hurt because he's a big, you know, a big name there. There's also some, you know, maybe interesting arguments around the case, the way he was arrested. Apparently the gun doesn't match up. I don't know. I didn't really get into that.

But either way, he's like a, you know, people that love him, you know what I'm saying? He's like a martyr for them, even though, you know, he shot this guy in the back in cold blood, essentially. But for them, that was a political assassination, whatever. So for about a week, the youth were fighting and I saw a video or anything that happens in Kursk, I'm like, right, I'm looking at it. And I was like, okay, this is a little bit different. Okay, Molotovs are out again. I haven't seen that for a while. And then the next day, and then the next day, and then it spread one night to like five different cities or like, sorry, three different cities, like big, big places. And then they burned like a very specific monument.

So that was like, oh, it's on. So for at least a week, they were, they were planning something, you know, and there was enough kind of momentum there, I think, for them to organize. Certainly, we know that there was people from Ajaxio, the capital city in Bastia, where we filmed like a lot of people drove in. They came, you know, specifically for this clash. So that was quite interesting. I think the youth movement have a very strong network there. And there's also quite a big football ultra scene there. So the day before the clashes, Bastia and Ajaxio had a derby. So obviously, I imagine a lot of the ultras or at least I know a lot of the ultras were also part of the independence groupings and part of the clashes. So I imagine that a lot of the football ultra is kind of organized, you know, at the match today before, or at least a week before. So I think there's quite a lot of organization there, you know.

What do you feel like is next? Do you get the sense that because the government has announced their willingness to sit down and talk that maybe folks are going to wait to follow up this? Or do you get the sense that they're going to kind of keep the pressure on? Well, the thing is, there was one option before Ivan Kolonar died. And now there's a new option that he's died. You see what I'm saying? Right. I think what you're saying would have would have happened. I mean, I don't know, but I think the youth would have, they would have held off the fact that the Interior Minister of France who answers directly to Macron within one day or less than one day said, we're willing to go as far as autonomy in these discussions.

If you stop being violent, I think the youth was smart enough to realize, all right, let's stop. Let's see what he's got to say. I'm sure if things faltered, if things didn't move quick enough, they would have very quickly stepped up the, stepped up the violence again. However, now that Ivan Kolonar has died, I don't think that they're just going to wait. So from what I understand from speaking to contacts and friends in Corsica, there's a period of mourning right now. You know, his funeral, he died in a prison in Marseille. He wasn't even transferred to Corsica to die. So for a lot of them, that's incredibly offensive. That's the kind of spark that started these clashes. It's all about independence and autonomy on one level.

The thing that drove this and sparked it was Ivan Kolonar's attack and the fact that there's a lot of Corsican prisoners, which are political prisoners are in prison in France at Corsica. Anyway, so now that he has died, I really think that there will be a moment of calm due to the funeral and respect for Ivan Kolonar and whatever. And then I think maybe a week after this week, I think it's almost inevitable that we will see some form of violence again. I've spoken to some people that may be going a bit far, maybe being a bit dramatic. I don't know, but they speculate that there'll be a little bit more than just clashes. One person I know said, I think they're going to blow something up again. Do I think that probably not? But certainly when we were in the streets, they were using, there's photos of it as well.

They were using very crude, but very small improvised explosive devices. Now, when a group even starts to do that, you know, okay, it's a very small device. It was in a kind of like a, basically a tennis ball type thing with it, with whatever in it. But it was fucking loud. It wouldn't really do much unless it probably blew up right next to your foot. But when they're even considering that, in my experience, that tells you that people, there's an element that are ready to go further up the ladder to the next level. Does that mean they're going to blow somewhere up? I don't know.

I don't see it personally. You know, these, these young people are very clever. I think that would be an insane decision because it would, France would have no option but to basically flood the island with a lot more police and maybe even military type police. I don't know. Maybe not. But, but yeah, anyway, we'll see what happens. But again, my point is not, not that I think this is going to happen. But there's that talk, which we haven't seen that kind of talk in Corsica for quite a while.

You know what I mean? And there's actually people now genuinely worried like, okay, where's this going to go? Which can never be a good thing. The French state really has to be careful here. And I think the fact they've now said, we're going to go as far as autonomy. Maybe they at the very least have to be shown to be doing that very quickly. I think, you know, otherwise, for a lot of people in Corsica, it's like even colonel colonel died in vain, I guess, and it's not just the youth. Everybody, even people that perhaps really don't like that the youth were fighting really don't support that level of violence.

They still support even colonel and a very sad he's dead. You see what I'm saying and the way he died and even even Bastia FC, the football team, one of the main football teams in Corsica. They said, oh, you know, we're very sad that he's dead. You know, a hero has died, that kind of thing. So he's a very, he's seen as a martyr now, definitely. Yeah, I mean, that's a predictable outcome from killing the guys in prison. Right, right. Right, right.

So we're kind of in this like waiting to see what the next step is then, I guess, like it's kind of this weird sort of like political liminal space, I guess, where the next steps are there's a number of things that could happen. That's the perfect way to describe it. Yeah, definitely. It's this very everything's in transition. It's it's very it's it's either calm before the storm or it's calm that turns into something positive. But I just don't see it, you know, after almost two weeks of extremely violent clashes, very well organized after seeing them on the ground as well. These are brave lads, these and women as well. These are not your kind of average weekend warriors. They're very, very up for it. You know how people clash in Paris like French people, they're very up for it. As soon as they find they'll fight, you know, it's like that times 10 from what I experienced because it's got the kind of incubated nationalist identity separate from France. But whilst also having kind of fiery French culture and fiery Italian culture influences and fiery Corsican culture.

Not to say that they're not very nice people. Everyone was absolutely lovely, very, very friendly. But you can tell they're, you know, they're a fiery people. They're active. They're about it. They mean what they say. So I don't think that the youth will just go quietly from this. Essentially, a political prisoner, a martyr now, and then for them to just go, okay, we'll just relax now. I don't see it. You're talking from like, you know, probably in the full week of clashes, maybe four, five thousand people together throwing rocks, burning barricades, throwing small improvised devices at cops. So then just to go to nothing after even colonized eyes, I'd be very, very surprised. I think the only way that that would happen would be for France to go, okay, here's your autonomy. And then that energy could be turned into a celebration.

I'm saying that should or shouldn't happen. I just think, theoretically, that's the only way that it could avoid violence because the energy is there now. You see what I'm saying? Not on like a esoteric level. It's just the level of like, they're revved up. They're ready, you know, in the attitude to kind of, it's in the air. It's in the air right now. So you published just a couple of days ago, your little documentary, like short documentary from Popular Front, which has footage, yeah, a little dispatch, which has footage from this, which people should definitely check out, especially if they'd like to see some of the tactics that we've talked about on this, this episode so far. Is there anywhere else you might recommend they go for further reading on this subject? Not to be only Popular Front, but we, it's just something that I've just been specifically fascinating and obsessed with for a long time. So when the time came, I was very well prepared. Everyone has said, like, oh, you know, this is, this is crazy. Like, you know, how did you understand all of this so quickly? Because I've been reading about it.

And the problem with a lot of the French reporting is, you know, it's naturally very French skewed. It's a little bit sneery, like all the island people are kicking off again. Whereas it's like, no, come on, like, this is an incredible, beautiful place. Of course, they want to preserve it. Of course, they want to control it in whatever way they want to. So again, it's very difficult. But I will say that there are some really good reporters there. There's a friend of mine from Corsica, Lionel Dumas. He runs like a thing called Corsican Passport or we used to, which was kind of a kind of humorous, but at the same time, you know, news about kind of Corsican related patriotic stuff. And then who we worked with, Jean Collin, he's not related to Yvonne Collin. Yeah, like it's it's quite a, you know, common last name. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Plus, it sounds quite, you know, all right, you must be related. But over there, it's like, not Smith, but you know, it's quite common.

So yeah, Jean Collin, he's great. And there's also the local papers in Corsica course mutton. They're really good. You might have to translate stuff, but they're very on the ball. You know what I mean? They're focused on everything. So if people are interested in it, honestly, I would say like seek out local French reporters from what I gathered as well. There's a quiet, but really thriving kind of youth media. I wouldn't say it's a it's a movement, but there's something growing there. You know, I spoke before I went out, I spoke to quite a few reporters, really nice people, really enthusiastic, really, you know, loving their island, but not full of hatred or anything like that. That's something that I've seen a lot of French people say, Oh, Corsicans are really full of hatred, they're racist, they're blah, blah. And it's like, I didn't experience that. And at the same time, it's like, have you been to Paris? Yeah, you've seen a French right? Yeah, you know, like, it's like, at the end of the day, I think the whole region probably has an issue with that.

But certainly the youth are very open minded, very nice. And like I said, this isn't just me basing it off of one trip. I've been fascinated with this place for about six to eight years. And I have not experienced anything like that. Sure, you'll hear the old comment like, oh, you know, very, yeah, it's Europe. Yeah, it's Europe. Exactly. Not to minimize it, but like, it's not just Corsica. Exactly. Whatever. But generally, you know, for a small island, it could be way worse. And so I had a lot of French people like they're really nasty, they're really violent. And it's like, they're not actually like, they're very angry, but they don't hate, they don't hate the French in that sense of like, oh, you're a French person, kill you. It's the same thing as we hate the state, you know, like, and at the same time, they have a very quite a few people brought up Ireland and the Basque situation and Sardinia. And so they have this, they have an internationalist mentality as well, actually.

And in fact, years ago, there used to be a youth conference in Corsica hosted there. I don't think it goes on anymore. But it was hosted in Corsica by what was a very well organized radical socialist youth movement in Corsica, where people from Northern Ireland, people from the Basque country, people from what's the one in Barcelona? Oh, um, Catalonia, yeah, Catalonia, yeah, people from there would come, you know, all people from different breakaway regions or whatever. And they would all come and they would all meet in Corsica and they would talk about tactics and politics and whatever. So it's a very, very interesting cultured place, amazing history, fucking Napoleon is from, Napoleon is from there, you know, that's all you want. So, yeah, it's a really cool place. And, you know, we only documented one side of it, a very radical side of it, because that's what was happening that weekend. Yeah.

But there are a lot of moderates as well. There are a lot of like political, very smart, political, moderate moderates that are like, look, we don't want violence, but we do want autonomy. We want something. And they, you know, they said, oh, you only showed the militant side of it. It's like, well, you weren't on the street that day, you know, these kids were. So obviously, yeah, that's how it worked. But yeah, I would try to question it again. Sorry, I would say just if you're interested in the region, check it out. And there's, there's a film, if you can find it in English subtitles, send it to me. But there's a fictionalized film about the FLNC. I think it's called A Life of Violence. That's actually like quite good. It's a bit romanticized, but it's quite good in terms of explaining the situation there. So if you speak French, check that out and just check out like Kors Martin and all these these other kind of local reporters there.

People are like, oh, it's too hard to find them. It does feel like that. But once you find them, you find them all. So awesome. Well, Jay Kanrahan, thank you so much. Check out the new Popular Front Dispatch on Corsica. On the YouTube, by the way, the popular YouTube. Yeah. So check out all the popular front stuff on YouTube. You've got a great documentary out also about the territorial defense militias in Ukraine that you filmed right before shit went, you know, where it is. Yeah, we started in it because we were a bit like, how do we, how do we make this most relevant? But it's coming. It will be quite interesting. I'm excited. Yeah, the perspective beforehand. Yeah, the shit you're posting on Twitter was really interesting. Yeah. So yeah, check that out when it's out. Check out all the popular fronts, other stuff. And yeah, thank you, Jake. Let's have you back on soon. Thank you very much.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast, the podcast. The podcast where we go, ah, every episode. When you open too many podcasts, you lose the ability to open podcasts. Anyway, St. Andrew, this is your episode, so I'm going to let you take it away. Take us on a journey. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Hi, good day. Good afternoon and good night. Today, we just wanted to cover a rather broad topic. I don't even know if it's going to be released before the end of February, probably not. But in honor of Black History Month, I wanted to cover the history of Caribbean resistance to slavery and the different ways that manifested across the Caribbean. For those who don't know, slavery in the Caribbean took place for several hundred years, beginning with the enslavement of the Amerindians,

and continuing up until the abolition of slavery in 1834, at least in British territories. Before then, there were multiple struggles against the institution, both passive and active, and in every step of the process. And then, of course, post-slavery, there were also multiple rebellions and insurrections and strikes that took place in the region. But I can't cover the, well, there are about 7,000 islands in the Caribbean, give or take. But I can't cover the histories of all of those for the past couple thousand years, but I will try to cover fairly generally the different forms of resistance that took place. Starting with, of course, the resistance that took place in Africa. I mean, even before enslaved people were put on these ships, even before they were captured, there were measures that were taken to protect themselves from enslavement. There was, of course, flight in the sense of running away.

But there was also evidence of Africans moving their villages to inaccessible areas like mountains or deeper into the forest where less accessible for enslaved people, sorry, for enslavers to try to capture their people. One of the more famous enslaved people, Oluwada Equino, he founded a society in Britain after being enslaved and taken to the Caribbean and eventually moving to Britain after becoming a freedman and starting the Sons of Africa abolitionist group. He had written his own autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oluwada Equino in 1789, and he detailed some of the horrors of slavery from an enslave person's perspective. And so a lot of what we know about slavery and how it occurred comes from his personal account, among others, of course. So he spoke about some of the measures that were taken in his own village to defend against capture. But after being captured, of course, from the Kingdom of Benin around 1745, he ended up being taken on the slave ships separated from his families and carried with 244 other people across the Atlantic to Barbados. And then eventually taken to Virginia, and then from Virginia being bought by a Royal Navy lieutenant and eventually being freed. During the voyages that occurred, and they were multiple during the whole triangle trade, it has been said that one in ten of all Atlantic crossings, through the middle passage, had some kind of rebellion.

Whether it be through taking control of the ships and attempting to seal them back to Africa with the assistance of the crew or without, or of Africans battling against other ships, or in one case in Amistad in 1839, some Africans were taken captive above a border cargo ship, and they freed themselves, killed the captain and the cook, and forced them to take them back to Sierra Leone. But instead, the owners of the ship ended up taking them to the United States where they were captured by the Coast Guard. Jesus. Yeah, it's a lot. One slave ship surgeon, guy named Alexander Falconbridge, became an abolitionist because he saw all the, but first of all, he saw the horrible conditions that were present on those ships in the middle passage where, you know, hundreds of people were shackled together and crammed into these tight, enclosed, dark, wet, infected spaces for weeks on end while being taken across. And of course, a lot of the so-called cargo, the people who were on route to be enslaved, were killed by the conditions present on those slave ships.

However, despite the fact that, you know, so many people were dying from the terrible conditions of the ships, the slave trade was so profitable for the enslavers and for the economies of the colonial nations, that they were still not only able to break even, but profit massively from the excursions. And even though the middle passage got more and more dangerous for crews as rebellions became more and more expected, production for more shackles, more weaponry to keep captives secured, arose in England and helped to secure some of their travels. Of course, there were also times where Africans would burn the ships they were on, or where they would jump off of the ships as I'm sure many people remember, Killmonka's famous final words in Black Panther, and from what I remember, the first enslaved people who arrived in Hispaniola immediately ran away and were able to escape before being recaptured. Once enslaved people arrived in the horrible conditions at the various colonies in the Caribbean, one of the major projects of their colonial overlords was to convert them while in the process of, you know, enslaving them. Of course, a lot of enslaved people were dying very rapidly due to the diseases and the terrible working conditions they had to endure.

But for those who did survive, separated from their families, from their ties to kinship, from really their home and everything that came along with it as displaced indigenous people, they had to figure out ways to maintain and protect their cultures from, you know, naming conventions to craftsmanship, to language, to philosophy, to beliefs, to music, to dance. These were all elements of African cultures that would provide psychological support for captives who needed to resist the process of enslavement. Because enslavement is an act of breaking the will and erasing the humanity of the enslaved, practices like voodoo in Haiti or Obea in Trinidad and Jamaica were able to strengthen the revolutionary efforts of rebellious Africans. And so in the Haitian Revolution, you know, they were fueled by voodoo and the ceremonies that occurred then and were able to eventually, you know, free the people of Haiti and establish the first independent black republic in the new world in 1804. So other forms of cultural resistance and one of the main forms of cultural resistance was the preservation of African culture through pre-alization, through the melding and the hiding in some cases of elements of African culture with European cultural forms to create these new cultures and new languages. Quio is one example, particularly Antillian Quio, which is related to Haitian Quio. These languages helped to maintain some measure of identity for people who are actively being stripped of it.

Women in particular played a major role in this process of cultural resistance and cultural preservation because in African societies, African societies were often matrilineal and matrilocal. And women played a key role in passing traditions on to their daughters and other young women and to the community at large through storytelling and through the sharing of skills and beliefs and ideas. And so African women played a major role in keeping that tradition going and that lineage going, maintaining the memory of people like Anansi and Brerabit and Mamadoulu and Soukian and all these other folkloric figures who bear the marks of African traditions. Women under slavery also had to do what they could to resist the consistent violence, sexual violence that was being done to them by their colonial masters. Abortion and birth control and other forms of resistance against sexual assault, resisting their masters, feeling illness. All of these things worked to not necessarily protect them, but to keep them going and try to stave off the worst elements of violence that was being done to them. As I mentioned, the Haitian Revolution and it being fueled by voodoo and whatnot, it really scared planters across the Caribbean and across the world really like this was the first time something like this had ever happened before. And I'm sure the US audience knows a bit about the consequences in the US, how Southern slave masters were so terrified by the Haitian Revolution, how France imposed restrictions on Haiti and how the US and other European powers were complicit in that attempt to strangle the First Black Republic.

But there were cases in other parts of the Caribbean where planters in their terror used the Haitian Revolution as an excuse to crack down on the enslaved. For example, in Trinidad, in the Christmas of 1805, the Haitian Revolution ended in 1804, so in Christmas of 1805, the planters were so afraid and had already seen some acts of poisoning that were occurring on some of the estates because part of the cultural resistance involved the passing down of certain recipes and poisons and concoctions. And so many enslavers fell victim to poisoners and so they had to try to find a way to prevent what they saw was a planned uprising. They basically invented this idea of a conspiracy in their paranoia that was meant to wipe out this entire slave voting population in Trinidad in one go. So, of course, as historians have uncovered, the conspiracy most likely didn't actually exist, or maybe perhaps not today, the scale that the slave owners thought, but it was more so an attempt by the planters to impose greater authoritarian rule. As Christmas Day 1805 approached, the details of this conspiracy or this plot started to be uncovered by the planters. They thought that, you know, at this place called Chan's Estate, enslaved people were organizing to launch the revolution. And of course this terrified them because at that point in time, the enslaved population was somewhere around 28,000 whereas the white slave-owning class was like half that number.

And so the authorities declared martial law and apprehended those involved, if they were even involved, oftentimes they were not. But it does bring attention to an important part of enslave resistance and that being the conspiracy and actual existence of slave secret societies. Secret societies are something that is something that's common in the African mainland where tribal rights and initiations and advancements through those rights in secret groupings were to sort of denote levels of rank or maturity. And so in Trinidad's slave society, as different tribes mixed and mingled on plantations, for security reasons, these secret societies continued but had assimilated some European systems of order and designation. So they gave themselves names like Major or Captain and described their societies as regiments. And the echoes, the descendants of those societies still exist to this day in Trinidad. They are highly obscured. I honestly don't know much details about them. I just know that I have some friends whose relatives are involved in those secret societies. And in some places, like for example, Grand Coover, where enslaved people seized the land and sort of held that land and kept it and passed it down across the generations. Such secret societies and membership in such secret societies is not unheard of.

So what did the modern-ish versions of them do? What are they doing, I guess? Like these days, if that's something that is... I don't know much about them or how they operate. And so I don't think all secret societies in Trinidad are descended from enslaved secret societies. Obviously not. They are other secret societies. They are societies of doctors and of lawyers and different trades. They are, of course, Mason groups as well. And I really know the most superficial details of most of these groups. Yeah, it's an interesting thing that comes up a lot. There's a whole bunch of these sort of secret society groups that wind up being part of the 1911 revolution in China. But most of them kind of go bandit after the revolution happens. And so it's interesting to see different contexts where they don't seem to have just overtly turned into organized crime groups.

Right. What's the organized crime groups descended from secret societies in China? The Triads, for example? I actually don't think the Triads descended from them. A couple of them joined the Communists. A lot of them kind of got wiped out in the sort of just general warlord fighting. And then some of them kind of got stomped up by the Communists because they were basically turned into organized, their own organized crime things that were sort of distinct from the other ones that existed. Right. There were seven major rebellions in the colony of Jamaica between 1673 and 1686 and several others in Antigua, in Nevis, in Virgin Islands, in Barbados, just across the Caribbean. There was continual African resistance and rebellion. And that really is what struck fear in these stakeholders at the time. In one case, in 1733, during the Amina Rebellion on St. John, which is part of the Danish Fusion Islands, or was part of the Danish Fusion Islands, the African insurgents took control of the island for six months before being defeated. And the most slave rebellions really occurred in Jamaica. In fact, more than all the other colonies, more than all the other British colonies in the Caribbean combined. One of the most famous of the Jamaican rebellions was one that started in 1760 by a man known as Taki, and it lasted for over a year before being suppressed by British colonial forces.

Because Jamaica's population was massively, overwhelmingly, lack in comparison to the very small minority of large slaveholding whites, they were more likely to launch and more likely to succeed in slave revolts. Slave revolts are more likely to happen, of course, where slaves outnumber whites, where masters are absent, where there's economic distress, where they are split within the ruling elite, and when large numbers of native-born Africans from one area are brought in one time. Which is why they often had to split up there with people that they captured so they wouldn't be able to collaborate with their kin. We often remember the flashier forms of revolts, such as the revolt in St. Joseph in 1837, led by Daga, who was a former African chief in Guinea, and the leader of the first British West India Regiment. He mutinied, along with 240 men, and although they were taken into custody and sentenced to death, they marked just one example of the sort of bold actions that were taken by the state people. In Tobago, in the year 1770, there were numerous armed revolts over the next 11 years, from 1770 to 1801. Six armed revolts, one led by an enslaved man named Sandy in 1770, two in 1771, one in June and the other in August, one in 1773, another in 1774, another in 1801. And so these revolts were not concentrated in one specific area of the island.

They would happen, in some cases, over the entire island. Tobago was, of course, separate from Trinidad until 1899, where it became a ward of Trinidad and Tobago. And so their histories, the history of Trinidad and the history of Tobago, were running separately for the first couple hundred years of the age of colonization. But Tobago's history of resistance is still connected in some ways to Trinidad's history of resistance in the sense of the bold actions that were taken by enslaved people. Of course, not all resistance to slavery was so bold. Day-to-day resistance was by far the most common form of opposition to slavery, whether it be through feigning illness, staging slowdowns, ignorance, deliberate carelessness, arson, sabotage, breaking tools, these sorts of expressions while they reinforced previously held perceptions of enslaved Africans at the time. They also were ways of enslaved people to express their alienation and to sort of carve some level of space or breathing room or to give themselves some sense of catharsis in that brutal period.

And so what we see is a sort of continuum of resistance from that sort of individual level of slowing down or feigning ignorance or whatever, to the sort of broader cultural methods of passive resistance, such as cultivating and passing down culture and cultural memories to the more bold aspects of resistance, such as revolts and rebellions and revolutions. And of course, there was the practice of maroonage, both petite and grand maroonage. Petite maroonage was an effort by individuals or groups of enslaved people to escape from their plantations, permanently sometimes, but usually for a limited amount of time, to escape mistreatment, to negotiate better treatment, or to even just catch a break, honestly. Grand maroonage is more commonly understood and recognized where communities of fugitive slaves would establish communities on the fringes in the swamps of Louisiana, for example, or in the mountains of Jamaica. And these maroon communities have been established since the very beginning, since the early 16th century, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish. They would often unite with Amerindians, whether it be, you know, Tainos or Kalinagos or Guajanatabes, and unite with them in their resistance, in carving out settlements or strongholds of safety. For example, in 1546 in Hispaniola, there were over 7,000 maroons among a slave population of 38,000.

After the island was split between the French Santo Domingo, which is now known as Haiti, and the Spanish Santo Domingo, which is Dominican Republic. In 1697, maroons took advantage of the hostility between France and Spain to maintain settlements along the border between the two throughout the period of slavery. In addition, there were maroons in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and in some cases with Puerto Rico. Fugitive slaves from the Virgin Islands would literally set sail to Puerto Rico to settle and escape their enslaved ones there. In Jamaica, of course, there were many maroon communities, and in fact, there is still an active maroon community in Jamaica to this day that has persisted and maintained their traditions. In St. Kitt's, in Antigua, in Barbados, in Martinique and Guadalupe, all of these islands have had maroon communities established. However, as European cultivation of the islands increased, as Europeans ventured further and further into the islands, into the depths of the islands, it became more and more difficult to establish maroon settlements. Because if you look at some of the smaller islands, it's kind of difficult to hide or to establish any sort of sustainable community on the fringes of an island that you could easily jog from one side to the other, or walk from one side to the other.

Of course, even on those smaller islands, there were still attempts to maintain maroon settlements, such as in St. Vincent or Dominica. In St. Vincent, the Garifuna, which an indigenous group who mixed with Africans, preserved their independence against both French and the British, and they ended up spreading to, if I recall correctly, Central America as well. And so the Garifuna community is still very much alive and well to this day. In Jamaica and Cuba and Guadalupe and in Hispaniola, maroon communities were able to last longer because they had more mountainous terrain to hide in, particularly in Jamaica. But there were also maroon communities on the South American mainland. In Brazil, there was the famous maroon community or quilombo known as Palmares, which has existed for nearly 100 years, from 1605 to 1694. There is a certain invasion by both the Dutch and Portuguese and had at least 10,000 organized members ready to defend their population. They were governed by a king who used the political traditions drawn from Central Africa, but they unfortunately were eventually destroyed. In the Guyana's, French Guyana, British Guyana, which is now called Guyana, Dutch Guyana, which is now called Suriname, maroon communities were also able to establish themselves and they still persist to this day due to the

Amazon rainforest and the riverways that allowed them to conceal themselves from colonial encroachment. In the US, there were also maroon communities like the Black Seminoles of Florida or the maroon communities in, I believe it was Louisiana. In most places, of course, maroon communities were not very large or often did not last very long. They were usually small griller bands led by an elected chief. But of course, these small bands in there, although they were small, that sort of protected them to some extent from detection and from recapture. In Cuba, for example, there were hundreds of small maroon communities and they were guarded and they had their settlements guarded by ditches and stakes and secret paths. And these settlements communicated with each other while remaining isolated so they could grow their own crops and hunt and fish and trade in peace, sometimes with other islands in order to prevent again, capture and destruction. I think there's a lot that we can learn from the different forms of resistance, small and large, that instead of people undertook throughout the period of colonial settlements and expansion and enslavement, elements of their practices that I think could be applied to today's struggles. Do you have any thoughts before we wrap?

Yeah, one thing I kind of want to plug is Russell Maroon Schultz wrote a really interesting, I don't know exactly what the name for it. There's an essay, I guess, called The Dragon and the Hydra, which is a study of organizational methods and it's about basically a comparison of different kinds of resistance to colonialism and enslavement that talks a lot about the maroon movement, so sort of the problems that these sort of like highly centralized top-down movements ran into versus the kind of stuff that these sort of more decentralized, less hierarchical maroon movements face and it's really interesting and it's pretty short so everyone should just read it because it's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he covers the US, Haiti, Suriname and Jamaica and how those different maroon communities dealt with their conditions. I'm pretty sure he wrote this from prison too, if I'm remembering my timeline history correctly. Yes, I highly recommend folks give that a read. I mean, I don't want to give the impression that maroon communities, whether it's like valiant utopias, I mean in some cases maroon communities were manipulated against the other and often in exchange for maintaining their autonomy, they were made to sign treaties where they would have to turn in fugitives, so it was not by any means a perfect situation to be in but they were trying to carve out their survival. Yeah, I guess you want to plug your stuff.

So you can find me on Twitter at underscore seen true and on YouTube seen down tourism where I have lots of stuff. I mean, if you were interested in, for example, the details of how spirituality played a role in African resistance, I have a video on that. If you were interested in, you know, how worldwide equino established the sons of Africa group and how that was one of the foundations of what eventually became the Pan-Afghanist movement. I have a video on Pan-Afghanism that you can check out. So yeah, that's it for me. That was great. I didn't know there were still maroon communities actually. Yeah, yeah, the one in Jamaica, the one in Suriname, they are still very much alive and well. Yeah, that's fascinating. Oh, Saint Andrew, thank you for that. That was wonderful. And that's that's our episode for today. So go home and doom scroll for several hours, probably.

Or do something productive. Or take a nap. Take a nap. Or go outside or something. Pet a cat. Bake some cookies. Hand out food to people who are hungry, you know, Bake some cookies and then hand out the cookies to people who need it.

Or doom scroll, you know, all productive things that are going to Some significantly more productive than others. All right, friends, that's that's the episode. Peace. Oh. Robert, too bad. Try harder. That's how you start a podcast. This is it could happen here.

That's right. That's Robert talking. And that's right. Also, with us today is Christopher Wong and Garrison Davis. Do your podcast. Yeah. Uh huh. Thanks.

So we're all gathering today on on the day after what I think will go down as the single most momentous moment in the 21st century. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars. So the entire world has pivoted from obsession with the massive land war in Eastern Europe to discussing how Chris Rock getting slapped is like the massive land war in Eastern Europe or or 9 11 or 9 11. Yes. Yes.

Yes. So it's a it's an amazing like an unprecedentedly incredible time to be on on Twitter right now. That said, we're going to talk about Nazi cat boys today. I've seen everyone's posts on the subreddit being like, why aren't you guys giving blow by blows about the war in Ukraine? This is this is the most pressing topic. And we're going to talk about Nazi cat boys previous to the Chris Rock slap.

This is the most pressing topic of the 21st century is why there's Nazi cat boys. And now we're going to talk about it. Well, because I mean the roots of the crisis in Ukraine are the different kinds of cat boys that Zalinsky and Putin are. Yes, Robert, that is true fan art up. It's going to be fine. We have sure I'm sure we'll find some horrible fan art. Yes.

Yeah, we have to figure out if if Putin's ever watched Shelsing and then we'll be able to know. So I don't know what that means, but okay, you're about to find out. Oh, great. So we have we have gathered here today to talk about to talk about the curious case of why there are Nazi cat boys throughout through 2020 and 2021. TikTok and Twitter pushed fanboys and cat boys into kind of the cultural mainstream, plunging these once much more niche subcultures out of the dark depths

of fortune, Reddit, Tumblr and Discord. And the the latest rebirth of these kind of gender bending communities. It's pretty socially progressive and affirming like generally most most fanboys cat boys are our lefties. There's a whole bunch of like Twitter communists. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of cat boys who like Stalin or something. But they're generally more generally more on the left. But but but for those who've dug deeper into the history and origins of these

internet subcultures, you may have found a dark racist and hateful underbelly. So we're going to talk about that today. I do have to note, Garrison, as soon as you said that, I found a Stalinist cat boy. That's it. It's an incredible account. So the their background image for their Twitter account is a picture of Deng Xiaoping and the Ayatollah of Iran having a meeting. Oh, boy.

Their their PFP is a lavender haired. It's like a it's like an anime pick her avatar cat boy. Yeah. Yeah. With like a Soviet hat and then Marxist-Leninist bisexual cat boy. Stalin did nothing wrong at North Korea stand. Incredible. Incredible.

This is this is why the left will never win. Oh, that's perfect. I'm pretty sure this is like illegal in those countries. Well, it would have had this person shot in a second. Someone tried to describe a cat boy to Joseph Stalin. He would have had this person executed. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah, I see. I see it now. That is that is intense. Outstanding. You know, the thing is this type of thing is not going to be uncommon. We're going to be again, we're going to be going into like actual fascists who are also cat boys. And obviously they would have been would have been killed for being degenerates as well.

But now we're going to kind of talk about how this how this kind of came to be. And I've been writing this for like over a year. Actually, I've interviewed a few people for this that have kind of contributed to the script. And initially this was going to be conceived as a video. And you can't really talk about these things in a video format without dressing up like a silly character. So I am I'm wearing a very actually a very, very high quality cat boy outfit right now,

which the audio will just have to you'll have to you'll have to see it through the audio. So good luck with that synesthesia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you are at the same time you've done that enough that I don't know that anyone really noticed. I've never dressed as a cat boy for a recording before.

You dress as something every other recording. That's true. I dressed as something. I generally dressed as something. So first, section one, section one, what is what is a cat boy? What is what is this? So but first of all, a few ground rules will be circling back to often. One, not all cat boys and femme boys identify as LGBT or queer.

And two, gay people can still be racist. These are these are these are these are two points that we're going to be coming back to over the course of these of these deep side episodes. So first things first, let's let's let's define what a cat boy is for all of the boomers in the audience. And if you are if you are a boomer listening to this, how I am, why, how did you find this wire? Why did you choose to listen to this?

The instant I became a boomer was the first time you tried to describe explain cat boys to me. Like I I I suddenly developed a strong opinion on HR Haldeman because of because of you. So that was a next administration joke. But most simply, a cat boy is this what I'm doing right now. So someone who is kind of kind of boyish, who who who sometimes enjoys dressing in cat like apparel, I guess it's like cat ears. It is different from furries from and we will we will get into this.

That's good. I mean, I'm definitely less boyish than I first was when I wrote this like a year ago. Now that I'm on recreational estrogen. But nevertheless, someone who's a boyish and dresses or likes to dress in cat like kind of outfits generally on an anime trajectory of aesthetics. Now this is this is this is different from furries for multiple reasons. The physical cat like attributes on cat boys are mostly confined to ears and paws sometimes with tails.

But it's iffy. Whereas, you know, furries like to have like the full fursuit thing going on. Whereas cat boys, they still have like human faces and they wear like human clothes. So this is actually a very key difference which will lots of made costumes. Like and yes, a lot. And the other other big kind of recurring trope is that is that well, they well cat boys generally usually usually wear clothes is that they usually dress up in something similar to like a French made outfit or or like different outfits like anime girls will wear.

So like the tennis skirt thing, but generally a made outfit to anime trajectory. So despite despite the animal ears, right, despite like the furry cat ears, the cat boy or cat girl thing has much more in common with the Fen Boy community than the furry community in a lot of instances, but more more more on that later. So after some initial research into the Nazi cat boy meme, I decided it would be useful for tracing back the roots of this kind of odd online phenomenon to broaden the scope of research to include Fen Boys as well, which is succinctly just cat boys without the cat part.

It's like boys who are generally male identifying people who dress in like feminine ways. Not a lot of Fen Boys will turn out to be trans. Not all of them do. A lot of Fen Boys identify as straight, but you know, it's like to wear, you know, boys generally kind of in the twink of variety who likes to wear skirts dresses, whatever. So I'm about to move into section two, which gets a little bit more silly. But but yeah, so Fen Boy is more silly. Great.

I'm excited. This this doesn't get less silly as we go on. But but yeah, cat boys, Fen Boys, Fen Boys identify as male dress up in more stereotypically feminine ways. There's a lot of similarity and crossover between Fen Boys and cat boys. But since Fen Boys have more of an established online history, including them in the research seems like the best way to kind of dig into like the fascist Fen Boy Nazi cat boy idea. So speaking of section two, the racist Fen Boy meme, the past the past few years, there's

been kind of a growing meme and perception across social media that Fen Boys are like really racist and just kind of pretty flashy in general. Even really homophobic and transphobic in a lot of in a lot of senses as much as a homophobic or transphobic Fen Boy may seem contradictory at first. But again, more more on this later. So when I'm talking about this going forward, I'm probably going to be mixing words and terms like Nazi and fascist and alt right or far right. Now, not not all of these racist Fen Boys are what I would call Nazis by any means.

And not not not all advocate for even joke about genocide. But there were absolutely recruitment attempts from self described Nazis. And you know, the line between jokes and actual beliefs is intentionally very foggy on this kind of internet subculture. So I'll kind of be lazily lumping together everything from racist to far far right wing folks for the sake of simplicity, because it's all like in the same spectrum. And like I mentioned at the beginning, not all Fen Boys and Cat Boys identify as being queer and gay people can still be racist.

These are these are points we're going to be circling back to a lot. So at this point, the alt right Fen Boy meme has kind of actually overshadowed the actual phenomenon of it happening, right? In the past few years, the popularity of leftist Fen Boys has skyrocketed. Yet if you still do digging on like Twitter or Discord, you can indeed find users who appear to be Fen Boys, but are also everything from racist to just openly fascist. Now, naturally, that leaves people wondering how can one have such a kind of contradictory lifestyle and belief system, which leads us to section three, the internet.

And that's it. That's kind of that's kind of the answer. We can kind of pack it up here. That's the answer. It's the internet. That's why that's why this is happened. Al Gore's fault. That's what I'm getting out of this.

Yeah, sure. Garrison, are you are you? Have you been caught up on why people say Al Gore invented the internet on where that joke came from? Are you? No. Oh boy. Oh, you have to you have to remember Chris.

Oh, no. Right. You were born after 2000. I was born after that. I was. Like Al Gore was among a bunch of different people who like voted to fund some of the different government kind of projects that became the internet, right? Like you have the ARP and that and shit, all that stuff.

Like he was one of the people who like pushed that. And then in the debate with George Bush while running for president in 2000, he like basically made some claims that you could uncharitably translate as him saying that he invented the internet. Cool. And I would say that it was more like he was saying, well, I supported from an early stage the development of the internet, but it got turned into like Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet because it was funny.

Yeah. Yeah. Abstraction essentialism. Yes. And so now that's the joke is even though he didn't really, he just was not, you know, anyway. So there you go. Welcome.

We can blame Nazi cat boys on Al Gore. Great. Absolutely. Well, that does it for us today. You can find us on wait. Okay. We still have like half an episode to do. That's good.

All right. Well, here's here's speaking of of of Al Gore and the internet. Here's some ads brought to you by the internet. Oh, boy, those ads were so good. They made me want to be a cat. Okay. All right. Wow.

Moving on. If you're in any way familiar with fascism, you are probably aware that one of its more consistent traits is that it's notoriously ideologically inconsistent. So for this project, I interviewed multiple people who have a more personal history in the cat boy and fem boy online communities than I do. So those interviews plus my own online digging through like hundreds of threads from various forum websites. I've literally looked through hundreds, hundreds of cat boy posts on 4chan.

But doing, doing all that has been very helpful for understanding kind of this intersection of politics and subculture. And since I did all this research, you don't need to. So there you go. But one of the first kind of big takeaways I had after the research and interviews is that the Nazi fem boy cat boy thing is not actually unique at all in terms of internet radicalization. It just has some aesthetic abnormalities that can be seen in the internet.

Some aesthetic abnormalities that can confuse on liquors or normies, which makes the internet phenomenon seen more outlandish than it actually is. But before we dig deeper into this litter box of hate, I would like to divide the fem boy and cat boy kind of racism spectrum into actually two, two succinct categories first. We have, we have type one, which I'm calling the fem fash people who are initially into fem boy community and aesthetic and then got introduced into far right politics online. And then we have type two, the fash fem people who were already into far right politics and only then got introduced to the fem boy community online.

So I usually break down lots of instances of fascists mixing with various subcultures into these like similar, like two, two categories of people starting off with politics and then getting into the culture, then people starting off with the culture, then getting into politics. I think it's actually kind of, it's useful for understanding a whole bunch of how there's differences between different types of fascist people in various subcultures. So these two types I'm going to be using to help to help talk about these different kind of strains of the fascist fem boy. For now, we're going to focus on the first one, the fem fash.

So let's, let's, let's wind the clocks back, let's say a decade. Broadly gay people can't get married and to most kids trans people are ostensibly a myth. So what kind of person is going to become a fem boy in this, in this type of environment? Simplest answer is like a certain sect of social outcasts and anime nerds, as well as some people who maybe don't consciously know or accept that they're queer yet. Really the only way to get initially exposed to the fem boy aesthetic back then was via anime, manga, hentai, porn, and, you know, select video games, specifically multiplayer games, and random and internet browsing, right?

This is, this is how you're going to get exposed to this type of aesthetic. In fact, one of the, probably the oldest example of a Nazi cat boy is from an anime called Helsing, where they had a, they had this Nazi cat boy character who is the, who was the source of a lot of Nazi cat boy memes on 4chan, like the very, very popular meme figure. And this is, I think, a lot of where that aesthetic tied to fascism actually really starts from. But of course there's a lot of fascist fans of anime in general. So the type of aesthetics that, the type of aesthetics of femininity that anime kind of presents get used by fascism a lot, even among like, they're more like cottagecore styles.

It's still that very like patriarchal type of femininity that is popular among Japanese animation. So now the reasons that someone might be drawn to the specific community can vary from person to person. Maybe they just don't feel as connected to like the hyper macho masculine style that American culture promotes. Maybe it's a way to get attention and validation, or maybe you just like wearing skirts or find it kind of hot. There's, there's, there's always the possibility that someone is trans or gay and they just don't fully know it yet. This is the case with a lot of these people actually. But some of you may be surprised to hear that before our modern TikTok fanboy craze, most fanboys did self identify as straight and cis.

There is a lot of reasons for this, including like increased homophobia and transphobia back then, plus like non-binary was hardly even a thing like culturally at that, at that point. One of the people I interviewed for this project talked about how some of the cis straight fanboys he knew back then now do identify as trans or queer, but back then that wasn't really the case. The other person I interviewed for this called themselves a cisgender fanboy at the time of the interview, but has now since come out as trans. So like it says, it is definitely a recurring pattern, but it's not a thing for everybody. Like there is definitely like a lot, like a lot of these people do call themselves straight, even still now.

And that is something that a lot of kind of people don't have a, don't have the easiest time kind of comprehending. That's what I'm going to kind of try to get into. So let's, let's, let's say you're a kid, a young teen in like 2011, you're getting into anime and video games. What kind of websites are you going to gravitate to, right? You're going to gravitate to Reddit. You're going to gravitate to 4chan, especially in like 2010, right? These are the, these are kind of the cultural mechas of, of those types of types, types of subcultures. So what is prevalent on these websites? Well, on 4chan, we have a slash B, which is their random channel, which also has a not safe work designation.

And it was often flooded with fanboy pics. And since there are so few female users of that site, you see a lot of hentai and occasionally boys dressing up like not safe for work female anime characters. Just cause there's people, people still like femininity, but there's so few actual girls using those sites that the femininity that you see is either through anime or it's through kind of cross dressing. Then there's also the slash D page, which is just completely dedicated to hentai. So you get a lot of, a lot of, a lot of that type of like anime style of femininity through kind of that type of appropriation and fetishization on the slash D page. So there's a decent chance that anime and gaming nerds that browse their interests online will get exposed to fanboy stuff at some point, right? Nowadays, it's discord used to be 4chan used to be Reddit. So it becomes this type of figure 8 infinity loop of people who are exposed to something and then start propagating it and get exposed to new people to it. And it's this like continuous cycle.

Cause if you're a kid who discovers they kind of like this super niche almost taboo thing, where are you going to go to find other like minded people? You're going to go back to online multiplayer gaming, Reddit and 4chan. It's all the same circles. So if, even if you don't get exposed to it in places like 4chan, you're probably going to end up there or somewhere similar regardless. And the other, and the other thing that's important to talk about, which is going to talk about like how, how the fanboys start getting into politics is like, who else is very prevalent and actively recruiting on these types of sites, on like multiplayer gaming, on Reddit and 4chan. It's Nazis, right? The people who are into very far right politics try to mask some of their beliefs initially in like humor and memes. A large part of an internet radicalization is done through memes, especially back in 2010. There's like so, so many like memes as a means as a social and recruitment tool or very, very common, especially on like, you know, if you're on like an image board, that's the whole point is that you're sharing images. So a big part of this over representation of racists in the femboy community was simply the online proximity between these groups of people between the femboys and then the fascists on 4chan,

early Reddit and certain online games, whether it be like Second Life, whether it be like MMOs, you know, all these types of places and any place that you can like design your own character as well. You got a lot of this type of like anime femboy type thing, because a lot of a lot of these games that are made in Japan can like give like more feminine options for like male characters, or just have like cat boy like ears and stuff available as a cosmetic option. So a lot, a lot of this fetishization that we see on 4chan and on and in the early 2000s and 20s is now is now applied to discord like this is kind of carry over. 4chan's obviously not the kind of cultural behemoth that it used to be a lot of this stuff just happens on discord now, where you can kind of cultivate online communities that are more self contained. So throughout the entirety of the 20teens fascism was pretty successful in festering among nerd spaces, right, nerds and geeks of many types, whether that be gaming or anime or these more like esoteric communities, esoteric as in like niche, but these communities generally they attract people who are more disenfranchised right, and femboys generally feel disenfranchised in one way or another, which is pushes them into these, you know, less mainstream subculture. At this point, they could be pretty easy targets for fascist recruiters to start suggesting that maybe some of their problems in the world are actually coming from feminism, immigrant stealing jobs, affirmative action, and slowly leading into talk of like IQ and racism and antisemitism.

So for those who found these ideas initially like abhorrent, it can be explained that all this talk is simply edgy jokes and irony attempting to trigger the normies, which is a big part of that type of propagation of this type of humor, and then politics, master's humor on these sites and on these like gaming chats. This isn't unique to femboys or calfboys in any way, right, the more people I interviewed and the more kind of old forums that I read, I started to actually see stuff that seemed much more familiar. And there's a lot of parallels between this far right femboy thing and the far right furry phenomenon, which I know Robert and The Worst Year Ever podcast put together two episodes that do a great job kind of talking about the far right furry. The only real episode of The Worst Year Ever that we ever got to do. Yeah. But yeah, I could do, I guess just briefly kind of talk about the furry, the furry kind of thing and how that, because there's a lot, there's, even though these cultures are different between femboys and furries, the tactics that fascists use to get into these communities is exactly the same.

And it kind of plays on the same tropes. Yeah, I mean, it's weird. So you've got, I think it kind of harkens to the fact that like whenever you have a fandom, no matter kind of what the fandom is about or the message of the media, it's about you're going to have like Nazis in it. And that's obvious like Star Wars, right, where the point of Star Wars is Empire bad Empire basically spates Nazis bad guys. And there's a whole bunch of people who have just like made that into their life and get tattoos of the imperial sigil or whatever on their fucking chest. Or you've got like Disney movies where like there's these there's weirdos who will take far right nationalist messages out of like every like everything. Everything has its Nazis the punk community right punk music is supposed to be anti authoritarian and kind of inherently left wing but there's Nazi punk. So like it's all like every community has their Nazis and the furries are no different. One of the things that does make the furries different is I think because of how and this this is something probably your little too young.

I mean, I guess a lot of our audience may have missed out on aspects of but like early on in the Internet. And I'm talking like the first decade of actual Internet culture from like 1995 or 96 to like 2005 or six, which is really the first decade of like mass Internet culture. The punching bag of the entire Internet was was furries like they were the people that like it was the safest to make fun of jokes about like killing them all sorts of really fucked up shit. And so I think they developed kind of this very strong defensive impulse within the community. And so while every subculture has their Nazis the furries have gone kind of the furthest in documenting and working to like ostracize those people and they've done. They're on the level with like punks in terms of the degree to which they have like that has become kind of a guiding principle for a lot of furries. Yeah, is that kind of what you were looking for? Yeah, because a big a big thing you mentioned about like furries being such the punching bag.

Oh, that's something that Nazis even definitely kind of grasp on to as a way to do grooming and recruitment, right? Is if if if if fascists can present themselves as friends to these people who are always punched down upon, then they can kind of put them into their in groups, right? They can they can support them, give them give them a sense of validation, give them a sense of community, tell them that like that they they they belong. You're always going to be kicked out of like real life social groups, right? You can only exist here with us. We're going to we understand you like right they can they can kind of foster this thing. Even though obviously it's dealing with things that are not the most like not the most like cis and straight thing in terms of like regular heterosexuality. Maybe like a lot a lot of furries are straight. But like in terms of like the way they approach that is is definitely different than a lot of regular people.

But they so white pharmacists and different fascists can like grasp on to this grasp on to this kind of disenfranchisement and offer this sense of community. Be you know, be very friendly initially be being very being very kind of open these people and start and start, you know, the term would be like redpilling them, right? To talk about that a lot of their social issues are actually, you know, the fault of SJW is talking about these, you know, all of these Jewish bankers. You know, it can start you can start crafting the propaganda very carefully if you're friends with them first and then only start slowly introducing them into your more extremist kind of view of politics. Yeah, it's just no one's really surprised when an anime nerd or like a capital G gamer starts spewing far right talking points. And when a femboy does that just seems off because like, aren't they also a degenerate right like, like it's like what there is a bit of a cognitive dissonance there. And like, yes, and no right, you may be over estimating some people's commitment to the fascist cause here, because a recurring pattern I found we're talking to people with history in these communities, especially if they're more of like the femfash variety right starting off starting off with femboy aesthetics, then getting into being racist and and like, like pretty racist and then getting into fascism is that

look looking back, these people and they say like themselves and others, all of their kind of parroting of racist and fascist talking points, especially online was like they claim much more due to having to like fit in with these with these already pretty ordinary online spaces, and make friends at seemingly one of the few places that people with similar interests gather. You know, some people deep down don't really care about the political beliefs that much. And we're more so looking for community. And it just so happened that back then in the early 20s, the places where these communities of outcast found each other were also places that other outcasts used racism as lazy attention seeking as comedy, and like the triggering of normies, which was basically like a sport on these on these forums. Now obviously, this is not excusing any abhorrent behavior and or horrible things is that, but that whole idea, plus the active like grooming, and the active recruitment from Nazis made the nerdy outcast to fascist pipeline that we see today. That's really how it built up and became such a powerful tool, you know, around 2016. And there is there is the other all this just generally more applies to the people who are into Fen Boy aesthetics, and then got kind of railroaded into into nationalism and to fascism right. It's because they, they're Fen Boy's on these platforms. There's also racist on these platforms. So these things start to kind of mix. But there's still that other type of Fen Boy Nazi, the one who started off online with far right views, and then discovered other ways and started to feel things will be starting by talking about them next on on on Part Two. But I guess does anyone anyone have any any questions, at least to close off Part One, about the more kind of femme

fashion variety of people who are generally kind of more regular politically, but are into into like Fen Boy and Cat Boy kind of aesthetics and then and then get put into into into more reactionary ideas. Stay off the internet. Yeah, that's not a question. But yes, that is that is a that is a good, this is a good mission statement. But yeah, in terms of like in terms of like the this topic can whenever whenever I bring it up. I thought about this a lot when I've tried to explain it to people. There is always a bit of like that. How that doesn't make any sense. And I'll be getting to some of the more kind of semantics of it in Part Two, but at least at least for like the initial initial kind of dive into how the online community aspect is used as such a powerful tool for people who are feeling so alone that just the the idea of there being an online community, whether it be racist or not, can is just super appealing. Because if everyone thinks that you're weird in an outcast, if these other people who are also weird and outcasts start kind of trying to make friends with you, then it can be a very powerful like recruitment tool, which then of course they'll be people they'll be people. Yeah, who eventually try to like take them out of the whole Femboy Stetics in a lot of in a lot of ways.

But a lot of fascists also get into the Femboy Static because of the because of the proximity issue right because these things are so like next to each other. Well, the thing you're kind of important broader realization there and this is something that a radicalization scholar named Scott Atron has been talking about for 10 years now probably more is that people get radicalized in communities people like when we talk about radicalization, like why like I guess the other half of the explainer that I started this with being like, you know, every subculture has their Nazis. It's not because like the reason every subculture has their Nazis is that subcultures are like people get radicalized as part of communities as part of subcultures. They don't get radicalized as individuals just like people don't aren't just walking out in the world and decide to become a Nazi. They become a Nazi because a Nazi reaches them in something they're already into right like that. That's just the way it happens. Yeah, there's definitely a large part of this is like a group of like group dynamics, especially on places like forums where you're you know, trying to trying to get like this like attention battle.

I guess the other other big part about the femboy kind of idea, especially on image boards is like it is such an attention seeking and validation seeking place right you you want to you want to post things that gets you a lot of comments likes up votes whatever the kind of the metric is. Yeah, so people will do things that get them visibility, even if even if half the people interacting with you are calling you a degenerate, at least there's people still looking at you right at least you feel seen. And then the other half people will be like, no, it's actually fine, you know, so as long as there's that visibility in that sense of community, then a lot of the more cognitive cognitive dissonance aspects can kind of be passed by. But we'll get into more of that for for part for part two. Anyway, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at a happen here pot and cool zone media you can find me talking about cat boys occasionally on Twitter at hungry bow tie. And happy about it. Well, it's you know, I've been I've been trying to edit down this episode because the script was way too long and we're trying to make it more succinct the past few days. So my, my, my, my, my, I am, I am pretty excited to be to close this Google doc at the end of the day. Well, congratulations on all your hard work, Garrison and listeners at home. Go dress like a cat boy.

Yep. And then don't be a Nazi. Yeah, I mean, that's also important. Recording in progress. All right. Well, that's my opening Garrison. Welcome to part two of why they're not the cat boys. What is this podcast, Garrison? It could happen here. I'm talking about that.

The cat boys of Nazis, which did, which did actually happen here. They're actually, we'll talk about how they actually happened. But before we, before we get into the topic of fascists becoming femme boys via exposure, because I do, we're going to start off by talking about kind of, well, that generally the book, the episode's going to be talking about people who are fascists who then get into femme boys. Last episode, we talked about the femme fasc, people who are femme boys who then get into fascism. Now we're talking about the fascists who now get into femme boys. But before we get real into that, I think it's going to, I think it'd be helpful to get a bit more into what these online communities were like in the 20 teens. Now, all this info is like a combination of what I've gleaned from interviews, direct messages, my own pulling up of old like 4chan and Reddit threads. It may not necessarily reflect your own experiences perfectly, but it's the most in-depth I can do in an audio only medium.

Some won't be thrilled about this, but we do need to discuss traps and their place within the online community at the time. Which means we must define, which means we first must define another term for the blissfully unaware. It's really heartbreaking because when I was a child, Garrison, trap was just a house where you hid your drugs. It is not a trap house, this is a different type of trap. This is before a trap house turned into a podcast and a bunch of New York people didn't know what a trap house was. It's great. Heartbreaking. But the term trap is using it here.

At least on the internet originates in the early 2000s on image boards, specifically 4chan. As it got more popular as a term, it got more widely recognized as a slur, specifically usually a slur against trans women or a slur for any feminine presenting person who was a sign male at birth. It's use and origins, at least on the internet, comes from people posting pictures usually from anime of very feminine looking boys alongside the meme of Admiral Ackbar saying, it's a trap. This is how this idea of the trap started at least online. I talked with some other trans friends of mine. They say that definitely, in their opinion, they remember it being a term even before the 2000s on the internet

of being more of a slur towards trans women. I can't find any stuff online about that specific angle, but the term may be older than that offline, but at least the online use of it really comes from the Admiral Ackbar meme. Of course, it's a trap idea. It implies some form of deceptions at play with these drawings that appear feminine, but may actually be depicting adolescent males or worse transsexuals. Very scary. This, the soon, got transferred over from being applied to anime drawings to being applied to pictures

and then in-person encounters of real femme boys or trans people. If you found someone that looks female enough, as the meme would go, to be attractive and later found out that they were actually a boy or they were a trans woman, the idea was that you were deceived, thus you must be on the lookout for any kind of potential attractiveness of femme boys or trans women or else you too might be trapped. Again, it's often very transphobic and it's comparing femme boys to trans women because they're not the same thing. Obviously, it's very hashtag problematic for a lot of reasons.

But there's also the meme of r-traps gay, which is referring to a kind of satirical debate around whether or not it's gay to find a femme boy, a male cross-dresser, or even a trans woman attractive. Now, the meme does riff on the whole, like, fellas is it gay thing? And gee whiz, am I glad the fellas meme has surpassed the r-traps gay meme? Obviously, not only is the r-traps gay thing pretty homophobic and transphobic, it's also tied to a lot of real-world violence against trans women by men, all of the trans panic defense. The whole trap idea does tie into the trans panic defense a lot

of men who claim they simply had to attack or kill trans women once they found out that she had a dick. Or maybe used to have a dick, not even anymore, it doesn't even matter. It's more commonly called the trans panic defense. The mere thought of that was so scary that they used the trans panic defense in court when violence against trans women is enacted. Now, this is also much more attacks against trans women in this vein are much more common on trans women of color than white trans women. That's another important thing to mention.

Circling back to Fortune and Nazis and Fenboys, in the 2000s and 2010s, trap was almost like a badge of honor and self descriptor for many Fenboys as well. Being able to trap or pass for a woman while having a dick was like the highest level of Fenboy-ness. It was like top shelf Fenboy was being able to achieve this feat. Usually this was for the purposes of taking lewd pictures of yourself and then having them be well liked or spread across online forums. In my interviews with people from these online spaces longer than I've been around,

it was described to me by them that being like, Fenboys are just trying to look feminine whereas traps are really trying to look like girls. And that is kind of the distinction in these places at the time. Now, all while calling yourself trans was heavily discouraged and ridiculed, in 2011, Fortune, it was hard to even be openly gay, let alone transgender. But being self-described as a trap was much more accepted. A lot of people would actually self-describe as this or want to be self-described as this. They want to be at the point where they feel like they could say this.

And it's interesting because a lot of the attraction to traps was, in a lot of ways, genuine. But also all wrapped in this joking, ironic kind of exterior being like, oh, it's all like a bit that we're all in on the joke for, right? That's kind of how this was explained away. Another quote from my interviews is like, quote, if you actually admitted to being actually romantically attracted to traps or Fenboys, you would be heavily ostracized. People would say things like, oh my god, you actually did it, like you actually did the thing.

Because it was wrapped in this sense of irony. And any hint of sincere attraction was masked in this ironic joke-like facade. So at this point, Fortune is basically an amateur porn-filled cesspool of anime, gaming, edgy jokes, and increasingly bad politics, with Paul really taking the shape of the Nazi machine that it is today. So close proximity and probability is all that's necessary to make these racists and Fenboys have this uncomfortable awakening once they start seeing a whole bunch of pictures with people with dicks wearing made outfits.

So with all these edgy, ironic, and not so ironic jokes, the racists populating these chans, forums, and online spaces, it's only a matter of time before they get exposed to boys posing in Japanese tennis skirts and pink wigs, which helps create this infinity loop idea of Fenboys who get into racism, and then fascism, and then fascists who discover they like dick girls, and when boys wear dresses, because these things are happening right next to each other, it's this whole phenomenon of self-contradiction that just keeps itself going. So we're now done this section, thankfully.

I did not want to get into having to talk about all that stuff, because I know people don't like talking about it. It plays on a whole bunch of extremely transphobic tropes, but it is a big part of this kind of phenomenon. So now we're going to the next part, which is incels, gamergate, and anti-feminism. So I'm not going to focus a lot on the idea of repressed queerness here, the idea of rage homophobes being secretly gay, because I think that idea gets a little too much attention when we talk about this sort of thing.

Now, don't get me wrong, this absolutely does happen, but I generally view sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression as much more fluid attributes, even among people who consider themselves cis and straight. So I don't like defaulting to this explainer of being like, oh, they're homophobic, that means they're secretly gay, and I think that's kind of lazy and stupid. But when we're talking about the curious case of Nazi cat boys, most individuals involved not only identify as straight and cisgender,

but are also very homophobic and very transphobic, despite their overly queer behavior, because it is queer in the original sense of the word. And I think there's much more interesting ways to analyze this beyond the repressed gay trope. We've already talked about some fanboys and fanboy appreciators adopting reactionary and conservative social beliefs to fit into the larger culture around 4chan and parts of the online gaming community to find this sense of belonging and, you know, shared community among other people. But in order for the fascist fanboy to be such a lasting meme and trope in and of itself,

in my mind, there needs to be a bit of a stronger justification for the inherent contradictions beyond just finding community itself. And we will talk about that when we come back from our break. Here's some ads that are hopefully about how you too can go on Amazon.com and buy a made outfit. And we're back. Okay, we're going to talk about incels. What if one of my... Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah. Incels or like involuntarily celibate people, whatever. I assume people who are listening to this know what incels are. But the incel movement gained traction in the mid-2018's alongside Gamergate and the growing kind of anti-feminist movement. And alongside a mass shooting. It's probably worth acknowledging. Multiple mass shootings.

Yeah, there was many. There was also the Toronto attack when the incel ran over people in that van. There's been multiple mass acts of violence tied to the incel idea. Which is why a lot of us just call them horny ices. I've never heard anyone call them that before. Well, they are. I mean, admittedly also, this is also the same period where just ices is on Twitter. They sure were.

You just argued with ices. I would really want ices to chime in on the Will Smith debate. No, you don't. I would love to hear. You bet she sucked. No. I'm waiting for the Taliban's take. No.

No. No. No, no. Is violence against comedians justified? The Taliban weighs in at six. You could get the Taliban arguing with ices K. By God, it could be done. What a better world that would be.

Especially if Trump was still on Twitter and can mediate. Oh God, that would have been so funny. If Trump had been around on Twitter, it's the only time I've missed him. Just like, oh, yeah, yeah, that would have been that. That would have been the good shit. Anyway, yeah, in cells, it's a pretty good like ostensibly violent movement because it's it's all about making young men disenfranchised about their future, right? It's this fatalistic idea that they were promised things and now those promises are no longer

being kept by society. So you are kind of doomed to live a pathetic life forever, right? So it is a very fatalist idea that really kind of encourages acts of violence. But the insolvent was gaining traction around this whole time, right? Right beside Gamergate and the growing anti-feminist movement. And I think the key to putting this puzzle together is in the hatred and resentment of women itself as like a thing. I think this is actually a key part of why the Fenboy and Fenboy fascist thing kind of

caught on. So most of the loose organizing of these movements were happening on 4chan and Reddit, right? Eventually, eventually discord as well. These were the same places that were home to the anime posting Fenboy, amateur porn community. And one of the most common viewpoints at the time was that feminism is ruining women, right? It's disrupting the natural patriarchal order that many boys were taught existed, you know,

with promises of girlfriends and wives that are like rightfully theirs as some kind of obligation. Yeah, I mean, this is when we talk about like people being men being promised women, we're generally talking about like the way in which fiction kind of implicitly promises women as a reward for heroics or just being good. Yeah, it's like it's specifically like a cultural idea that is the best example of this. Star Wars Luke Skywalker becomes a hero and gets to gets to kiss his sister. You know, that's probably just the key, which is the driving, driving motivation of many,

many incels. I said they two can one day kiss their sister. Thank you, thank you, Robert, for that, for that synced analysis. I used to, I used to be a film's reviewer, Garrison. So like if you're taught and raised, like thinking that something like this exists, right? Like this, this, this, this correct patriarchal order, like it's like, it's, it's, it's almost like this like righteous truth. And if you then discover that like that's kind of a lie and that like women are actually

individuals with value not tied to the ownership by a man. Some men have a very, very unhealthy, often volatile reaction to this realization or confrontation. So some people then decide to do mass shootings, some people kill people, some people just do, you know, some people might just do, you know, like intimate partner violence, right? Say that they do get a partner at some point and it's not going the way they want and they just become abusive. So there's a whole bunch of ways this, this type of thing can manifest.

So faced with the work of like not being a dick and trying to combat this ingrained misogyny and then having to like actually put effort into being attractive and desired. A lot of men instead opt to either like attack outwards or withdraw inwards and sometimes a mix of both. So with the, with the fascist fanboy thing, a lot of this is like withdrawing inwards, right? A lot of these people are too introverted and too kind of cowardly to actually do like a mass shooting, which is like, that's, that's, that's probably good.

But then with them and drawing inwards, we're gonna, it's kind of manifests in this, in this, in this different way. So when dealing with this almost like misogynistic nihilism, a lot of dudes really lost hope in the prospect of a future romance with women. So instead of putting in effort to adjust their personality, adjust their behavior, change their part, change their patriarchal outlook and improve their physical appearance, many guys instead will retreat to their online communities full of other guys facing similar issues, right?

It's easier to live in front of a screen and not have to face other humans in person. So these, these people don't really have much substantial experience in real life interacting with the opposite gender. So these, perhaps, you know, these, these so-called straight guys that were drawn to femboys also may have had just had like bad experiences with women. They may have faced rejection and that rejection may have really brought them down. And then they assume that they're always going to be rejected by women because of like a few bad experiences.

And the kind of guys who are on these chans, forums and Reddit, online gaming, they tend to be generally more socially outcast, people who aren't necessarily super physically, naturally like attractive and masculine, right? You have to like people, everyone, almost everyone can be attractive. You just have to like put in work. If you just never do that, like a lot of boys are never taught how to actually make themselves look good. So they're just kind of like, just like, like,

Well, and also like attractive is, is a much like they, if you go on these in cell forums, they give us a lot on like, well, I have, you know, there's these folds and the creases of my eyes are like the way that my nose is built. They get very physically impossible for a woman to be into me. And it's like, no, like more than people, like there's all sorts of different preferences people have for physical things. But overall, like the number one thing you can do to be attractive is, is to be a person that people like be confident and be like, if you have like a good personality, like

learn how to do a variety of things and just like have, have a life. A lot of the other people are like, oh, that seems neat. They think that they can achieve, you know, they think that women should flock to them, even if they put in like no effort at all, right? If they just do what they're doing, they feel like, why is this not working? Or the effort they put in is like, again, Elliott Rogers, the perfect example of these kind of people, like the effort that he put in was he like made his dad buy him a really nice car and he dressed like expensive clothing and it's like, well, that's actually very few people are attracted to that.

And yes, the people who are attracted solely to someone having a nice car and clothing probably have really weird, specific, like physical things they're also only looking for. But that's because you were like, like that's not making yourself attractive as opposed to, I don't know, learning how to cook or learning, you know, a foreign language or, you know, being an emotionally available person who's not purely viewing relationships in a transactional nature where you're paying for sex by being friendly, you know? But, you know, it's easier than doing all that is just hating women. That is, that's a much easier thing for these people to do.

So they often default to this. The internet's taught me one thing, it's that it's quite easy to hate women. So while these like alt-right hellholes like 4chan and Reddit, online gaming is full of misogyny, all these places like really hate like actual women, they still heavily fetishize femininity, right? It's still viewed as this like glorious like thing that's put on a pedestal even though they hate like actual women themselves. So feminine dudes can be femboys or cosplay anime to garner attention or social praise,

you know, amidst some, you know, standard, you know, like people like, oh, you're faggots, you're disgusting comments. But you can, they can still like cosplay and dress up and post pictures without being totally shunned by their fellow edgy alt writers because it's kind of funny and some of them may actually find it cute even though they may not admit it. Femboys often do have, you know, I generally think cute and effeminate features. For these people, a big part of the goal is to like trick the brain

into thinking that you're just looking at a girl that might just so happen to have a penis. So therefore, when like viewing these pictures, these guys are also like getting a sense of familiarity with a girl like imagery while thinking that like they also might have a shot with interacting with this individual because they don't have a vagina so that makes it makes interacting with them like easier because there's like more things to relate to, I guess. You would see a lot of like role playing and like role playing of sexting and like role playing of dating girls through this femboy framework

just actually a really common occurrence as like, and it was it was explained as like, as like a sort of practice for imagining their future of dating women. It was like, it was like they're doing this to like practice interacting with women. So they're just going to be role playing dating femboys while being Nazis, but they're doing it so that it's like a practice so that they'll be better at dating women in the future. So that's actually a really common thing. Or like sexting as like, yeah, I'm just doing this for practice.

Like I'm doing this so that I will be good at sexting in the future. Just doing it with these femboys on discord, on four chat, whatever. Because like all of like the whole femboy thing is still dealing with the patriarchal views of beauty, right? It's femininity as this sort of performance put on for the enjoyment of others. And because it's about that like appreciating femininity itself, it's seen as a lot safer than full on homosexual attraction, right? Because it's allowed if you're if you can appreciate the femininity,

then that's allowed to propagate despite also kind of being degenerate because the person generally femboys usually self ideas male. But because it's wrapped in this feminine package, it's allowed to be appreciated. And for the people that did eventually come to terms with their queerness, the 4chan femboy thing allowed them to safely dip their toes into exploring like exploring homosexuality, bisexuality, exploring like gender bending without like abandoning the typical masculine feminine roles

that were kind of raised to be comfortable with, right? It's still in the regular masculine feminine like role sets, but it's approachable because it's allowed to be done through this both both this like ironic joke, but then also it's still it's still based off these patriarchal views of feminine beauty. So it's it's it's a weird thing. It's it's it's the other part of it that I like to explain to people because you're like, oh, that is like trying to picture fascists fake

dating each other online so that they'll be better at dating women in the future. It's just a very absurd idea. It's I it's very I'm actually fine with this. But like it makes like it makes sense like it like it like I understand it and you can like yeah, I get it and it did help a lot of people eventually realize maybe I'm not the straightest stick in the shed or maybe I'm not the straightest stick in the fascist. Yeah, I mean, everyone needs a safe space

to figure out what they are. And I guess that even includes fascists maybe because like not because I want fascists to be fascist, but because maybe some of them through this weird role playing role will like get over some stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Recognize that like, oh, maybe maybe I'm just like gay and I need to not like work on myself. Like work on myself.

Like I'm maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree with all this Nazi stuff. Yeah. No, because like it's amidst like the gamer gate and the height of the Incel era, these guys felt more comfortable exploring their bridging sexuality in these male dominated online spaces, right? It's easier to relate to other males when they're when they're all like growing up, coming of age, dealing with dealing with these like feelings of like abandonment, loneliness, right?

They do this in these male spaces. They feel a lot safer to express themselves. You know, whether or not they're full of fascists or like other people who are like very like reactionary because at least they can understand a male desire and that's they can relate to that and interact with people who are, you know, they can eat in our easier with people with dicks while wrapped in this feminine package, which is so much easier than the much more scary and much more elusive of like females out there,

right? That's kind of the framework that this was propagated through. It's really interesting that it's like you have these people who like they're like their trans misogyny is such that like they've they've escalated to a point where it circles back around. Yes. It is so intense. It is such a it's there's so much going on.

Yeah. It's like it's like it becomes this like I don't know. It becomes like the fact that it's like conceptually impossible for them for just like a woman to have a dick like that has like circled back around and just completely come to define how they have gender in such a way that someone who is like just is performing gender like as a woman like to the extent that like they're trying to like they're trying to have people use like anti trans slurs against them.

Yeah. There is. It's an interesting there's there's so there's so much going on because yeah, it's rooted a whole bunch of it's people exploring gender in this weird way while also like relying on heavily like misogynistic trans misogynistic homophobic kind of ideas. But it's it's also it's like it's very queer in this in like the way in the way they're going about it because it's a whole bunch of like self

it's a whole bunch of like self justification. It's a whole it's a whole bunch of like stuff around like what they view as feminine what they've used masculine what what they view like being a woman means it is it is it is it's a lot. Yeah. Like as as like a more as like a gender queer trans person I like I like look at them go through all this work and like wow they could have bypassed a whole bunch of bullshit if they just like less

of a dick like if they're just less of if they were just horrible people they could have experienced these same things but again like they were they're in their own isolated communities. They're they're dealing with these same ingredients just from this weird backwards way. So like it's obviously very transphobic in a lot of senses but a lot of these people eventually realized oh maybe I'm actually trans. So it's this it's like I don't know it's obviously not great

in a lot of ways but I don't know how to discuss it when saying like yes it's obviously not great for how like trans misogynistic it is but they're all working through some stuff. Yeah. One thing I will say about this is like yeah like if kids were actually allowed to be queer normally like this shit mostly would not happen like you wouldn't get so many people who get locked in these like who are queer who get locked into these spaces but then also like the only way

that they could express themselves in these like narrow isolated spaces is to like this shit or they're into the like just let people express themselves normally and this this you can deny the fascist recruiting grounds like. Yeah. I mean it's it's interesting like it's like when all these people are looking at interacting with fanboys I think a lot of the reason why they were able to play with these ingredients is that they did not

experience the same like anxiety or like heightened stakes or like negative connotations in their mind that they normally do when thinking about women because women are just like so other. So especially like if you can rationalize this attraction to fanboys as simply a prelude to dating like quote unquote like real women and whatever like fantasy Cottagecore future they might imagine then this idea is a way more approachable. Harrison you're going to need to explain Cottagecore for the last

years. I am not. We are having an ad break. I still in brief it is this like return to tradition obsession you see among like chunks of the far right who are obsessed with the idea that if they if culture was the way it was in the 50s or in like the 1850s they would live on they would live on a small farm with their wife and children who would be utterly submissive to

them and everything would be perfect. But like the only thing in between them and happiness is that they're not able to live in a in a in a small like the farm with a woman who they essentially own. That's the gist. I will say a lot of Cottagecore aesthetics are also used by liberals and people on the left as well just as like an aesthetic thing.

We all want to live on a small farm in the woods. The thing that makes it the Cottagecore that we're talking about is specifically the idea of I want to own a woman and and own my children and have like no no power capable of like stopping me from yeah because like Cottagecore and TikTok is pretty sanitized and pretty much like more of an aesthetic thing less tied to those patriarchal structures. But anyway like everything we're talking about there's the version

that's Nazis and there's the version that's like boy it sucks living in a four thousand dollar a month apartment in New York City that I share with nine people. I sure would like to live on a cottage in the woods. Anyway speaking of living in college in these woods if you buy these products it'll get you closer to your cottagecore lifestyle. So that's right. Give it a listen.

We are sponsored entirely by the concept of big cottage. Yeah big cottage. Yes. The cottage industrial complex. All right. We are back and now we're talking about the point of the Nazi Catboy debate that everyone I think who's familiar with this topic knew was coming.

No no breakdown of Nazi Catboys and the Nazi Catboy phenomenon is complete without talking about Nick Fuentes and Catboy Cammie. So Nick Fuentes. Yeah this is this is probably the part of the show that everyone's been waiting for. I don't know that most people would know to be waiting for this but Nick Fuentes is broadly recognized by our audience. So in short if George Lincoln Rockwell has the permanent body

of a 17 year old boy that would that's Nick Fuentes. As many of you know Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist live streamer and political activist that runs the fascist America first organization. He's known for fostering a farther right conservative base than say Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA and has pulled stunts like sending his fans called Gropers to Turning Point USA events to take over the Q&A sections and basically ask Charlie Kirk

why he isn't more fascist. Yeah so he runs this organization mostly known by doing his daily live streams. He's been doing this since he's like 16 or 17 years old. Fucking nonsense. And it's kind of a running joke or widely acknowledged secret that Nick is kind of gay based on the way he talks about women and based on what he said about his own dating history

and snide comments from fellow homophobic Nazi friends has led a lot of people, has led a lot of people to this conclusion that Nick may not be again the straightest stick in the fascist. Nice. Thank you, thank you. You did good there Garrison. Thank you. Proud of you. Proud of you for that one.

A significant contributing factor to this like questioning of Nick's sexuality is due to his 2018 to 2020 Catboy arc. So this arc begins in January of 2018. Finally giving our audience the important news. This is what you need to know people. That month Nick created a Catboy themed channel in his own America first discord server. Hell yeah he did.

With Nick messaging post Catboys in here please. With weird capitalizations throughout the thing. So Nick cheered on along with other people posting pictures of various Catboys from pop culture and Catboy edits of Nick Fuentes himself. One America first server user posted, Catboys are trad. Which means like traditionalist in kind of the sense that like

Nazis are traditionalist. That's what that person is saying. He also posted. Which is very funny. He also posted Catboys more like Catboys. Oh God. So like again Fuentes is like a Catholic fascist. Yeah so that's the joke.

Sorry I am losing it. I know. This is so funny. You're out of control right now. This is, it is so, I've looked through this discord. Nobody's arguing this isn't very funny. I've looked through this discord server multiple times for the screenshots of when you have the Catboy channel and it always

makes me happy. It is, it's one of the most funny things I've ever seen. Yeah as your friend I'm always warring between wanting you to be happy and worried that this is a cry for help. But please continue. Eventually Nick faced some pushback from inside the server for fostering degeneracy with others, with others defending the Catboy channel by saying brotherly love is Christian.

Amazing. Outstanding. See this is, this is, this is exact, this is the good shit. This is what we've been building towards as a civilization right here baby. God yeah. Other people, other people defended the Catboy channel by saying women don't respect Christianity.

Your tribe's thoughtory always leaks out eventually. Good God. Yes. That's, that's, that's the good stuff. I got no comment. Just perfect. Thank you. But because Nick is fundamentally a coward, he did cave

under pressure and deleted the Catboy channel. And we, we lost, I think the America first movement today could be so different. This is, this is why the cause of Americanism is doomed. This kind of cowardice. But, but, but as, as we will see. We'll cuck shit from Nick. Oh, absolutely.

This whole, this whole sections about Nick Fuentes being thoroughly cucked. But as, as we will see, Nick continued to use the exact rhetoric I laid out in my incels, gamergate and anti-feminism section while defending what he calls attraction to traps. And we can, of course, we can apply this, this defense broadly to Catboys and Femboys as Nick does. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to play a video about,

about Nick Fuentes. Our traps gay. Yeah, traps are gay. I've always maintained traps are gay. Of course you have sex with a man that's gay. There's no getting around that. Now that said, now that said, look, it's gay. I get it.

100%. I agree. Now that said, it's, you know, we're in times where the women are not really meeting their obligations. So I'm not saying you're not. Look, if you have sex with a trap, you're gay. No doubt about that. And you should be ridiculed.

You should be made front of. But it's a little bit different than if you did it like 20 years ago. That's all I'm saying. If you in the 1960s, in the 1960s were banging a trap, I would say, what's wrong with it? Like, I would say that now. I would say that now.

I would say we are some kind of sick freak. We have all these beautiful girls and they're normal, you know, and you have sex with a trap. What's wrong with you? But in 2019, it's like, well, it's different. It's a different circumstance, different options. You're still disavowed. I disavowed.

It's condemned. It's gay. It's all bad. But you know, it's just different. I think everybody understands that. Oh my God. But I'm still disavowed. I hate this thing.

We just have to have a little nuance, all right? A little nuance? Different times. It's a different time. I maintain strong disavow. Strong disavow. Do not. Do not.

Do that. It's gay. It's immoral. You're going to hell. And it's weird. And it's gross. Oh my God. What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you? What? Female. The female race. The female race. Yeah, I haven't heard that one in a minute. Pearson, I'm upset. That was horrible.

I haven't heard Femoids since the Davis Irini days, which folks at home, if you don't, if you missed Davis Irini, you missed the one brief moment where the far right was purely funny. That was bad. So being attracted to traps makes you gay, according to him. But not really, because the female race isn't carrying their burden like it once did back in the 60s. It's like back in the old days of the 1960s.

It's like they've like almost gotten back to the like, the, I mean, I guess it probably still exists. But like the thing you got with fascist sometimes where they were like, yeah, like I fuck dudes, but I'm a top. So it's not gay. It's like, they're like so close to getting back there. Sure. They're like so close.

And it's like. Oh, it's like Roy Cohn. Kind of. Yes. Yeah. And it's like, I think, I think, like, I think once we get like just slightly, like maybe like 20 more years out from like the evangelical, evangelicalism, as I don't know, I mean, maybe it's for certain just could be like a big enough heyday thing.

But it's like, I think, I think if you had like 20 years where the right wasn't completely dominated by sort of evangelical homophobia, like, I think you would just get it. Get back there. And. Oh, we're already on that way. Yeah. I mean, it's but the the Nick Fuentes kept by saga does not stop here. No.

No, no, no, no. No. I am. It is funny, maybe the wrong word, but fascinating that we are heading inevitably barreling towards this future where simultaneously homophobia is still a massive part of conservative politics and conservatives are gay as hell. Like. Yeah.

It's absolutely something where we are speeding towards like a drunken family on the back of a four wheeler about to break all of their necks at once in a crash in the woods. So Nick Fuentes loved tweeting about cat boys. He did it a lot. He sure did. And for a while, Nick's cat boy jokes and like a memory was tolerated under his banner of like irony poisoned reactionary comedy. Well, every ironic joke has a tipping point that makes that makes enough people wonder

is this actually ironic? And for Fuentes, that moment came when he live streamed a 10 hour date with a fellow fascist live streamer who went by the name Cat Boy Cami. Now, first let's let me explain who Cat Boy Cami was at the time. Then we'll get into the date and then we'll get into Nick Fuentes's brief alt-right cancellation. So Tor Brooks, a.k.a. Cat Boy Cami, formerly going under the username LolliSocks. So that's fun. Is an Australian fascist live streamer who first came to prominence by uploading clips

of himself harassing users on the popular video chatting site. Oh, Mowgli. Oh, I never know how to say this one. Mowgli. Mowgli. I don't know. Yeah. I have no help for you here.

People will know what I'm talking about. It's this randomized chatting app that does video chatting with the randomized users. Oh, yeah. It's O-M-E-G-L-E. I never know how to say it, but it's this, he would upload himself videos of him harassing people via this chatting app. In one of them, he dressed us up in blackface and well brandishing guns. He was trying to find black kids to taunt on this platform.

Another one, he dressed up as a policeman and Niels on an effigy. He made an likeness of George Floyd. He is pretty gross. He's a pretty horrible person. But for a long time, his bit was dressing up in anime costumes and dressing up as a cat boy to then talk about like neo-nazi rhetoric while dressed as a cat boy. This was his funny bit that he would do. At one point, he was streaming like 24 hours a day for the days and days on end.

He was earning thousands of followers in places like US and Russia, and he became the seventh highest earning streamer on D-Live, and D-Live was the popular live streaming platform used by fascists. In late 2019 was when Cat Boy Cammie popped up in America, initially catching the attention of Nick Fuentes. Over the course of a few months, he made friends with various people in the American far-right internet sphere like Milo, Richard Spencer, Baked Alaska, but Nick Fuentes was his original entry point into this.

Nick saw his videos online and was interested in what he was doing. Nick said that he had a good sense of humor and he's good-looking and demonstrated his repeatability that he's able to achieve viral moments and retain a streaming audience. Nick became friends with him because he thought Cat Boy Cammie would be a growing internet presence and wanted to kind of move his type of racist and horrible joke pranks and try to give them more of a platform to kind of front-line reactionary ideologies. When Nick was getting familiar with Cat Boy Cammie, Cammie's online activities were mainly consisting of dressing up as an anime catboy, to do random political debates or live streams

or show up at anime conventions to harass people, and doing various gags and pranks. One of the most infamous incidents was when he was deep-throating a massive horse cock dildo hooked up to a bucket of fake semen. So, in December of 2019, Cat Boy Cammie flew from Australia to go visit Nick. Where did they get the horse semen, Garrison? The semen was fake. Oh, oh, oh, okay, gotcha, gotcha. It was a massive horse cock dildo hooked up to a bucket of fake semen, right?

Okay, so just like cornstarch and such? If we want to go over recipes later, I'm sure we can make that a whole episode. No, I know how to make fake comb. In December of 2019, Cat Boy Cammie flew from Australia to go visit Nick Fuentes. And then proceeded to live stream the 10 hour totally straight hangout session with Cat Boy Cammie dressed up as a catboy the entire time. I mean, this does sound very straight to me, Garrison. They go to an arcade, they play games together, they get food and milkshakes, they go clothing

shopping and try on matching outfits. All while laughing and giggling the entire time, while driving and listening to extremely gay pop music, Cat Boy Cammie says to Nick that he reminds him of an ex, it's great. And by the end of the 10 hour stream, it's implied that they end the stream and it's implied that they share a room for the night. Sure, I'm sure they did. And it's 10 hours of pure, horrible Nazi flirting, and it's a thing, it exists. But as news and details of the live stream started to circulate, a wave of infighting

among the alt-right and the groepers spawned some amazing articles and headlines from neo-Nazi news sites. There's a headline from the Daily Stormer called, The Groeper Revolution is Canceled after Nick Fuentes reveals to be a catboy and gay faggot, which is pretty astonishing. Yeah, that sounds about right, okay. Other great headlines, we have Fuentes disavows Cat Boy after pressure from Trad News. If you're sitting down and for your movement that you want to take over the government typing down Fuentes disavows Cat Boy, perhaps you need to think about some things.

We got another headline as Cat Boy Cammie versus Richard Spencer, because Richard Spencer tried to cancel Nick for this, because Nick was getting more popular than him. And we have another great headline, which is Nick Fuentes' Cat Boy BFF is a mockery to his sexuality. Anyway, it's pretty good. There's this great, there's this great bit from one of these articles, which I'll quote. It starts off by saying, is Nick Fuentes attracted to women? If you trusted the plan, you wouldn't ask such questions.

I will say that I don't think the 10 hour live stream helps King Nick of the groepers at the moment. He had a good thing going by trying to promote a more Christian and normal presenting nationalist movement and was gaining a lot of traction until he ruined his image by associating it with this. None of his various enemies did this to him either. He did it entirely to himself. So yeah, but like obviously like the point of this is not to like, not to like put Nick

Fuentes' sexuality on blast, like I do, do not care one way or the other. It's not a problem. The problem isn't that Nick may find Cat Boy's incredibly hot, but the problem is that he's like a Nazi and stuff and calls for the extermination of gay people while also doing all of this shit. And Nick still maintains that he isn't gay and gay people should be exiled from society and he would never associate with homosexuals, blah, blah, blah, blah, all while doing all this incredibly straight behavior.

For an update on Cat Boy Cammie, later in 2020, Cat Boy Cammie made multiple appearances that Trump rallies and various other political events going viral multiple times for screaming incredibly racist, anti-Semitic and openly fascist rants. You probably saw footage of Cat Boy Cammie in 2020. He was just dressed as like a regular person. But there was a few clips of him at Trump rallies that went very, very viral. And Nick even disowned and disavowed Cat Boy Cammie for bad optics during these incredibly racist rants he would go on at Trump rallies.

And then of course we have America First and Nick Fuentes then being an escalating part of the protests in DC, leading to January 6th. We have the person alleged to have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop being in those America First discord servers and grooming young boys by dressing up as a cat girl. So all part of this will get talked about later in like news articles and stuff. This has not been talked about some people already know about it. But yes, so it's all part of this same Nick Fuentes Cat Boy sect of things of these people who call themselves trad cats, who then do all this weird Cat Boy shit.

And yes, the person who stole Nancy Pelosi's laptop, who was like an open Nazi, was grooming like minors on discord by dressing up as a cat girl. Yeah, so this whole sphere of stuff, you can find some incredibly dark corners. But nowadays, in 2021, in the year of our Lord 2021, Fen Boyz are way more of like generally acknowledged to be like a kind of like a leftist communist thing almost. And I think the reason why this debate got so, the reason why the fascist Fen Boyz debate got so kind of heightened in the past few years, ever since Tumblr banned porn, there's been a migration of Tumblr users onto Twitter, and a part of this migration is not safe for

work users and content, including Fen Boyz and people who fetishize Fen Boyz and even fetishize racist Fen Boyz, moving on to Twitter, right? Twitter has become the new de facto Tumblr in a lot of senses. So the past few years, more and more normies have been exposed to these types of like off the cuff people. Then of course, TikTok has sent Fen Boyz into the mainstream because TikTok is also, it's not an image board, but it is a visual medium, right, where you're posting small videos of yourselves.

So a lot of cat boy and Fen Boyz content on TikTok, there's even this horrible article from August to 2020 by Vice called Introducing Fen Boyz, the most wholesome trend on TikTok as if Fen Boyz were invented in 2020, just mind boggling article. But yeah, Fen Boyz are now much more, if you take the Vice article as an example, Fen Boyz are now fully mainstreamed, right? Fen Boyz used to be a small subculture, but among Gen Z kind of culture as a whole now, Fen Boyz are very popular. They are kind of, they are one of like the hot new Pokemons to collect.

And I'm going to- Garrison, Garrison, that's cultural appropriation for millennials, you're not allowed to talk about Pokemons. I don't, I don't care. We own those. Now, so just to talk about like scale of memes here, I have some like Google Trends on like Nazi Cat Boyz and Nazi Fen Boyz. And we see the mass, the biggest, biggest spike in Nazi Fen Boyz is January of 2021,

which makes sense. That's when I started writing this script actually. So yeah, for Google Trends, we've got a massive spike in January of 2021, and it's kind of been decreasing since then. But still, still like, it was like, you would see blips every once in a while, like there's a small blip of Nazi Fen Boyz in 2017, a small blip in 2018, and then a small blip at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020, because people are alone and isolated. So they're doing this instead.

And then yeah, January of 2021, massive, massive spike. Same thing with a very similar to racist Fen Boy. It's basically the same exact trajectory. We do get a pretty big spike in racist Fen Boyz in June of 2020. And then another big spike of November of 2021 is the highest searches for racist Fen Boy. So it's still very much an ongoing meme of like a thing of being like, yeah, Fen Boyz are pretty racist.

It's still completely, completely ongoing. Oh, thank God. Yeah, it is. Don't worry. This is not a closed case. That's good, Garrison. I was really worried for a second. No, people in this, I think if you're not extremely online, you might not know about

this. This is like an, this is an actual discourse on Twitter. Like, oh yeah. Like this, there will be like a week where the only thing people argue about is whether Fen Boyz are inherently racist, which obviously, obviously they're not. Like it's, it's awful. So the last thing I'm going to mention here is in the, is in the, is in the unicorn riot discord leaks when they leaked a whole bunch of information from lots of different fascist

channels. They have over a thousand mentions of Cat Boyz inside the unicorn riot fascist discord leaks. Garrison, I have a question for you. Yes. Do you think God stays in heaven because he too, lives in fear of what he's created here on earth? So if you want to have a fun time, you can go to discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja, um,

slash discord slash search, then put in, put in Cat Boyz and just scroll through thousands of posts from these Nazi channels. It is not going to make you happier. We got stuff from like Sargon of Akkad, the, we have the discord channel domestic terrorism planning discord, we got a Cat Boyz channel, we of course have, we of course have Nick Fuentes, we got every, whatever you would look for, you could find it here. And that is, that is the curious case of Nazi Cat Boyz. So there, there you go.

Any, any questions class? Garrison, why did, why did you do this to us? Because I thought it would be funny. It is. On the, on the inside, it's funny. I'm really happy. Well, that is a, so yeah, now I hope, I hope you all have a better look into why the fascist femboy meme exists and how people can have the cognitive distance in their own heads

in terms of, you know, fetish, fetishizing feminine attributes while still hating women and then leading into the Nick Fuentes Cat Boyz craze that has swept the nation as a whole. So just, okay, just, just, just be queer and a leftist. You don't have to do this shit. You do not have to wrap your brain in fucking 17 layers of bullshit of like weird misogyny and tragedy, tragedy, you can just, you can just be gay and a leftist. And as, as we, as we showed, you can, you can, you can be a leftist, you can love Stalin

and be a cat boy. It's totally fine. I think you can be anything and be a cat boy. That's, that's the, the main message of the 21st century. Vladimir Putin is going to come out as a cat boy when he releases his next unhinged rant in support of J.K. Rowling. That's, that's, that's where the discourse is headed.

It's inevitable. It can't be stopped. Nick, I wanted the meme of Nick Fuentes and Vladimir Putin holding hands being a cat boy. All right. Well. That's where we're going. That does it for us today, everybody.

If you want to follow the show, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZone Media. You can follow my cat boy posting at HungryBowtie. Nia. Nia. Nia. Ooh. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of

the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.