Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 37

Episode Date: June 4, 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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we spend all of our time talking about skincare. Now personally, and a lot of people say this is a bad idea, I enjoy using concentrated chlorine with a little bit of ammonia. It just cleans the pores, it cleans the grout, it gets all of that pesky code out of your lungs. An entire generation of British and German and French boys all agree chlorine gas does the trick.

How are we doing? What's this episode about? Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and how we can maybe put them back together. I'm Garrison, I'll be leading this episode with me is Chris and this random person that we brought on from the street named Robert. And we'll be talking about some things that are not great and kind of current problems. We sure will. I spent a lot of my formative youth, lurking, studying and documenting some of the bad places on the internet. Nazi chat rooms, chan sites, Facebook hate group, whatever, all of the things. And growing up in Portland, Oregon in the 20s, this was something that felt foisted upon me as a kid,

discovering my own queerness and coming out of an extremely homophobic, like, insular Christian community. Meanwhile, in Portland, having self-described fascist march alongside gay-hating Christians on my city streets, Nazis murdering people on a public transit, you know, that put a lot of fellow scrawny gay kids to put on black hoodies and balaclavas to mace and fight far-right extremists that were like two to three times their size. But the problem is, of course, 100-pound depress teens aren't necessarily the best brawlers under some circumstances. Although they can handle a fire extinguisher filled with paint pretty well. That's true. But a lot of us also started doing, like, online research and stuff to find, like, the names and addresses of, like, fascists and members of hate groups

and all that kind of stuff. I still remember the kind of the thrill and the buzz of my first, like, big find as a baby online lurker. I think it was the leader of the hell-shaking street preachers who was living in Tula McOregon at the time. That's fucking prick. That was the first guy I did. And I remember being very excited because, yeah, he was a massive asshole. And so, yeah, he's like an extremely homophobic quote-unquote street preacher. Just a big old chode.

Yeah. But a lot of this online research work wasn't just cross-referencing social media posts with the white pages, property records and voter registrations to send nice postcards to hate group members. Time was often spent tracking the use of memes and cataloging and sharing fascist plans for projects and events, and keeping tabs on their current propaganda trends that online white supremacists were trying to push. And one of the things that I came across about two years ago was called Operation Pride Fall. This is one of the... One of these, like...

It was an organized campaign ran by people on Fortune, Discord and Telegram. And I came across it a few days after the plans were published online. And if you already know what Operation Pride Fall is or have heard that term before, and if you're like me and we're on similar online spaces, you've probably found the past few months of anti-queer propaganda, the massive increase in the gay and trans people, our groomer shit, and the shutter's kink at Pride discourse to be all very predictable. A strangely familiar, like the worst case of deja vu,

and in large part of the result of years of work behind the scenes by social engineering online bigoted trolls and self-described fascists. So we're gonna talk today about kind of the overlap between this thing called Operation Pride Fall, the groomer discourse, and how that kind of feeds into kink at Pride discourse. So three things that are not great, that don't go great, that actually do kind of go great together. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, yes. So, first of all, a little background on the whole recent groomer thing. Because we haven't actually discussed the groomer stuff in depth on the pod yet.

We sure haven't. You know why we haven't? Because I hate it. I mean, like, whenever, like, horrible things happen in the news, I try to push back on just releasing an episode immediately covering it, in case we have something, like, actually good to say. So we've kind of waited to talk about the groomer discourse stuff for a long time. And I think now is totally fine to do so, because we've had months to let it simmer, look at, like, the types of things they're encouraging,

look at all of, like, the physical action they're trying to do, and with Pride Month approaching, we're going to see a resurgence of it in the next few weeks here. So, as mentioned, in our week-long War on Trans People episodes, which was released, like, right before the new wave of the groomer shit accelerated. But in those episodes, we talked about the long history of conservatives and evangelical organizations promoting the false narrative targeted at parents and, like, concerned citizens that gay people, especially gay men, are more likely to be child predators than their heterosexual counterparts.

Along with the idea that queer people are out to, quote, groom your definitely 100% straight child into being gay, right? So insinuating that they can then, like, have sex with them or something. But, yeah, they're trying to scare parents to be like, gay people are out to get your kids. So the actual, like, idea of what being a groomer means changes based on who you're talking to. In part two, I'm going to quote a conservative writer who, like, admits this as such, but still defends the use of the term.

Because at the very least, if they use grooming within the context of turning your, again, absolutely completely heterosexual child into a gay person, thus they would begin to hate you and resent you as a parent for your godly Christian values, they also consider that grooming. It's not actually just... As a general rule, the attitude is if they do not turn out to be the exact kind of weirdo Christian as their parents, they were groomed by somebody. And it's merely a matter of picking the topic of the person to blame.

Yeah, and all of that sort of rhetoric was extremely popular through, like, the 80s, the 90s, and the early 2000s. But then came the knots in the 2018s, and this kind of had an attitude shift, and some of that started to go away. We got Queer Eye, we got Ellen, the rate of conversion therapy started to decline. It was getting banned in more states. There was more queer acceptance in certain sects of the church even. Of course, gay marriage went national in 2015, and eventually being, like, aggressively homophobic became, like, not a good look.

You were not able to do that anymore and still be able to have... And do it as, like, nonchalantly as you used to be able to, whether that's in your, like, TV show, or whether that's you as a corporation, or, you know, random other sectors of public life. But then, of course, Trump got elected in 2016. A year after gay marriage went national. And then there's this resurgence in far-right extremism. And the more kind of commonly accepted, kind of nonchalant, gay bashing of old

gets passed down to the next freak down the line, which is trans people. So with that, the adage of, like, the disgusting groomer freaks are going to turn your kids gay turns into the gender ideology freaks are going to turn your kids trans. It's all the same stuff just passed on to the next thing. And so we have that, like, anti-trans and, therefore, anti-queer hate festering for a few years. And this inevitably opens up the door to just a revival of classic homophobia. Even liberals, like, friend of the pod at JK Rowling, and lots of the original TERFs, got to apply the same homophobic rhetoric to trans people and gender nonconforming folks,

which then obviously results in that propaganda and rhetoric being used to attack LGBTQ people on a whole once again. So it's resurrecting these old homophobic tropes and supplying it to a new generation of queer people. And so for this next part, we're going to talk about libs of TikTok, because they did play a big part in what some current discourse is today. And I promise we'll get to Operation Pridefall here shortly. Just hang in there with me. But before we talk about, again, other friend of the pod, libs of TikTok, do you know what else it wants to turn your kids gay?

Oh, are you talking about the Washington State Highway Patrol? Because yes, they absolutely do garrison. That's the one guarantee the Washington State Highway Patrol makes. They'll make your kids gay. Okay, libs of TikTok joins the fight today. God, let's just take a moment to acknowledge how fucking frustrating it is that we have to discuss seriously libs of TikTok, that it matters. The worst.

It's terrible. It's terrible. People always criticize the show for being like, why do they talk about all these dumb social media things? They're like, yes, I know that they're stupid, but the bad part is that they actually matter. Yeah, we talk about them because of the 17-year-old trans girl in Texas who just got assaulted by five dudes because she was blamed for the shooting because in part of a lot of shit that libs of TikTok helped to stir up.

Because they proved there was a market for it, that if you're like a right-wing shit grifter, attacking trans people is a great way to get engagement. Anyway, sorry, Garrison. So libs of TikTok is a social media account turned social media campaign started in April of 2021 by a Brooklyn-area real estate agent named Chaya Rychik, who by the way attended the January 6th attempted fascist insurrection. When violence broke out that day at the Capitol,

she actually tweeted a play-by-play on a previous Twitter account of hers, posting videos from the crowd and talking about tear gas and rubber bullets being shot right next to her. And then after she left the riot, she tweeted on Twitter that the event was peaceful compared to a BLM protest. So that's, yes, anyway, five people died. We've now reached the part of it. We're now in tragedy as farce of the thing that happens in every single state that goes fascist,

where all the fascists try to do a coup and it fails and then nothing happens, they take over the state like seriously. Except our version of that, instead of like, I don't know, weird fascist yakuza guys, it's the libs of TikTok. It is the libs of TikTok. So the libs of TikTok was around like the third attempt by Rychik to start a viral social media account. You know the saying, third time's the charm.

But in this case, it actually was. So the account's gimmick is reposting and often grossly misrepresenting select clips from quote unquote libs on TikTok. Big shocker, big surprise. But more often than not, that really just means posting videos of queer kids and trans people, captioning it with something reactionary and then leading a targeted harassment campaign against those individuals. On May 31st, 2021, so just about a year ago, she made her first grooming related post, just tweeting,

stop grooming kids in all caps. This is the first time she tweeted anything related to grooming. The day before that, she tweeted a video of a trans person alongside the vomit emoji and a caption that just says, men should not wear dresses, you can't change my mind. Her first super viral video related to LGBTQ people was later in June, next month during Pride, by posting a TikTok of a kid explaining the concept of gender fluidity, a pretty, pretty basic concept. But she, lives of TikTok commented, this is so messed up in so many ways.

Her post racked up half a million views and indicated to her that the way to grow her little social media project into a right wing viral sensation was going to be with homophobia and transphobia. This is how she decided to continue her online career, essentially. She called the prominent LGBTQ youth suicide prevention group, The Trevor Project, a grooming organization. And towards the end of 2021 and into 2022, she kept using that term grooming, groomer at an ever increasing rate, right? It starts in like May and June of 2021, continues throughout the summer and fall.

And then in the fall and winter, she starts really kicking up all of the stuff around grooming and queer people. I mean, all of her posts are already mostly about trans people and like trans people at schools. Obviously, she was a big part of like the whole school board thing from last year. So, but towards the end of 2021, though, is when the groomer thing started becoming more of a recurring trend, quoting slate, toward the end of 2021 and into the new year. Rycek found her rhythm with memes and videos calling LGBTQ people and those who supported LGBTQ youth, quote unquote, groomers. She has even attempted to smear one of the most prominent gay men in the country as a groomer. In a deleted tweet, Rycek's account accused transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg's husband,

Chaston, of grooming kids for his work at supporting LGBTQ youth organizations. This isn't fair, but I hate that his name is Chaston. I know I don't like I don't like that name. I don't like that name. I'm not a big has nothing to do with anything. I'm not a Chaston's Stan either. But yes, shocking. But but yeah, it's like finding the most prominent Libby gay men and being like, hey, these people probably groom kids.

And you know that that obviously riles up their base. Yes. She's she's called for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be, quote, fired on the spot, which actually has happened since then. Sure has. This has happened multiple times since since since this account has been has been launched. The accounts popularity grew alongside last year's racist homophobic and transphobic attacks on school boards across the country. She would often posting videos of queer teachers and lying about them grooming kids into being gay or whatever.

She was promoting organized harassment campaigns against those teachers interspersed with tweets and screenshots of news articles about teachers who sexually assaulted students. Importantly, not posting the article, but just like a screenshot of the headline along with comments like funny how this keeps happening, which is like neglects to mention that like all these incidents are from heterosexual teachers. Or like that one story from last year of a cop and his wife, who was a teacher working together to sexually abuse children. Like none of them are actually about gay people. It's all I mean, I'm not certain if a school resource officer has ever stopped a mass shooting, but I know that something like 50 of them have been fired from a lusting kids. Yeah.

It's really insidious because she's she's posting all this stuff about, you know, teachers grooming kids into being like queer teachers, grooming kids like alongside headlines of teachers actually assault like sexually assaulting kids. But those headlines are all stories about heterosexual teachers. Like, but you know, so she posts both of those things. So it's like to like to have this correlation for her audience, despite them not actually being related. Because yeah, lips of TikTok sure ain't posting about how cops should be kept away from kids for the safety of the children. And they're never going to post about how many people who do the grooming stuff have been arrested because like several of the organizers of this whole like gay people are like grooming kids thing like have been arrested for child abuse since this started. Which yeah, no, it's not it's never it's never going to matter, but you know, posting and lying about queer teachers grooming children next to headlines about teachers sexually abusing kids to manufacture this correlation, which is of course false, but it's still highly effective.

Now, believe me, I would love to not talk about Twitter nonsense. But unfortunately, Twitter accounts like lips of TikTok actually do play a massive role in shaping offline conservative politics. Lips of TikTok was very soon being interviewed by New York Post, being boosted by Joe Rogan, going on Tucker Carlson, other Fox News hosts like Jesse Waters began featuring content straight from the lips of TikTok Twitter feed. And Tucker encouraged his viewers to follow the account before it's banned if you want to know, quote, what may be happening in your child's school. Last March, when lips of TikTok posted a video of a woman teaching sex ed to kids in Kentucky, like, you know, preteens or whatever. She called the woman a predator. In the next evening, the same clip was featured on Laura Ingram's Fox News program with the host saying, when did our school any of any schools become essentially become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals. So yeah, this is just content straight from Lucid TikTok being put onto the most watched news programs in the world.

And as we'll see also being taken in by some of the most powerful conservative politicians. Mainstream conservative politicians quickly joined in in the tooting of the lips of TikTok grooming horn. Obviously, Ron DeSantis is a big, big part of this. One of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is top aides and press secretary is a huge fan of lips of TikTok and is in frequent communication with them, quoting the Washington Post quote, By March, 2022, lips of TikTok was directly impacting legislation. Ron DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Persha, credited the account with quote, opening her eyes and informing her views on the state's restrictive legislation that bans discussion of sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade referred to critics as the don't say gay bill. The bill has been unquote. So this bill has has already been used to get middle school teachers fired for for for saying that they are not straight. And you'll notice that middle school is not in kindergarten through third grade. So remember when we were all saying, hey, the actual it actually doesn't matter that the bill says it's only up for kindergarten through third grade, it's just going to be applied for anyone.

Yeah, turns out we were right. So it's this the bill has already been specifically cited in the firing of multiple teachers from Florida for for just not not, you know, conforming to the heterosexual Christian hegemonic worldview, and lips of tiktok is still currently among the most prominent influencers affecting actual material conditions and shaping both the rhetoric and propaganda while impacting legislation. A friend of the lips of tiktok and DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Persha has said quote, the bill that liberals inaccurately called don't say gay would be more accurately described as an anti grooming bill. If you're against the anti grooming bill, you probably are a groomer, or at least you don't denounce the grooming of four to eight year old children. Silence is complicency. This is how it works. Democrats. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn't make the rules. So yeah, see, see how we have see how that works. You call you call the don't say gay bill a anti grooming bill. So then everyone, anyone who criticizes it is now a groomer. Isn't that a fun way to play with words? Isn't that nice? That is a fun way to play with words, Garrison. I love it.

So the past few months, we've seen this, you know, queer people are groomers meme reach seemingly never, never before seen heights. And at least is and at the very least is the highest and most medic has ever been in the past two decades. You know, it's it's really building off of all of the kill your local pedophile shit, right? It sure is. It's it's Robert. Do you want to briefly, briefly talk about kill your local local pedophile? I mean, it's a bunch of bumper stickers. It's a slogan. Like I know dudes who are not at all fascists and say that because they're like new dads and they're horrified at the. But like the whole like the core of it is this right wing. And it kind of started off in like the sort of libertarian gun nut communities.

It's it's it's it's really used a lot as sort of it's a group that you can talk about doing anything to you can talk about killing. You can like fetishize murdering. And if you can then like define other groups as inherently pedophilic, then you can do anything to them, right? Like that's the basic idea is if you get people saying it's always OK to use vigilante violence against this group. And obviously no one's going to fucking defend a child molesters, but then you start making the case that people who are not in fact molesting children are somehow pedophiles or, you know, or somehow related to pedophiles. And then suddenly it's OK to kill them. It's OK to do violence. Massive social groups like all of gay and trans people.

So if you if you conflate these two things are able to make these things represent the same thing in someone's mind. That makes homophobia now not a bad thing, but like a moral imperative. Like you have to be homophobic because these people are grooming children. Yep. And you can get you get this interesting thing to which like there are people who are like not quite as far in who will do who will. I see things a lot where it's like someone's like, oh, well, I don't have a problem with gay people, but like they shouldn't groom kids. And it's like, yep. This is that's not what's happening, bro.

Yeah, no. I do you know, do you know what else doesn't groom kids? I mean, the Washington State Highway Patrol definitely does. But let me tell you, if you want somebody to groom your children, the Washington Highway State Highway Patrol will do that. But you know what they won't do is protect those children in the event of danger because that might endanger them. So look, look, sometimes, sometimes, right, someone is someone is killing your kid and you need to get pepper sprayed. Mm hmm. And yeah, when that time calls, you will beg for the Washington Highway State Patrol. Well, you'll beg for a different police department.

But when those police get in trouble because of their failure to act, then the Washington State Highway Patrol will show up to protect those cops. Anyway, here's here's the bads. We are back. Um, so as the queer people are groomers, shit was reaching the most memetic and the highest rate of of trending that it has had in decades. This past April, at the height of the recent increased wave of anti-queer legislation and anti LGBTQ rhetoric. Um, this, this is when some terminally online teenagers tried to start kink at pride discourse once again. And I do not want to talk about this, but I've written stuff about it, so I'm going to. This was legitimately what I was like thinking about.

I like realized I was gay and I was like, oh my God, I should come out. And then I was like, one of the things that I spent a long time thinking about was, does this mean I have to do kink at pride discourse? And this is like a serious consideration for me. For a long time, I would have said, no, of course not. I'm never going to do this. But no, we're doing it live. But here we are. So anyway, uh, doing kink, doing kink at pride discourse, uh, then and even still now, while the anti queer onslaught is accelerating at the highest pace it's had in years,

sure seems to be like dumping fuel on the fire. Uh, what's up with that kids? Why? Uh, so anyway, uh, the discourse itself revolves around whether kink apparel or paraphernalia render the pride space unsafe for minors or quote unquote, non consensual observers. Uh, heavy, heavy quotation marks there, by the way. Uh, but also it is heavily rooted in assimilationist and respectability politics and a push for LGBTQ people to be seen as, uh, more acceptable or more normal while still existing in a heteronormative society. Um, and now obviously I'm not a fan of this discourse happening in the first place, especially now. Like, why are you doing it now during all the groomer stuff?

Stop it. That's stop it. Don't do that. Quit it. Why are you doing this? But first of all, I also want to point out how this entire discourse runs on the same train of thought that fuels all of this groomer stuff in the first place. It's picking at the same part of human brains. So here's I'm, I'm going to read this post that went super vital about a month ago that that sparked that sparked the new wave of this much, much frustrated discourse quote.

LGBTQ youth being uncomfortable with kinks at Pride is not homophobia. Kinks at Pride might have been fine if this was still the 1900s where adults were the only ones attending Pride, but it's not the 1900s anymore. And now kids are way more involved in celebrating our identities. The celebrating our identities part there is really important and we'll talk about this more soon. But largely in the past like 20 years, there's been this shift with queerness and sexual orientation being less about who you fuck and more like a personality aspect or a social identity with a branded aesthetic. It's, it's this, it's like, it's, which is in some ways good, like it's some ways good that people are more able to express themselves however they want. But, you know, kids at school aren't getting bullied for being gay anymore, which again, is good. Well, less than they were.

They're getting bullied less, somewhat, depending on where you live. But it's also kind of, it's made people forget the whole like, like gays bash back or gays don't bash back but shoot first. Like it's forgot we don't have that. That's not as a core component of queerness anymore because queerness is now able to be kind of more safe and sanitized. And it's, right, it's like, it's, and it's, it's, it's a personal identity in a way that it's not just about who you fuck anymore. It's like this like personal identity aspect, which I'm not saying is bad. It's just that there's this thing that's happened that's changed the way we talk about sexual orientation. Hey, quick pause.

This is Garrison from the future here, just popping in to clarify a bit on what I mean regarding this note on identities and identifying as various shades of queer. What I'm getting at is that when observing some of the baby queers around my age or maybe a bit younger, queerness is seen as a more available option for young people when putting together their personality or sense of self and more separated from the nitty gritty details of who you fuck. Now that queerness is generally more tolerated. Now, don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of being free to choose queerness. In many ways, I consider myself as having chosen to be gay. The thing about framing that as your quote unquote personal identity, as opposed to simply choosing to be what you are, is that the former lets you wield

that quote unquote identity against other people or other queer people that disagree with you. It's this thing where queerness is filtered through the lens of brands and brand recognition, which is definitely made worse by social media, dating apps, personal profiles and personal bios. It's part of this cultural push to have everyone create their own personal brand. I don't want to identify as genderqueer, I just am genderqueer, I don't identify as gay, I just like cat boys therefore I am gay. It's a different ontological framing and one that I think is less susceptible to heteronormative assimilationist ideas and like the capitalist marketing to queerness as a brand or as a market demographic. If your queerness is a personal identity that's more sanitized, more approachable for a heteronormative society, then you get to use your identity to attack gay people whose queerness is more based in deviant sexuality and alternative communities. I'm going to read the follow up tweet to this thing that sparked the new discourse, quote, not even all LGBTQ adults are comfortable with seeing kinks at Pride, there's nothing stopping you guys from adjusting or having after events strictly for adults when it partake in that you all need to adjust that every LGBTQ person feels comfortable attending. So let's just do some like queer history here for a sec. The first Pride was a riot on that night in June in 1969.

The police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the largest private gay clubs in the US at the time. The patrons of the bar, you know, trans women of color, homeless queer teens, drag queens, lesbians and leather daddies fought back. Lots of trans teenagers through bricks at cops and like a fair number of those trans teenagers were also sex workers. Kink, including, you know, like leather daddies and lots of aspects that we now view as as like kink or BDSM has been a part of Pride since its literal inception and like way back in 1969. And while like, while drag isn't considered kink now in 2022, it still is considered sexually deviant. But back in like the 20th century, in, you know, in 1969, New York City still had laws that prohibited cross-dressing. So drag used to be way more kinky than it is now. And like basically all queer sex used to be unacceptable kink. Yeah, it was illegal. It was literally illegal. Or just a crime. Yeah, it was a crime in Texas until like 2003. I think the law stole the books. Right around when I graduated high school. 2003 was when the Supreme Court said that it's no longer an enforceable law. In the state of Texas, it's illegal to what and it's illegal. It's still illegal to own more than five dildos. Yeah, I think it's five, but it might be six. So like all queer sex used to be unacceptable kink and many logistical aspects of gay fucking used to happen in public. I'm going to I'm going to quote an article from them dot us quote, For some people, gay rights and gay liberation do not hinge on particulars of sexual desire. For years, I've heard that we aren't just our erotic identities.

But for many of us, it does begin there and it does revolve around the ways we organize our erotic choices. Before LGBTQ plus people had pride parades, our community spaces were not just bars, but cruising spots like bathhouses, dungeons and public restrooms. It should be no surprise that many queer folks find their sex lives and their sense of community to be intertwined. BDSM subversive sexuality and leather culture have enjoyed a long history within the LGBTQ rights movement. They are inherent expressions of queer culture and sexuality. Being free to signal your sexuality out in the open within a queer context is the entire point of pride. Unquote. So like all of this discourse around pride and kink of pride reflects a modern but regressive idea that sexuality is inherently damaging to see experience or think about in a public context, especially if that sexuality is inherently queer. And there's this other idea that we see a lot of in this type of discourse and it's mirrored a little bit with like the groomer stuff to that if you see someone quote unquote engaging in kink and like in the case of pride that's like what wearing a collar, a harness or a putt mask that just the act of observation is somehow a violation of consent. And it's really frustrating because indication of sexuality in a non vanilla sense while in public is not a violation of consent like I didn't consent

to see the rainbow cops, right? But public indication of sexuality is not a consent violation. And again, indicating sexuality is like the entire point of pride. Weaponizing quote unquote consent to call out people that we see but don't interact with who are quote unquote dressed to sexual in our own mind is bad for multiple reasons. It also potentially dilutes legitimate claims of non consent in cases of actual sexual violence. And it's like this thing like if you look at someone in a pup mask, there is no consent violation there. That's a really weird thing that people that people talk about and it's not, it's not like I'm not trying to start fights on the internet with like these tender queer queer children because like and I don't want anyone to find like these like, you know, months old posts and start harassing these people. But that post has like over 30,000 likes and thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets. And it basically just repeats like old queer bashing talking points that conflate kink and queer visibility with public sex that endangers children and like conflating gays being visible and semi clothed with being like dangerous to children are the same talking points that it gets used for book bans conversion therapy and the don't say gay bills right. This idea that if you look at a gay person shirtless, that's dangerous to a kid. That's the same. That's the same underlying motivation that fuels all of this group or discourse. It's the whole thing where it's like, I'm okay with gay people. I just don't want to see it. Right. It's like that that idea in and of itself is like is still like exists on that. You know, I didn't consent to look at it type of thing. You know, this is other other tweet from somebody being like forcing people to see kinky stuff without consent is really weird. I'm sorry, but I don't want pop masks at Pride events for families. I saw that shit in real life and it made me uncomfortable. Don't involve other people in their kinks if they don't consent.

And like looking at someone in a mask isn't involving you in any of these kinks. If you're looking at someone in a leather mask, if that makes you uncomfortable, that that's your problem. I have a right to not be uncomfortable with how people look or are in public. Look, every time I go out into the world, I see something that makes me uncomfortable. I see a lot of people with children. Now, do I think it should be legal to have children? Yes, we do. I do think that it should be. It should be illegal. Exactly. So I like, look, we all have to deal with things that make us uncomfortable. Look, we have a clear solution here. The way to deal with events not being family friendly is to get rid of families. That's exactly right. We have to eliminate the concept of the family. Yeah, come on, come on. Communist Manifesto. This is 101 shit, people. Oh, you were quoting from the Communist Manifesto, huh? Okay, that's interesting. That's not where I got it from.

But I feel like a lot of these people, many of them like young teens who are complaining about being forced to look at, quote unquote, inappropriate things at Pride, have never actually been to a Pride. Because most of modern Pride is really sanitized and chill. It is overrun with corporate sponsors, politicians, and cops. You are way more likely to see armed police at a Pride march, then you'll be likely to see tits or gags or whatever. It's funny to me because I started going to these, and this is before the internet was what it was, or moral panics were what they were. But in Texas, I would go to these events where there would be people of all ages and families. These are little burning regions. People would be like, on the big night when people are doing the fire shows and the firework stuff, people would be like, fucking and manning flame torres while having sex. There was a whole chunk of it that was just like the kink row and you could walk down it and watch people get whipped and fuck a Sibian and stuff. It was just like, I don't remember any of this fucking. The only discourse was like, well, okay, we should probably make sure that people know where that kind of stuff mainly happens so that they don't have to walk around it if they don't want to.

But yeah, it's like this idea that not even full nudity, but semi-nudity within a queer context is inherently more dangerous to children if it's in a queer context than a straight context. We have all of these even queer kids complaining online about being forced to see things at Pride. They would see way more skin if they went to a beach in the summer. It revolves on the same homophobic idea that if you look at these things in a queer context, that is like more adult than looking at it within a straight context. Yes. It's, I don't know, frustrating. Another reason why that I think many of these baby leftist tender queers are who are crusading against kink at Pride and complaining about leather or sexy underwear. First of all, I think lots of them haven't been to Pride because there hasn't really been Pride for the past two years and lots of these people are like 15 years old. But a lot of them also just admit to never going to Pride because they're too terrified to see a pup mask.

They openly say like, I've never been because I don't want to see these things. Like, sure, you're allowed to do that, but then don't make, don't campaign against kink at Pride, which will result in your posts getting used by homophobic trolls and bigots. I don't go to Chicago because I don't want to see a deep dish pizza, but I don't try to ban them. I understand that that's the thing you people like. The first time I saw a pup mask was at fucking Comic-Con. You don't see like banned pup masks from Comic-Con. These people, these kids are basing their fears off of like a few viral photos that are often shared in a disingenuous context. Now, we'll talk about these photos in a bit, but these people are like 15 years old,

have never been to Pride and are just like simply terrified of actual sexuality. They engage with queerness as like a personal identity and stuff, but once they get into like the nitty gritty of like sex, that makes them really uncomfortable because they're teens, because they're kids. That's okay, you can be uncomfortable with sex. That makes sense. That is appropriate for your age, but then don't make your entire online presence about trying to shut down this massive aspect of queer history. The kinky stuff that I've seen at Pride is on par with what you see at Comic-Con. I often will see more nudity at Portland's Comic-Con than I will at any of the Pride events I've been to.

All of the more openly fetish folks or kinky folks are really responsible and act pretty appropriately at Pride. And the people who like say otherwise online generally just have not actually been to Pride in their entire life. Because like this complaining about quote unquote like inappropriate fetishes or like kinky conduct is basically code for I am uncomfortable with you being positive about the way you view sex and I want you to not show it and I want you to not talk about it, which is the same underlying thought process that people use to be homophobic. It's the exact same thing. Now, a lot of this discourse oversimplifies kink and BDSM.

Queerness can be about love. It can be about sexual attraction and both or sometimes for asexual people lacking one or the other or both. But by that same token, kink, leather, and BDSM aren't all exclusively about sex. To a large extent, they're also about community building. And I just think these like earnest think of the youth arguments are very silly because even when it comes to youth, because if you're uncomfortable with things, that's totally fine. But in a lot of cases, like queer teenagers also have sex generally with other queer teenagers, sometimes even in a kinky context.

And that's okay. Pride is about celebrating everyone's individual ability to do that. And I don't like it when people just rehash old homophobic talking points to, especially during all of this group of discourse, because a key part of kink, a key part of queer sex is consent. And you start conflating what consent is by saying that me looking at you wearing a collar is a violation of consent. Once you start undermining what consent actually means, that's not a good thing. That is actually a bad thing, especially right now, during all of the groomer stuff.

So we've gone kind of over on time here. But we're going to make this a two-parter. In the next episode, we'll talk a bit more about like tender queers, and we'll actually get into the plans of Operation Pride Fall and talk about how we kind of got to this point. Because man, there's a lot of kids sharing pictures online. And oh boy, do those pictures originate in some dubious places. So that does it for us today. We will see you tomorrow. Pride's fun.

We should not police what other people do. So yeah, anyway. Bye. Welcome back to Kineppen here. This is part two of our discussion on Operation Pride Fall and the Kinkai Pride Discourse and the groomer stuff that they all combine in this really horrifying, really way that I wish they didn't, because it's pretty frustrating. So last episode, towards the end, I talked of decent amount about tender queers.

And I actually would like to define this term here, and kind of get into why these people are boosting these specific talking points that are just kind of regurgitate old types of homophobic stuff. They claim it doesn't, but like it does. You're using this exact same logic, you're just kind of reframing it. So tender queers are this type of like, they're kind of like an in-joke for like the queer community of this like personality type. Generally, the tender queers are like a, you know, typically a Gen Z or a millennial queer. More likely to be like femme, whether that be like a woman, non-binary or femme person, lesbians, you know, femme bisexuals, pansexuals,

or like queer soft boys kind of, they feature this like combination of personality, designation, and aesthetic. And they're known for being especially adept at using like watery language of therapy as a means to like get out of most things. Everything's about like holding space and healing and intimacy. And it's like, it's wrapped up in this like jovial pastel bubbly package, right? If you throw in some astrology, some like corduroy overalls, shaved heads and round glasses, and you got yourself like a basic tender queer. And a little quote here from an author named Daisy Jones from an article that they made, quote, just like the straight soft boy who uses performative sensitivity to get away with being a little shit sometimes.

So does the tender queer. Tender queer generally refers to a trope in the queer community of a queer person who presents themselves as being sensitive, hyper vocal of their feelings, sometimes thought of as prioritizing feelings in hyper intentional language over their own harm and privilege. So they kind of use like identity politics to avoid accountability. There's like this competitive oppression and self victimization. They center themselves and their feelings in social or political movements that aren't necessarily about them. They kind of they prioritize ineffective methods of self care. They utilize like gaslighting and dumping the emotional labor of dealing with your own self onto onto others.

Like tender queers are kind of they're known to like mask toxicity and manipulative lists in the performative language and aesthetics of social justice. They have this like performative soft hypersensitivity and use identity politics to kind of call out or avoid things that make them uncomfortable. And will like and will publicly declare those things as problematic in an attempt to force others to conform with their own will. So that's why I describe a lot of these like younger younger teens who who use these talking points against against quote unquote kink at pride as tender queers. Because like they're the people who are really sensitive about what makes them comfortable and they avoid any they try to avoid or campaign against anything that makes them uncomfortable. And they use all these like performative terms of phrase and talking points to to avoid having actual discussions about it. It's just like weaponization of their marginalized identity as a shield to avoid accountability or to deflect against people challenging them for abusive behavior or in the in the in like the pride case this like internalized homophobia. There's this the these little little tweet exchange for some from some people on the super viral kick at pride post from a month ago.

I'm 14 and I don't want to see a half naked person in leather straps in a gag and an event I take my family to and someone replied like try glancing at a Mardi Gras or even a public beach before you apply homophobic double standards. And then they the poster replied you think I'm homophobic. I'm literally a trans non binary lesbian. So again this is this is this is this is what I mean when I when I when I when I talk about tender queers right there is someone's calling them out for applying this homophobic double standard on how they view like public semi nudity right not even like full nudity just like how they view public semi nudity like a bikini or something right. And then they respond by saying I'm literally a trans non binary lesbian. And then went on to say also people at those don't wear kink shit. And it's why I don't go to Mardi Gras or large public beaches. It makes me uncomfortable seeing a bunch of adults in kink shit being sexual just physically makes me ill.

People at Mardi Gras and public beaches don't act sexual aware kink shit. And so like I feel like you haven't been to Mardi Gras. You will see way more skin at a public beach. Most kink shit requires like requires covering your body and a lot of extra stuff. Like if you're wearing a harness or like a latex full leather outfit you're like showing way less skin than someone wearing a speedo or a bikini. So maybe you're just uncomfortable with people expressing their sexuality. Which in case don't go to pride because that's what pride is all about. That's the entire point.

But yeah the whole point like I'm literally a trans non binary lesbian. Like that's like such a perfect encapsulation of what the tender queer kind of trope is. And like not not not not many people like self self identify as as tender queers. It's kind of this joke that the more kind of punky queer community has kind of it's like we're putting a label on this this behavioral trend that we've observed. And it's kind of a joke right. I'm not trying to call out specific people. I'm not if you are soft and emotional sensitive cool whatever do whatever you want. I'm fine.

Just don't don't use these things as a shield to justify forcing your will onto other people. It's cool to not it's totally fine to like not like people being publicly affectionate or like doing public. Like it's perfectly fine to be uncomfortable with that. It's perfectly like that doesn't mean anything bad. It doesn't mean you're a prude. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. But like there's nothing wrong with people wanting to be public with that at a public event celebrating the fact that it's they are now less oppressed for doing that thing. Like yeah or a beach or Mardi Gras.

And like make sure you're cognizant if you're engaging in any kind of like socially normalized ideas of like straight stuff is inherently less sexual than gay stuff. Right. I always I mean I advocate people being able to like get into their own head and figure out why they think certain things like this. It's it's it's this like idea of Meta thought trying to try to think about why you think about things. So if you if you're if you're more uncomfortable with two men kissing than you are with then one man and a woman kissing you should think about that. You should be like even even as like even as a trans non-binary lesbian if you if you if you're more if you're more comfortable looking at two men kiss. You should think about why why what social conditioning has caused this to happen because that's something that people have been pushing for a long time is that yeah. Gay stuff is like more adult or more mature than queer stuff.

I think that's a big part of of these types of things being at pride is like pushing back on that idea. So like I think and the reason why we see more of these now is like there are these baby tender queers who grew up in a world where you were less likely to get fucking assaulted for being gay. While also growing up on the Internet in the age of Tumblr and Instagram right these kids were able to construct their own comfortable safe bubble diversions of reality online only being exposed to what they want when they want right. They get they get to only view it things that they find aesthetically pleasing and the pandemic certainly heightened this right with people being forced to solely exist in their self catered online worlds. So now with the outside world opening up some of these soft baby tender queers are going through puberty and are dealing with their quote unquote uncomfy feelings. And the added notion of being exposed to things that you have specifically not sought out like that that causes them to be uncomfortable right if you're if you're if you're a family person who is just attracted to other family people. Having to having to look at dudes be affectionate may not be your cup of tea but. And you may not like enjoy it but that's like it's just as queer as you are so if you shouldn't you can't prioritize your queerness over somebody else's.

It's it's it's it's it's like there's this collection of baby gays that gets uncomfortable being reminded that people like especially people whom they are not personally attracted to. Have sex it's like if they're reminded that this happens and they don't like it. It's like it feels like they have this sort of like anxiety just about about just looking at something that they perceive as sexual in nature right. And for this for them this includes other but to differently queer people wearing leather or being semi new like dudes being shirtless or women being shirtless for like I think that that's a whole other double standard that should be pushed back up on. But like again it's pride's not any more naked than people at the beach. So you're not it's not actually it they're very selective in the types of things that they that they will that they will focus on. And it plays into this notion that's used by all like anti gay legislation that gayness is inherently more sexual than being straight right it's it's it's more sexual it's more mature it's more adult. Because for a long time being gay was exclusively seen as like a hyper sexual deviant act.

And now especially among Gen Z baby queers being queer is now less tied to specifically the act of sex right queerness is much more of an like an overarching personal identity now especially as like as it intersects with like gender and stuff right. You know whether that being non binary other stuff like pansexual bisexual what have you, but to kind of circle back to the kink of pride stuff. People want us dead for being queer. It doesn't fucking matter if someone's parading around in a collar. If you're uncomfortable, you should maybe learn to fight actually fight back against people who actually want to kill you. Like pride was a riot you should you should sort out your uncomfy feelings elsewhere or direct your or direct your uncomfy feelings at the people attacking us. So maybe maybe you don't prop up kink at pride discourse when accusations of queer people being all groomers is that an all time high. And there's fascists organizing to like shoot us at pride marches.

So maybe consider that before you do discourse on twitter.com. I'm going to do one little quote and then we will have an ad break. I'm just going to end this section with a quote from them.com again quote kinks sex and protest are all inherent parts of pride. One of the core tenants of pride is liberation and working against cultural shaming calling to quote not perform your kinks and fetishes at pride. Because some minors are there and kink can quote sexualize the event and quote implies that celebrating sexuality and kink is openly bad and normalizing these things should be a goal of pride. BDSM subversive sexuality and leather culture have enjoyed a long history within the LGBTQ rights movement and such public displays of sexuality are driven by much more than libido or counter cultural impulses. They're an inherent expression of queer culture and queer sexuality and as such deserve a place at pride as much as anything else. Okay, and now it's time to actually get into what the title of this episode is about the operation prideful stuff. We're going to talk about this thing that sucks.

So whether you're looking at the conservative groomer discourse or the tender queer kink at pride discourse, you'll see a lot of the same logic as well as a lot of the same photos. We've talked a lot about memes on the show and I'm not going to get into the powder memes very much right now, but suffice to say that a picture can stick in your head a lot easier than a bunch of words can. And throughout the groomer and kick at pride shit, there are a few select photos that people use to demonstrate their opinions on how gay people are a threat to children. Either either the just pictures of adults and like kink associated garb, usually like full latex body suits or pup masks. Or, and there's these specifically like, there's these two specific pictures of kids just like standing next to adults who are wearing pup masks that get used a lot. There's also there's also a lot of pictures of like a drag queen story time. And whenever whenever I see any of these very specific pictures, I flash back to when I first came across the original operation prideful 4chan thread back in 2020, because these are actually all of all of the exact same pictures. So operation prideful was a cyber harassment campaign started on 4chan targeting the degeneracy of the LGBTQ community by attempting to sway public opinion against queer people by linking being gay to grooming and pedophilia.

So checking back in in 2022. Oh boy. Oh boy has has things happened. So initially organized on 4chan discord and telegram right before pride month, the campaign set out targets and methods to flood the social media platforms of gay venues pride sponsors and LGBTQ people or supporters with spam anti gay memes and media usually photos intended to imply a link between being openly queer and the grooming of children and operating online under the banner of operation prideful. The campaign started on May 10 2020 when an anonymous 4chan poster posted a thread on poll outlining operation prideful, which was pitching it as a crowdsourced campaign aimed at damaging the LGBTQ community during the month of June of in 2020. The plan centered around quote unquote, red pilling users in the comments sections of companies that support LGBTQ causes on social media. The 4chan post read quote, every June hundreds of massive corporations band together to smother social media in posts in flavor of pride month, a code word for the degeneracy that is LGBT activism. Many of these accounts are rather small and get very little engagement, yet they continue to post without backlash. Beginning on June 1st, the goal of operation prideful is to get on Twitter, Instagram, etc. and drop a shit ton of disturbing red pills on homosexuality on the comments of the lesser known pages. The bigger pages are okay targets, but posts tend to get unnoticed in the sea of other comments. Commenting on smaller pages, ones with less than 100 likes and so means anyone who views it will see the posts and companies will reconsider their pro pride posts afterwards.

So if you scroll through the archived initial pridefall thread, you'll see a crowdsourced collection of pictures that they intend to flood the internet with in the comments section of posts discussing pride or discussing LGBTQ activism or whatever. So in this crowdsourced collection of photos, we see a lot of drag queen story time stuff, but many of these pictures and memes are now the same ones used both in the recent groomer thing and in the past two years of kink at pride discourse. It's the exact same photos. There's hundreds of them. There's hundreds of photos of people in pup masks, waving pride flags. There's a lot of them, and the specific ones get used for so much of the groomer shit. And they really started to gain much more visibility during 2020 after the oppression prideful thing got launched. The oppression prideful 4chan thread also instructed users on how to set up fake phone numbers to make burner accounts to comment on these on these social media pages. There's another really interesting part that the oppression prideful planning stuff detailed was on on on discord on the oppression prideful servers and channels. The users were planning to repurpose cringy tick tock videos while relabeling them with anti LGBTQ captions and hashtags. Here's a here's a quote from their from their from their planning planning discord. An additional idea, we can redpool zoomers on tick tock and literally build a fucking puppet army to fuck the shit out of millennials. We should expand this operation to as many social media outlets as possible in order to maximize effort. Let's operate like this on tick tock, convince any Gen Z sibling or relatives to do some kind of shitty gesture charade slash horror dance,

and then add LGBTQ critical captions on top of it and reposted under trending hashtags. So you see elements of this exact strategy mirrored one year later in libs of tick tock by getting videos of people being kids and like kind of cringy because kids are kind of cringy, but videos of kids on tick tock and mischaracterizing, you know, tick tock videos and adding adding LGBTQ talking points on top of them to sway the public opinion of queer people. It's the it's the exact same strategy as a similar idea was also implemented alongside setting up fake dating app profiles to not only spread their anti gay kind of grooming memes, but also to farm viral content by catfish and gay people and getting them to like be an embarrassing interactions. Another quote on Tinder, bumble and grinder set up fake profiles with legit convincing images and descriptions that criticize LGBT. So it's this it's trying to catfish queer people and like then I guess spam them with pictures of these like grooming memes and see what their reaction is then post it right it's. The whole operation prideful strategy might appear pretty simple, right? It's like basically glorified shitposting, setting up a bunch of fake suck up accounts and demonizing queer people in the comment section of small corporations and influencers. There definitely is a lot more to it than that right there was there was this element of like planned escalation, starting off first is like appearing as a reasonable commenters right acting in very good faith just as somebody concerned by kids being exposed to sexual materials,

whether that be, you know, people in drag at a library reading books, or people at a pride parade, right? So instead of immediately going on like full 100% gay bashing, saying that we should, you know, kill all deviant trans people, which a lot of conservative commentators just say now like Elijah Schaefer who just posts memes about wanting to kill trans kids. These, these, these board fascists, unfortunately, try to coordinate a slow, more insidious approach, which they would hope would just gradually turn the tide of public opinion against queer people. Here's a, here's a snippet from one of the prideful organizing chats quote, keep it normie, palatable and friendly. This means no Nazi or Hitler shit. The goal is to make them question whether what they're supporting is really the right thing. So as, as, as pride month progressed, the, the, as the pridefall participants coordinated on 4chan discord and telegram to slowly increase the frequency and intensity of the campaign. Another quote from the organizing chat quote, think about it as waves day one is simply questioning homosexuality and then as the days goes on, it will get worse and worse until the end of pride month. So, in terms of physical things that actually had, I believe operation prideful resulted in a few gay events getting shut down. There was like this event at, I think it was, it was like a, like a, at a queer nightclub in the UK. Like a shut down. There was a few other like, like, obviously like material results that they had by doing this harassment campaign against venues and corporations. But I think they're just, they were more successful in first of all spreading specific mimetic images that are now commonly used in the grooming stuff and in the kink of pride stuff, some, some of which these images were not really used in discourse before, but now are commonplace. I think that that's really where more of this idea succeeded. So over the course of the month, they will want to get more regular people to start

associating members of the LGBTQ community with pedophilia. And in order to do that, the way they see it is by just gradually shifting this discussion. And then as public opinion alters, they hope that brands will distance themselves from the LGBTQ community and stop doing more, more pride bullshit. Right. So that was, that was another big part of what their intention was. And they may not have done all that stuff immediately. Like they may not may not have succeeded in that, but they definitely did succeed in the prevalence of the images that they were trying to intentionally spread. Because that absolutely has happened. Do you know who else loves implanting ideas into your brain? That's, that's, that's right. The products and services that sponsor this podcast. Go go go buy their product or get a job. You know, you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, here's, here's the ads. And we are, we are back. Wasn't, wasn't it fun reading about Operation Pridefall? Didn't that just bring, bring joy to your ears? So happy. Me too. Yeah. So as we mentioned, a big part of their attempts to sway public opinion is by spamming photos and memes that attempt to showcase just how dangerous gay people are to children, whether that be drag queens doing storytime at a library, photos of gay people doing quote unquote, kink at pride. Basically, basically they're trying to say how could any reasonable person or corporation support pride. It's essentially a grooming parade, right? That that's the thing that they were trying to implant. And one of the things that Operation Pridefall was successful in was popularizing a few of these kink at pride photos, many of which were then subsequently used last year during King of Pride discourse and used this year as well, mostly by some, some like anti sex people on the left and some of these young tender queers. And, you know, the same photos are used in grooming stuff and in Pridefall stuff and kink at pride stuff, because it's the same big psychology at play, right?

So the idea that sexuality in a queer sense is dangerous and way more deviant than sexuality in a heterosexual context, right? Like straight people kissing is rated G, gay people kissing is rated PG or PG 13. It's that idea, but accelerated another correlation between the openly homophobic groomer talking points and like the tender queer stuff is this idea that I'm only comfortable seeing expressions of sexuality that I can relate to or also find attractive. And another interesting thing about a lot of these photos is that a lot of these photos that they use aren't actually photos of pride. A lot of a lot of the photos that they use are actually from the Folsom Street Fair, which is like a kink festival. It takes place in San Francisco every year. And it is hard to exaggerate how horny the Folsom Street Fair is. So it's very horny, but also obviously because gay people have sex, gay people also existed the Folsom Street Fair. They may even wave a pride flag, shocking. So a lot of these photos that they use in the grooming stuff and in the kink at pride stuff are actually from the Folsom Street Fair.

There are actually photos of pride parades. And of course, anyone who's been to pride would kind of know that because pride is not like the Folsom Street Fair. They are very different to vets. And that's another indicator of how a lot of these people who prop up this discourse online have never been to pride either because they're sharing photos at the Folsom Street Fair and saying it's pride. Obviously, lots of these Nazis on 4chan have never been to the Folsom Street Fair or pride. But they also share these same photos because hey, it's people who look gay doing sexual things in public. That means it's at pride and it's a danger to children, even though a lot of them are actually at the Folsom Street Fair. So then if you're a queer person and you're reposting these Folsom Street Fair pictures and claiming that they're from a pride parade to bash kink at pride stuff, reconsider that because you're basically just doing the work that neo-Nazis wants to do.

You're just doing it on your own time. You're repurposing the exact same photos that they were putting out there within this context and just not even knowing where these pictures are from. So stop that. Consider not. If you're going to go to all of this work to denounce queer people for existing, maybe you should consider why you're doing that. Because wow, that sucks because calling the Folsom Street Fair a pride parade and then demonizing it because... And then demonizing pride because there's people who act like pretty kinky is not great because that's not what anything is happening. None of that is accurate.

So it's really frustrating to look at all of the ways these things combine because you get tender queers sharing Folsom Street Fair pictures, you get conservative politicians sharing them, all calling them pride stuff. Again, a lot of the stuff you see there isn't even... A lot of pictures don't even have full nudity. So it's not even super important but you're conflating these things in a really disingenuous way and you're just repeating the exact same things that Nazis have been trying to get you to repeat for years and you should consider why that happens. So all of the grooming stuff obviously has gotten worse in the past few months.

Definitely ballooned around the don't say gay bill. And this got tied into a whole bunch of stuff happening in Florida with the Disney Corporation and a lot of the grooming stuff got tied to conservatives attacking Disney now and calling Disney a grooming organization. We've had far right candidates show up in front of Disney World to do protests. We've had Nazis show up in front of Disney World to do protests. We've seen a lot of mega people show up at Disney World to do protests all against Disney's grooming of children by including anything not straight in any of their materials, which is already so little.

Which is also extremely funny of imagining you bring Walt Disney back to the bed and he's like, what is it? Come on man, guys, we're all on the same side here. Yeah, and I don't know, I don't know if I really actually think that, do all these people actually think that millions of teachers, Democrats, corporate entertainment creators are all complicit in a long term planning to sexually groom minors? Some might believe that, right? That kind of overlaps with some chewing on stuff and the paranoia around child trafficking.

But I think others understand that they're kind of being hyperbolic and they're being inflammatory to get people angry and to get people very active in their hatred of gay people. They need to, old school homophobia kind of became a bad look. They need to find a new way to rebrand it and now it's with this groomer stuff and gay teachers, trans teachers, gender identity stuff. A lot of it is now wrapped up in trans issues. But I want to read this quote by a right wing writer named Rod Drear. It was cited in The Atlantic and I think it's actually a really good look

at how the people who are smart on the right, how that they are intentionally using this grooming label, quote, about the term groomers. It's usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning. An adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not be specifically to groom them for sexual activity,

but it is certainly to groom them to take them on a sexual gender identity at odds with the norm. Which really, I think that quote really showcases what's going on in their brains there. Yeah, and this is something I think like, like, Rod Drear in particular doing this I think is a really bad sign because there's people who don't know who Rod Drear is. He's like a weirdo Catholic guy. He's been like a right wing Catholic, I think he's a right wing Catholic columnist for a long time. And like, you know, if you go back to like 2017, his big thing was this thing called the Benedict option, which was basically like, okay, so like secular societies become corrupted,

like Christians should just pull out of it, right, and go live with their own communities that can be sort of like, like, you know, we've lost this world, we have to like create a new world which we can live around sort of like Christian truth or whatever. And he was in this long running kind of like battle with a sort of like, I guess like openly phalanges kind of like openly fascists. I mean, not quite openly fascist, but like people people who are reading like, what's his name? People who are reading Schmidt and like the Nazi lawyers who were like, okay, well, we, you know, instead of as opposed to this thing of like, we're Catholics, we're going to pull back from the world.

Their thing was we're going to use, we're going to use like the state to enforce Christian doctrine. And Dreher had sort of like fought that. And the fact that Dreher is now just full on in this grooming shit, right, that is really bad. Yep. And looking to get in, you know, if you want to go back in terms of history, right, like this is the kind of flip that happened that brought the evangelicals into the political scene, right, like you have this flip from like people being like, well, the rapture is coming inside his impure, so we're not going to become be politically engaged to, oh, hey, look, we can use the state to just like destroy our political enemies and create the kingdom of heaven on earth.

And yeah, this is, this is not good. This is. Yeah, but I think specifically that quotes a really good insight into how the smart conservatives who like know what they're doing, like they know what's not actual grooming, but it's, if they can, if they can use that word within the context of being like, it's about getting, it's about getting kids to adopt a non normative sexual identity. Again, it's like non normative, right? It's confusion in them, turning them against the institutions in society, right? All of, all of these things that is, that is mirrored across lots of the grooming discourse, the kink of pride discourse, all this kind of stuff. It's the same, it's the same thing. It's like a non normative sexuality is more sexual than a normative sexuality.

It's this whole idea. Man, and it's not great because it's not going to stop with kids either. It's not good. We, we, I talked with, I've talked with this a lot how, how once they ban, you know, trans health care for minors, they're going to bump it up to age 25, then they're going to bump it up to no one has it at all. And I have, I got, I got an update on that front. So first of all, for recent legislation, there's the Alabama felony health care ban for trans youth, which forcibly detransitions teens across the state. And that's, that's, that's, that's going to enacted. And in Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works officially titled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act.

And it applies to individuals younger than 18 years old. And it would, it would inhibit Missouri physicians and healthcare providers to and prevent them from providing gender affirming health care to patients. And it turns out Missouri lawmakers a few weeks ago were debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender affirming care for minors. And, and they also suggested that access to medical interventions like hormones be withheld from transgender and non-binary individuals until at least their 25th birthday. During public hearing a few weeks ago in Missouri's for House Bill 2649, Lori Haynes, a psychologist, testified that she believes young adults under the age of 25 are unable to fully comprehend the dramatic and drastic and irreparable changes their body will go to under if they receive gender affirming medical treatments like puberty blockers or hormone therapies. Hayes also said that she supported getting conversion therapy for trans kids. Yeah, I'll bet she thinks that 18 year old should be able to buy AR-15s though.

Join the military. Join the military. So it's already happening. We already have lawmakers and we have psychologists being brought in to testify that this is the case. They want this is they're going to be the next thing they want this to happen. Now, I'm just going to say, obviously, a recent study published in the Journal for America in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that receiving gender affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormones between the ages 13 and 20, is associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower are odds of suicidality. Another study published late last year by the Trevor Project found that among transgender and non-binary minors, hormone therapy was associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression or suicide attempt over the last year. And a lot of the effects of puberty blockers and even hormonal placement therapy actually are reversible and are not damaging. So, I mean, but we all know that there's that horrible Matt Walsh trans documentary coming out soon.

Oh, God. Yeah, that. Yeah. And I know in the trailer, he says that one of the drugs used to give puberty blockers to minors is also used as a chemical castration for sexual assault perpetrators, which is kind of true, but it's castration in the sense that you need to take the drug always for its to work. It is a hormone blocker. It stops testosterone from being produced. If you go off of it, it's going to happen again. It's not a permanent castration. It's going to suppress testosterone. You know what? A popular medication for people with heart problems is also a highly explosive compound. Oh, no. It turns out things can be used in different ways. Yeah, like 100 percent of cancer victims are found with dihydrogen monoxide in their system.

Like so. But yeah, anyway, we're going to see a lot of we're going to see a lot of lies about HRT coming up soon. This Matt Walsh documentary is going to be stupid. But again, he doesn't understand the science, obviously. He's a propagandist. But the last thing I want to talk about here is what's going to be happening in Cortilane, Idaho. So taking taking their cue from the the I'm going to be I'm quoting. I'm going to quote an article here by by daily costs. They did a really, really, really good write up. David Newert wrote it.

David David Newert for the record, like the thing that he has been this beat that that we're in, like writing about these people. David's been doing it for like 30 years. He's he's amazing. He's incredible. Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to quote from him here. This is the last thing we'll close with. Taking a cue from the incoming tide of far right fear mongering about grooming and an LGBTQ agenda in schools and libraries. A group of Idaho biker militiamen are planning to show up to confront people celebrating pride at an event in downtown Cortilane, Idaho and in a public park next month. Two men from the leadership of Panhandle Patriots, a militia oriented bikers club based in northern Idaho. Justin Allen, the group's vice president and Jeff White.

It's Sargent at Arms told a recent gathering at a church hosted by Republican State House member Heather Scott that they plan to have a gun driven event next month in Cortilane, Idaho. The same day as the city's pride celebration at a park less than a mile away and they planned a confrontation. I'm going to play a clip of them announcing this. And yeah, give it a listen. These parades are government funded. Many of you aren't aware right now in Cortilane. On the 10th of June, there is family day. And in family day, they are promoting family values, activities and everything the very following day.

They're having gay pride day in the very same park. The very next day where they will be allowed to parade through all of Cortilane, drag queen dancers, education hour, making all this material available for all the kids in a park that is designed for kids. We are having an event the very same day. That very same day, we actually intend to go head to head with these people. A line must be drawn in the sand. Good people need to stand up as she was talking about the repercussions. We say, damn the repercussions. Stand up, take it to the head, go to the fight. If you can possibly, we know a lot of you are in Bonner, we live in Bonner County.

We are fighting in multiple counties. We are asking for all of you to come stand with us. Our event is advertised as gundelain because it's an anniversary of when we stood to protect our community. We are standing again to protect our community. We shifted our date to be available to go head to head with these people. They are trying to take your children. This fight is not just paper. It's not just words. It's not just politicians. They have to see people standing and they are facing no more.

Wow, that sucked and is entirely expected. The meeting at this church read by a Republican House member was titled, The Game Plan to Remove Inappropriate Materials in Our Schools and Libraries. It was held at a cavalry chapel in a small town north of Sandpoint, Idaho. Scott, it's a long history of associations and identifications with the far-right patriot movement specifically in Idaho. It was bad. Heather Scott, the Republican State House member, about an hour into the night, Scott invited the two militia dudes up to the podium to speak and they said that.

Yeah, it's in a flyer posted by the Panhandle Patriots advertising their planned conversation at Pride. A flyer that they made shows a drag queen reading at a public library and urges people to join in and standing up against the indoctrination and grooming of our children. And if you don't protect children, you are part of the problem. So yeah, they're planning to take a whole bunch of guns the same day as a Pride parade and we'll see what happens. I love that we're just going to see what happens. And I genuinely very incredibly deeply hope we're not reporting on the result of that because... Yup.

So anyway, before you share King at Pride discourse, think this is what happens. This is what happens when you engage in this type of rhetoric that queer sexuality is inherently more dangerous to kids. Because anyway... I'm sad now. Yeah, this isn't really an upper of an episode. You don't say. But it is important to talk about. So if you're going to Pride this year, please be careful because there's a lot of worsening attacks on queer people.

Bring an IFAC. You shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to do this. But this is the world we live in. But you should bring an IFAC. Anyway, well, that does it for us today. It could happen here. Hopefully it doesn't happen here, but it could. Welcome to Pick It Up and Hear, a podcast about something that did happen that sucked enormously. I'm Christopher Wong. I'm the host. Also with me is Garrison and Sophie. Hello. Good morning. Just a quick quick quick.

I'm Christopher Wong. I'm the host. Also with me is Garrison and Sophie. Hello. Good morning. Just really starting off positive there. It's this episode, the next episode. I mean, I guess this episode kind of ends in a high note, but that's great to hear. I'm so happy. I totally believe you. It kind of does.

Yeah, Shireen is also here. Hello. Hi, sorry. My fault. Keep going. No worries. So this is this is the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Tomorrow's episode, I think we'll actually be going out on, I guess, the day that it started kind of starts like the night of like June 3rd. And OK, I'm curious what you choose like. I don't know, like received like cultural memory of Tiananmen is because I don't know. I think I got a kind of weird one like being from a Chinese family. But as a white Canadian, I have zero amount of my knowledge about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, nor really about Tiananmen.

It just, yeah, that is something I never, never have really learned about. Yeah, I know that it happened in 1989. That's the American lesson we got on the history of that massacre that it happened in 1989. Really mediocre. Yeah. OK, well, today and tomorrow we're going to go. Well, we're going to talk, I think, less about what happens there specifically and more about the sort of broader history that's in. But I guess let's start out.

So there's really three Tiananmen's. There's the student protests that's inside Tiananmen Square itself. There's this part of Beijing, like around the squares, like a bunch of blocks are taken over by workers. And then there's a bunch of protests in other cities. And unfortunately, we're not going to be talking about the protests in the other cities because like basically nothing is known about them. Other than that, like they happened, but the people who would know aren't talking. So for somewhat obvious reasons. Yeah.

And the students themselves, I think like the normal version of Tiananmen is like these students and they're like pro-democracy protesters, right? But they're way weirder than that. There's like this weird ideological grab bag thing going on. They're basically what they're pissed off about is that this thing is called the reform and opening like isn't going fast enough. And we should talk about what that sort of is. So reform and opening is like this period in China in sort of the 80s and something like the 90s. And on the one hand, you have these sort of steps to like ease restrictions on speech and like rehabilitate intellectuals and like allow for a broader public discourse. But the other half of it is that like they're basically they're bringing markets back to China, right?

And this, this is a shit show in a lot of ways. If you want to hear about like the CCP reinventing debt peonage in about five years, go listen to my bastard's episode, the poison milk scandal. It's a trip. But on the other hand, you have, you know, so you have kind of like opening up, right? You have just more discourse, they're not persecuting intellectuals again, sort of. They're they're they're deep persecuting the intellectuals that they had persecuted. But on the other hand, you get this absolutely draconian sort of like set of crackdowns in the social sphere. You have the one child policy, you have this like really powerful tightening of one man rule in the factory.

And you have the sort of the destruction of these. We'll get into this more later, but like the sort of limited decision making capacity that workers had had in the factories just is sort of dismantled. And so you see these sort of gaps beginning to form here, right? Like, on the one hand, you have these students who have market reforms to go faster, they want more freedom of speech, they like kind of want democracy. But like mostly what they want is to be in charge of the party so they can crush the sort of like bureaucracy they see as holding market reforms back. And it's worth noting that like a lot of these students are involved in what becomes known as neo authoritarianism, which is the sort of ideology that holds that like the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy the factions and the bureaucracy. And so, you know, and that that's how you can lead development.

And this stuff like that stuff like neo authoritarianism survives the protests and goes on to become like a pretty major faction in the CCP itself in the 90s and 2000s. And, you know, this is this is where things just get weird, right? The student movement itself is very hierarchical and it gets to the point where like, but by the end of the student movement, they're these the student leaders are like kidnapping each other over like who has control of the microphones and like the stages in the square. And it is it is extremely bizarre. And, you know, in terms of like the protests actually like if what they're trying to do is they're trying to like influence this factional fight inside the CCP over like the speed at which reformers are going to go. And this it doesn't work. It's like stunningly ineffectual.

The guy they're trying to defend like winds up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Okay, so those are the student protesters, but the part and that the student protesters are the part of this that like everyone knows partly because some of those people escaped to Hong Kong and, you know, they're very influential sort of shaping the memory there. But there's also the workers that I mentioned earlier, and the students basically like hate the workers. But for most of the time this protest is going on and this is this is months right, they literally won't they will not let any of the workers go into this into Tiananmen Square. Like they have they have this whole system and like in order to get into like increasing like, like closer to the center of the square you have to be a student and then if you get to the center of the square you have to be like a member of the leadership it's very weird. And, you know, and like one of the things the workers are trying to do is they want to carry out a general strike and the students are like no absolutely not do not do a general strike. Because largely because okay so if these people start doing a general strike like that's not something that's not under our control. And, you know, okay so this raises the question like if the relationship between the students who are at Tiananmen and the workers at Tiananmen are this bad like why are the workers even there.

And there's a few answers to this question the sort of the simplest and most immediate one is that like the workers are initially they come out because they're pissed they see how badly like the cops and sort of like the party is treating the students in the square. And so they get mad but but but there's there's other stuff going on to the late 80s is the ladies in China is sort of a mess economically that there's rampant inflation and the sort of rapid increase in prices is a threat to you know the sort of like cheap supply grain which is like the sort of main subsidy that if you're an urban worker that you get and meanwhile you know you have marketization happening so at the same time that the prices are increasing for everyone and they can't get access to stuff that they need. You have just like CCP princelings like racing down the street and imported sports cars. And like these are like the only these are like the only cars right like people people. I don't know like like people are starting to get bicycles and mass sort of in this period. But then you know it's okay here's here's this like party boss guy who was a sports car they're like spending years salaries like gambling at race tracks and people just get pissed off. So they they start organizing and I'm going to read from a section of a piece by your hands on about what what they were doing.

During the struggle to obstruct the military workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization in action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self organization ensued. The development of organizations led to a radicalization of action. The workers started organizing self armed quasi militias such as picket cores and dead or died brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. In a sense Beijing became a city you self managed by workers. It was reminiscent of Petrograd self armed workers organized in the Soviets in the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the same time Beijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications on the street. In many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns a possible general strike was put on the table as well.

Many workers started to build connections between factories prepare for a general strike. And yeah like this is the part of it that like people don't talk about because it wasn't in the square and I mean the other part of the other faction like factor that's going on here is that like. So the press corps is like sitting in the square and this is why Tiananmen is this is like this is massive spectacle right because all of this everything that's happening here inside the square is happening like in front of the entire western press corps. And like people are like you know like people are just pointing cameras at their window right and. You know but on the other hand. The people outside of the square like the workers outside of the square are the workers are getting more organized and this is like. This is absolutely unacceptable to the party and so. Yeah on the night of June 3rd the army just starts killing them.

They. There had been a couple of attempts earlier to clear to clear the sort of fortifications and it hadn't really worked but this time. Like they're able to bring in military units that aren't from Beijing or like aren't from around the area. And they kill an enormous number of people. Yeah and I think it's important to note that like. Both in terms of the killings that happen immediately. And the political persecution like after that it's it's mostly the workers bearing this especially an initial massacre most of the killing happens. As the army is like fighting its way into the square.

And you know I mean they kill people in the square too but. You know and eventually they get into the square and this is where you get like tank man and like the sort of the famous accounts of the massacre but like but that place basically over right because. What one of the other things that's happened is that over the course of this protest a lot of the students have left. Because they sort of they sort of gave up after the like factual conflict like. Stopped but so so most of the people like. Who are there are on the outs are the other workers on the outside of the square trying to defend it and. Where those people get killed and the army gets to build the square it's the whole things are ready over. And you know the these protests get crushed and.

You know before the last bullet has been fired everyone everyone left standing is trying to create their own narratives but what just happens. The most common one is that gentlemen is this like clash between democracy and authoritarianism and like. Okay to some extent that's not wrong although I mean you know. We've already mentioned that there are a lot of new authoritarian students there I. But like you know okay this is this is kind of a fair interpretation of what's going on like there's a lot of other pro-democracy movements in this period like in the region most famously there's Taiwan South Korea. But the actual question of what's happening here. Is. Is really a question of what kind of democracy there's you know that these people are fighting for. The students at Tiananmen's you know to the extent that their democratic principles are sincere and not.

A cover for a sort of like deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that's. You know demanded by like a sort of new class of intellectuals to receive market reforms to the extent that they like they actually believe in this right. They believe in a very narrow conception of political democracy. And you know this democracy is sort of political democracy operates at the level of the state right it's based on free citizens were equal before the law participating in elections that she's representatives you like pass laws. And you know oversee and manage a state bureaucracy. But you know that this model of political democracy which is you know this is the one that we live under right. It really gets the workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy doesn't extend. The capitalist firm or its state owns equivalent remains the absolute dictatorship of capitalists and advantage here your flunkies.

And even even the sort of progressive wings of the pro-democracy movement in like Taiwan and South Korea like maintain this private this private dictatorship. You know if you're a worker in one of these states right you get rights. You get you know you get the ability to form unions you get access to the welfare state you get these sort of limited protections from the worst like physical and psychological abuses that your bosses can inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movements actually are the legitimate Jesus sorry. The legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses which was not up for dispute. You know to these sort of pro-democracy movements right like democracy means a democratic state and not a democratic workplace. And this is this is the huge divide between what's happening at Tiananmen and what's happening like everywhere else in the world. The workers at Tiananmen are the only people left in this entire sort of like run of pro-democracy movements that disagree.

They they are standing against not only that like every they're standing not only against their own government against a lot of the students who are who are also like at these protests. They are standing against literally the entire tide of history itself. By by by you know by by applying the principles of pro-democracy movements like their own concerns right which is skyrocketing inflation mounting debts like rampant corruption to government officials like skyrocketing and spiraling inequality and petty bureaucratic oppression. Beijing's working class had reinvented a old and now like largely forgotten tradition of democracy in the factory that I'm going to I'm calling it democratic worker self management because there's no good name for it and they're all kind of clunky. Fair I mean this is based on who these people were at the time it makes sense that all of their names for things were pretty clunky. Yeah well the thing is that they don't name like like this and this is one of the things about. Okay well one of the real problems of studying Tiananmen right is that like.

Okay so we have really good accounts from the students right because some of the students flee and they're able to make it out we have like jack shit basically from the workers we have. Well what we do have is we have some of the we have some of the documents they produced and we have some a lot of interviews that were done with people there and they. I don't know that they have very very idiosyncratic. Ways of expressing what they believe and so you know you'll get things were like okay they're like okay we believe in the rule of law right and then the next sentence will be like. I we have calculated the exact amount of surplus value that has been distracted from us according to marks and it's like what. Because yeah the thing that they're doing is like they're synchronizing this news they're synchronizing sort of like a political tendency. That's trying to address. The sort of dual dictatorship are dealing with right like because they're dealing at the same time with like.

This political dictatorship the party has and also the fact that their bosses now like completely control everything that they do. And because of this they you know they they wind up being like the last or I guess technically second to last because Argentina happens so that that's sort of confluted mess in itself but they're there. In the 20th century like they are the last people who are fighting for democracy in the factory and. This like to a larger extent is what you know is actually about it's the culmination of a century and a half long war between. The democratic wing of the classical workers who have been and like every single other ideology that exists. And these guys over over that century and a half long span they're going to fight communists are going to fight capitalists are going to fight liberals and fascists and monarchies republics and social democracies and theocracies. And at Tiananmen they're going to lose one more time. And that defeat that the fact that they lose here the fact that these people get slaughtered the fact that like they're crushed so effectively that no one even remembers what they were no even members they exist or like much less like what they were fighting for.

This defeat is the origin of the modern world that one man rule in the factory like the individual single boss who has total control and power over you is in in its sort of thousand forms is the author of the hell that is 21st century. And when we come back from this commercial break we are going to look at the international part of the struggle that Tiananmen is sort of like the conclusion of. So here's some ads maybe for the job working at their distribution center. And we're back to look at why you two also must live in the absolute one man dictatorship in the factory. So it's not not not as much one man it's the one algorithm. You have to you have to listen to what your iPad tells you when you're walking through the Amazon distribution center. That's true. Yeah. It is funny because it's like they've somehow made a worse version of it was like OK.

Sure have. Yeah it's like it's like OK now now you are ruled by a computer whose whose job it is to make one person an extremely large amount of money. It's even further like depersonalized and further disjointed from actually being a human. Yeah it's it's I don't know. There's there's there's there's some metaphor here which if I wasn't like sick out of my mind about how like power depersonalizes and dehumanizes you until the point where you replace with a machine that you can make here. But I I don't know how one in one and every two days the rumor randomly starts bidding on me. So yeah I can't I can't do that. The lesson here the lesson here is is that when you're thinking about factories and how bosses suck and how it's not great to work in a factory just have a boss that tells you what to do.

The lesson is that it can always get worse because it could always be a computer. Anyway continue. So OK to get a sense of like what this fight is and like how how we got to Tiananmen. We need to go back to the revolutions of 1848 which is at first glance not like not an incredibly obvious place to start. OK if you want like a really detailed like blow for blow account of the revolutions of 1848 go listen to the revolutions podcast. It's good. I am not going to do it here because oh my god there's so much stuff. But the very short version is that so in 1848 across Europe there's a bunch of revolutions that are collectively known while sometimes known as like the spring time of the peoples.

And this is this is the first this is the first wave of revolutions where socialists are like a real thing. Frederick angles like that angles like the marks and angles angles is like on a barricade with a rifle fighting in Prussia. There's like yeah I'm not going to sadly I can't get into August von Willich here but like go go go Google August von Willich. He's wild. There's a huge revolution in France where they like that they finally deposed the king and you know this there's this question here as these revolutions look like they're winning. There's this question of how far democracy is going to go and what it's going to mean. And yeah you have a large thing you have this is in a lot of ways very similar to what you're dealing with within China in 1989. Inside of France you have the split right you have the split between you know like the people who are like who are like French radicals but in the sense of like the original French Revolution.

Who are you know OK they want like they want an elected democracy they absolutely do not want to like deal with the fact that the workplace is not a democracy. And then you know and you have a bunch of socialists and the socialists are like hey can we do something about like property relations and like the fact that there's a bunch of poor people with no jobs. And you know and the socialists get slaughtered but you know they they don't die I mean OK. You just said. Well OK so a lot of these people get horribly slaughtered but a lot of them escape and like make it out. The ideology lives on. Yeah well the ideology lives on and a lot of the lead. Well I mean there's an interesting story here like a lot of the leaders like live on a lot of these people like for example a bunch of people flee to the U.S.

And they wind up being like the like a lot of the officer corps of the Union Army in the Civil War is made up by these by these socialists who like had to flee after the revolutions failed. And like Prussia and stuff. But yeah so many of them do in fact die. Yeah it doesn't go great for them. And you know and you get to see one of the other things that's going to happen a lot which is that OK. So like the the the the sort of like the French like like the French radicals who are like pro capitalism but also pro democracy like ally with the conservative factions and then they also all get killed when Napoleon Napoleon the third takes power. But man it's really it's really it's really hard to root for someone here and that.

Yeah I know it's like this is really like like the revolution produces his own grave diggers shit like oh hey what did you expect was going to happen when you allied with like the landlords and Napoleon. Good thing this mistake will never be made again. Nope. Good thing we're not about to talk about this. Yeah yeah pay no mind to the rest of this episode. Yeah anyway. So yeah you have the split between people who want electoral democracy but you know dictatorships in the workplace and these people who wants like democracy in the workplace. And this also prefigures a split inside of socialism itself.

For you know for for the this isn't even I'm like in my script I say like for the most radical factions of socialism you know like control over the means of production which is like the thing that you want means that like production is controlled either by like free associations of workers like you know direct democratic unions this is later called syndicalism or like workers councils. And that that's you know I say it's like that's a very popular conception of like what this is going to be like if you read Marx like Marx is like oh yeah free associations of workers sure. But you know as as the sort of like 1840s role into the 1860s in the 1870s there's this faction of the movement that becomes just like obsessed with with bureaucratic technologies of the states. And you know like they watch the state really get involved in the economy in a way that it like kind of hasn't before. Then they in over the course of sort of industrialization they watch with like incredible envy as they see like. These incredibly elaborate like planning schemes they see the state building roads and canals and railroads and then entire cities with these like complex electrical grids and like gas lines and plumbing systems. And especially trains like specifically trains this drives them all completely insane.

And they become they begin to believe that like a single centralized planning body like not an American Association of Workers like a single centralized state planning body. Can like you know bring about the long sought after like cooperative Commonwealth socialism and all these people get they get obsessed with like such a planning right and this becomes this starts to sort of like consume more and more of the left. In Germany which is home to like the powerful German Social Democratic Party which is like probably the most powerful socialist party in the world at this point the socialists become divided into two camps there there's the revisionists led by Edward Bernstein who like he like renounces Marxism and revolution and like entirely in favor of reforming capitalism in the state from like within. And then you know you have these Orthodox Marxists that are like led by Karl Kotsky whose whole thing is that he hates Bernstein and like the only thing that these two people that these two groups agree on is that I. The only thing they agree on is bureaucratic state planning is the thing you're supposed to be fighting for and not like democratic workplaces. And this leads the SCP to like they they they do a lot of things that are like disastrous. One of the things that they wind up doing a lot is like actively working with the bosses to like destroy the like workplace autonomy for their own unions.

So like they'll be things where it's like like I don't think this is a famous example like there's like I think they're like and they're on metal workers and I think they make knives or something. And they have a lot of control of the production process right they can control like how much stuff gets produced the process like how it works like what they're actually doing and the STP is like no this is bad because it's inefficient and so they like basically crush their own union. And this this goes in really disastrous directions but we're still the single person who becomes like the most obsessed with like the potential of bureaucratic state planning is one very very very obscure guy named Vladimir Ilya Lenin. Who I don't expect anyone to have heard of. I just said Lenin it. Oh that's funny. Yeah. So as David Graver points out Lenin's obsession with like the German postal service is such that like. Okay so he writes a very famous book about like what a future social state is going to be called state and revolution and like almost all of it is a lie but he also says this in it a witty German social Democrat of the 1870s called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system this is very true at present the Postal Service is a business organized along the lines of a state capitalist monopoly.

This is the whole thing but like imperialism is making everything also this but so to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the Postal Service so that the technicians form and bookkeepers as well as all officials that receive no salaries higher than a workman's wage all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat this is our immediate aim. And if you think about what this means about five seconds right what he's saying is that socialism is the entire economy being planned by a bureaucratic state. And you know this this like this sits off this like massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who you know like what to control the work that they do. And you know like make and like you know the people who like who think that like the revolution means that they're actually going to be able to make decisions over their work and not you know just like. Work for like a slightly different set of bureaucrats and this struggle between you know this is the sort of like new socialist bureaucrats and like democracy in the workers movement. Is you know it's an enormous part of the struggle that happens here and there's like another version of it happening between. The workers movement itself and the capitalist state like in the 1880s on the workers movements in like in Italy and Germany and like.

France is at a certain extent that they have these they form these parties that are called like states within a state. And you know these things are these massive networks of these workers institutions they have like free schools they have workers associations they have like friendly societies they have libraries they have theaters they have like unions they have co-ops they have like. Neighborhood associations they have tenant unions and mutual aid societies and you know and these things are all run democratically by like by by the workers who form the associations. And you know and like the people who are doing this are like you know the hope is that like this is going to be the basis for the new social society right it's like OK we can just come together and like do this stuff. We can do it democratically we can administer the stuff ourselves. And these things are enormously popular. And you know and this like terrifies the sort of old ruling class and out of on Bismarck who's the guy basically running the German state in this period like. He his solution to this is to create like bureaucratic state run versions of like all of these things. So he creates like state run library state run theaters like state one welfare services. And he's using these as like a replacement to the sort of workers institutions and he has this great line retells an American observer quote.

My idea was to bribe the working classes or shall I say to win them over to regard the state as a social institution existing for their own sake and invested in and interested in their welfare. And like this works this is this is an enormous success this is one of the greatest propaganda crews ever because. Like it's so successful in convincing people that the thing that they're fighting for is like the state bureaucratic version of this thing and not the version where they do it themselves. That like when the socialists like take power that they confuse Bismarck's like literally the welfare state bribe thing that he like made to buy off the movements like they confuse that with socialism itself. And like to this day everyone believes this it's like it's it's I don't know I lose my mind constantly over this because. All of these things that Bismarck developed like specifically to destroy the social movement everyone was like oh my god this is socialism it's like no no please stop. And you know this is really effective particularly on the leadership of the movement but like the actual like people in these parties like in these movements. Don't forget it and as as the sort of like 20th century draws to close and you get like the as as the 19th century draws to close and you get like the 20th century.

The workers who are like doing the uprisings. And the thing that they do immediately when they start doing uprisings they start building these democratic institutions and particularly workers councils. The most famous of these are like other workers councils that form sort of spontaneously in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 these are like. This is actually like this is what like these they're called Soviets because Soviets just like the word for council in Russian and these these things are originally these like. Ad hoc strike committees and they eventually become these like like formalized like like elected bodies representatives from like the various factories who are like coordinating a strike and okay so 1905 they lose and they all die. But in 1917 they do this again and they form the Soviets again and this time the council start to take like a larger role in coordinating production directly. And you know coordinating between different like factories and industries and they turn into the sort of like counter power thing to the new government. And this kicks off this open period of warfare that stretches like literally from Italy to Argentina between the different socialist factions who like people like the different factions of this movement who want democracy in the factory.

And this like a lot newly formed like anti democratic alliance of like social democrats Bolsheviks and capitalists who like you know are like okay well some of them are in favor of like you can have to walk. Okay there's a whole range of this thing right like the thing that unites all of these movements social democrats the Bolsheviks the capitalists and later the fascists is that they like emphatically like do not want democracy in the factory. And they're willing to put aside their differences to make sure it doesn't happen. But you know there's still there's still a huge fight that happens here between between 1917 1920 you get workers councils in you get workers councils in Germany Poland Austria Ukraine Ireland and Ireland there's there's these like two giant revolts by syndicalist workers unions in Brazil and Argentina and these all get crushed in Italy Italy has like one of the most intense conflicts between these like a lot of syndicalists in the Italian state and they have this this really famous like set of factory occupations where instead of like before this people will go on strike right you go on strike and you leave your factory. And in Italy they're like okay what if we just stayed in the factory and took it over so that they couldn't like just like restart production with scabs and we now control the factory. And there's this huge wave of it in Italy in the late 1920s and you know it looks like for a little for like a bit like it really looks like they're going to bring down the government but the factory occupations get crushed but they don't get crushed by the

government they get crushed by the Italian Socialist Party and like their union the general confederation of labor. And like this is how fascism wins in Italy like to a large extent it's that like when when like you know and it happens in Germany too it's like when. When when when when sort of the social democrats and the capitalists are faced with this possibility that like workers could take over the factories the social democrats. Turn on them and just kill them all and the problem with that is that like okay well who who who do you do the killing with me answers the fascists. And then the social democrats like themselves all get exterminated by the fascists it's it's this like. You know it is a it is a terrible cycle that we're going to see like. Literally over and over and over again. Yeah it's bad.

That sounds not great yeah. Yeah. Do you know who else will slaughter your your factory council. Oh no oh I actually know this one. I guess it go we have a few options here. There is our good friends at the Washington State Patrol. If you're trying to set up a highway business next to the highway and run it run it via workers cancel state patrol come up be like not on this highway. Yeah you're done.

Probably also like Amazon or something who knows. Yeah. And we're back to see. You know okay okay. We are back to see like the worst defeats that they're going to have that like the people who want like. A factory council are going to have this period which for once actually has nothing to do with Amazon or the capitalist whatsoever. Which is that like the worst balling they're going to get is from Lenin and the Bolsheviks who. I don't know how many people sort of like know the history of the Russian Revolution but like the factory councils are the people who like basically put the Bolsheviks in power in the first place.

Like to a large extent like they're the people who like were the shock troops of this and like literally the moment Lenin takes power he starts undermining the Soviets. He publishes this thing like like like three or four days after the October Revolution he publishes this thing called the draft decree on workers control which is like you know he basically is like he's trying to like shift power from these councils to the Bolshevik party in the state. And this doesn't really work initially because these groups are like pretty powerful. But in it you know he publicly Lenin's like no we draw a driver power from the Soviets like we're the people who support these councils but then like Lenin's he's like shipping away from them and then. In 1918 he writes this thing he writes this paragraph from the immediate task the Soviet government which is like one of the wildest things I've ever read in my life. Which is saying it's it's it's wild it is. Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large scale machine industry. Today the revolution demands the interest of socialism but the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.

Which is like what what what. How how much you explain to our good viewers why that is so bonkers like. Some of them might just hear that and be like oh leftist words cool moving on even just the first two words unquestioning. Yeah makes me like that but like a questioning submission the whole thing about like the masses must unquestioningly obey the will of the single leader like what. This is like like what is happening this is. The thing that's happening here is that Lenin Lenin is being really. Candid about what it means for there to be a boss. Like what it means for there to be someone whose position is above you that can order you to do literally whatever they want and if you don't obey them.

Like bad things happen to you starve or get shot. Yeah she's she's she's incredibly candid about this right like this this this is what like having a boss means it means like questioning submission to the single will of a leader. This is like this this is how I talk about Sophie all the time. Yeah. Well shaking her head I'm with you Sophie. Can't be scared. Yeah you're welcome. Whatever you say Sophie.

Thanks care. God I'm thinking about this. There's this line. It's sort of financially related to this story. I read this thing once about so the workers who took over this or bond. I should think it was a student sure of that. A bunch of students like take over this like like the like the like the big academy in in Paris in 1968. And they send this like I think it's a telegram to like the Chinese Embassy.

And like the end of it is what I think if I'm remembering the exact words correctly it's the revolution will not be complete until the revolution will not be complete until the last capitalist is hung with the entrails of the last bureaucrat. Incredibly hot. 68 was wild. That's that's the thing this brought to mind for some reason. But you know I mean going back to sort of Lenin is like unquestioning like submission to the single well like he's more candid about what like one man rule in the factory or like having a boss you have to obey like means but the system he's describing like isn't different than any other political system like Bolshevik rule in the factory like isn't really different than capital social democratic or fascist rule. And you know the movement for democracy in the factory as you know as as as these people are crushed especially in constant 1921 like the movement for democracy in the factory is faced by four implacable enemies who are willing to put aside all of their ideological differences to ensure that like no one ever like gets to control their workplace. And you know as as the 20s blended early 1930s like the movement seemed to have disappeared but they didn't they absolutely didn't even though even though they got murdered by the fascist the communists.

Social Democrats and the capitalists they're going to be back next episode to do like 12 more revolutions. And yeah that that that that that that that come come back tomorrow for us talking about like why these revolutions happens what the ruling class did to stop them and then yeah the lead up to Tiananmen Square to see the sort of like the final stand of the Chinese working class and yeah like get to what Tiananmen actually was. What a cliffhanger. Podcasts. Yeah that that counts as an intro. Look, yes, we've now started the podcast the podcast that we are starting is it could happen here. And I, it's me because for long I'm doing I'm doing the host thing. And I have a bunch of other people with me who do a lot of things. I have garrison. Yes, I have.

And I have Sophie, our lovely boss Sophie licked her bed. I'll praise on high. Your words. Your words not mine. So weird. I did not enjoy that at all. Take over. So Sophie, unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately, lacks the sheer ruthlessness to cross the workers movement.

Well, we will see. That remains to be determined. I don't buy it. Sophie is very sad. I'm sorry, Sophie. So when we last left off, Lenin, Lenin has like in theory crushed last sort of remaining factions of like the workers, but who want democracy and factories but unfortunately for the Leninist like literally no many how no matter how many workers they kill and they are going to kill enormous numbers of workers. The demand for democracy and the factory like just refuses to die. For over 100 years, the development of the sort of mass factory system and logistical infrastructure that you need to support it, maybe most importantly coal mines and railroads that are used to transport stuff, generate this incredibly militant working class that sees, you know, democratic control over the workplaces like the fundamental

aspect of its liberation. Ideologically, this is, you know, this is this is manifested in like a series of interlocking beliefs about like the nature of the working class and like what class society is, all of which are sort of necessary components of this like what becomes this like incredibly like this like instinctive formation of workers councils the moment like an uprising happens. And this is something that that's very interesting about about the 20th century is that like, yeah, like whenever there's like a crisis someone someone's like about everyone in the factories like okay we're we've taken control of the factory now like we were forming a council we're forming a giant assembly and like we don't do this anymore. And we're going to come back to like why we don't do this anymore but like this hasn't happened. Like the last time it happened was like in Argentina in 2001. And I don't even know if Garrison Garrison might have been alive for that. Thanks. But like, we'll say the other time it does happen is when after after a recording session when our boss Sophie leaves me and Chris will stay on the line to talk usually usually about Star Wars. And in a way kind of is a workers council just for the factory of podcasting. Yeah. Yeah.

Talk about Star Wars in front of me. I feel so bad for Sophie. Next, the next time we will. Just a little puppy face. It's okay. Thanks, Sirene. Your petite bourgeois tactics won't work on me. Oh, God, we've all all all the people on the subreddit who think that we hate Sophie are going to just have a. Oh, no.

That is my favorite recurring conspiracy theory bet. That's a real conspiracy. Oh, man. Oh, man. Wow. I'm a lot of catching up on to do. You don't. You do not. You do not because it's not true. Run away. Meanwhile, meanwhile, so in the period when people actually like did this seriously, you know, there's a lot of sort of ideological things that come together to make it so that when people like, you know, like when when bread prices increase too much is what people do.

And a lot of this has to do with the physical experience of what being a worker is in like, you know, the 1920s centuries like you have these like these these these these incredibly rapid like. Technological expansions and, you know, the people who are who are doing this stuff like see themselves as the creators of the new world. Right. And this like literally this is happening. Like these are the people who are literally like they are building the cities. Right. Like all of the sort of the infrastructure of the modern world is physically being created by them. And this creates this, you know, like if you were the person who is like who has transformed like this fishing village into this giant industrial city.

Right. You know, you see yourselves as the creator like literally physically the creator of this new world that's being developed. And then the second belief that it produces that drives this movement is that the people who produce this world should be its inheritors. And so this this this sort of this is what drives the workers movement in this period, which is that like OK, so if you if you are literally physically creating the new world and you think that because you have created it should be yours. The next thing that you do because it's not yours, right? Like you don't like, yeah, you know, like the people who build cities are not the people who own the cities. And, you know, if you see this, yeah, like, yeah, OK, like in the city is actually owned by like three real estate speculators and like a bunch of cops. And more applicable examples like the people who build the podcast is not own the podcast.

Yeah, no, we don't know the podcast like we are. Exactly applicable result that, you know, that kind of that, you know, everyone understands that example. I actually don't think the people understand that we don't own the podcast. It's actually unclear to me. I just people people have weird things about how podcasting works. But yeah, we don't own the podcast. We just create it and we do all the work and then Sophie sits in her leather chair looking down at my leather chair. Look at all my podcast creations I have created and then all of us.

Climate change has gotten so bad, how could you think I could sit here on an 85 degree day in a leather chair? If you're going to insult me, at least get your facts right. My word. A leather chair. Continue, Chris. Okay, so for the people who are like actually watching their boss, like sitting around smoking a giant cigar in a factory while they pound like hammers or like work at a hospital and get a watch. So he's just started taking off a massive cigar and a comically large cigar. It's incredible timing.

Because for the record, whenever I do hang out with my other boss, Robert, he often does sit in some chair smoking a cigar. And I do think it is in fact leather. Okay, so we're describing Robert. He forces me to slave away at my laptop writing scripts and just sits in his chair. Look, we're working the podcast minds. Yeah, it is. It is really hard out there. Yeah.

Continue. Okay, so the belief that you produce the world and that if you produce it, you should own it is like this is not unique to the part of the workers movement that thinks that also you should have a democracy in the factory and you should have the autonomy to decide how you do your work and what needs to be done. Those beliefs broadly comprise the ideology of the entire workers movement. By, you know, by the 20th century, the workers movement is really, really broad, right? I mean, it stretches from sort of like really mild social democratic trade unionists to like the intellectual heads of these like Leninist Vanguard parties. But what makes a democratic wing unique is that their concern is the fundamental alienation of factory life. And this, I mean, originally, like it is very much factory life, but like this gets expanded out as this goes on into sort of the fundamental alienation of labor itself, which is this condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who use you as a tool to do something. And, you know, this is a concern for everyone in some sense, but for the Leninist and social democrats, alienation is just like a product of ownership or distribution, right? So, you know, if that's what you believe, the way you defeat alienation is through the working class and productive capacity, not in it, not in sort of like any kind of like innate human like humanity or creativity.

Like all you have to do is like, well, okay, you flip a switch, right? And the factory is now owned by the state instead of being owned by like JPMorgan or something. And like now your alienation is gone. Uh-huh. That's how it works. Yeah, or anyway, social democracy, it's like, well, okay, so you flip a switch and taxes get higher. And now you have a union, but you're still working for the Goldman Sachs. But, you know, for the way the workers movements that, you know, actually cares about democracy, this doesn't solve anything, right? Like as long as the fundamental relation of being an object, right? As long as like you fundamentally the worker are not a human being who has agency and control and autonomy over their life. As long as you're just an object that, you know, like you're a living human tool that the one man ruler of the factory can like, you know, can wield around to do whatever they want.

As long as that persists, changes in ownership structure and, you know, like health benefits miss the entire point. And this kind of, the degradation that comes from just being a tool can only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class. And that means like actually giving the class control over the production process. And, you know, in 1936 in Spain, workers are like fuck this and decide to take the entire thing into their own hands. And they do this by just seizing their workplaces in mass. And this becomes known as the Spanish Revolution. And it is one of the most extensive sort of experiments in like workers' democratic self-management or like whatever you want to call people making their own decisions in the workplace like that has ever happened. Like especially in the modern era, like everything from like public utilities to like bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories, like falls under the direct control of these like democratic unions. And once their bosses have been like, you know, chased from the premises and like flee in terror, these workers said about like transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines.

Like they pooled their resources to get the collectively and that they allocate them democratically for the benefit of like society as a whole. And for a brief moment this works. They have this incredible like this triumphant experiment, democratic self-managements and output increases dramatically and social services are expanded. And like in the span of two years in the middle of a civil war, like the workers of Spain are able to create a universal health care system that expands carriage like rural areas of Spain where like you couldn't get it before. But you know, the problem is once again, is that this is happening to the civil war and you know, using sort of like nominally anti-fascism like as they're sort of like, you know, they're using the threat of the need to oppose fascism as a sort of. Front like a French for what they're actually doing. You get this alliance of liberals, liberal socialists and Stalinists who just like brutally stamp out any attempt to do democratic self-management. And like you have like Soviet caudries and like NKVD, like Soviet secret police guys, like literally leading Arby's into these cities and like like killing the workers and then physically like taking control of these factories that people had seized and giving them back to the bosses. Which is, you know, this is great communist stuff and yeah, this ends exactly how you would expect it to end with, oh yeah, like the Stalinists get everything they want, they murder all of the people who want like a factory council and then they all get killed by Franco. But you know, undeterred by sort of the casualty tolls of these like massacres by people who want bosses. This just keeps happening and you know, by the time you get to the 1950s, 1960s, like all this stuff is back.

Like there's factory councils again in Hungary, you get them in Italy and France and like Czechoslovakia in 1968, there's like, there's councils being, like there's communes being formed in like Vietnam, there's like, we've talked about the Cordonnes in Chile on the show before, like these things are happening everywhere. And I think Hungary in particular is a really interesting one because, so there's a revolution in Hungary against sort of the Soviets in 1956, that's, it gets a lot of the same liberal mythologizing that you get with Tiananmen, but like kind of more egregious here. So I don't know, I think like, I got taught this revolution in schools is like one of the few ones that we actually get. And they taught it as this like, this is like the Hungarian revolution was this like kind of nationalist like liberal democratic revolution for people who wanted like democracy and freedom and like free markets and then like, you know, if you go read about what the people were saying, but people actually doing the revolution, we're saying you get quotes like this. This is a direct quote from a member of one of the Hungarian workers councils. The time when the bosses decided our fate is over. And it's like, huh, huh, these guys do not seem like, I don't know, these guys don't seem like liberal democrats. So something weird is happening here. There's something that's actually happening is that like, Hungarian workers like seize control of their factories and like their workers councils, the government and then the Russian slaughter them all. But you know, like, this is not a liberal democratic revolution at all. This is a revolt against the dictatorship in the workplace. And there's identical revolts break out across both the capitalist world and the capitalist world. And in the newly decolonized society, you start seeing them too. And, you know, and to the sort of like dismay of both the communists and the capitalists who are both like, Oh, my God, why is everyone keep forming workers councils like this solution to alienation, like, it's not like an ideological thing, right? Like, it's not that there's like, a group of people who are like, secretly infiltrating these countries and being like, Okay, you need to form workers councils. This this is this stuff is happening in places where there's just like none of that.

So like what one of one of the sort of like movements that does stuff like this is is the revolution in Algeria. You know, and they're like, they're like, Algeria like does have a pretty high level of political education, but the political education they're getting is from like, it's from the National Liberation Front, which is like, insofar as it's any one thing, it's like it's a nationalist vanguardist movement, which is, you know, they're the people who like fight the fresh colonizers and beat them. And their ideology, like, insofar as you can describe one ideology, like the thing that they want is like the state having this decisive role in national rights. But you know, immediately upon taking power, Ahmed Bambella, who's Algeria's first president, like, discovers that, you know, he's not actually going to be the one like making the decision about what the country's economic structure is going to be, because he takes power and a whole bunch of like French people who live in Algeria flee. And basically what happens immediately after is that all of like all of these this property that had been originally like held by by French sort of like colonists, like it gets immediately seized by the Algerian working class. And, you know, they build their own workers councils. And, you know, Bambella is like, Okay, I guess I guess we have like workers councils now. Like, I guess I guess we have sort of like autonomous democratic production. And Bambella is like kind of trying to undermine them. But he doesn't really get a chance to because once again, there's a military coup. And Bambella, like, he I think he escapes and doesn't die but like the fact that the council's also sort of get dismantled again. But like, the number of times this has happened is getting just like completely out of hand. And it's like, Yeah, okay, the, the, it's like, Yeah, okay, so every time this happens, they murder everyone, but like, you know, the

revolutions keep happening and they keep happening and they keep happening. And, you know, even as late as like the late 70s, like it's not clear that that like, it's not clear that the people who want one man rolling factor are going to win. Like, there's this moment in the late 1977 where it's like this, this like giant student and worker coalition almost takes power. Like in Spain, even after like, 50 years of like Franco and like the fascist dictatorship, like the the CNT, which is the anarchist union that had done the revolution, like reappears in the 70s again, even though everyone thought it was gone. And like, you know, this is a real, this is a real source of strife for especially the sort of capitalist managerial elite who are, you know, they like, this stuff keeps happening as like, okay, like, it is an unacceptable risk that one of the one day one of these groups is going to win. And so they start looking for a way to like, dismantle this sort of like, systemic things that like create that kind of people to do this. But you know, but they're trying to do it in a way that doesn't involve them giving up their power. So, yeah, as Vicky Ostawell points out, the sort of like this like instinctive embrace of like democracy in the factory like as a political program is only possible. As long as factories, as long as like the factory functions as a point of encounter, her, I think it was her term for when she calls it a dark agora, which is like so agoras like the sort of like the Greek marketplace in the center of a town, everyone goes there, and you like talk about things, right. And the factory serves as this kind of like, it's sort of like dark version of it where like, on the one hand, you know, it facilitates these interactions that allow people to sort of like identify with each other and like, you know, create collective meeting by like interacting with each other. But on the other hand, it exists to exploit you and it's like terrible. And you're just getting, you know, you're getting physically and socially destroyed like every moment

you're in it. But, you know, it's still is a place where you can like assemble an identity is like, like, you want a bunch of the people around you can go like, Hey, like we are workers, right, like we are the working class and this is like a shared political community that you have that allows you to do things. And so the thrust of sort of the attack against this takes the form of this attack on like the shop floor as like a site of like, formation of identities that can allow you to like mobilize stuff. And so this takes like a number of forms. Most famously is there's this deindustrialization and this sort of like, spatial relocation to factories. So like, like part of what's going on right is that you have a you have a bunch of people who work in a factory and then they live like around like right around the factories, right, they work in a coal mine, everyone lives in a town around the coal mine. And this means that everyone sees each other constantly and they're like constantly like running into each other and like physically talking to each other. And, you know, this is a really good way to create radical So what happens is you these factories get sent out to the suburbs. And this allows you to create places where you know workers are isolated from each other. And you know, the other thing you can do is you turn workers into homeowners. And you sort of like buy them off with this combination of like cheap credit And the other thing you can do is promise that like their houses will not be a financial asset. And so, as the sort of 80s rules on the sort of the like the heralded democratization of finance replaces democratization the factory is sort of the capitalist class like the like really insidious is they they they they tied like the remaining union pensions into the stock market. And this is stuff like like you see this today with like 401ks and it means that like, if you want to like have a retirement, you are like physically invested in the stock market, which ties, you know, which ties everyone sort of like into the system and corporations start to turn workplaces into these like enormous propaganda apparatuses. You get like like Walmart in particular has these like like these

ideological like programming things that they run that are designed to sort of like get you to identify with like the corporation itself and not with like the other people you're, you know, like the other people you're with in the class as a whole and you know the like the other thing that they're able to do is the fact that capital is mobile and workers like art allows, you know, combines with like logistics advances. And it means that like if workers ever start getting an upper hand somewhere capitalist can just leave. And the process that you see is that as the sort of the total number of people working in in the end, like in industrial work keeps decreasing as percentage of the population, it keeps decreasing. And as this happens, capitalists are just like, Okay, screw it, we're gonna we're gonna pick up our tools and leave. And this spits out like enormous populations who are just like kicked out of the traditional workforce and these developments. This is what actually like eventually destroys the classical workers movement is the ability to leave and the sort of destruction of the factory is like a site of stuff. But in order for this to work, the one thing they need is a place to move to right and they need somewhere with this large exploitable labor supply that is been like crushed enough that it won't revolt against them. And the capitalist class finds that in our products and services. And we're we're back, we're we're back and we're back to China. And, okay, so I've been talking about the way this sort of like this this whole system like this whole factory system mass production stuff like develops. But China is weird, because this is the one place where the factory system works like really differently than everywhere else. And there's a lot of reasons for this one of which is it like, so Chinese like stayed on firms. It's like almost impossible for them to fire someone. Because I mean there's a lot of reasons for this and one of them is that like people's entire sort of social sphere is built around their work unit. And like the work unit is like it's the company you work for and there's this whole sort of like legal apparatus built around it and it like, you know, like this like unit gives you everything from like your retirement like it like feeds you like often like entertainment stuffs like tied into it like you get health care you get like childcare from it.

And the CCP also gets rid of the peace rate system, which is this like this is this thing that like, I mean it still there's a lot of capitalist places to work with this was like okay so the peace rate system is you pay people for like every unit or something they produce. So like you get paid by like, I don't know like how many, like how many pounds of like cherries you can pick. And so the USSR brings this back because the USSR and the US are really not that different. But China is like nah this like sucks this is capitalism. And you know okay like I'm not gonna say the Chinese factory system is great but like, because they don't have the peace rate system is because they can't fire people. You get this very, you get this weird thing where it's like, the people who run the factories, like don't have very good ways to force people to work. And because of this, they like they sort of like have to allow this like degree of participation in the worker process in like in the labor process that like you don't really see most other places. And the other thing they have that I'd luckily Garrison and I also have this is we have the ability to criticize our bosses. Although we have more of this.

Yeah, one day. Yeah, what do you got? Go ahead. Okay, we've got it. We don't we don't have our big character poster yet but like one day Garrison and I are going to show up to the office with like giant big character posters with your faces on it. My favorite part of like big labor protest is when they make those giant like puppets. Yeah. If we just make a giant stick puppet version of Robert and Sophie that we just create around the office. That was as long as mine is bigger than Roberts. That's fine. We can do that.

Great. Great. Full support. So we got to do this in China it's it's weird like you have the ability to do this but like it's like run through the party. If someone gets unpopular enough like the party will like start a campaign about how bad like that one boss is and then you could show up to like the meeting and go like hey I hate my boss this guy sucks. But then they're just replacing with like another boss. Right. So it's not like it's not actually a democratic system.

Really. But the way that it works ensures that like the people who are managers are like pretty popular, at least to some extent like our popular and people don't like really hate them. And this means that you know because there's all of this stuff that makes the Chinese factories different from like the other systems. And also because of like structural stuff and Maoism that I mean I could talk about that but I don't like talking about Maoism. But basically the product of this is that like you have in China during this period a lot of demands for democracy but they're really deep they're not they're not tied to the workplace at all. They're they're mostly like political demands for like democracy in the party years like that. And that means like you know at least in the cities. The system like kind of works okay ish until the Cultural Revolution.

Or everything falls apart and this means that it is at long last time for me to do the Cultural Revolution rant. Which is something I have been planning for like. Yeah I'm very excited about this I've been waiting for an excuse and I finally have one. Okay so the Cultural Revolution rant is that everyone gets the Cultural Revolution completely wrong. Like everyone every like it's like it's one of the rare events where like it's misinterpreted in like exactly the same way by both people who support it and the people who oppose it. And okay the first thing to understand about this right is like okay so the the the initial the very very beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Like it's basically a bunch of like teenagers kind of like it's like middle schoolers essentially and they're attacking these they're attacking like other kids at their school. And these kids are kids who have what's called a black blood background like black blood.

Which means that like they're they're the children of people who were from like quote unquote bad class backgrounds. And this is really weird for a number of reasons one because you have you have a sort of like a pseudo class system. Based on like who your parents were right you have people who have red blood who had like good class backgrounds like your parents or workers or your parents work with a party or something. And then you have people who are from like bad class backgrounds quote unquote who like are persecuted and like. Okay like I don't really care that much if you're like persecuting like a Shanghai oligarch who like collaborated with the French and Japanese imperialist or whatever but like. Hey this extends to like the children of these people and a lot of the children of these people like weren't even alive when their parents were like. You know like doing stuff that was bad and everything is that like the term bad class background this is really loose like I know people whose families were declared like declared. Like black class backgrounds who have black blood and like you know they weren't allowed to hold any government position.

And the reason that this happened to them was that her dad had made bird feeders before the revolution. And they considered that like petit bourgeois. And it's like this is like this is like what like what are you doing like you you you you reproduced like you've turned class into like a pseudo race thing that's like her like. You like inherit from your parents even though like their parents don't own property anymore because it's it's it's really bizarre and what's what's happening here is. The kids from the red class backgrounds are you know they're the kids of the new of the new Chinese elite. And they're just like picking on attacking the kids who are like now this this sort of like like minority class and. So what it's amounts to is the beginning of this is a bunch of privileged rich kids who are like attacking the bunch of kids who are being persecuted for stuff that's like not their fault at all. And you know part and the other the other part of this like this is the part that people think gets like Mao is trying to like play power game inside the party blah blah blah blah blah.

But you know things get more and more chaotic and you get you get to start getting his attacks on like CCP bureaucrats and cadres and stuff because Mao is trying to like. Mao is trying to solidify his place in the party and he's a blah blah blah there's a little stuff that's happening. But then it gets really interesting. So this starts in 1966 right. And at the very beginning of 1967 there's something there's something called the January storm. Which is where a bunch of rebel workers just seize control of Shanghai and like they run the party out they run the are they run I think they run the army out too. And you know and now like they control the city of Shanghai and this is like an oh fuck moment for Mao because you know now he has to like deal with this city that has been taking over by its own working class. And I found this this incredible line from Joe and Lai who's having a meeting with Mao and they're trying to forget what to do about the fact that like this this this like that Shanghai has been seized by by these workers and I'm just going to read this.

When asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up. Joe and Lai replied bluntly that quote anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct elections of the Paris commune type. And I think this is like this is this really incredible like like thing you can find right because it's like OK well there's two things that can happen here. One is either like OK you give these people democracy and the ability to vote right. And Joe and Lai and Mao look at this and like that would be anarchism we can't do that and second thing is you don't do that and you repress them and they take the second line. And you know OK like it takes them a bit to get this ramped up right takes a bit to get the sort of kind of revolution thing they're doing to like stop all of this rebel stuff that they've started to. To get it takes about a year but. But by 1968.

The students and the workers who had like. You know done done this sort of uprising stuff drug getting slaughtered. Like just masquerade I killed on an unimaginable scale. And then this is this is where everyone gets the culture revolution completely wrong because everyone the entire memory of the cultural revolution is from basically the first two years of it right which is like. All the stuff about like like you know like professors being marched out onto the street and dunce caps and like students like humiliating the professors and like. Like party officials being like marched around with like placards on them and like people like that's and like the chaos of the revolution like that's that's stuff everyone remembers. That's the first two years of this. There's still like I mean you can art like there's there's the short the short the quote unquote short culture revolution which is like the high point of activity goes from 1966 and 1969.

And then there's like a longer one that goes to like the death of Mao depending on how you want to count it. But. Almost all of the actual violence in this period happens in this in in in the third phase which is the first phase of the initial uprising and then the rebel groups are fighting each other. But then phase three is when the state like cracks down on like starts like starts trying to crush this like rebel student factions. And I'm going to read from Walder who did a. So this guy named Walder who went to he did a bunch of work in the Chinese archives where he like went and like found the death tolls. And I'm going to read like he like he goes to a bunch of archives he goes to a bunch of state archives and he like like tracks down the death certificates and like tracks down like who died where. And this this is what he wrote about it.

More than three fourths of all documented deaths and local animals are due to the actions of authorities in the in this third phase and then more than 90% of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. So what he's saying here is that 75% of all of the deaths in the entire culture revolution weren't done by like the revolution parts they were done by the state murdering the workers faction the rebel factions. And not only that 90% of the actual political persecution was done by the state and not by the rebels. And when you actually look at what this means like this means everything everything anyone ever talks about the culture revolution is completely wrong. It wasn't that like the thing that happened in the culture revolution wasn't that sort of student radicalism got out of control and they started killing everyone it produces all this violence. The thing that actually happens is that there's a student like uprising right. But what happens is that the sort of conservative and state factions just slaughter them. And Walter estimates the total number of people dead.

It's somewhere between 1.1 and 1.6 million people. And again like 75% and I think it's actually slightly higher than that like percent of the people who were killed in this are killed by the state. And you know this this has an enormous effect on I mean just everything that happens in China in Chinese society from then on because on the one hand. The popular memory of the culture revolution persists as this thing that was like this is what happens if you like if people outside the party and like students and radicals like start like making trouble is that you get all these people dead. But then you know you have the people inside the state who like know how many people they had to kill in order to hold on to power right they kill. They kill probably more people than like the you know there's there's a very famous massacre of like communists or like suspected communists in Indonesia that doesn't get called a genocide because it was technically on political lines but like. Was one of the worst anti-communist massacres in history and they killed more people than that in during this period and that like that level of violence and the fact that the people running the state understand what they had to do. It means you get you get an elite that's incredibly paranoid about like anything that like smells like organizing happen outside the party and the other thing happens is that like.

The most radical students and workers of this period just get they're all dead right they killed they killed like they killed like a million people the. You know for for for every one person who got killed there's about 19 people who were like persecuted in a lot of way and that's like a lot of people are tortured a lot of these people are like sent to prisons they're like. Like really horrible stuff happens to people and this process keeps going like through through the seven like there was a huge spike in like state killings 1970. And by the end of the 70s like anything that sort of like could have cohere into into like a movement that like wants democracy in the workplace for example it's just gone. Because all of all of the radicals like and anyone anyone who like wanted anyone who wanted democracy in the factory and the people who were like even sort of like just for like sort of rebellious like these people have all been killed. And the consequence of this is that throughout the through the 80s you get this politics that's driven by this like sort of like intellectual liberal like liberal democratic politics. That ignores just like completely ignores working class entirely and. You know and these these people start to take power and you get danger ping.

Well I think I think it's like right before you take power but danger ping wise up implementing the one child policy which is this like incredibly draconian and really successful attempt just like. Reestablish the states like patriarchal control over the household and strips like hundreds of millions of women from like like of autonomy over their own bodies. And you know and it really looks like through through through through like the late 70s in the 80s it looks like the like the Chinese ruling class has succeeded right like they finally destroyed that they finally destroyed. Like any opposition to them but then you know things get very weird which is that Tiananmen happens and. You know what but by 1989 like the whole like as a rule like in general everywhere the sort of classical workers who met that was like at demanding democracy the factory like they're basically done. And so they're unable to sort of do their own revolutions now the only thing they can do is sort of like latch on to other stuff. But the problem that the party has is that so they had a lot of measures in place to try to make sure that you'd never got these kinds of movements in China and they kind of worked. But when it went to the 1980s like China starts implementing a market economy right they said they start they start like cutting the welfare state they start like destroying the sort of like limited control that works as had in the factories.

And they kind of like unknowingly reproduced the conditions that have been producing these revolutions in every other country. And you know as this massive inflation wave hits they turn China into this powder keg. And this you know and this combined with sort of like the liberal democratic students moving. Gets you this really interesting and weird ideology that these workers have and I'm going to read it from from an interview with with with one of the workers who was at Tiananmen. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshops does what the workers say counts or what the leader says. He later talked about it in the factory the dictatorship sorry in the factory the director is a dictator. What one man says goes if you view the state through the factory it's about the same one man rule. Our objective is not very high we just want workers to have their own independent organizations.

In work units it's personal rule for example if I want to change jobs the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at five at five p.m. but he tells me to work overtime for two hours and if I don't he'll cut my bonus. This is a personal rule a factory should have a system if a worker wants to change jobs they ought to have a system of rules decide how to do it. Also these rules should be decided upon by everyone and then afterwards anyone who violates it will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law now we don't have this kind of legal system. That's a really like I don't know I think it's a really interesting sort of like fusion of a whole bunch of stuff right because on the one hand. The sort of like ruling discourse that's happening the things the students are talking about is like that we need democracy read the rule of law. The workers in these factories are looking at the situation they're facing and they're like we don't have a democracy like here either right.

And so you get this you get what's a really conservative framing of the sort of this is a very this sort of very classical like critique of one man rule in the factory that has been happening for like. You know like a hundred years but what's just thinking about this is that like. Any actual attempt to like do this right get gets you to workers control like democratic workers control in the factory. And as Walter who Walter also wrote another like he's a guy who went and interviewed a bunch of the people who had been workers who have been involved with this. And as they point out like this. Unlike really like any other time in Chinese history like the. The people who are part of like the Beijing autonomous workers autonomous federation are you know they don't they don't have an intellectual class like this is these are these are just a bunch of workers. And they have very little connection like they don't they have very little like political connections right like beforehand like to the label circles are just sort of hearing what they're reading.

And this is this means like what you have here is like it's not like an intellectual like this is this is just a bunch of workers. And for you know for for like one final time their instincts when the revolution sort of like starts is to demand democracy in the factory and this demand like above all others is completely politically unacceptable. And you know when when the army marches on Beijing it's it's these workers that they wipe out. And they wipe them out so thoroughly that the fact that this is what these people were fighting for. Is it's scrubbed from the records of the CCP it's scrubbed like the pro-democracy movement doesn't remember it even though their entire thing is memory. And yeah and this this ensures that the meeting of these actual events what the people were fighting for what they were trying to do has been almost completely lost. And I think at this point we can finally ask what what what actually was Tiananmen. And in some sense in the Chinese context itself it's a transition between two different Chinese working classes.

These protests are sort of like this is the last like political sort of like mobilization of like the of the old Chinese working class which has been these people who had been in the cities who had been like they'd been the beneficiaries of this old sort of like socialist period welfare state. And these people in in in the streets around Tiananmen they mount the last attack of the classical workers movement. And when they lose this entire class like this this entire urban working class that had been around since like the 20s that had been sort of the driver of Chinese radical politics that had been like that have been fighting and striking for like 70 80 years. They they're gone they're completely destroyed. And over the course of the economic restructuring in the 1990s they they they cease to exist as a class and they're replaced by a new Chinese working class which is drawn from sort of these rural and sort of semi urban underclasses of the old social system who are like dragging the cities from from their villages from their towns and who now fill actually I well I don't know what the numbers are today because it's a weird because of COVID but like in in 2019 there were 277 million of these people. Of this enormous market worker like force who formed the backbone of like the entire Chinese working class. And these people who they have rural housing registrations and this means that they don't get any of the benefits like the sort of like welfare benefits that you would get from living in a city.

And this means that they're you know the they they constitute like an entirely new class of of of workers and instead of you know, like whatever sort of privileges had had been like carved out by the old working class. This one gets nothing. And the other thing that they get is this entire raft of sort of capitalist ideology that's baked into like every aspect of the workplace culture this this is massive attempt in China to get people to buy homes. And you know that like when we're the old working class could at least like posit the factory is like a place where you could have democracy where like life could be improved by like different controlled factories like this new working class like the thing that they want the most is to leave the factory and become a business owner. And you know like this this probably sounds familiar to like us right like this is this is the old joke about like about the you about the American working class which is that everyone sees themselves as template temporarily embarrassed millionaires and like yeah you know in modern China it's like yeah. Okay, it's like people consider themselves to be like temporarily embarrassed small business owners. And this stuff. This this this ideological self conception of like I'm going to work in the fact that I'm going to become a small business owner is completely inimical to the formation of like the classical or there hasn't been that kind of formation in China sense. And this this is not really unique thing right the death of that workers movement has seen a sort of like complete and total collapse of the demand for like democratic self management, like everywhere across the entire world. And, you know, incredibly stubbornly like the working class like refuses to sort of cohere itself in the factory.

So in this sense, China is really just sort of late to the game. They got slightly early they got they got slightly later to the point that we're at now. You said there was going to be a happier ending. Oh, the happy ending was last episode. Oh, this episode is this episode's ending is really depressing. Okay, there's a slightly less depressing note kind of. Okay, the thing that's less depressing here is that for my entire literally my entire lifetime has been the US lurching from one economic collapse or another. And the world the world like the international economic system. Like, I think I was born in like the middle of like the calm collapse. And then I got 2008. And then, like, there's been a bunch of economic collapse in the last like three years. And, you know, the whole system is like lurched from crisis to crisis to crisis. And that means that there's been an incredible just like a rapidly increasing number of revolutions everywhere, even even though the sort of like

darker gore of the factory like a cease to be this thing that like creates the working like the identity of the working class. And this means that, you know, okay, so in order to have some kind of mass movement, you need some kind of collective identity to mobilize around. And, you know, if you can't make this into factory the place where it's going to be made instead is the street. And this means in the last, you know, like 20 years. Without the sort of positive identity in the workplace to hear itself around. Workers are really only able to sort of mobilize on a mass basis like indirect opposition to a threat that can that can that can confront like everyone at the same time. And this is the only thing I could do this is really the state. And, you know, the state has the ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, and that becomes the only available enemy.

And so yeah, if you look at what revolutions have been in the last 20 years, it's a constant fight against the police because fighting the police is the only thing that can that can allow you to create new social identity, sort of collective identification. And, you know, and so this means that collective like modern revolts, like everything we've seen over the last like four years, the form that it takes is mass street movements and you know continuous confrontation with the police. And you get to literally see this with with Occupy right Occupy was originally like the the the the like the slogan Occupy was about the Argentinean factory occupations in 2001. But then, you know, that stops like that's the end like just one like that that that's the end of the whole cycle there's there's no more factory occupations. You get one in Bosnia, Hezegovia, which is funny because it's like they occupy a bunch of factories, but like they don't know what to do with them. And so you get just like a regular like Occupy like in like in the sort of like score occupations you'd get in like New York or whatever, or everyone's sort of like sitting in a circle and talking about stuff but it's happening in a factory. But but they're not like trying to run production they're not trying to do any of that stuff they're just sort of like there in the factory isn't is no longer this sort of like space.

Of like creation and possibility that could like be turned into something new it's just like a place where you go that's like indistinguishable from like a square. And, you know, for the last 10 years it's like people people originally it was like it just left right so everyone's everyone's occupying squares. But, you know, by about 2014 people figured out you can't like it's almost impossible to hold a square if the police attempt to run you out. And so this gets replaced with running street fights with the police but this, you know, this places everyone who's trying to do this in this incredibly dangerous bind because, you know, the like the old workers councils were able to bring down states like largely they got crushed by outside militaries but they were able to bring down states because, you know, there isn't an enormous amount of power in being able to control production. But the problem is that like, you know, if you're in a square right like you don't have the ability to do that. And without the sort of without the factory occupations alongside them there's been a lot of general strikes in the last four years there's one of Peru is one in France or some in Hong Kong and Sudan and every single one of them has been crushed. But you know but but this is a real problem right because the current labor conditions aren't going to produce another wave of factory occupations.

And so the way forward for anyone who like, you know, wants to have a democracy in the workplace is completely unclear. And I think I think that's the actual legacy of Tiananmen the workers who are assembled outside Tiananmen Square had already left their factories. And you know, for for all that they spoke the language of the workers movements right they spoke of democracy in the factory and one man rule. They stood and fought and died like we do in the streets. They're this bridge between sort of the classical workers movements and us. And, you know, they face the same revolutionary crisis that we face the crisis of Papua and Palestine and Columbia and Iran and Myanmar and Hong Kong of is this crisis of victory that's just beyond the horizon can't be grasped. You know, I don't think the people at Tiananmen have any answers to give us. I don't think they do. I think they ran they ran headlong into the crisis that we ran into and they all died. Yeah, I think expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those who before and after us died fighting for liberation. And all we can really do now is find our own way when with the names of the dead in our lips build the world they died fighting for. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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