Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 54

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

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

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

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. It happened somewhere else a while ago and also somewhere else now-ish several days ago. What a great title for a show. I love how snappy and memorable that is. We can go into a tiny bit of pulling back the curtain, which is that you can't do too many good intros

because if you do too many good intros and everyone expects you to constantly have a good intro. So every once in a while you have to lower the overall quality of the intro so that when you are truly desperate and have just been dragged out of bed at like 3 a.m. and you have to record a podcast, your sort of atonal noises will be considered normal. That's why I script all my intros. But I'm just built different. So this is what could happen here. What are we doing here today, Chris?

We had planned this episode before this happened. We planned this episode before the referendum in Cuba about the new family code. But yeah, we're going to be talking about the kind of bleak but sort of gets better history of homosexuality in Cuba and how things went from very bad to getting a lot better and then also how a lot of American leftists like picked up a version of the history of this that is just sort of nonsense. And here with us talk about this is Andrés Petiera who is, well, doing many things, one of which is studying for PhD in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Andrés, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So, okay, I guess the place that I want to start is I want to go back to the 60s and I want to go back to something that I don't think a lot of people understand very well in terms of what happened in various ways over a lot of sort of these new sort of revolutionary social states, which is that you get this attempt to like form a sort of like a new revolutionary subject. Sometimes it's like, I mean, the Soviet one was like the new man.

There are sort of different versions of this across the sort of various social revolutionary states. I guess I wanted to ask you to talk about how this kind of got really, really homophobic in Cuba like pretty quickly. Yeah. So, I mean, and one of the interesting parts about the story in Cuba is that it actually is in part imported from the USSR and ideas in the USSR. And that's actually one of the connections which in the literature isn't in the academic literature, at least isn't always that well explored because Cuban is tend to be very insular. We don't really tend to learn Russian.

I'm kind of crazy. I actually am learning Russian. But no, so, so, you know, there was obviously lots of homophobia, lots of, you know, like lots of bigotry against LGBT people before 1959, not unlike the United States of the 1950s, like you could live privately or maybe in certain safe spaces, you could live a kind of okay life. But, you know, it was definitely very marginalized position, lots of bigotry and lots of personal danger in addition to a lack of basic rights. After 1959, you know, you have this jettisoning of the Catholic Church and kind of religious reasons for being bigoted with the coming of the Revolution, which is a secular communist revolution.

But what ends up happening is they, and this is something that Abel Sierra Madero's recent book on these policies talks about a lot, is this kind of attempt to remake Cuban men into the man that's needed for this communist society in the future. And as part of this, they engage in a sort of social hygiene. We don't want people who are lazy. We don't want people who are degenerate, but you know, bourgeois degeneracy, blah, you know, that kind of stuff. And within this, you know, a persecution of people who are seen as either come out either as gay, or at least as soft, and they need to be made into real macho men for the Revolution. And this started out in a very serious series of isolated things, right, you would have, like, Vigilio Piñeda was who was a dramaturg.

He was, he was jailed, and he basically he was being targeted because people wanted his house. And so if he was jailed and his belongings were separated from him, then like someone could get to keep his apartment like that seems to be why he was originally targeted. And he was detained twice for basically walking while gay. That's how basically what the incident boils down to is walking effeminately and people, and he was detained by police. And he was free because he had like he was an important person, he was, you know, he had some protections. But then as the decade rolls on as the 1960s roll on that's like that's 1960, one year after the Revolution. 1965, you have the creation of a series of forced labor camps, and there's not really any way to get around that. We don't know exactly how many were sent there.

But it seems to be in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, we, again, we don't know because the government hasn't declassified that information. So it's still a conjecture, but it's not because people don't want to investigate the details. And these are thousands and thousands of people who are being said for all sorts of reasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, people who listen to rock, people who are seen as hippies, Presleianos, so Elvis Presleians, so people who listen to Elvis Presley because that was seen as too effeminate and too Yankee. And so they were sent to the camps and to do forced labor, but the camps weren't just about forced labor. They were about remaking through labor these men into real men because hard labor, proletarian labor would, you know, remake their spirits and their ethics and ha ha ha. I mean, it's kind of not alike what we're seeing in the 1960s in China, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a very explicit, like, one of the things, well, yeah, one of the things that is just going on during the Cultural Revolution also, yeah, it's like they had this sort of reeducation through labor thing that starts. And it gets, it does get, yeah, like, I've seen conflicting accounts of the extent to which like people were directly targeted for being gay. It definitely did happen and there's, yeah, and you get a lot of this sort of same thing of like, these people are like spiritually unpeer and like they have to be like reeducated and they have to be sort of like turned into like proper like subjects. And there's a lot of, especially like, there's a lot of sort of like, there's a lot of people like being forced to hold signs that say sodomite and shit. Yeah. Although funnily enough, and the weird part about this is that like, in the Chinese case, so the Cultural Revolution is like not a good thing. The Cultural Revolution is like not a great time to be gay, but there's also this thing. There's this thing kind of like, it's kind of like, like 1920s Berlin, where like there are, there is some really bad stuff that happens, but there's also this sort of like there's a kind of general political chaos.

So you can get away with some stuff too. There's actually, there's another campaign in China in sorts about 1983. Yeah, it's called the Strike Hard campaign. There's actually two Strike Hard campaigns, so there's one in the 80s that's supposed to be this campaign against like crime and stuff. And so like they target a bunch of people who are like, supposed to be like social criminals and then that winds up being a lot of like, there are just mass arrests of gay people. They're imprisoned for a very, very long time. Yeah, under, although that one's also interesting because it's like, you have very similar kind of reasoning, but it's like, but it's in this sort of like dang, like kind of revolutionary like phase where it's like, instead of being a danger to the revolution, they're like sort of a danger to traditional Chinese values.

Which is interesting and bleak. Yeah, well, because this is one of the things that happens in China, right? Is it like, in, you know, there is an attempt to sort of do more egalitarian like gender relations during the Cultural Revolution, during the sort of like revolutionary period. And then when Dan takes power, part of his thing is like, no, we're going back to traditional gender relations, like all of this egalitarian stuff was a mistake. And like, this is part of where the one child policy comes from. But then also, you get a really homophobic crackdown in like 83, like, like three or four years after sort of like, he's always so. And actually, weirdly, almost exactly the same time that like, the real sort of market reforms hit, like, it's like a year later is when the package that sort of like, really brings the market back. I try to happen, I know it's a very weird, yeah, we've gotten very off topic, but it's a very weird interesting sort of like social flip that happens.

Yeah, for sure. And that definitely makes me want to read more about like China during this period. Yeah, well, I think it's interesting, like, like the everything you were talking about earlier that is interesting that like, is similar to me as I've talked to like core people from Vietnam and they have a very similar story about like, I mean, there was homophobia before, but they have a very similar story to the Cuban story about how, like, there is a sort of importation of like Soviet homophobia. And how that made everything like when that this starts happening in the 80s and it gets just like significantly worse. Yeah, no, it's, and in Cuba, what's it called like the the whole idea that this is a form of bourgeois degeneracy and the genius, genius is specifically bourgeois is like was really surprising to me as I dug into this like there's comics, I, in this thing I wrote, I include a couple of them, but it's basically like, it's put up there with wanting to be in La Socieridad, like free society in the West and so the West is diverse. It's almost like reactionary.

I mean, it is reactionary. I mean, it's like, it's like a very weird weird mirror of like far right discourse because it's like the degeneracy of the West. Meanwhile, here we have masculine values. And you even see that type of rhetoric with we were talking about Alexander Dugan recently. And he exposes a lot of that type of stuff as as as well as someone who is, you know, a fascist writer who's pulled on some of like the National Bolshevik type stuff before. Yeah, you can attack attack gayness as it's like a sign of liberalism in the West as like this like almost like bourgeois tendency. Yeah, I forget, I forget who it was. There was someone on Twitter who was talking about this like it's very interesting thing like yeah like in in like in in the US like that I don't like being like for very, very long time. It's so kind of now you get this versus like like being gay like is is you know like being queer is a sign of like you're a communist and you're like like a degenerate communist etc.

And then you go to like Vietnam and it's like, oh yeah, this person's gay, they're a degenerate Western like kind of revolutionary and it's it's it's like it's always the same. The actual sort of like homophobic thing is the same. It's just the signs are flipped of like what the other is and who you can accuse the most sort of having the values of. I wonder if the unifying factor here is, and this is something I'm thinking of a lot a lot because of the Sierra Madre's book, which is that I mean, goodness as a disease. Yeah, an illness and so like that so it allows you to go on to it anything you don't like from your own ideological prism. So I also wonder a lot about how nationalism plays into it because that's one of the things that happens in a lot of these sort of revolutionary projects is like, yeah, like the sort of ideal of the new man is sort of like a communist thing. But it's also like very specifically something that you get with like with nationalist revolutions where it's like, well, okay, so we like we have to like like part of the basis of our national identity is like, we are these like incredibly sort of masculine hard man or whatever. And then this like, I don't know, it strikes me.

It strikes me as interesting that like the further that sort of nationalism becomes entangled in like these revolutionary projects like the more you start to see this kind of stuff. Yeah, and, and definitely part of this is is nationalism because it's it's not just homophobia in Cuba in this context in the 60s it's not just homophobia for the sake of homophobia. So there is that too, but it's it's also that I don't think Fidel Castro is entirely lying when he says that it was part of the need to mobilize as much of society as possible for the economy. What's happening in Cuba in the 1960s is basically the economy is going into a meltdown. The economic policies that they're enacting have not been working. They've burned through any surplus they had in 1959, including goodwill surpluses in a couple of respects. And I think that like some people point to like the new man and people will work for moral incentives not material incentives as just this naive thing and then I think the most convincing counterargument is they didn't have anything else to incentivize people with. Yeah, people people make this this is like basically there's an identical like argument that you get about the Cultural Revolution where like you start to see these like incentives or like Mao will like give you a mango or something or like you have these like pins that you get. And like it's like, yeah, it's very it's like the same thing of like you have these rewards that are sort of like, yeah, they're supposed to sort of like spiritual almost or sort of like a spiritual ideological rewards and then eventually like kind of just stops working because it turns out that's not actually a very good basis for.

Yeah, economic system. Do you guys know the old joke about check give out or when he was given a sign to become the minister of the banks. I don't know the joke I know the thing about. Like, he was my vague memory is like the story that I heard was like he signed his name like really sloppily on it because he was pissed off that like, you had to put his face on money or something but I have no idea. That's actually true he hated money so much he refused to sign his actual name he just signed his nickname. Just to show his disdain for for economics, but at a meeting the old joke goes and this is something that chair apparently like to tell as well even if it's not necessarily true that at the meeting where they were deciding who's going to become the minister of what they said, who here is an economist, and he raises his hand and everyone goes, Che, but you're a doctor you're not an economist uses. Oh, I thought you asked for a communist. Economist, communist, like.

So, yeah, no, I mean, and I think I've heard arguments I'm not an expert on chair but I've heard that he was actually pretty heavily influenced by China real compared to the USSR he lean closer to China. Yeah, that actually that actually guess I make I think I guess that kind of makes sense given his sort of like, like the ways military strategy seems to work, which is very, very much like a lot closer to sort of like Mao strategy then. Well, okay, I'm going to put Soviet strategy in quotation marks because oh my god is there like the I have a very negative a very dim view of so of the military strategy of people who are like guerrilla organizations who are taking their military strategy directly from the Soviet Union, it's a lot of like we're going to build up one giant made a place in one day they're going to roll into the capital and it's like this. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, yeah, raining raining myself in a little bit. We have these basically labor camps that gave people are getting put into we have kind of a material basis for it, which is, and this is one of the things that like people actually will use as a defense of sort of like, like, well, we had to put these people in these camps because of our material conditions which I think like, I feel like that makes it worse, like I feel like the fact that there's a there's a material basis for your homophobia, like makes it harder to get rid of and makes it like a more entrenched part of the system, which I don't know bizarre defense to me. But yeah, um, can we talk a bit about like how did this actually end and to what extent did it end and did it sort of like have this like half life afterwards. Sure. So, so these last for a couple of years this is not like a flash in the pan like oops are bad kind of like, you know, six months in this is like a series of multiple work camps across the province of come away which is the central Cuba, and they last for

three years, and there's pushback during this period, domestic pushback international pushback like people have been complaining about it for a while. Exactly what the definitive thing that got them, the UMAC close specifically those are the unidades militares de ayuda a la producción military units to aid production. So the UMAC themselves which were opened from 1965 to 1968. They do eventually get close and 68 people are free, you know, like, you know, the camps are closed, and people are sent home, and there are varying stories I have looked through, like trade tried to trace as many stories as I can get. And even even people who like were participants have different stories so like, I remember Carlos Frankie who was one of a position figure he has one story of that centers himself in the closure. Other stories say that it was the international pressure. Other stories say that it was the writers and artists union, the official one, the state one, the UMAC, which filed enough complaints and that convinced Fidel to get it closed down. The book is actually from Maddie Glass Iglesias's dad, Jose Iglesias, who wrote about his grandfather, his communist grandfather, but he who actually who wrote a book about the 60s is an interesting guy. Anyway, so the camps get closed one way or another and I don't think we're going to ever know the definitive answer until like there's actual declassification, but they're close but the thing is, while the camps get close. We have reports from different people including some of the sources that are used as apologia for you mob, saying, wait, wait, wait, social disgrace units keep existing well into the early 1970s.

So you have sporadic reports of things like this happening, where seminaries are sent to religious people for being atheists, or sorry for not being atheists, you know, gay people are being sent. Other people, Maddie Juaneros, so people who spoke, you know, anyone who's seen as like not conforming into this ideal new man, you're sent there and the labor is supposed to reform you and that's that's a key part of this it's not just labor as punishments but labor as ideological reform. There's even one of the people's some of the people in one camp say that there was a sign that says el trabajo os hará hombres work will make you men. Jesus. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah, it's so so the camps do continue seem to continue. And it's it definitely seems to be the case that, you know, gay people do continue to be arrested for being gay, even though the intensity of this does die down by the 1970s. There's something pretty bad that also happens in the 1970s, but it's a slightly different project. It's not as centered on forced labor.

Yeah. Yeah, and I guess so the thing that you wrote this piece about that I should probably mention that is one of the things we're talking about is you wrote a very long piece about called factually base which is about sort of the kind of mythology that developed in the US about like how these camps were closed and the sort of like apology around it. And a lot of this is based on Leslie Feinberg, which is depressing in a lot of Leslie Feinberg people who don't know is like one of the most important like trans authors ever wrote Stone Butch Blues, which is like, if you've ever been in, like, any sort of like queer or trans scene, you probably know about, or possibly have read. And she wrote not a great account of this. Yeah, do you want to talk a bit about what what this was and how people have sort of used it in different ways. Sure. So like I for years I heard like arguments from this book and I didn't know they were from this I just saw people sharing online online and thinking where the hell are people getting this this is not. This is not true. And eventually I find out that it dates back to this book called Rainbow Solidarity and Defense Cuba by Leslie Feinberg was written mid to late 2000s.

It's not a book. It's a compilation of articles, which Feinberg wrote for as part of the lavender and red series for this world's workers world newspaper, which is like this Marciite sect, which Feinberg's been a part of real real weirdos I they those people like they have positions that are like bizarre even by the standards of like modern tankies like they're they're like these are people who are like hardline on defending the dirt in Ethiopia, which is like stuff that's weird enough that like most most modern like idea like hardline ideological Stalinist don't know what this like don't even know what this is or won't defend it because it's like it's like most Ethiopian Marxist are like this was fucked like it's it's Yeah, also this is the other thing about these guys is so if you know what the PSL the party of socialism liberation they emerged from a split with the WP. Yeah, because it was the WP was too moderate or something. Yeah, my memory of it was it was a split about whether whether or not you should take money from North Korea. I don't know. I don't know that's 100% you that that's my memory of the last time I read about it. So these are who these guys are. Yeah. No, no, I mean, there's a reason that PSL and WPWP seem to have very similar lines. So, so anyway, so I finally get this book I ordered second hand, so not giving anyone royalties. And I get the book and it starts like arguing, you know, trying to, you know, defend the track record of the revolution and really it's like basically it seems that this book and an article that came out before any of fine bird articles

by john hillson in the early 2000s are kind of a response to how as the kind of like how LGBT rights were treated in the mainstream in like the United States with shifting either was like less homophobia movement towards more recognition of rights in the 2000s. And in that context, Cuba was Cuba's track record on LGBT rights, which is pretty, pretty bad, you know, was getting hammered and so they're writing this as a response to that. And Feinberg warns in the introduction don't expect a criticism of Cuba this far. It's factually based but you know I put in quotes factually based but you know it's it's actually based but it's you know where this is basically meant as counter propaganda to the criticisms. And the section that everyone quotes I mean the book is the book isn't that long and things like 100 pages I have it over here. 100 pages long, all these different articles. The section that most people quote is actually like two or three pages. It's this very short section on the amount. Feinberg talks about the omop and sites, basically, three people to talk about it. Basically, one, one of the sources is Ignacio Ramonette, who is this foreign journalist who interviews Fidel and gave Fidel the opportunity to give these explanations and defences of his policies, where basically Fidel defends it as a part of the necessity of mobilizing the entire country in the face of the crisis that it felt that was facing in the 1960s from the United States. So needed to mobilize everyone it was part of my economic mobilization, and it was almost a favor to gay people because they couldn't go into the military because there was too much homophobia in the military so they almost did them a favor by giving them sending them off to do

labor that wasn't with the military in these nice little, you know, economic productive units. And then, you know, oh, there were some views, there was some stuff so we shut them down. And this is before Fidel actually admitted that there was persecution of LGBT people in Cuba under his watch, which comes in like 20 to a 2010 interview so this is like his version of things right before then and that's what Feinberg sites. Another of the sources is Cardinal, Ernesto Cardinal, who I'm happy to expand on him but the short version is that Ernesto Cardinal is going around Cuba in 1970 and 1971 for two short trips. And he's just basically writing down everything and anything people tell him, some of it's very critical some of it's very supportive. He's not actually claiming anything is factual, he's saying, I am in Cuba this is what people are telling me, make up your own minds, like that is his test, but it's presented as this. It's not critically analyzed at all and it's these two separate stories. One of them is that 100 communist youth members infiltrated the camps on hearing that there were abuses there. They wrote reports saying that there were abuses so the camps were shut down. And then there's the separate story also sourced to Cardinal by Feinberg that Fidel personally infiltrates the camps in Cognito. And then there is this like guard who was going to like cut the cord on his hammock to wake him up and get him forced him to work and Fidel revealed himself.

And, and you know, almost almost like why does thou persecute me Saul kind of deal like very it sounds like a very biblical story so it's a good yarn, but it's not doesn't sound very serious and also the two stories kind of contradict each other why does Fidel have to infiltrate if the hundred communist youth members have gone, you know, or vice versa, you know, you don't. Yeah, it's really weird like why would there be both like both of them you can't present both of them as true at the same time like they they're mutually contradictory accounts of how this happens very very weird. Exactly. And, and, and in Cardinal they're not even presented back to back. The 100 communist youth members is literally a dude he saw on the street who told him this. It's a paragraph and that's it. Like we don't have any other context the other story that Fidel infiltrating is shared is light sounds slightly more credible if you really want to believe it but then if you actually read into it it's more like it doesn't it also does no water. Yeah, it's like a guy heard from another guy. Like it's it's.

Yeah, he's he's a guard, it is a guard narrating this but he like he talks about what he saw until like half into the paragraph and then the rest is clearly implied to be stopped stuff he heard about but wasn't actually present for and find and present him as a witness of both. So, anyway, so that's that's fine birds whole defense like basically Fidel had no idea there were abuses, even though the very existence of the camps themselves were abuses, and then, but they were shut down and everything's hunky dory, you know, that's that's fine birds defense and then of course the third thing is that she refers both citations to Wilson, which I can get into a second but just I think part of the problem is that find work didn't actually read Cardinal. Yeah, so hilsin hilsin is another activist, I'm not sure if he's LGBT, and not like that that part of list clear on, but he was another activist, he died very early in the 2000s I think, from from cancer, he, but he wrote an article that sites cardinal and sites both sections that fine bird later sites, and not more not less. And I think what's what happened was that fine bird basically goes to this article which basically makes more or less makes the kind of arguments that fine bird is already making in her own work, but what what when when she sees things that seem to exculpate the Cuban government. She basically does copy paste and a little parenthesis to give credit hillson and then moves on right she doesn't actually read. Yeah, hilsin hilsin even like treats it a little more cautiously than fine bird day even though not sufficiently cautiously. And I think that that explains why and the least this is a generous interpretation of fine bird doesn't actually address the fact that in her own territory source. There's talk of other camps. Like, at the time Cardinal is like I'm going to the camps I'm visiting the camps there are camps here. Like, you know, so it doesn't it doesn't make sense unless maybe fine bird didn't read the book, like just like

copied and pasted and didn't really think about it. Yeah, or just like went and found the one section that that was useful and then just read that part. Yeah, which, yeah, not not a great way to do history as it turns out. Yeah. Yeah, I will do my one return to Mark's moment in this interview which is to say ruthless critique of all that exists. Yeah, things that you generally support because otherwise you wind up with this stuff. Yeah. And yeah, my God, it's done the rounds. This thing has been going around around and around on the internet for years and years. Yeah. And I guess we should also say that like, you know, this is this is the thing happens with like any like every one of these like this is one of the socialist countries we've been talking about like you will get people who basically are like, like, hey, look at this bad thing. We're going to people who are like, I don't know. Yeah, you get like Cuban right wingers who are like also unbelievably homophobic who suddenly have repassioned for gay rights because look at these abuses and it's like, yeah, it's, I don't know, it sucks it. Yeah, I mean, I think it genuinely is a part of the reason why this version becomes like a memory that like, like this for these sort of versions of the story which like don't have not like really credible, like become sort of entrenched in the sort of like socialist memory of of this period in the US because it's like, well, okay, so so on the one hand you have a bunch of sort of like, like incredible fanatical right wingers talking about what was going on and then you have like, hey, here's another story from the socialists is like, well, we're going to believe the socialist version is like, well, neither of these people like not like, but both of these groups are like,

have an incredibly clear agenda going into what they're doing. And so you have to sort of like, actually sift through the stuff yourself. Otherwise, you would wind up with very, very weird and distorted histories. Yeah. And people just really want to believe it. I mean, I think that that's that's my conclusion like I when I was originally researching for this, I was, I was pissed. Like, I was like, this is these are just not true. How could someone publish this, you know, it's really angry. And I kept trying to write that like a piece or based on that and I keep kept stopping and like this is not the right approach. This is not the right like I kept stopping myself. And then I, I finally was like, try to okay, put myself in Feinberg's shoes. If I was, you know, really loved, you know, if I was like as enamored as Feinberg was of everyone and everything involved in the Cuban Revolution. And at the same time, one, a member of a persecuted group, right. You know, and I really wanted to square this circle, like, and I saw something to let me do that. I would probably also just glamp on to it and just not really try not think about it too much. For the same reason, right, you want, you know, our defenses are low when it's something we want to believe. And this is, there is an enormous amount of stuff that just started people. I mean, just, yeah, like everyone has a bunch of stuff that they believe because they want to, they want it to be true. Like, it's not like, like, we're, we're, we're, we're being hard on the socialist tier, but like, I don't know, like this is why half the people who believe Q ship believe it, right.

Like, it's, it's, it's the, it's the, it's the thing they want to believe and the thing they sort of have to believe for the ideology to function. So it's like, it's not like, I don't know, like, it's not that much different than like, in Paul Wolfowitz, like still thinking the Iraq war works or something, right. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's the thing you have to believe in order to not, like, have to sort of process the complications of what you're supporting. Yeah. So I think, yeah, everything I want to talk about sort of moving past this is about the stuff that's been happening recently and about how stuff got better in Cuba, because this is, I like, this is, this is one of the places where like things actually did genuinely get a lot better than like it was. And I want to talk a bit about like how that happened before we get to sort of the stuff that's been happening the last like week or so. Yeah. Um, and, and you know, I'm happy to get into happier territories. Yeah. Like, God, it's definitely do more stuff to always think about the sixties. The, so after the sixties, it did get pretty, it was pretty bad in the 1970s to there was a purge of education and culture of anyone LGBT or suspected being LGBT, because the idea

is that they would recruit and influence and corrupt the minors and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where we heard this before. Someone can probably do an article comparing the culture and education Congress in 71 in Cuba with with with policies in the United States right now. Yeah. But then things start to get better in the 1980s, a little bit like the the throttles pulled back. It's not great, but it's, you know, it's not terrible as terrible as it was. And then from the late 1980s into the 1990s, we really see to see it start to see a sea change, both in terms of popular culture. And in terms of the state policy and of course they're intertwined because who who who allows films to be put on in theaters. Yeah, they own all the theater so. In terms of culture actually know one of the people who had a play played a key role in this which is Senate bus and Senate bus is this writer from a small town in Cuba small village and he goes to have been a he's a he's a writer and artist and he wrote this short story about this platonic

relationship between a patriotic gay man and a patriotic Cuban heterosexual member of the Communist youth, who develop a respect for each other. And it's like even though like the gay man is alienated from state policies because of the persecution of LGBT people. He actually knows a lot more about history and culture in Cuba than the heterosexual guy, who's rah rah revolution but doesn't actually know like all these important writers and artists and and things like that that are also important for Cuban national identity. But when that was first read in the Casa de las Américas which is like this huge building for Cuban culture, people wept just openly, and then it was made into a movie called fresa si chocolate, so strawberry and chocolate. I can explain the time if you want but they basically it's the same story that's expanded a bit because the original was short story, and you can actually get in the United States I think paramount, but the rights for distribution in the box may have bought the rights I don't know. But it was came out in like 1993, and it was a big turning point for public public perception, right. Actually have a friend of mine was who knows who knows the offer, he was stopped at his building, and this the wife of a Colonel who lives in this building says, My husband wants to see my friends. What did I do, it goes up to the Colonel's house the Colonel says, sit and want coffee or anything. My friend says no, the Colonel says, explain to me this film that's come out recently because the Colonel wasn't going to see it in theaters. Then my friend explains the movie, and guys says no no no explain everything so basically my friend does a scene by scene synopsis for memory.

And after like an hour and change in this guy's house, the Colonel's just sitting there, not saying anything and said, but I understood this and seeing this earlier things might have been different. It's like, like, thank you, it's a huge turning point, culturally, and then politically, you also have Maria La Castro, so Maria La Castro is daughter of Raul Castro, so Nisa Fidel, and she from within the government using her position of privilege really starts to push for better LGBT policies and better laws and runs. And she at the head of the Senate sex which is the National Center for Sex Education, she really starts to spearhead an improvement and we start to see in the 1990s and 2000s, not just a pulling back of persecution at least official persecution, you know you can still have informal person with a level of jobs. But you also start to see things like trans people can have gender affirming surgery, backed by the state, you know, free of cost, like all these sorts of different protections and policies, like the Senate sexual if there's like a homophobic incident to the school they can send out somebody to give a talk and say, this is why persecuting someone for their gender identity or sexual orientation is wrong. And you really see a shift in the position of the state and that's not just Maria La, I don't want to make it about Maria La, but behind her is of course all these other these LGBT people who would not be in the position to demand this for themselves. But she definitely spearheads this and I think she deserves some merit for that. I think that they have like that they have a level of sort of buy in from the state because I think like that doesn't happen in like China or Vietnam and like, you know, I mean like Vietnam.

Like there has actually been stuff there in the last like year where there's been a lot of real progress but like they like literally one month ago the government was like, we're going to declare homosexuality no longer like a mental illness. And like that's sort of just like a month ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And then there's only people but like poor people have been fighting for in Vietnam for like a long time but like and even then like there's this whole thing there were like people like You get you get this because if you talk to medical people in like you start to doctors, you'll get this thing where like well okay so there's like real and the other thing this thing is it outlawed conversion therapy.

But if you talk to doctors about doctors like well there are real gay people and there are fake gay people and the real gay people you can't do conversion therapy on but but this rule there but these guys are like this ruling only covers the real gay people doesn't cover the fake gay people you can still do conversion therapy on like it's it's a disaster and like I don't know like it's and like China also has been really bleak like I'm just gonna you're talking about a lot about sort of like the effect of media has on it. I'm gonna read this thing from the Chinese general rules for television drama content production from 2015 which okay I've seen conflicting things but I think this is still in effect. If it's not still in effect it was only reversed in like 2021. But I think it's still in effect and also there have been new sort of guidelines have been put out from movies that are about like. I mean specifically there's stuff like you can't have gay men in movies you can't have men there to effeminate in movies like you can't have men that look like they're cross dressing in movies I'm gonna read this thing from the TV code. So this is this is something it says is explicitly is not to be shown content which depicts or portrays unnatural sexual relations and actions such as incest homosexuality perversion sexual harassment sexual assault sexual violence etc. This is version that's version two version three content which portrays and promulgates unhealthy perspectives on marriage and married love sex is such as extramarital love one night stands free love etc.

Sorry 2015 sorry try guys not allowed yeah no like it's like it's oh god yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna do a try guys joke every episode for all the eternity now. The French are surely complaining that the ban on cheating on your wife is a imposition on their culture. Yeah definitely that's actually extremely racist against the French. I said it doesn't mention I was gonna make I was gonna make a French film pedophilia joke but it doesn't actually ban it bans incest but it doesn't actually ban. Yeah so I think part of what was going on there was like yeah like there wasn't like I mean think things have gotten like it the law that was being used to arrest like gay people in China like was they abolish it in the 90s but like and like there was a culture shift but it didn't like the state decided it was gonna do the same thing the US state which is doing which is like do this sort of backlash to it and it didn't like that kind of stuff didn't happen. Which is I think really bleak but also like is genuinely a thing that like. Like yeah like the good good good for good for the Cuban people good for Cuba like glad glad you all are doing this. Yes no yeah major yeah cuz like major win.

Yeah cuz like you know like you can you can see what happens when like this doesn't happen. Which is all of this bullshit that exists in a lot of the other sort of post Soviet like or post communist countries. Yeah I think that Cuba would have done it eventually but I think that Mariela definitely just sped it along. And like there's definitely a problem of a cult of Mariela with like abroad where it's like all all things be great be due to Mariela it's like completely cuts out all the people behind her. You know who also been like please ask ask your uncle. That's for me I gotta get married someday but you know but at the same time I think we can't cut her out of the story. Yeah and that gets us to well I guess I guess you start in twenty nineteen first but yeah the new family code that's passed which also I do want to mention this because I don't think like people don't seem to know this when I tell them about this about. Neither China nor Vietnam is gay but in neither China nor Vietnam is gay marriage legal and there's a lot of people who think that the repeal that happened in Vietnam legalized gay marriage and that's not what happens.

Like the thing that it did is you will no longer be arrested for having your own unofficial marriage. Which is a thing that could happen but this is this is this is not this is not the thing that is happening in Cuba like. I see this with people a lot where like something good will happen in Cuba and people will protect it on to like China and it's like that's no like they're not the same place like. Don't don't don't do this with this stuff don't project the Cuban medical system onto the Chinese medical system they're not the same please stop. Yeah yeah yeah okay but yeah going on to the stuff that's good and the stuff but on also the sort of like. Yeah so can we talk a bit about like what but talk about like the the the the 2019 referendum and the sort of. Like. The stuff about sort of.

So how to explain this like the story of how the stuff that's happening now didn't happen in 2019. Yeah so what's happening. Yeah so so when the in the 2010s of Raul Castro who took over after Fidel. He began using a bunch of referendums to side major things major policy changes, and using referendums kind of just till like, because like because the nationalists place basically a rubber stamp committee, like referendums really took to the four as a way to like channel channel support and you know show popular acquiescence to major changes among the Constitution. So, as part of the they did a draft constitution they debated it. There were debates all around the country at local levels in in in on in neighborhoods and workplaces, and people gave feedback. The marriage equality and and and things connected to it which we can get into in a second, these were part of, for the most part part of the 2019 Constitution, but there was a lot of pushback.

Like, obviously, if the state has been repressing LGBT people for decades, that part of their coalition just doesn't stop overnight, doesn't just stop being bigoted overnight because of you know a change in policy. So, you know, it wasn't just that the religious right, like evangelicals there are a lot of evangelicals in Cuba right now there's a growing evangelical population I'm sorry to say. Yeah, backed by evangelical money. No please repressing the wrong people. And, and then there's the the Catholic right obviously, you know, much more, you know, discreetly but still very, you know, against this. And there was enough pushback that the government was worried that I don't know if they were worried that the referendum would fail entirely. It did seem like they were worried that it would lower the voting percentage in favor of the new constitution enough that it would hurt the new constitution's legitimacy or something. They decided to carve off the more controversial parts about the LGBT rights, and basically carve them off, push them into a referendum on the family code, which both all the new laws based on the new constitution all the new laws governing family law,

and punt that down the road indefinitely. And so what's happening now this would just happen is the culmination of this referendum that they punted down the road in 2019 the original the 2019 constitution was passed with something like 90% approval. And, and this was just kind of left it on the to do list. And then with the current crisis in Cuba. I mean like there's a couple, there's a couple ways to read this but I think one of the most obvious is that the Cuban government needed to win. And this was an easy when they could actually deliver in the age of extreme scarcity and rolling blackouts it's like we can just at least deliver on this promise. So, yeah, I guess so can we talk a bit about like what what what what actually is in the new code and what like what what it does. Yeah, so it does it does a bunch of pretty cool things. It legalizes same sex marriage, which is great for a lot of people, not just because you know, not just because of the principle of it but also things like okay, you're separating from your partner, but everything is under your partner's name, you're not never nearly married what are your rights, so you like for separation for immigration if you're trying to immigrate and you're not married to your spouse, you know, you know if you're trying to inheritance all these kinds of things. Yeah, this is going to be this is like important and concrete material ways. It legalizes adoption by same sex couples, which is also pretty cool. Yeah, that was not allowed. Good. So I said it wasn't before glad glad glad glad you can now do that that that's good hopefully we can still continue to do that here for like a few more years at least like.

Yeah. Um, it legalizes surrogacy and same sex couples can then can benefit from can use surrogacy now, although on a not for profit basis. And that's that's specific. I am not an expert on whether or not it is the best policy to have it as only not for profit. I know that there's a lot of debate over it, but the law says not for profit only for surrogacy, but that's still another option for people in addition to adoption. It expands civil unions to be much more inclusive they're called a union of the hecho in Spanish these so now they were much more inclusive and also, you know, you don't have to get married you can get a civil union. Can we explain what that is because that was like, there was a whole thing in the US, like in the in the 2000s about like, oh, like you can do civil like there was a period where it was like there are a lot of places you can get civil unions but you couldn't get married. So couldn't explain what a civil union is because I think that's a thing that like a lot of our audience probably isn't going to like remember when that was a thing anyone talked about. Sure, I mean like I'm, I'm not a lawyer. My understanding is, it is, it is a way to recognize your, your basically partners, you have some rights and it helps with some issues of like, I think it also varies country to country but it's basically like a step down from the full commitment of marriage is my understanding. Sorry, that's less. No, yeah, no, like that was that was my understanding of it it was like, like in the US it was this whole thing of like, well you can have civil unions so you don't need to be married, and then people were like, no, because it doesn't give you doesn't give you the sort of full suite of

rights and stuff but it gives you some things, which I'm glad I'm glad he was doing like no you can do both of these things and then wasn't there something about like, like, yeah there were changes to like what like changes to what can be recognized as a family. That is the part that I've seen the most like, I have read a bunch about this, and I'm, I still feel like this is something that's not, it's not entirely clear what this is going to look like in practice. So basically it expands the what the legal definition of what can constitute as a family units to be more focused less focused on blood ties and more focused on effective ties so love affection, you know, caring for each other. So that for example, let's say, I think like the big hypothetical that was held up was like grandparents so like if the parents aren't around, but in practice, these people are the ones that raise you, you know, you know for for for legal stuff that has to do with kids and family law, like we can consider this a family unit, is my understanding, it's still really murky and it's not really helping me feel like like the things I've read on this also seem to be kind of like, like here's an explanation for that that doesn't really help me understand this at all. Yeah, it is a little and I've seen people running about this is like human government has abolished the family Ray and I'm like, did it. Yeah, for everything it seems like it's all they've abolished the family it's that they've allowed you to change what a family is in like in the eyes of the state which is not the same thing.

Like, I, it's like giving you more wiggle room. Yeah, is my understanding but again it's one of those things where I feel like everyone who I've seen running with it has run with a completely different very triumphal explanation that are sometimes mutually contradictory and I'd like to see what this actually looks like in practice and like seeing the effects better because it's it's an under discussed dynamic of it because like what most people abroad were looking at was like same sex marriage. So, like this. So, that was less discussed but I mean it seems to be positive the thing that the thing that cause more controversy on the island was, there was a shift to what this that, which is father paternal rights, basically parental rights, right. And basically the idea is to switch the child from merely being a subject of their parents will, in theory they have more rights and are subject on their own, even if they're just a kid. That's generally cool. Yeah, to like prevent things like corporal punishment and things like that you can't be kids, which also seems like a positive change. Yeah, I mean, would would would love more of that in the US to just like absolutely clobber the like parental rights people because oh my fucking they're they're going to kill us all. Yeah, and I mean, the funny thing is like every time that there's a leftist movement, the thing is always they're coming for your kids and then like, oh God. Yeah, anyway, sorry.

Oh, yeah, it's the right has one thing. It's the same thing every time. Yeah. Those are the kind of the big things that are in the referendum. The one thing I wanted to talk about was like, I, okay, so there was a thing of, okay, so like obviously it passed with like 67% of the vote, I think. Um, something like that, like basically two thirds of the vote. Um, and I want to talk a bit about like, okay, so something I saw. Okay, so like, okay, so you have the people who voted against it because they're Christian and they suck. Um, and the other people who are just homophobic, non Christian homophobes, non Christian homophobes, but then there was also like something that I saw that was like, like people in opposition groups being like we're going to vote against this as like a vote against the government, which yeah, can we explain what that was about because that's yeah. Sure. And I think that you also have a division there between the people who are like, it's really against the government, but really it's against the.

Yeah, yeah. Like I think that even there it's a mixed bag of both but um, basically the idea was that by approving this and voting in favor of something cooked up by the government that they were giving credence to the government legitimacy to the government. Ergo, the only moral position was either extension or voting no. And so, I mean, again, a lot of it's mixed up with they also really as a rule did not like the content of the law. Yeah. I mean, the part of the thing is like it's the the the opposition is in this weird space right now where they have like the more historical branch, which is you have like a historical branch that is like rapidly far right. And then you have there's a lot of overlap with like the fault Catholic right in there.

And the Catholic far right in there, as I'm sure you understand what that means. But, but then you also have a growing prominent liberal contingent who speaks better not just doesn't just put on a better face for international audiences, but also puts on a better face for Cuban audiences. And because like Cuba is not a far right wing society, like, for example, abortion, like I spoke to a right wing Cuban who left, who's like, yeah, I like Ben Shapiro and a lot of what he says, but I don't get his obsession with abortion that's a woman's right like that's so weird to me. It's just like Cubans aren't necessarily super religious as well, which is a big part of it. They're kind of like a butt like it's like cats and dogs tied into a sack. So there's like, you have these different opposition figures and I think that the really right wing ones know that they can't be as openly homophobic as they used to be. And so they need to couch it in a different way. I think it's not just that I don't want to reduce everyone to that. But I do think that's a huge part of that project. And then, in addition to that just people who are like anything that the government does is bad because

it's an accelerationist, which is another big part of the opposition. Oh, no. Why is everybody an accelerationist now? This is the worst. I wonder why everyone's an accelerationist. I wonder if there's material realities that you're contributing to that. I am going to take a time machine. I am going to hunt down Nick Land and I am going to stop the GRU from forming and no one will ever know what accelerationism is. You know that's not true. Without Nick Land, someone else would come up with accelerationism. It's a very easy thing to think of considering our current material reality. To be fair to Nick Land, at least his version of accelerationism had to do with everyone. Capitalism is a human machine that's also a god that only exists continuously in Patentia. The market being irresistible because the market itself is a thinking machine. This is at least funny. The modern stuff is, oh my god. I longed for the days where there was an argument where people would do the modern accelerationist thing and the landians would go, no, no, no, that's not what accelerationism is. I hate this reality. It's the worst. I think a good chunk of the opposition movement can be described as accelerationists. It's not just accelerationists, but I do think a lot of them are in there. Any improvements to anything is helping the government. That's why they support the embargo. That's why they don't want any improvement on any laws. They want things to be as dysfunctional as possible because they think that like the government is incapable of actually getting doing better and to the extent that it becomes better and stronger. It's just going to be more repressive. Ergo, the solution is bring the country to a standstill so there will be a general strike and overthrow the government. That's their plan, I think.

It seems like a terrible plan. I'm just going to throw that out there. At that point, why not just become a terrorist? I don't know. Because that's more scary. That's the actual reason. People who are too cowardly to kill someone with their own bombs so they kill people by trying to get sanctions due instead, which is like... Although there have been, there have been turns. There was the Posada Carriales. He blew up a, put a frag bomb in a Cuban hotel and killed an Italian tourist. Yeah, actually my dad was working on the extradition case to get him extradited to Venezuela over that. He also committed the first act of terrorism involving civil aviation in the Western Hemisphere in 1976. That's pretty late. Yeah, maybe it was just people were just doing it and maybe it was just a European thing and then the CIA was like, what if we bring this here? It's like, no, surely this will work better for us than it worked for every other group who's hijacked a plane in the 1970s.

Oh, God. This sucks. I hope those guys have a bad time in that. Yeah. Posada at least kicked it a couple of years ago. Oh, thank God. Okay. Rest in peace, official pot opinion. We're doing the crabs. God, these people suck. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess do you have anything else you want to talk about? I think that's it. Just thanks a lot for having me on. It was great to be on. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, queer rights, goods, not doing them bad. I don't kill people with sanctions. Yeah, definitely. The embargo has been an utter failure at everything. Yeah, get rid of that. Yeah, fuck that. Yeah, and I guess, do you have stuff you want to plug?

Oh, sure. That's that's a very good and generous point. So you can find me on Twitter at as perity. He isn't Peter. He R T as in Tom, I E R R a. I also have a podcast which is linked in my bio. I'm doing a history of Cuba as an academic but writing for a more popular audience and we're going way when we start with the indigenous people we don't just jump over them. I'm currently working on Columbus and then let's see. And I also have a sub stack called scene embargo, S I N and then the word embargo. So, yeah. Yeah, that's without embargo. If I'm my Spanish is okay. Yes, it means without embargo, but it also sounds like sit embargo, which is I feel like would be a cool band thing. So, yeah. Yeah, we will link to stuff and we will link to that in the description and yeah, thank you for joining us. This this has been it could happen here. Yeah, make bad things happen to homophobes and get good things to happen.

Hello, and welcome to it could happen here today. It's just me because it's early and I live on the West Coast. And today we are talking about America's drug problem. And I'm joined by David Mitchell from patients for affordable drugs. And we're going to talk about the cost of medicines. Why it's so economically high. Why I sometimes go to Mexico to buy my insulin and why you probably know someone who can't afford the medicines they need to survive or maybe thrive. So, David, can you explain a little bit about first, if you'd like to introduce yourself and explain what patients for affordable drugs does and the role that you play there that would be wonderful. I am the founder and president of patients for affordable drugs. We're the only national patient organization that focuses exclusively on policies to lower drug prices. We're independent. We're bipartisan. We don't take money from any organizations that profit from the development or distribution of prescription drugs. We do two main things. We collect patient stories and we amplify those stories to policy makers and elected officials so we can bring home the human impact of ridiculously high drug prices on the people in the United States. And the second thing is that we recruit and train patients to be advocates. We teach them about the policies, give them coaching on presentation and prepare them to go tell their story and deal directly with the people who set policy in this country.

And so we've had patients testify in state legislatures all over the country. We've had patients testify in Congress on many occasions. Just last week, one of our patients who happens to be a type one diabetic introduced the president of the United States in the Rose Garden and a speech the president made talking about the new Inflation Reduction Act and how it's going to help lower drug prices and out-of-pocket costs for people. So that's our work. I do this work because I'm a patient. I have an incurable blood cancer. It's called multiple myeloma. It's incurable. That's not good, but it's treatable for some period of time with very expensive drugs. Right now, my oncologist have me on a four-drug combination that carries a list price of more than $900,000 a year. These drugs are literally keeping me alive and I'm very grateful to have them, but they're wildly overpriced. And the drug industry drug companies exploit patients everywhere in the world, but especially here in the United States. They use us as a piggy bank to hit their targets for executive bonuses to trigger executive bonuses and hit profit targets for their shareholders. And the unfairness is not acceptable. Anyway, when I got diagnosed and suddenly I found myself with a disease through no fault of my own, they required very expensive drugs. I began this journey and the journey taught me a fundamental point and that is that drugs don't work if people can't afford them. And so I retired and decided to devote myself as a patient to trying to change a system in this country. There really is built to benefit the people who profit from it at the expense of the people it's supposed to serve. And I work for free as a volunteer and I've been doing it for six years.

That's great. Yeah, let's say I'm sorry to hear about your own wealth, but I think it's a very admirable thing you've done. So David, can you explain because it does, I think people sometimes maybe if they've only lived in the US they might not realize or perhaps they're extremely aware. Why are medicines so, why can I travel 16 miles, right? Go across the border, flash my passport at someone, have a bunch of scans taken right go through a bunch of machines and then buy medicines for less than half the price on any given day. Why is it like that? It's like that because we are the only developed nation in the world that lets drug companies dictate the prices of brand name drugs to their citizens. Every other developed country in the world negotiates on behalf of their citizens directly with the drug companies to get a better deal and we don't do that. The net result is that Americans are paying almost four times what other wealthy nations pay for the exact same brand name drugs. And the impact is that three out of 10 Americans report that they are not able to take their medications as directed because of the cost. This has a direct impact on health and you know, I understand that you are the type one and that you're insulin dependent and so you know the struggles and the high prices of insulin.

But we've had five people confirmed dead because they tried to ration their insulin in the United States of America. This happens because we grant the drug companies this incredible market power and we let them dictate the prices to us. Prices that are completely unjustified and patients suffer financially and worse because of their health due to these high prices. Yeah, I think it's heartbreaking the stuff like and I've known people have died from lack of access to insulin and it's just it's pretty horrific stuff. Can you explain because let's get into that lack of justification right? There's ways that a drug the things that make up the cost of a drug would be the research and development of the drug, the distribution of the drug and the marketing of the drug and maybe something else I'm missing. But can you explain like how do we arrive at this insane price for insulin which was synthesized in a lab more than a hundred years ago? Like what what makes up that price structure and how much would it actually cost to produce that insulin if we stripped away some of those things? Well, you're asking a very intelligent question about what should exist but doesn't and that is a framework to arrive at an appropriate price that will provide a reasonable return to the drugmaker and ensure that drugs are affordable and accessible for the people who need them.

We don't have a system like that. The drug companies charge as much as they think they can get away with. Period. This was shown just last year when one of the drug companies named Biogen tried to bring a drug to market for Alzheimer's and proposed to sell it at $56,000 even though there was no proof it worked. And after it got big pushback and no one wanted to pay for it, the government, private employers, they cut the price to $28,000. Now, was it worth $56,000 if it wasn't, then why didn't you just price it at $28,000 to begin with? Why? Because they thought they could get away with $56,000 a year for this drug. Now, where insulin is concerned, it's very unfortunate. There is an insulin cartel. Three companies control 90% of the global insulin market in the world and here in the United States as well. And some people would say correctly, you have to call it correctly an oligopoly, a small number of producers and sellers who are controlling the market.

What happens as a result of that problem? Well, insulin costs roughly $10 a vial to produce. It sells for more than $300 a vial. It has gone up in price more than 600% in the last 20 years because of this cartel that literally controls the insulin supply in the world. I'll give you another example. I take a drug. It's called, for my cancer, it's called Pomolist. It's an oral drug that I get under Medicare Part D. Pomolist costs less than $1 per capsule to make. It sells for almost $1,000 per capsule. Now, you cannot justify, you cannot tell me that there's justification for a 1,000% margin. It's just ridiculous, but because we do not use our power, our market power, to negotiate for a better deal, they can get away with it and they do. And there are many examples of this. Now, all of that is about to change with some new legislation that has been enacted into law. It's about to start to change. I should be more precise. And we can talk about that. Yeah, let's talk about that. One thing I want to get into first, I think is this, I think sometimes we have this impression certainly with new or novel compounds that there's this massive lab and it's entirely funded by the money that's made from selling other drugs.

And in that lab, people are just all day cooking up cures to the Ebola virus or these various very deadly conditions. So I wanted to explain, I wanted you to explain who pays for the R&D for the most part and who decides what that R&D focuses on because I think those are both very important topics. Yeah. Well, it turns out that every single drug approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 was every one was based on in some part on science paid for by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health, another organization in government called BARDA and another organization in the government called DARPA, DARPAs who invented the Internet, for example, and GPS. We pay taxpayers billions of dollars every year to finance basic scientific research that lays the foundation for all these drugs. And when a drug company sees a drug that has promise, it will try and acquire from the NIH or the other government agencies that do this work, fund this work, the intellectual property, and then they'll finish the job of running late stage clinical trials and going through the process of gaining FDA approval.

I'm going to say a couple of things here that are critically important to understand to try and illustrate this. The drug industry tries to take credit for the mRNA vaccines that were developed to fight COVID-19. And these are the vaccines that are marketed by Pfizer and its partner in Europe by Antec and by Moderna here in the United States. It turns out that in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, drug companies weren't investing in vaccines because they didn't produce a big return. So the federal government invested through NIH, DARPA and BARDA, all of them, to develop the technology that we now call mRNA. So that when the virus hit, that technology was ready for Moderna and Pfizer to run with. But they didn't make the big investment. We did.

We, being taxpayers, to get that technology ready to go. And in the case of Moderna, we paid for everything, and I'm not exaggerating. They had never produced a drug, so we stood up manufacturing capacity for them. We paid for their late-stage clinical trials, and we signed advance purchase agreements to completely de-risk the enterprise. But they will tell you that they saved us. It's not true. We saved ourselves. There's a reason that the president, who cares deeply about trying to reduce the death toll from cancer, has to have this new organization called ARPA-H,

which is going to be funded with billions of dollars, to try and do something to accelerate cancer research. Why do we have to pay for that? Because the drug companies will not pay for the high-risk early-stage research that goes into getting really breakthrough new drugs to market. So who does this, who pays for it? By and large, taxpayers are underpinning all the basic science. Drug companies are taking drugs that show promise, acquiring the intellectual property, and then charging whatever they want for the drugs. So that's our system in the United States of America. It's completely screwed up. We need to have a process more like what you described in posing this question, which is, well, shouldn't we look at what the government invested, what the company invested,

what is the cost to manufacture the drug and distribute the drug, and all of that, and then arrive at a price that provides a fair return for investment and risk to the drug company, but not any price they want to dictate. That's what we have now, is they get the drug from us and they get to dictate the price. We don't have a system like the one you referenced. Yeah, and it's much to our detriment. It's interesting, you talked about how this profit-driven model tends to focus on certain conditions and not others. And I know that you focus mainly on the United States, but perhaps we could get into a little bit what that means for neglected diseases on a global scale. How looking at only patients who can afford to pay these inflated prices means that drug companies are sort of tacitly saying, well, we're okay with people dying from conditions that people don't get in America.

Are you comfortable talking about that a little bit? Well, we only work in the United States because that is a big enough challenge for us. I will say that drug companies want to invest only in drugs that produce a big return. They're profit maximizers. They're corporations. And we don't have a way that we balance that out where we say, yes, but taxpayers are doing the foundational research that leads to these drugs. And these are, in that sense, public goods. And we need to figure out how, yeah, you can have a fair return, but we also make sure that they're priced to maximize affordability and accessibility. And this plays off overseas with neglected tropical diseases, which you reference, which drug companies don't want to spend a lot of money on because those countries don't have a lot of money to pay for them. Because all the companies care about is honest to God.

They want us to believe that they're all about looking after our well-being. They are corporations, and corporations, by law, have to maximize profits for their shareholders. And that's what they do. You know, who invests in neglected tropical diseases? The Gates Foundation and other foundations that put the money out to do that early stage research that changes the pricing equation should, should change the pricing equation, so that we can still develop the drugs that people abroad would benefit from tremendously if only we made the effort and made the investment, which they're not inclined to do. Did that answer your question? That's very well, very well. I think if people are, like, looking for evidence on this, they could look at the speed at which we started to develop Ebola treatment of vaccines once that became a threat to us versus once it became a threat to people in the global periphery. By the way, I will say one more thing.

Yeah, of course. It's not that drug companies only hurt people in poorer countries in the world. Yeah. It is that drug companies insist on high prices everywhere. And for example, the disease cystic fibrosis is incurable and there are new drugs that help people live longer. They are marketed by vertex. Interestingly, the gene that all of these drugs are built on, the genetic component, was identified by the former head of the NIH, Francis Collins, when he was doing research paid for by the NIH at the University of Michigan. His discoveries were seminal, but still the drug companies wouldn't invest. So the cystic fibrosis foundation raised money from its community to do more early stage research.

And when it showed promise, vertex bought the intellectual property from them and brought these drugs that are built on that genetic discovery to market. But in countries that have said, we can't afford the price you're demanding because we only have so much money to pay for our citizens for health care because we provide health care to all our citizens. Vertex will let people, kids, because it generally affects kids and younger adults, will let them die if the companies won't agree to the price that they are insisting on. Literally, let them die and say, look, if you won't strike a deal that has a high enough price for us, we're not going to sell the drug in your country. So it isn't only the poor people, the poorer countries around the world, it's patients who are stuck with a disease that requires a high cost drug and maybe they can't get access to it because it's not affordable for their country or them. Yeah, it's really pretty bleak stuff in that sense. Let's get on to a little bit then of how we can make this better. And I know that there are approaches that are incremental and there are approaches that are more revolutionary or sort of making these big leaps.

So let's start with talking about how this legislation that we've just seen, the Inflation Reduction Act, does that make a difference? How much of a difference does it make and how does it make that difference? The Inflation Reduction Act is really historic legislation that is going to save millions of people in America, millions of dollars over time. It does four big things. It does many more, but four big things. One, for the first time ever, Medicare is going to be able to use its purchasing power as the largest purchaser of drugs in this country to negotiate lower prices for people on Medicare. For the first time ever, we are going to curb price gouging by forcing companies that raise prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay a rebate to Medicare. That will curb their price increases. Third, we are going to limit the amount of out-of-pocket annually a Medicare patient can pay under the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit.

Right now there is no annual out-of-pocket limit. I pay for that drug I described to you before that costs almost $1,000 a capsule. I pay out-of-pocket more than $16,000 a year. In 2025, there will be a limit of $2,000. No Medicare beneficiary will pay more than $2,000 out-of-pocket for Medicare Part D drugs. And four, for the first time starting next year, people who depend on insulin in Medicare will pay no more than $35 per prescription per month for their insulin. These are all truly significant changes and begin to shift drug policy in this country, begin to break the dictatorial pricing ability that the drug companies have. And I want to take a minute to explain why Medicare negotiation in itself is such a big breakthrough.

Very quickly, when the Medicare prescription drug benefit was enacted into law in 2003, the drug companies in the dark of night got stuck into that law, something called the non-interference clause that said that the Secretary of Health and Human Services could not negotiate directly with drug companies, period. It got stuck in in the dark of night by a man named Billy Towson, who was then Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. And within months after doing that, at the behest of the big drug companies, he went to work to run the Big Trade Association for the drug companies, it's called Pharma, at a salary of $2 million a year. In other words, they bought the prohibition on Medicare being able to negotiate, and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to keep that prohibition in place ever since then. Just in the last two years, in fighting to not let Medicare negotiate over any drugs ever directly with the drug companies, they spent north of $200 million to try and stop that legislation from passing. So these are all big, significant, important changes. They are not enough. If we ruled the world, we would have written legislation that negotiated over more drugs, and the pricing for which extended into the private sector and to people without insurance. But we had to do that to extend it to the private sector and people without insurance. We needed 60 votes in the Senate because of the filibuster rules, and we couldn't get one, not one, Republican vote. So it had to be passed under a special procedure called reconciliation. The Democrats used it, they stood up to Pharma, and they passed the bill. God bless them.

We, in the course of it, had a vote on trying to extend the $35 insulin monthly co-pay to the private sector. We could only get seven Republican votes. And so we couldn't take it all the way there. So there's much more work to do, but this breakthrough is truly historic. Yeah, it's good. It's good to see some progress, because there hasn't been progress for a very long time. Let's talk about the difference then between a cost and a co-pay, because I think it's easy for politicians sometimes that, you know, tweet, insulin will cost you X, and in fact, it only costs you X if Y and Z are true. So can you explain for folks what a co-pay is and why sometimes these claims are made about co-pays and those are not the same as costs? Well, the big difference is the word price versus cost in our system. In order to lower out-of-pocket costs for people, we have to lower price. Why? If you were paying $100 out-of-pocket for your medicine and we zero that out to nothing, but we don't lower the price, the overall price, that $100 has to be paid for it by someone.

And what happens is patients wind up paying higher premiums or higher taxes or getting less money in their paychecks, you know, more than half of all Americans get their drug coverage and healthcare through their employers. So if that $100 still has to be paid by somebody, then we wind up paying for it, either with higher premiums, higher taxes, or getting less money in our paycheck because someone needs to absorb that $100. This is very important for people to understand. There's no free lunch unless we lower prices. That's why pharma will always say, the big drug companies will always say, well, what we need to do is we just need to lower everybody's out-of-pocket, make it zero, and let them have all the drugs they want, and let us continue to charge any price we want. But there's no free lunch. It would still have to be paid. And so we fight very hard at Pages for Affordable Drugs to help patients and policymakers understand that we need to do both. We need to lower out-of-pocket costs for people, and we need to lower the price in order to do that. Co-payments. Co-payments are what you pay when you go to the pharmacy counter, and they tell you that your share of this prescription is $5 or $10 or $20.

And lots of times, employers and the insurance companies they hire to run their programs will use co-payments to try and steer you to a less expensive drug, a generic, right? So if you want a brand, you're going to have to pay $50. But if you take the generic, you pay $5, for example. They're trying to steer you to an equally effective drug. Generics are, by definition, the same exact drug, and they are trying to steer you to the less expensive but equally effective drug. The problem with our country, big time, is that sometimes they are not used for that purpose. In my case, I have co-payments on all my drugs, right? But I don't have a choice. I don't have a cheaper generic. I got to take the drugs they're telling me to take. And so when we misuse co-payments like that, we are hurting patients. And it's how we also need to change. It points to how we also need to change our benefit design in this country.

If we can steer a patient to a healthier or as healthy, at least less expensive option, that makes sense. But if you're charging me for something that I can't do anything about, that makes no sense at all. And so these are changes that we at P4AD work on and will continue to work on in our benefit design in this country. Yeah, I can see they're trying to give you a price incentive to what not buy your drug in your case, or be poor, or be sick because you can't afford it, which is really not the function of the incentive and it's silly. Can you explain why some drugs have generics and some don't? So, boy, you're asking some really good questions. You're going right to the heart of our system. Thank you. A long time ago in the 80s, 83 or 84, a bill was passed called the Hatch-Waxman Bill.

And since then, everyone refers to a concept called the Hatch-Waxman Barbon. And the bargain is this. If you're a drug company and you bring a valuable new drug to market, you get a period of exclusivity, along with you, you have a patent already, probably. But upon approval, we give you a period of exclusivity where, for sure, no matter if your patent is old and only has a year left, we give you additional years of exclusivity where you have a monopoly on that drug. But at the end of that period of exclusivity, generics and biosimilars are the name for biologic drugs. They're more complicated drugs. But at the end of that period of exclusivity, a generic, I'm not a generic, generics and biosimilars come to market

and we use the competition from the generics and biosimilars to drive down the price. When you have one generic that comes to compete, the price goes down about 15 or 20 percent, two generics, the price goes down 35 to 40 percent, three generics, 40 to 30 percent. By the time you get five generics in the market, the price is roughly five to 15 percent of the original brand name price. So the hatch wagon bargain was, you got a good drug, you bring it to market, we give you a time where you can charge whatever you want, you have exclusivity in the market, but at the end of that, we have competition from generics and biosimilars to lower price. Why aren't there generics and biosimilars? That was your question.

For all drugs, well, some drugs are still in their period of exclusivity, but the drug companies don't let competition come to market, the brand drug companies. They fight, they file additional patents, they sign deals with generic companies not to bring a competitive drug to market and pay them not to. They make small changes in the drug and then file additional patents. There is something called a patent thicket. Humera, the best-selling drug in the world, has like 132 patents. 132, 75 percent of which were filed after the drug came to market.

What are they for? Well, they could be for the packaging, the instructions, the color of the capsule, they patent everything. Why? Because a generic or biosimilar competitor has to fight its way through all of them to bring a drug to market. So we call them patent thickets. If you grew up anywhere near a place where there were thickets, it's very hard to get through a thicket. In some cases, there is no competitor because they're in the period of exclusivity, but in far too many cases, there are no competitors to drive down the price

because the drug companies are manipulating our system. They're very good at manipulating our system. Yes, they are exceptionally good and that has terrible results. We've spoken about the way that they've manipulated the system, the way that maybe that's beginning to change. One thing that I'm interested in, I've written about it a little bit, is these ways that are perhaps more revolutionary, if not always as cast iron safe. One of those is obviously people making their own medicines,

which is something that we'll see, unfortunately, increasingly in this country because of bans on access to reproductive health care. I wonder how you think that has the potential to change this. We've seen the EpiPencil, we've seen these home brew abortion drugs, things like that. Do you think that has the capacity to change access? Remember, I'm a patient and it scares the hell out of me. The reason is there was a time in the United States and in most of the world when drug companies were not regulated.

They brought patent medicines and mixed it at home brews and sold them. We had no way to make sure that those didn't hurt people. They killed people in some cases. Then in the 20th century, the government realized, and our Congress and our elected officials realized, we needed a way to regulate this industry, which would sell poison in some cases. They created what is now called the Food and Drug Administration. Food and Drug Administration is charged with making sure drugs are safe and effective.

I'm a patient. I want the Food and Drug Administration to do its job. I want drugs that are safe and effective. I do not like drugs that are not subjected to some scrutiny to make sure that they do what those who are selling them claim they do. Remember, I'm not big on taking chances with my life. If the drugs don't work, I'll die. That's that simple. I'll die of cancer. Not to mention I could die from a drug that's no good.

Some drugs cause harm, you know. Even drugs approved by the FDA cause harm sometimes. I am not a fan of homebrew drugs. I am a fan of a system that protects me and ensures that drugs are safe and effective. But that's one man's perspective. Yeah, I think it's reasonable to say that we have a way to make drugs that are safe and effective. It's the law, the legislation or a system that's getting in between people and the life-saving medicines that they need.

We should certainly struggle to fix that instead of looking for ways around it even though I understand why, especially with things like reproductive health care, that doesn't seem like it's getting fixed anytime soon, sadly. No, it's terribly sad. It's heartbreaking. Yeah, this whole thing is extremely, and I know you've obviously seen it too, but in my previous life I've worked with someone who works for you now in diabetes non-profit and seen firsthand the consequences of this and it's really heartbreaking stuff to look at

and I wish it just seems so unnecessary in a world where these pharmaceutical companies make, we should say, billions of dollars, right? It's not as if these people are driving to work in a second-hand Toyota Corolla. They are doing very well for themselves off this system, right? Yep. People will be familiar with like Farmer Bro, Martin Screlly, the guy. Yeah. Yeah, but this is just one example of a very problematic industry.

I think you've done an excellent job of explaining it, David. Is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here? Just, Martin Screlly, you called to mine. I'm going to take you back to Moderna and the mRNA vaccine in the fact that we not only developed the MRA technology to taxpayer money, but we brought the Moderna vaccine to people with taxpayer money. And in the course of doing that, we minted three new Moderna billionaires. You're talking about them not driving to work in second-hand Toyota Corollas.

Oh, far from it. Yeah, these are the people whose yachts I see in the Bay. I think that's disgusting. Three new millionaires off the back of the bay. Billionaires. Billionaires, God. Yeah, God, it's gross, isn't it? Yeah, it can't be said enough.

Not only does the NIH fund their research, but often the taxpayers will fund the lab, right, if it's at a university. You pay for it twice before you try and pay for it again. Yeah, it's a very broken system. David, how can people find P4AD? How can people find you? Is there a website, a Twitter, a Facebook? Where should they go?

Go to our website, patientsforaffordabledrugs.org, just like it sounds. You can leave your story if you or someone you love, care about, has struggled with high drug prices. Give us your email address. We don't ask patients for money, but the stories in the email addresses are our power. They're the currency we trade on to make sure that the voices of people in this country are heard to counter the propaganda and lies that are put out by the drug companies. Okay, yeah, that's very important stuff that people can hopefully do, even if they are struggling sort of materially to afford their drugs.

Maybe they have some time. So that's great. And it's for F-O-R, right? Not the number four. That's correct. All right, great. Thank you so much, David. It's been a pleasure.

You've done an excellent job of explaining a very convoluted and broken system. Thank you for taking us. James, you're a patient man. I try to be. Sometimes I'm very much not that. Yeah, I do appreciate your time on this Monday morning. Thank you very much, David. Thank you.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. I am Robert Evans, and today we're going to talk about a specific part of Eurasia, where, I don't know, things are kind of on the edge of falling apart and maybe becoming something else, as I'm sure most people are aware. Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. It has not gone well, and the government has recently announced that they are doing a general mobilization to bring in other 300,000 soldiers into their armed forces.

A significant chunk, if not the bulk of these recruitments, are coming from areas away on the periphery of Russian power, you might say, particularly different chunks of the Russian state, where there are minority populations who have been dissident to the Federation of Russia in the past. Probably the most active of these is a place called Dagestan. Most Americans probably are not super well-versed on this area. It is the furthest southern point in the Russian state. It borders Azerbaijan.

It's pretty close to Turkey, and this is a region that has a massive Muslim population and has been the site of a lot of resistance to the Russian state in the recent past. And today we're going to be talking about what that looks like now as the government is attempting to draft men from this part of the state and as resistance has risen up significantly within Dagestan. I'm going to be talking with Karina Avidisian. Karina is a PhD studying social movements, particularly in Russia. Karina, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. So first off, I'm not an expert on Dagestan. What do you think is important for people to know about the relationship between this region and the Russian state? It's the biggest republic in the North Caucasus, and it has actually independent media, despite the really intense repression and the dozens of disappeared or murdered journalists from the republic. Kinship ties are strong in Dagestan,

so the announcement of mobilization and the start of the mobilization process really affects people because extended families are closed, so when someone is taken away it affects a lot of people. So that in large part kind of explains the level of mobilization. The other thing I want to mention is that the North Caucasus region in general, but especially Dagestan and Chechnya, just kind of don't see themselves as part of Russia. To be honest, Russians don't really care about what happens there either.

I mean, you know, it's as if it's another country, and there's this huge disconnect. So there doesn't really exist this kind of civic Russian identity, and the concept of Russia as a country is to a large extent held together by sheer repression and propaganda. Yeah, that's kind of why I try to focus on like, this is a part of the Russian state rather than like these areas are Russian, because that's certainly not the way it feels on the ground or the people feel about themselves. Yeah, exactly.

And you can kind of see differences in the way police respond to these protests in Russian regions versus places like Dagestan in Russian regions. And by Russian region, I mean places where ethnic Russians are a majority. You have people or you have police kind of arresting or detaining and arresting protesters. Whereas in Dagestan, the tactics of de-arresting people who are being kind of carted off is really significant because of the history of violence in the Republic. So abductions, disappearances and murder is very common. And this is something that I've heard Dagestani protest participants kind of express fear about.

Like, you know, people know that that might happen. You might get identified among the protesters and you might not get detained and arrested like you would in Moscow, for example, but you might get identified and then kind of targeted later. Which is, yeah, I mean, obviously very frightening. One of the things that I had read kind of about some of the origins of the conflict in the region right now is that it had been common for some time because the economy in Dagestan. Dagestan is in the Caucasus, which is a mountainous region in southern Russia. And it's where a great deal of the country's fuel comes from.

There are kind of folks who will say that the government of the Federation has, like, avoided utilizing that infrastructure to the most that it can to avoid providing jobs. And it's made a lot of young men join the military to become contract soldiers. In the past, that was a good way to provide for if you had a large family. You do a military contract, you're not going to get sent outside of the region. It's pretty safe. But then, of course, Putin invades Ukraine and suddenly a lot of these people who had been doing this, not because they wanted to support the Russian Federation,

but because it was a job, are suddenly being sent to go fight and die outside of Kharkiv or wherever. Yeah. The other thing is that's why there's so many security personnel kind of internally in the Republic as well. So the Republic experiences high unemployment, as mentioned poverty. And it's almost by design, right? So many people just rely on the state for jobs and security services is one of the main sources of employment. But that also kind of has that double effect of being used as a tool for repression. So anytime kind of dissent comes up, even when a large part of the grievances are about poverty

and unemployment and just kind of having a future, you have a kind of excess of people who are ready to kind of suppress any expression of kind of dissent that might lead to problems later. And it seems like a great deal of dissent right now is coming from the Muslim pop, in particularly like the Muslim religious community within Dagestan. The reason that you and I are talking right now is you shared and commented on a post. Someone was sharing a piece of protest art that was referencing a recent comment by the deputy Mufti of Dagestan. And it's a stylized drawing of several mountains on a green background that says the invader doesn't become a martyr. And if I'm interpreting that correctly, what that's saying is it's a statement of protest from within the Islamic community of Dagestan saying

if you go to someone else's homeland to take part in an invasion and you die, you're not being martyred. You're not dying in a way that is respected by Allah, essentially. Is that am I am I interpreting that correctly? Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what it's saying. I found that remarkable for a couple reasons. The first is that dissent in the region originally. So, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the first stretch of the war, there was dissent, but it was mostly limited to ethno nationalist movements who were very narrow in their messaging.

So their grievances were, you know, just about their one ethnic group and, you know, whatever repression that they experienced. So they kind of missed out on broader support and political Islam became a channel for kind of representing oppositional identity. And because of that, cutting across ethnic lines through Salafism, which is kind of a stricter interpretation of Islam, which is prone to radicalization. That had much broader support and posed a significant threat to Moscow. And I want to kind of make a parallel here because mosques and religious communities across the world are actually really interesting spaces for social movement mobilization. Some of the earliest works on social movement mobilization talked about black churches in the US as being, you know, key to the civil rights movement because you have these spaces that are kind of away from the state, away from surveillance, although in Dagestan and lots of parts of Russian Muslim spaces are totally infiltrated by the state or they're actually, you know, state musties or the state's eyes and ears are kind of there. But still there's these spaces and I think that's a big kind of significant key factor in how this movement has been able to mobilize.

And I'm interested in because obviously Chechnya is another part of Russia that has a large Muslim population. There was a horrible war there, not all that long ago. That is really a prelude in a lot of ways to the kinds of violence and the kinds of repressive tactics that are being used right now by the Russian state. What sort of separates, like why didn't Dagestan kind of go the same way as Chechnya, like how I'm kind of interested in that because it seems as if the Muftis there are much more willing to kind of act in resistance to the state still. Is it just a factor of the violence that was unleashed on Chechnya earlier? Is there more to it? I think in large part it's, yeah, I mean, that's the legacy of violence and war in Chechnya, but I think it's partly because of how this kind of historical view of Chechnya as being, you know, a threat, a problem for the Russian Empire and previously and then Soviet Union and then now, you know, independent Russia, and it's really the rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, which plays a really suppressing role in the Republic and his security services.

Chechnya has experienced post-war. I would argue it's calmer and in a strange way. I mean, I was, when I was doing my field work in the North Caucasus, I visited Chechnya. I was in Cabardino-Balkaria, which is, you know, a couple of republics over. It didn't experience war, but I remember at the time there were counter-terrorist operations in Cabardino-Balkaria where the security services would kind of lock down whole neighborhoods and kind of storm apartment buildings to go after someone who had been, you know, identified as a problem and just kind of, you know, neutralize that person. They were rarely detained, they were just kind of killed, no questions asked. Then going to Chechnya from that kind of context, that stuff doesn't happen just because the security apparatus is so strong and so intense that that kind of thing doesn't happen. At the same time, you feel that tension, that kind of fear.

So I think that's the main reason why you're not seeing these sort of protests in Chechnya. When we talk about like, what is it reasonable to hope for here? I wonder if you have any thoughts on that from Dagestan, like in terms of resistance to both this kind of general conscription order and resistance in general to the increasing imperial aims of the Russian state? Yeah, I think it's revealing those cracks that I mentioned in the beginning about identity and then kind of this region not feeling like a part of Russia. Yeah. And I think the other thing is that it's unprecedented in many ways, just in terms of its messaging. And you know protest movements in general are seen to kind of, when you participate in a movement, it's sort of transforming on an individual level. You feel like you're part of something, you see all these other people on the street who are agreeing with you in a context that's so authoritarian and you don't have that freedom to speak out, there's no free media in general. It's transformative.

And I think that's probably, for me, at least as a social movement scholar, the most interesting aspects. I mean, we can't predict, we don't know what's going to happen. You know, new wave of repression, but it's revealing these cracks and kind of almost providing this proof of the lie of this unified Russian state that is being kept together by repression and propaganda. I think the messaging also reflects a change in identity and oppositional identity in the region. Previously, protests in the region were directed at the local leadership so that at the Republican level. Right. So these are usually co ethnics who are installed by Moscow, not so much to govern, but more to manage. And Chechen leader Ramzan Kaderov is an extreme taste for this. And it was a practice common in Imperial Russia, right, you install your own guy, but he's local, so it sits better with the population, even if they're only there to carry out policies that are decided So those protest movements were normally against the Republican authorities, their accesses, their corruption, you know, and again, the exception to that is Salafism, which was targeting both Moscow and the local leadership. But here, in this new wave of protest movement, the sentiment the grievances are against Putin. Yeah, that's totally now. And I, one of the things that is kind of remarkable is you've gotten in the wave of and these are not just in Dagestan, but Dagestan had a lot of the protests against this general mobilization order.

You actually have what what looks to me and you're you're certainly no certainly no more than I do so tell me if you think my analysis of this is wrong but looks to me like the regime blinking a little bit because at in the wake of the protests, you had both Putin and a number of different local leaders come out and say we because one of the things that was happening as soon as the mobilization started as you saw a lot of these people, including like doctors, healthcare workers, other kinds of professionals and industries that are generally protected from this sort of thing, getting pulled in by state forces and effectively drafted on the spot along with protesters. And the in the wake of the outcry against that Putin himself and a number of other local leaders have come out and been like this was a mistake we're releasing a number of these people these these certain, you know, we're not supposed to be drafting people from these certain professions and whatnot and to me that looked like, well maybe that's a little bit of a blink, but I don't know if perhaps I'm being overly optimistic there. No, I agree. And it speaks to the level of mobilization that kind of unprecedented levels of mobilization on the street, and also speaks to the fact that you know previously, Moscow, I mean they didn't care as much when the protests were directed at the local authorities. I mean they did, but not like this. This is this is threatening. And I was listening to an interview of a protest organizer from Dagestan he's exiled that he's kind of you know in touch with the people on the ground and he was talking about how he felt that the reason mobilization orders have been commissioned kind of to the Republican authorities or regional authorities is on purpose, so that grievances aren't directed towards Moscow because it's a regional authorities

deciding on who's being mobilized. And it's the kind of deflection of blame that he thought was by design. And the interviewer asked him a couple other questions he was saying oh you know we're hearing reports about the police being really brutal. And again he was like no not really. Or that's not the point that's not the question to be asking it's actually deflecting because again the grievance is not to the local police it's actually towards Moscow who is you know the the the origin of this whole problem. And I think that's that's a threat. Do you have any kind of advice for people if they're looking as kind of things continue to develop in Dagestan as there are more protests which I'm sure there will be. Are there actually like organizations over there that can be supported by people, including you mentioned independent media there. I'm just wondering if you have any kind of particular advice for folks who might either want to learn more about the region and what's going on, or who might want to try and help the people who are protesting right now. Unfortunately there's not much for outsiders to do a lot of the news and I think I was kind of expecting the answer. Yeah, it's like it's kind of a denied context so where I get the news is a couple telegram channels that are only in Russian. So that probably doesn't help your audience if they don't speak Russian.

There's a couple Twitter accounts that I would recommend people follow, you know, there's, I don't know if I can mention that word. Yeah, please. No, absolutely. Let me quickly find the guy. Personally, when it comes to like where I'm able to get English language news about the region. Medusa is generally kind of like one of the places where I've gotten some Medusa is a Russian news site that's or news organization that's banned in Russia. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, a Medusa journalist just got arrested in Dagestan by the state security services. But it you can go to Medusa.io and that's one place where I've come across news that's English language. It's not the most detailed coverage but it's kind of hard to find that in English about stuff going on in Dagestan.

It is it is hard to find and I would echo that sentiment of you know Medusa being a good source for that. There's a researcher on Twitter named Harold Chambers. His handle is Chambers Harold 8, the number eight, and he is an analyst and he is posting kind of more detailed, you know, in the weeds up to, you know, up to date, day to day developments from from the region. And is there anything like as we I'm kind of closing out here that you wanted to particularly get into about what's happening over there about kind of the development of social movements in Dagestan right now that you you find particularly fascinating that you'd like to kind of talk about to the audience. Yeah, I think the context of the Russian war on terrorism in the North Caucasus plays a huge role here. And I mentioned, you know, the counter terrorist operations that that Russia used to use in the region as a repression tool. So they didn't have to be cell office or kind of, you know, I'm seeing this, you know, extremists to be targeted and stuff like that like secular Dagestani's and churches were absolutely targeted and that kind of in those in those in that context of counter terrorism. And it's really the fact that you've dug a studies are really tired of the repression, people leave the Republic and move abroad, because they've been labeled a terrorist, and they don't want to die. And when their families send them money to support them abroad, they get labeled as terrorists because they're helping, you know, support a terrorist so it's, it's why it's also why the movement is leaderless.

Because there's really no intelligentsia or leaders left in the Republic anymore anyone who had any kind of critical standpoint has either been killed or exiled. So we have to see the mobilization and I guess that is kind of, you know, with that backdrop, people are tired of the repression. And, and yeah, the protests are spontaneous. And the fact that it's horizontal is also unprecedented. And it obviously means that it's much harder to repress the movement and suppress it because there's no, you know, individuals to kind of target. That's interesting because that's obviously a global trend that we've seen in protest movements, not just against the Russian state but around the world governments have gotten much better at no finding leaders in protest movements compromising them, going after them targeting them arresting them. It's it and I think this has been a part of why all over the world you've seen so many more horizontal movements leading street protests against different kinds of oppression because it's really the only thing that can't be compromised easily by the security forces. Yeah, especially in an authoritarian context. Yeah.

Well, Karina, is there anything else you wanted to say before we close out. No, no, that's it. All right. Well, why don't we talk a little bit about your plugs here because you have a podcast that you're about to be starting. Yeah, I'm starting a podcast it is called Obscura Stan podcast where we'll talk about the bizarre and fucked up nature of the region of Eurasia, but also more importantly how it got that way. Yeah, that's what we're doing. I can think of few more topics, more important topics for people, particularly people just where I live to understand so many people have been affected and, you know, we're looking at the energy crisis hitting the UK and to a slightly lesser extent continental Europe right now we're looking at rising food prices in the United States all of it tied to this conflict, which people wouldn't have been surprised by if they'd been paying attention to Eurasian history and politics a little bit more. So I think that's a commendable effort and I'm excited to start listening. Thank you so much. Can I mention one last thing? Absolutely. So I'm sitting in Armenia and speaking to you from Armenia so I would just encourage your listeners to find out about what's happening. We were recently attacked by Azerbaijan and we have some 41 square kilometers that are currently occupied by Azerbaijan soldiers.

So I would encourage people to learn about the conflict and kind of pay attention to what's happening here. Yeah, absolutely. We continue to be big advocates for folks paying attention to that. And yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, you know, I had this brief period of like optimism when the White House started making statements and Pelosi visited that like, and we'll see maybe that I know there's like there's a vote coming up right now in Congress to stop selling weapons to the Azeris, which would be at least a start. But I mean, you know, the what's I think is necessary is for Armenia to have access to the kind of weapons that have been so successful at stopping foreign aggression and other countries, shall we say. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right, Karina, thank you so much for your time. That's going to be our show for the day. Have a good one, everybody. Keep paying attention to stuff. You try to conceive of a go boss noise.

No, I'm trying to there's trying to think of something that's about like Italian racism and how we should all be racist against Italians, because now it's important. Oh, hi. Welcome to It Can Happen Here, the show where we're talking about anti-Italian racism and also girl bosses. Finally, two great tastes that go great together. Mm hmm. It's like mixing peanut butter and piss. That's right. Yeah. The piss being Italians and peanut butter being girl boss.

We usually don't say things that are that obvious, but yes. With me today is Chris, James and Robert. I'm Garrison and we're talking about girl boss fascism today. And it's are we going to say Georgia? Is that how we're going to do it? Is that how we're going to say her name? Georgia, but I don't know. Georgia Milani.

Georgia Milani. Italy's new prime minister. Georgia Milani. That's what I was waiting for. Thank you. Put some Italian on it. Yeah. Spice up that meatball.

Mm hmm. So since since 2014, she's been the head of the Brothers of Italy party, which is funny, because when I think of the Brothers of Italy, I just think of Mario and Luigi, obviously. That's what most people think. But Mario and Luigi also fascists. So, well, they're monarchists. Yeah. They're monarchists. They specifically serve a princess.

So, so Bowser. Who's a girl boss? Bowser is your standard issue left wing, uh, Politburo chief type leader. Whereas what Mario and Luigi are doing like Mussolini is installing a royal in power is taking it's essentially every Mario game is recreating the March on Rome. I have like 10 pages to get through. Where does the toadstool come into it? So since 2014, she's been the head of the Brothers of Italy party, a party with direct lineage from the fascist Italian social movement. And Milani herself has been on camera praising figures like Mussolini. And until very recently, the Brothers of Italy party, besides being very pro plumbing, we're pretty on the, we're pretty on the fridges of Italian.

Here we go. Just four years ago, the party won only 4% of the votes in the last election. And now it's become Italy's largest political party, claiming the greatest percentage of the vote in the last month's election. So today we're going to talk about who Milani is, what, what she believes, what she kind of, what, what her rhetoric is. And then also the types of how the types of ways that media has been framing her relation to fascism. Because there's definitely been this perception that like liberal feminists and mainstream media have been kind of soft on Milani, because she's the first woman prime minister of Italy. And they've kind of framed her ascension to power, and like a girl boss go get it, sort of way, and have been downplaying her more fascist views. So we're going to talk about kind of where this perception comes from, the few ways where it's kind of correct, and some of the ways where it's, I think, a little off base.

To start off with this, one of the kind of, one of the biggest things that pushed this perception into the forefront was a tweet from Politico Europe, accompanying an article. Now this, this tweet again. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. And because I hate basing our research off of things that are just on Twitter, this tweet has been referenced a lot on like television, on like news, like news TV. Has been using this tweet a lot as well. This is, this is kind of shaped the way that discussions happening on a national stage, even off Twitter.

But the tweet, the tweet reads in 1992, a 15 year old school girl went to join her local branch of the far right youth front in Rome. The all male group of radicals met her with bemusement. 30 years later, Giorgia Milani is now on course to become Italy's first female prime minister. So the way that frame works is like, yeah, this, this little girl wanted to join her Nazi club and it was a boy's club. Hashtag girl boss. And now she's finally prime minister. The first one. And so yes, obviously this is very cringy, not, not great framing.

A lot of good girl Hitler jokes. Democracy. We even picked out presidents. Listen, I'm flat. Don't get off. No, really. I'm, I'm, I'm happy for you, honey. Wow. A girl president.

How progressive. And so takes like venture brothers, venture brothers, credit. No, uncritical support. It's just, just support to venture brothers. So takes like, like that, like what, like what we just heard a dean of venture say kind of, kind of spawned a, a big slew of, of comments. You know, I'm just going to read, read some of the stuff that people have been saying in response to stuff like that. Politico Europe.

A piece quote, begging liberals to stop praising girl boss Alini for being brave enough to shatter the glass ceiling in the neo fascist parties she's joined. And like, why is media treating this as a freaking girl boss story. The girl boss vacation of Georgia Milady has been interesting to watch liberals will literally stand anybody. So there's a lot of, a lot of takes like that have been, have been, have been going around. There's, there's been extremely viral viral tweets, getting hundreds of thousands of likes, thousands, thousands, retweets and shares stuff getting referenced on national TV. All kind of about this. You know, people complaining the takes from political Europe and other, other kind of various soft headlines emphasizing the girl boss nature being like the sweet little girl defies the odds and grows up to be the first female Mussolini. So like, some of these jokes are pretty funny.

I think, I think they're, they're funny. They're fine. There is probably the worst one of these takes that I found that still got hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes was quote. The American right and the American left. The aesthetics are different, but the effect is the same support for the rising tide of fascism. Communists are the only people now as in the past who truly oppose fascism. It's off. I don't far for fuck's sake.

This is true. If you're following along. No. There was a terrible Megan McCain tweet, which is very funny because people definitely were standing. We'll talk about the Megan McCain. Good. Can't wait. I have.

Yes. We'll talk about our good friend Megan McCain. But yeah. So, you know, Italy's Italy elected their first female Mussolini in a remarkable victory for both girl power and diversity in politics and people, people, people had some good shapes. So the other the other kind of big thing that caused this perception that that like that like the liberals will literally stand anybody. The other big thing that kind of caused that was some viral quotes from Hillary Clinton talking talking about the the role of of women in politics and referencing Milani. So some remarks from Hillary Clinton published in Italy last September. I think it was at I think it was at like the Venice Film Festival actually.

So some quotes from an interview that she gave at the Venice Film Festival went viral, mostly because tweets included two two small clips of these quotes when she was talking about both women in politics and Georgie. Georgia. Georgia. You're doing great, buddy. Multiple viral tweets circulated mostly with two short quotes from Clinton getting the majority of attention saying quote, the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past and is certainly a good thing. And a second quote is being every time a woman is elected to head of state or government. That is a step forward. One quote. Obviously, those takes in and of themselves.

Not very good. I don't think those are good opinions. Shocking. Shocking that we are going to criticize a statement from Hillary Clinton. Rodham Clinton. This is this is rare for us. It's, you know, it's it's I'm surprised as well. But these kind of are slightly cherry picked from a larger section of this interview discussing women in government and how the far right is starting to use tokenized women to uphold patriarchy and conservatism.

So the first quotes taken from this from a translation of an interview that that that Clinton did at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022 prior to Milani's apparent victory in the Italian elections on September 25th. So she do it in Italian. Does she speak Italian? No, but it was only published in Italian. I see. So we're translating from Italian back into English. Double translation. Yes.

But the so in a section of this interview talking about the increase of women in government in governmental leadership roles, a translation from her remarks in the larger section of this interview. Reads quote the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past and is certainly a good thing. But then as with any leader, women or manned, she must be judged by what she does. I never agreed with Margaret Thatcher, but I admired her determination clearly. The ideas are voted for. I admire her determination to do what stamp on the neck of the working class fuck off. Also, does she really oppose Margaret Thatcher's policies? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if I believe that one. No, that lady's dead in the world is better for it. Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power? Yes, of course. Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland? I don't know about that. There's this thing that you get with people talking about all of these ghouls. And it's specifically like a centrist thing where it's like, well, certain things are just admirable traits, no matter about who has them.

And you can admire that trait. And I was like, no, it's not. There were a lot of men in the SS who were willing to do things that you would call brave, but it doesn't mean you have to consider them admirable. I think we don't have to have respect for that. You don't have to hand it to the Nazis. Exactly. Like just fuck certain people. Yeah, their contribution to the world is bad.

You can just stop that. Margaret Thatcher being a good example. I have kind of the same thoughts on the inclusion of Toadette inside the new Mario Kart games. It's just really, it's just, you're signifying it, but it's not actually a step forward for the Toad race. So in the next section of the interview, Clinton also. Gerson's come out against Woke Mario Kart. In the next section, Clinton also acknowledges the conservative women politicians role in upholding patriarchal government, saying, quote, women on the right are protected by patriarchy because they are often the first to support the fundamental pillars of male power and privilege.

Today in America, the right wing leaders are very much against abortion. So she did like, it was part of this section talking about how women who are on the right and are running as conservative politicians actually support all of the, all of the things that keep patriarchy alive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, it's true centrism, right? It's half of a good take and half of a terrible take. Exactly. Back to back. Exactly.

So a lot of the... It's a piss and peanut butter again. So yeah, so are snippets of her comments embarrassing, rewomen being a break from the past, always being a good thing? Yes, most certainly. Are they taken out of context enough to change the scope of what's being said? I suppose that's subjective. But I just thought that's interesting that there was very select few quotes that were getting a whole bunch of traction and her larger statements were actually slightly more interesting.

Go read the article. Don't do the Alex Jones shit of getting mad at a headline. Yeah. Like six seconds of clip, like, come on, people, you have to be better than this. And I think still, you know, I see the same thing. Whenever I'm playing Mario Sunshine and there's the graffiti and you can, you can get mad at just saying, there's the graffiti all over Deflino Pazza. You can get mad about that.

But once you actually start learning how Bowser Jr. was treated as a kid, there's actually more, there's more that you actually can understand about what's going on and what leads to that behavior from Bowser Jr. Very identifiable. Everybody understands those references, Garrison. Yeah. Good work. Yeah. I just want to say that there is only one square in Italy that matters, and that is Piazza Loretto.

And you can, you can Google it. I just, I love the juxtaposition of Garrison struggling over every single word that's in the, in the neighborhood of Italy. And then James just perfectly saying some fucking Italian shit. It's great. My Italian is bad. My Italian comes exclusively from... Your Italian is much better than anyone else hears. Maybe.

I don't know. I just swear at other men in spandexes. I know a couple of curse words from watching my uncles play pool when I was a kid, but that's about all I've got. Yeah, I rely on that. Hand gesture, which works very well in... Hand gestures are 80% of Italian. Yeah. Yes, it's true.

So now having now exhausted every conceivable Italian joke, we could proceed with the script. Oh, hell no. No, no, no. We can actually proceed with an ad break. Do you know what else is in support of anti-Italian racism? Who won't kill Mussolini and hang him up so down in a square? I mean, probably the current prime minister of Italy. Yeah, that's true.

Also, probably these advertisers. Okay, and we are back. So there has been this kind of perception that the media kind of by and large dropped the ball on this one. And this sentiment was pretty widespread among leftists that there was a lot of emphasis on the breaking the fascist glass of ceiling and less on the fascist part. There was even people like the MSNBC host, Mehdi Hassan, who ran a whole segment on his show about kind of mainstream liberal media outlets downplaying the fascistic elements of Mussolini in headlines in favor of the girl power angle. What's been so depressing is to see so much of the quote unquote liberal media, the mainstream media, the MSM giving a pass to Meloni or playing down her and her party's fascist roots, focusing more on the fact that she's female and less on the fact that she's, you know, fascistic. That has been deeply, deeply depressing to see.

There was the Washington Post headline, Georgia Meloni could become Italy's first female prime minister. Here's what to know. Now, here's what you wouldn't know from that headline. You wouldn't know that she has ties to fascism. But hey, she's female. There was the headline in the Financial Times. We can pull that up as well. Likely victory for Italian right portends risks, but no lurch into extremism.

Don't worry, no lurch to extremism, even though they just elected card-carrying extremists. But still, hers is a heartwarming tale, isn't it? I kid you not, this was the tweet from Politico Europe. Let's pull up the tweet from Politico Europe. In July 1992, a 15-year-old schoolgirl rang the doorbell at a local branch of the youth front, a far-right movement in Rome, and asked to be let in. This weekend, that same schoolgirl could become Italy's next prime minister. Wow. Forget the fascism.

Forget the fascism. Focus on the inspiration there. Then there was this op-ed in the New York Times. Georgia Meloni is extreme, but she's no tyrant. Well, that's all right then. At least she's not a tyrant. There was this op-ed in the Atlantic, which argued that the most immediate concern about Italy's new government is not any threat to the country's democratic institutions. Still, less a return to fascism.

Did you notice a trend yet? It's not as bad as you think. This isn't really fascism. So, we'll talk a bit more about media coverage of Meloni's election in a bit, and how I think some people are kind of desperate to see the stupid Democrat libs shill for fascism trope, especially with the whole girlboss thing, that they actually kind of miss how the framing of Meloni's fascist ties has been perceived on a broad scale. But first, I want to get into who she actually is, what her views are, and what her election means. Italy is home to 60 million people. Well...

Which part of that sentence do you have a problem with, Robert? We should just move on. And it's continental Europe's third largest economy. When it comes to the actual election, the right-wing coalition that Meloni led won around 44% of the vote, with Meloni's Brothers of Italy party getting around 26% for the Senate race. So, in all, around three out of four voters did not vote for Meloni, and one in three didn't even vote at all, no surprise there. But overall, that means like only one in six Italian adults voted for the Brothers of Italy party. And that does make them the biggest party in the new parliament, but its long-term legitimacy is still kind of in question. Because she was leading a larger right-wing bloc, but the actual party that she's in and leads got like 26% of the vote.

So, I think that's an important perspective on how long she'll actually stay in power. Italian politics are kind of known for... They're kind of residing government, not lasting very long. There's usually a pretty high turnover rate, so we'll see. Yeah. It's an interesting composition, right, of like moderate-ish right-wing people and then like some more hardcore... It's the people who used to be the League of the North, I think, are the second largest party. So, it's not like a homogenous bloc that she's in charge of, so it'd be kind of interesting to see how they hold together. Yeah.

And I think Milani can be an example of what political scientists call like gender-washing. When female politicians adopt a non-threatening image to blunt the force of their extremism. I think you can see this as well with Daisy inside Mario Kart for the Wii. Extremely brutal character, play-style, very brawly, but, you know, she acts very nice. Yeah, she just like powers through other carts on the track. And it leads to this slightly warped perception of what Daisy actually does. So, and Milani's signature look involves flowing outfits in pastel shades, kind of like Princess Peach. And to uninformed foreigners, her aesthetic could look like female empowerment.

She poses as like a defender of women, even though her party has rolled back women's rights. Just like in the 2006 Princess Peach game, she did brutal suppression of protests around the Mushroom Kingdom. So, David Broder, author of Mussolini's Grandchildren, Fascism in Contemporary Italy, wrote in Political Europe. Funny, this is a very different take from Political Europe in this one. Quote, Milani owes much more to the moderate forces in what Italians call the Center Right Alliance. They've allowed her the opportunity to present herself as part of the mainstream, not just because she's been softening her policies, at least in presentation, but also because the Center Right politicians jumping on her bandwagon has given her a veneer of respectability and credibility.

You can see this in Super Fashion Moves Brawl when Wario shows up in a biker outfit, not wearing the regular Italian uniform, and they just let him play. Mario Luigi are wearing their proper outfit, and Warrior just showed up in a leather jacket and ripped shorts. That's not okay, but it gave him the veneer of respectability because others allowed it to take place. Kind of the same thing here with Milani. At the same time, attempts by the main center left rivals to make the election about this kind of ghost of fascism spreading again through Milani have proved unsuccessful. The voters by and large did not buy the narrative that the left was trying to push, that Milani was this reincarnation of fascism.

They were not convinced enough to affect the election results in any meaningful way. The same way Nintendo is not convinced that putting Wario Luigi in the new Smash Bros. will actually lead to more people buying the game. The Italian essayist Roberto Slavinio wrote, quote, the far right can succeed in Italy because the left has failed exactly as in much of the world to offer credible visions or strategies. The left asks people to vote against the right, but it lacks a political vision or an economic alternative. And I think these are all the kind of factors that actually led Milani to win this election. Should we talk a little bit about the sort of Democratic Party, like five-star alliance thing that was happening? Sure. If you want to do like a TLDR on that, that would be great. So, all right, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, Italy had a very, very large and powerful left.

And then when the Soviet Union fell, so they had the Communist Party, the Communist Party was like one of the most powerful Communist parties in the world. It wasn't like a sort of like dictatorial ruling party. But when the Soviet, like when the USSR fell, it like voted to dissolve itself basically and became the Democratic Party. And all of their sort of militants, like, much of the militants basically turned into libs. And, you know, I mean, and the Italian left like held together for kind of a long time after that because they had, you know, there's a very long tradition of sort of an actual parliamentary left. And like specifically an anarchist left in Italy, but like the modern, I don't know, it's kind of a shit show. Like in terms of actual party politics, like there was this thing called the five-stars movements, which was like kind of like basically astroturf by a billionaire. It was this like very weird, very like early 2010s party that was like doing the whole sort of like we're going to do direct democracy by like online polls thing. It has this like really weird mishmash.

They're like the main social democratic force. Yeah. Well, it's also sort of, but like they're very weird. Like, I don't know, you'll get things from them like, okay, we want like, like they're not a normal social democratic party, right? They're closer to like the pirate party, but like way weirder. Like, so you'll get people in this party who are like, you know, who were like, you know, sort of like old school, like, like leftist militants because this is where sort of like the energy was going, right? But also like, there's like anti-vaxxers in it. It was this really weird, ideological like sort of mishmash. And then when they sort of got into power, like none of these people have ever been in politics before.

And so like, you know, you'd get someone who was like the head of garbage collection, right? Who's from this party and they have no fucking idea how to collect garbage, right? And it was, it's this real shit show because like, you know, and then you have the Democratic Party, which are basically sort of just like lib hacks at this point. And this meant that like, you know, they eventually sort of aligned with each other to try to keep like other like fascist basically like right wing groups out of power. But they like, they also like had an alliance for a little bit with one of the right wing parties. It's an incredibly like bizarre story and like honestly like deserves like its own episode one day. But yeah, yeah, they're very weird. They're not an effective left thing at all. They're just very, very sort of like mishmash confused populist thing. And it didn't like they, yeah, like they definitely did not sort of like succeed in preventing an alternative, et cetera, et cetera.

It was, I don't know, kind of a disaster. Yeah, Italy's like, it's worth noting as well, I think that like anti fascism is sort of baked into the myth of the Italian Republic, right? Like that's what the Republic rests on. That's where it comes from. That's creation myth. But like, much in the same way as people living in the United States will be familiar with how these creation myths kind of lose all relevancy apart from like some kind of totemic meaning. Like their repetition has some kind of link to that, but they don't really have any value in the contemporary discourse in terms of animating the way people act. I think you could say that that's happened in Italy, right? Like people talk about, people in institutions talk about anti fascism as where they come from and as foundational to Italy's democracy. But it's been so subsumed into structures of power that it that institutional discussion of anti fascism has lost its relevance from like the street fighting like anti fascism that created the Republic.

In the first place, so that concept is kind of defanged along with like Italian liberals have always walked hand in hand with like business interests and the right wing, right? Like from even previous to fascism, like there was a quote unquote liberal monarchy, right? So Italian liberalism isn't necessarily this anti authoritarian force. It was briefly like it got made to be briefly by the organized working class movement, but it hasn't been and it's going back to not being. Yeah, I mean, I think I now think we should may as well get into Milani is actual like views and what she actually believes in this process. Which I mean, what she actually believes in this process may be slightly different things, but we'll at least at least start. So Milani's party, the Brothers of Italy party was formed to quote carry forth the spirit and legacy unquote of the Italian social movement or the MSI. The and the the MSI is the descendant of Mussolini's National Fascist Party.

It's it's like it has a direct lineage. They even have the flame, right? They are still using the same logo. Which is the flame on his tomb, I think that's where it comes from, right? Yeah. Yeah. Great stuff. So Milani has said that quote LGBT lobbies are out there to harm women and and they're and they're attacking the family by destroying gender identity.

She's made statements about George Soros calling him an international speculator. More on more on that in a sec. Yeah. Good. Who says that that Soros finances global mass immigration that threatens a great replacement of white native born Italians. Yeah. Milani shows affinity for other kind of authoritarian strong men like the the the Marine Le Pen, who's the leader of the of the National Rally Party in France. That's a strong woman.

Yes. That's not a man. It's part of the section on strong men like political strong men. She's she's she's previously supported as Joe Rogan taught me Garrison. Strong times make hard men. And also what I've learned from Matt Welch is what is a woman. So yes, yeah, strong man. Milani is previously supported Putin, although she's kind of lowered that enthusiasm since the invasion of Ukraine.

She is she does have a pro Ukraine position on that publicly. But she's expressed kind of affinity for the types of other fascist leaders across Europe that we see in Sweden. We see in Poland. We see in Hungary. She kind of aligned aligned herself with some of some of that kind of trend inside Europe. Milani wants to ban same sex couples from adopting children and possibly dissolve same sex couples legal parentage over the children that they've already adopted. Her party has sought to ban a cartoon featuring a bear with two mothers arguing that kids should not be seeing same sex adoption as natural or normal because it's not. So basic kind of right wing censorship of materials that they don't like.

I don't think children should be allowed to watch cartoons with bears in them. OK, good for you. It is going to reduce their readiness when it becomes time to fight the bears. Milani also wants to ban gay Italians from traveling elsewhere for like surrogacy. So like they can't they can't leave the country to get to get like to have them become parents in return. It's like it's it's it's it's it's this whole whole thing. I'm going to read a quote from Ruth Ben Gait of a professor of history in Italian studies at New York University quote since 2017. She has tweeted repeatedly that Italian identity is being deliberately erased by globalists such as Soros and European Union officials who have conspired to unleash quote uncontrollable mass migration.

So normal normal stuff there. And more on so. So in in a in a speech in a few speeches and repeatedly she refers to financial speculators and has called people like George Soros international speculator. And you know when when she says financial speculators I don't think she actually means just people who speculate about finances. I think she means something slightly different. Michael Benchloss who is kind of history political person who works for NBC MSNBC PBS had a really good thread on on this. And I think it's important like this is this is a mainstream media guy like this is not coming from Antifa one six one on Twitter. This is like coming from like like in terms of like mainstream media actually talking about this quote the new Italian Prime Minister says that quote.

He will never be slaves at the mercy of financial speculators sounds just like 1930s in Italy and Germany. No thanks for the memories. A Mussolini enjoyed publicly referring to Jewish people as financial speculators who needed to be controlled when a fascist leader speaks whether it be in Europe or America. Never brush aside what you are hearing as meaningless rhetoric. Do not fail to learn from the history of the 1930s. History of the 1930s shows us that fascist leaders in the United States have been very eager to link us and pool resources often in secret with fascist leaders in Europe. Monitor carefully and beware and please never take it at face value. When and if fascist leaders in America and Europe tell you that they have no personal or political animus towards Jews or other minority groups in society.

Too many examples in history tells us the opposite unquote. So that is like you know regular MSNBC MBC people being like hey when she says this thing she reads Jews. Should we also talk about like the way parts of like the left on Twitter reacted to this and also the sort of history of like how some people were like oh wow she's calling out the capitalists. I saw a lot of this is like you guys are maybe the people who have ever lived like she immediately like axed the. No she like this is the same thing we see with people like like do again even right. What she's saying she's not saying that you know international capital is bad because it hurts the poor people or workers. She's she's bad about it because it's because it's a threat to traditional identities. It's a threat to the way that you want the idea of the family.

It's the way it's threatening all of these things that are about your like God family country brotherhood shit. It's not about actual poor people working class people at all. That's not that's not what it is. It's it's not a good criticism of capitalist modernity just to just to propose another form of more like authoritarian capitalist modernity. It's it's it's it's not it's not good. The original fascists in Italy did the same thing when they denounced like British pleurocrats. It's it's it's not it's not the it's not a good critique of capitalism. Well we should point out to that like like so Mattel Savini who was like the the former like he basically until this lesson he was like the guy he was in charge of the right wing like he he's the guy who got like arrested basically for trying to sink a migrant boat.

Like so that's actually this guy's he sucks. And but he would do this like more explicitly he would you know like specifically use Marxist terminology to push right wing stuff so he had a speech where he talked about like the reserve army of labor which is this concept of Marxism. That's about like basically what Marx is arguing that like like capitalism inherently produces this like quote unquote like reserve army of labor like industrial army of labor which is like an enormous mass of people who are unemployed. You've been spit out of the labor process and you know OK and like and and and like Marxist like Marxist pro these people which is a very important thing. He's like these people are part of the proletariat but they've been spit out of like the capital wage relation to spit them out and they they. Yeah they're they're they're they're just sort of like regulate like wages and stuff happens but also they're people who just been sort of like disenfranchised etc etc. So when he talks about the reserve army of labor specifically is like there is a reserve army of labor. These people are immigrants to North Africa and like the like the elites are like shipping these people into Italy to like destroy your jobs.

And it is it is again very very important that you understand this is what he like when he's using the Marx term he is using it. He is using it Marx racism and not like yeah Marx anti capitalism. And you need to be able to tell what difference between these two things because yeah like especially in time politics like this is the thing that happens like people people will use even like even literally explicitly stuff that is from Marx but they will use it to be like we need to like machine gun every like boat of small children trying to flee Libya like. It's like cherry yeah cherry picking these these bits of Marxism and then arranging them into a racist as fuck college that you use to justify your bigotry. It's fashion it did that the first time it's doing it again. Then another thing that kind of that is that's notable in case people have not have not seen it. There has been lots of video going around of Milani openly praising Mussolini saying quote. I believe Mussolini was a good politician everything he did he did for Italy and there have been no other politicians like him in the past 50 years that now these interviews all come from the mid 90s.

She has since said that her opinions on Mussolini have changed. She has not said what her opinions have changed to. But this was this was these interviews all come from when she was when she was a young plucky girl getting into the boys Nazi club and leading the youth wing of a fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini's dictatorship. Since since her own modern party the Brothers of Italy which was again started in 2014 emerged from the Fascist National Alliance which grew out of the Italian social movement which was founded by Mussolini regime officials. And she still uses the same logo for her current Mario Louis sorry Brothers of Italy party. So yeah let's have let's have one more ad break and then we'll talk about how mainstream media has been talking about the new girl boss Mussolini. And we are back oh I'm so excited I'm so excited so we're actually going to talk I'm first going to read some stuff from the intercept just not I would not say is actually mainstream media. And it's a little bit outside of that but it sets a good stage for the rest of the stuff that we will be talking about which actually is dealing with how mainstream media has been framing Milanese election.

So quote the media got this right much of the time giving predominant billing to Milanese far right nationalism but numerous English language headlines focused solely on her being Italy's first woman Prime Minister. It's tempting to say that her position as a woman leader should be considered irrelevant given her and her party's vile anti immigrant nationalist racist anti LGBTQ plus policies but ignoring her womanhood misses some crucial points about her political ideology. Being a woman a white woman that is is not in conflict with Milanese fascism white supremacy has always relied on active enforcement by white women especially when it comes to upholding racist Poe nationalist narratives. So yeah, I think that's that's that's a good stage for kind of how every other headline and article we're going to talk about here. Let's start with the Guardian the Guardian ran a piece saying quote the election of Italy's fascist adjacent Georgia Milani is a public reminder that women can be just as awful as men. That's a good headline and this was the Guardian US the Guardian UK this was a garden UK. That's a good position to Australia's Sky News headline Georgia Milani is not a fascist. NPR is morning edition went with quote a far right group with neo fascist roots wins big in Italy's election.

Morning's host said Milani rejects the label of fascism while embracing its symbols just its symbols just it's symbols. They were specifically talking about like the actual like iconography that they directly lift like this like the slogans like Brotherhood God country type things and like like the logo and it was a part of a larger thing around around fascism. We'll actually get bit more into that on our Tucker Carlson's section. Oh good. The Washington Post had lined quote the mainstreaming of the West's far right is complete and then opened that article with saying in the land that invented fascism the far right is back in power. Milani has a lengthy record of extremist rhetoric has embraced the white supremacist narrative of the great replacement theory and has engaged in frequent dog whistling to a radical base. The Atlantic had a good piece titled the return of fascism in Italy, saying the brothers of Italy which Milani has led since 2014 has underlying and sinister familiarity. The party formed a decade ago to carry on the spirit and legacy of the extreme right in Italy, which dates back to the Italian social movement. The party that formed in place of the National Fascist Party, which was banned after World War Two. Now just weeks before the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome, the October 1922 event that put Mussolini in power. Italy may have a former Italian social movement activist for its prime minister and a government rooted in fascism.

So that's like overall there was a lot of really good like most of the extremely referenced or viral kind of articles on this had decent headlines and decent content actually emphasizing the fascist nature. Now it's funny because the Atlantic had this return of fascism in Italy one, but the Atlantic also ran an op-ed piece titled Milani's election win is not a vote for fascism, which later changed its title to Italians didn't exactly vote for fascism, which to its credit still discusses Milani's links to fascism, but it questioned how much power she actually will have to enact said fascism. But so there was there was some like both sides in going on on some a lot of these news outlets they'll put one up, they'll put one piece out that's actually very good about centering the fascist rhetoric, another one being like, Hey, she may be a fascist, but it's not like she could do much. And she's a woman. I think this is kind of like, I think I think this is kind of a post J6 thing. Like, I think if this had happened in like 2017 or 2018, I don't think the media would have been like as willing to just do this. Absolutely. That is that is undoubtedly true. I think I think they kind of like like liberals in general kind of were shaken out of their complacency when they're sort of like beautiful symbols were under like finally actually came under attack and not just like us.

Routers ran a confusing headline titled Nationalist Milani sets to smash Italy's glass ceiling and become premier, which is really just sounds super weird. Nationalist Milani smashes glass ceiling. It's just like, it's like, yeah, I guess the coffee has never been that strong a suit. It's what that was one of the weirder headlines because it still has nationalist in it, but it has the whole glass ceiling bit, which is just like, why? There was another Guardian UK piece that had the headline, Italy's Georgia Milani is no Mussolini, but she may be a Trump, which is an interesting article. It has some a lot of it's actually pretty reasonable and emphasizes her more recent comments trying to align herself more with the modern US Republican Party, rather than any kind of form of 1930s style fascism, quote, hawkish on foreign policies, orthodox on economic policies, nostalgic nationalist and inimical to civil liberties. This right wing politics is illiberal at heart, but it would aim for respectability in what used to be called the establishment, including by not undermining the rule of law in the way that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done, unquote. So there is some things that are worth thinking about in terms of how she has a lot in the past year, tried to align herself more with the modern Republican Party in the States, which still is as we discussed in the show a lot is kind of getting more flashy.

I would say so. I don't know if you're going to talk about this, but it has been very funny. She managed to sort of like lose like the like really hard line, like American right wingers because she did some sort of like pro-natoe things. I don't even think Sir Novich even believes that because I don't I don't I've seen much more people be very enthusiastic about her than people being critical of her who are on like the fascist right in the States. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like there's definitely was especially like there was a whole thing about her being like member of the Aspen Institute that I think was happening for like, I don't know. Maybe maybe there's just a thing like right after she got like elected. I don't know. I mean, yeah, on kind of on this note of her trying to align more with like modern United States conservatism. In one of their newsletters, Politico included that Milani has appeared at CPAC this past year on the National Prayer Breakfast and and did did join the Aspen Institute in 2020. But she and Steve Bannon were film strategizing together as far back as 2018. And Bannon said of her back then quote, you put a reasonable face on right wing populism, you will get elected.

So her and Bannon have been strategizing for years. She's at CPAC this past year. She gave a speech there that Tucker was very enthusiastic about in his segment about her. That Politico newsletter that included the bits about Bannon and CPAC also had I think this line, which sums up some of my thoughts on this quote. You've already read in dozens of headlines that Milani will be Italy's most far right leader since Mussolini, but don't fall for the trap of reducing this far right fire brand to simple labels like the Italian Donald Trump or Victor Orban or Marine Le Pen. Global takeaway, right wing populism is getting smarter. It could have died off with Trump's election loss or Boris Johnson's humiliating ejection from Downing Street, but that isn't happening. So I have a few more of a few more things here which will lead into kind of how the right has been talking about this. There was a CNN there was a CNN article on the victory that had lined the conditions are perfect for a populist resurgence in Europe, which also referenced the anti immigration Sweden Democrats who are expected to play a major role in the new government after winning the second largest share of seats in the general election last month. The party has been now mainstreamed and initially had its roots in very strict neo Nazism. Overall, I was less happy with some of the New York Times headlines relating to Milani's election.

There was there was the cheeky headline. Georgia Milani is extreme but she's no tyrant, which is of again a weird way to frame a headline. But even that piece still opens with this line saying quote, it happened here again nearly 100 years since the March on Rome, Italy on Sunday voted in a right wing coalition headed by a party directly descended from Mussolini's fascist regime. Mrs Milani is the first post fascist leader to win a national election in Italy after World War Two. And her party is the heir to the Italian social movement, the reincarnation of the long dissolved and constitutionally banned fascist party. So weird headline. Still, it includes stuff in the article, but in the age of social media and honestly on news media headlines are way more important, unfortunately. And there was an actual New York Times article, not just not just opinion piece had the headline Milani wins voting in Italy and breakthrough for Europe's hard right. Another Times piece read Europe looks at Italy's Milani with caution and trepidation. Milani posed to be the country's first far right leader since Mussolini. So still, not the worst, not the best from the New York Times, which I mean, no, no shocker is there.

Now on to kind of the right. So the right had a really big mix of reactions based on how the left was talking and liberals are talking about this. There was a lot of enthusiasm coming from the right. A lot of people on the right questioning the fascist framing being like, I can't believe Megan. I mean, we can talk about the Megan McCain tweet. Everyone wants a woman in power until it's a conservative woman in power. This one Breitbart reporter said, quote, calling her Mussolini just because she's Italian is racist. This is one of the best tweets about this. Laverne Spicer said, so everyone calls Milani a fascist. Can anyone offer proof of that? Most people just replied with videos of her praising Mussolini. Lauren Bobbert had the extremely, extremely bad tweet this month. Sweden voted for a right wing government. Now Italy voted for a strong right wing government. The entire world is beginning to understand that the woke left does nothing but destroy November 8. November 8 is coming and the USA will fix our house and Senate. Let freedom rain.

Great, great. Just shouting at cloud. But it is actually super messed up to be praising Sweden's new right wing government because they're pretty, pretty bad. The Wall Street Journal had the great headline, Milani is no fascist, but can she revive Italy's economy? Yeah, that is perfect. Italy is. Classic. I'm very excited in about eight months when the Italian economy makes the British economy look fucking great when the Wall Street Journal posts their turnaround.

Can some other random person save Italy? That's not saying. Yeah, like somebody further to the right and they'll just continue to be like, well, maybe it's good for the economy. The economy I have running in my Super Mario RPG game is better than the current UK economy. So again, it's not saying much. A Fox News headline in the lead up to the election read, Italy on track to elect first right wing Prime Minister since World War Two. First female to hold office. I really, I really do. This is one thing I really need to get people on. Like, is fucking Sylvia Bearless Goni a joke to you?

Like, the answer should be yes, but also like, come on, man. Like, I was a power forever. A few days later, another Fox headline read, Milani's Italian election win renews spotlight on Europe's continued migrant woes. Great, great, great headline there. That's definitely what we should be focusing on. And so now on to a friend of the pod, Tucker Carlson. So on September 26, Tucker Carlson ran a 15 minute segment titled, We Live in a Fake Democracy and there will be a revolution like Italy. So the segment was on the election of Milani and how she's daring to address the issues that voters really care about, but aren't allowed to talk about.

Like the attacks on the family, immigration, the unpopular climate change policies that are ruining the economy. Aren't allowed to talk about. What, Berlusconi has literally been saying whatever the fuck comes into his brain for like 30 years at this point. That was a big thing of the Tucker segment was that voters have all these issues they care about, but they're not allowed to talk about it. It's actually illegal in some places to talk about this. That's an actual quote from what he said. And obviously, Tucker obfuscated her links to Mussolini style fascism while still praising the fascist rhetoric that Milani espouses. Here is a clip from the segment.

She's not the first person to say this. People have said it before, but she's just been rewarded for saying it. That's the point. The population likes it. This is what they actually want. They're not that worried about global warming. They don't want open borders. They think the woke stuff is absurd.

They want to see what they think. And now it's obvious because she just won. And so even in this country, the people running and benefiting from a deeply corrupt and doomed system are hysterical. Watch the reaction to that. I want to start today by talking about a politician on the right who we should all be worried about, who's on the rise today. A politician who has brushed off accusations of fascism. What separates us from, let's say, Italy, who elected a fascist? She is from fascist roots.

A far-right political party whose roots go back to post-World War II neo-fascist. A party that has its roots in Italian fascism. It's roots in Italian fascism. Define that for us if you would, Joe Scarborough. Oh, sorry. You're an idiot. You can't. But the point is fascist means unacceptable. Whatever this chick is saying, you're not allowed to agree with. They're very worried that that many Italians do agree with it.

So she has to be completely unacceptable. Don't read further. She's a fascist. So yeah, that sucks. That's not great. I don't need to waste any more time talking about Tucker's segment because it's typical Tucker Carlson stuff. Pretty fascistic, pretty awful. He's going to start chanting Nuremberg at the end of every time he comes up that episode. Anyway, so yeah, kind of the reaction was as one might expect. American right wing operatives have celebrated her rise to power.

For example, Keith Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, drew on some of the familiar kind of language in terms of... I'll just say this. This is what he said about her victory on Twitter. This can be a trend. Conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as to what it is. Us versus them. Us versus globalist elites who've shown they hate us. So familiar dog whistles and shit. But to kind of close this up, I'm actually going to do...

I'm going to do a Guy Debord quote. One of our favorite philosophers on the show. Can we put a little French on it? Can we have Guy Debord? Guy Debord quote? Yeah. So he wrote the Situations Philosopher wrote this in 1968. It literally sums up the social contradictions of the entire world.

As such, it is a laboratory for international counter-revolution. Hell yeah. So hilariously, they held out longer than the French did. Well, what he's trying to say there is that it's a way to try out social change and try out the suppression of progressive social change. It's like a model for the rest of Europe. It's this own miniature model that you can try out things and see how they'll react on a ground or European political scale.

In the vein of that, I'm actually going to do a quote from one of the Washington Post articles about... One of the better articles about Milani to kind of finish up the types of stuff that I wanted to talk about. So if there's been one dominant story in Western politics over the past decade, it's that the far right is no longer beyond the pale. Indeed, it has taken over the right-wing mainstream in many countries, including and arguably most significantly the United States.

In France, the far right has long been the leading force of the opposition. In Spain, it's also gained ground. In Sweden, a party originally founded by neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists will now be the second largest faction in parliament. In Hungary and Poland, the far right is already in power. So just in terms of this overall trend of how people are trying to mainstream far right things and how they're getting more normalized across Europe, in the United States here, and the types of aesthetics that they're using to gain such ground.

Because the Italian voters were not convinced by the left's attempts to paint Milani as a reincarnation of Mussolini. The way that she wrapped her fascism in contemporary US-style conservatism was convincing. And the left did not offer any viable alternatives to fix the problems that the country is facing. So she got 26% of the vote, which was enough to get a majority. So yeah, that's most of the stuff I have on the girl boss Mussolini. Any other comments on how the right's been talking about this, how the liberals have been talking about this, how media has anything at all before we close up?

No, I wish her the best of getting strung up in the street. It is very funny to turn pictures of her upside down. People will tell you it's not funny, it is funny. The 2020s seem to be turning into the 1920s, but like tragedy is farce version of it. But this means we can do it funnier. We can do it funnier. We can all go to Italy wearing Mario costumes. That's right, we can do it funnier. It's always possible to be more funny.

That's what we strive for. So yeah, I'm still laughing about the Brothers of Italy thing. That's pretty funny. Anyway, go have fun fighting anthropomorphic lizards who steal the princess and hang her in a cage and go race around the Mushroom Kingdom on your way to save her with your brother. That is how I spend most of my free time. Yeah, in the Mushroom Kingdom. In the Mushroom Kingdom.

Jumping on lizards, yeah. Yeah, let's go. Let's go. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how everything is falling apart. And today we are talking about how the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is continuing to fall apart. Can I say, great job, nailed it. Thank you, buddy. Out of the park.

You absolutely just stunning work introducing this podcast. Yeah, I've bought the level of commitment that British people have bought to governing half of the world for centuries. I have my coffee cup that says fuck it and that's where we're at with this one. That's exactly what we wanted from you. Yeah, I'm incredibly sad about the plight of my home country and continue to be so. But I'm going to explain the reason for my sadness to Garrison and Chris and Robert today. Hell yeah. One of the reasons for my sadness.

Okay, so what I want to talk about today is Elizabeth Truss. Liz Truss, I want to talk about the British cost of living crisis. And I think more broadly, I want to talk about like how we consent to be governed by people who do not give a single fuck about our well-being. Well, now James, that's an experience that only the British have. That's correct. Yeah, it's not to be not something that much of the colonial periphery experience for centuries. We fought the monarchy away. Now we're free.

Beat the monarchy, Garrison. That's a bold wee Garrison from a Canadian. Yeah, that's right. Your people tried to stop it. All we did was invade you a couple of times. Don't think you can sneak in there and then the ambiguity of accents. My US passport is on the way. On the way.

On the way. Yeah. So was the Queen of England's. Yep. Liz Truss is going to take that away. King Charles is going to make it no loud. I do have to get a new Canadian passport with the King on it now, which sucks. That was the most I guess we all learned a lot because it's been so long since you had

a change of monarchy. But the fact that everyone has to stop using the money and everyone has to get new passports is fucking absurd. This is the worst political system I've ever heard of. Just wait because it's going to get even more. Okay, Chris, you live in Chicago. Yeah. Here's the thing.

Here's the thing. Right in Chicago. Right. Everyone, everyone, like two in the core of their being. They know that the people who rule them are robbing them. Everyone in Britain actually genuinely like wants to be like this. No, no one in Chicago wants any of the people in Chicago who rule us to be ruling us. Right.

Everyone in Britain is like, they want to have to throw all their money away because some fucking 90 year old in a hat died. It's an incomprehensible level of just... Outstanding. Yeah. It's a marvelous country. There's nothing wrong with it. It will continue to be marvelous.

The lowest 10% of income people in Britain now enjoy a quality of life which is substantially lower than that same income bracket in Slovenia, which... Yeah, the economic powerhouse of Slovenia. Yeah. I just want to say we do not deserve a better quality of living than the people of Slovenia. No, because Slovenia actually fucking rules. Yeah, it does. Great place.

Yeah. It's a really nice place. It takes about two hours to cross, but it's a great country. Yeah. Right. You can ride your bike across it, but that's great. That's what you want to do. What's happening here is that Maoist-Liz Truss is very slowly returning all the grits to the

countryside. Yeah, she's... There you go. She's doing a cultural revolution. Let's talk about Maoist-Liz Truss. Her parents were actually a long way to her left. There was a thing a little while ago where her dad refused to campaign for her when she ran for a seat as a conservative, which is based.

They have critical support for Liz Truss's dad. Her mom also ran as a Lib Dem, which is not exactly... They're Liberal Democrats, so not exactly the party that are going to liberate the working class through a glorious revolution, but it's still pretty funny to have your mom running for a different party than you and objectively amusing. She was born in Oxford. Her parents are her mother's a teacher. Her dad is an academic.

I think it leads her dad. So he's a mathematician. Which is... Oh, what a nerd. Goddammit. No, her dad is not the nerd here. Her dad is the best Truss, as far as I can tell. It's Liz who we're worried about.

She described her parents as being to the left of Labour, which is not hard. Labour just exists to kind of... These days, really, to have the pretence of opposition. They've deliberately purged the left from Labour after 2019, and they exist for Kier Stammer to say, I broadly support this terrible neoliberal policy, but... And then say something completely ineffectual. I'm sure he will be Prime Minister soon, and nothing will change. Nothing that Liz Truss has done and is doing will be walked back, because Britain doesn't

have an effective left opposition in Parliament. It does in society and in the streets, and we'll see there are lots of movements. Our Parliament is a farce and continues to be a farce, and it's lots of dudes who went to the same educational institutions making this funny kind of noise. There are more diverse people in Parliament, but I'm sure people have seen videos of the British Parliament, right? And everyone was like... when someone missed the point. Yeah, it sounds just like that.

Yeah, that was a sound bite. Thanks, Daniel. Americans who don't understand entirely how British educational culture works. The fancy schools that they go to, they're like Hogwarts if you replaced the magic with kids beating each other in the shower. And yeah. Yeah, with repressed sexuality and violence bullying and being picked on because you're the poorest kid in a school for literature.

So actually, it is a lot like Harry Potter. It is a lot like Harry Potter. It's actually quite a bit like Harry Potter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are still turfs. It's very disappointing. So talking of educational institutions, Truss went to Oxford, right? She went to Merton.

I went to Oxford too. I didn't go to Merton. Let's see. Better off college. I went to a college which is renowned for being poor for what that's worth within Oxford colleges, which are all full of rich people doing rich people stuff. She read PPE, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, which I don't think you can really do as a degree in the US, right?

No. What is that? Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Yeah. Yeah. It's called PPE. Three made up things. Well, what are you saying?

Other degrees on the other hand are real and tangible and exist in the physical space where you can touch them. Everyone knows that. Yeah. It's true. Apart from PPE. It is. I went to Oxford too.

I took Modern History and Politics, which is way cooler and better in every way. But the PPE kids, so that people understand, a vast number of British prime ministers have taken PPE as their undergraduate degree. It's like the kingmaker of degrees. And you take it because you're an insufferable fucking dork who wants to be prime minister or work for the British government in some way, right? It is this kingmaker of degrees. Who wouldn't want to be prime minister?

It looks like such a good job. Yeah. They last a long time. They have universally great approval ratings. And to be fair, they do just go on to grift a shit ton of money. It's not. And they don't have to do it for a fixed period of time like American presidents do. So that's nice.

They can just have a bunch of parties for their friends in the lockdown and then leave, which is more or less what Boris Johnson did. And I don't expect Liz to be prime minister for long, but it's what she's doing and what she has already sort of done that I think is of interest here. I tell you, she was also president before we get off her university time at the Oxford University Liberal Democrats. So yeah, yeah, great stuff. So like she's gradually drifted to the right, which, you know, what do we, she's grifted

to the right. You know, the Lib Dems were a little bit more left then, but labor was very neoliberal in the nineties, right? When she was in, when she was in Parliament, sometimes the Lib Dems provided something of a left opposition. If you remember like Tony Blair and you labor, it was just kind of bold, neoliberal, like shameless neoliberalism, right? Now, Tony Blair is the one who was pillied by Hugh Grant, right?

Is he the one? Is he the inspiration for love? Actually, I was assuming because Tony Blair was the only British politician I could name as a child. Okay. So he must have been right. Because Tony Blair is completely devoid of charisma. And the one thing that Hugh Grant character has is charisma.

So maybe, maybe he does kind of, I mean, they're all white men. They are all, they are all white men. That is a very white movie. He looks like him, but then that's not exactly a remarkable thing is it in this sort of homogenous British ruling class that we have. So Truss has gone through like being Secretary of State for Justice, through being Lord Chancellor, through being Foreign Secretary. God, okay.

So Chancellor is a pretty cool sounding title. I got to give it to him. That's like Star Wars shit. Wait, do they have a Shadow Lord Chancellor too? Yes. The thing that your people do is they pick the terms to make it all sound cool. Whenever one of your parliamentary coalitions collapse, they're like, the government has fallen.

It just makes it all sound like it's so much cooler than it is. It does lend an air of Shakespeare and Epic where it's, what it is, is these 17 people who all went to the same schools and read the same telegraph newspaper columnists have disagreed with each other over a minor point and will shortly be reconstituting their alliance in a slightly different way. Yeah, but it sounds like people are fighting each other with machetes at the center of London. Yeah.

It has a Game of Thrones beheading vibe, which, maybe that's where this is heading. Who knows. She, I think if people had heard of Liv's trust until she became Prime Minister, it was probably from her really wonderful pork market speech, which if you haven't watched the pork market speech is a study in where you should and shouldn't pause for applause. Robert, have you seen this pork markets? No. No, I don't.

What is a fucking pork market? Oh, it's so funny. In December, I'll be in Beijing opening up new pork markets. What the fuck is this shit? She's not a real person. It's reminiscent of when you take a fish out of water and it moves its lips, but makes no coherent noise. It's like an alien trying to pretend to be human.

Yeah. It's wrong. It's just a great leader of our people. It's like the uncanny valley of politicians. It is uncanny valley. It is uncanny valley. Yeah, it is uncanny valley. It's crafty and it's unsettlingness.

What's happening here, what we're seeing is this is the final result of affirmative action for white people. Yes, we're going to get into that. This is why she has this job. She benefited from affirmative action for white people. Other examples of this include destiny. Yeah, you get the same kind of person every single time. Same, same, destiny and the Prime Minister of the UK.

She becomes Prime Minister and it's worth noting that the way you become Prime Minister in the UK is different to the way you become President in the US. You are the leader of the majority party in Parliament or of the coalition that controls the majority of the votes in Parliament. She becomes Prime Minister not through a vote of the people, but through a vote of the members of the Conservative Party. You can understand as people whose dogs have girls' names and whose daughters have dogs' names.

I think that's a trash future bit. I don't know where it came from, but it explains them perfectly. These people got together and she ran against Rishi Sunak, who is eminently more capable of doing the flashy neoliberal shit that they want to do, as are many other people of colour within their party. But above all things, they are racist. Above even doing this kind of speedrun extraction from the British economy, they are still racist. They're fine with having people of colour in positions in the hierarchy.

That's something that Britain established through hundreds of years of empire. But the idea of having someone in a leadership position is fundamentally anathema to the Conservative Party. Instead, they picked Liz Truss to just flap her lips around and talk about pork markets. That's how we get Liz Truss as Prime Minister. No one per se votes for Liz Truss, no one even per se votes for the Liz Truss agenda that we're seeing now, right? And I think that's really important.

In her acceptance speech, she talked to Boris Johnson. She said, you're admired from Keev to Carlisle. What? Yeah, she said, yeah, okay, first of all, bizarre, absolutely fun. The one thing I know about Boris Johnson is that he looks like Donald Trump if Trump didn't have his shit quite so together. Yes, yeah. He looks like Donald Trump, whose mum didn't tell him to comb his hair, tuck his shirt in

before he went to school. Yeah, if Donald Trump couldn't have paid a half people like check in before he walks out the door, that's how he would look. Yeah, yes, exactly. If he fell over in a wind tunnel, he would look like Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson, a guy so fucking rich he's never had to comb his hair. Stop being Prime Minister because of these scandals, right? These sleaze scandals about them having parties during lockdown, more or less, that was what

destroyed him. Not any of his terrible policies, his bigoted bullshit. I'm writing Op-Ed saying that the problem with us was not that we were in charge of Africa, but that we're not anymore, it was what God, yeah. This is a type of guy who exists and can become Prime Minister. People don't understand, I think, the British right is very different from the American right. And I think we're going to get into that.

Also, a guy who famously just pulverized a small child on a trip to Japan playing rugby. You don't need to say the things that he did that are rad. He did finally discover the actual third real of British politics, which is that if you have fun in a way that someone else can't have fun, they will destroy you. Yes. The mere act of a British person seeing another person having any joy whatsoever, a switch flips in their brain and they just turn into Brits, but worse. This is like, there are basically two ways a British political party can be, right?

One is that they enjoy themselves while they're plundering the institution to still remain in the United Kingdom. And the other one is that they are, like, monastically abstinious while they're doing it, right? And Labour tend to be the abstinious ones, and the Tories tend to be the ones who drink the pour and have the lockdown parties and have literal karaoke events when they're asking people not to go to their grandparents' funerals. And Labour tend to be the ones who ring their hands and go, oh, no.

And then fundamentally do the same shit, right? That is a difference. Chris is entirely correct. That is the thing that irritates British people most, right? And maybe we'll just talk about this right now. It's increasingly, like, it's not the material conditions that bring down British governments, because material conditions are getting worse and have been getting worse since we started this austerity stuff in 2010.

This is stupid scandals, right, these personal scandals, which normally involve them having too much fun when they're supposed to be pretending to be serious while they steal all the things that still remain in Britain. I want to talk about it a little later. So, yeah, she said Boris Johnson was admired from Keef to Carlisle. He's not. That's why he's not Prime Minister anymore. Everyone fucking hates him.

And also, I don't think she's been to Carlisle, because I got a family who lived there. Not everyone loves Boris Johnson there, and I'm sure not in Keef either. But so, the UK has been having this cost of living crisis since the economy reopened in 2021, right, since the end of lockdown. What this cost of living crisis is, what a cost of living crisis is generally, is that the goods that you need to buy to exist are rising more quickly than the wages you get paid for working. Now, some of these causes are global, right?

We have this inflation issue in the US, too, but the UK has compounded this by leaving the European Union, that creating massive labour shortages and these repeated bumps in the energy price cap, right? Which is the limit that an average family should pay for their energy consumption. It's not a hard stop. It's not a limit on how much you definitely will pay, but it's a limit on how much the average family should pay, right? So, trust comes to power in the context of skyrocketing energy rates for British consumers.

Gas is used for heating most homes in the UK, and it's increased 926% in price before the coronavirus times. Despite the fact that most British people don't pay spot prices for gas, they don't pay the going market rate for gas. There's a serious crisis in affordability. Now, it was looking like the gas bills were going to go up into the average gas bill for the average British person was going to go up more than it now is because trust has announced some capping of spot rates.

We're going to get into why that isn't as great as it sounds. The big issue here is that Britain doesn't have a nationalised provider, right? It's privatised, it's energy-grade, it's privatised, it's energy generation. It ends up with this bizarre situation where one of the people you can buy energy off and often you don't have a choice, right, depending on where you are, is the French national energy company. That makes sense. Sure.

It makes perfect sense, right? It's great. One of the notable consequences of this is that gas prices have gone up, France caps, the prices that consumers can pay, Britain allows them to charge a lot more. So, British people, at this, as a rule, one thing that Britain would dislike. They're telling me that France finally won that long war. Yes. I'm saying that we have been owned by the French, and if that doesn't bring down the

Conservative government, I don't know what will, because there's one thing British people dislike, it's French people, and so, yeah, Britain is now subsidising energy rates for French consumers, which is great, having just left the European Union because we are incredibly xenophobic as a nation, as it turns out. People may have seen this UK TV show called This Morning, where they did a Wheel of Fortune type thing, where you could win a thousand pound, or they, or they will pay your energy bills. Yeah, but for like three or four months, right?

Four months, four months of energy bills, and the bloke that they're doing it in, it's just like, it's this sigh of relief when he gets energy bills, right, and he's like, oh, massive, like I'm going to have my energy bills pay for four months, it's such a relief. And this guy is one of four million people in the UK who uses what's called a pre-payment meter, which I'm reliably informed that Americans don't have. So do you, do you all, are you familiar with the concept of pre-payment meters? Uh, no. Okay.

So maybe people are familiar with like pay-as-you-go phones, right, where you go to the shop and you buy the credit. Yes. Yeah, if you're like selling drugs, or you're engaged in anti-government extremism, yeah, you want, you want a phone like that, sure. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Or if you're doing journalism, you might want one for legitimate journalism reasons. Same as one of the others. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yes, true. Yeah. Here at Coolzone Media, you know, you know, you know who won't use a pre-paid cell phone to sell you drugs?

Because they're not, wait, yeah, they would. You think so? I think they just got enough money. They, they would just use a regular phone bill and have a lawyer just do it. No, I think, I think they're deep into boost mobile. Okay, the only thing keeping John Laugh, they're fucking back. Okay, so you know who has to go to Walmart to buy more credit to their phone so they can sell you some weed?

It's the advertisers who support this show. Okay, we're back. And we are talking about pre-paid energy meters, a scintillating topic. So the pre-paid energy meter, you have to go out, you have to pay for your energy. So if your rates go, the reason for these overwhelmingly is that like there's a agreement by which most energy suppliers won't just cut you off in the UK, like if you have old people in your house, you have children in your house, like they have to do this. The appearance of caring is this thing that we're going to see is really important in

lots of these policies, right? So they can't cut you off, but if they have, if you have a meter and you can't pre-pay for the electricity, then you're de facto cut off, right? And the best statistics I could find about this was in 2017 where roughly 140,000 households, 16% of those that had pre-payment meters, self-disconnected, self-disconnected, the euphemism for they couldn't pay, right? For gas or electricity in 2017, they couldn't afford to add credit to their meter, right? And they didn't have the credit, so they couldn't get the electricity.

So they end up disconnecting. And if you add to this that the British houses are made out of cheese, like our houses are very poorly insulated for the most part, right? They're often single brick. So it's expensive to heat them and they get cold in the winter and they get hot in the summer. We don't, we have like houses that are designed to deal with the extremes in temperature, which we are now experiencing because we have ruined the climate.

So people are spending more and more, using more and more electricity and gas to heat their homes. It's costing more and more and increasingly they can't afford to pay it, right? And this will lead to people dying. So if we look at like what the average pensioner in the UK, right? I looked up some statistics of the Office of National Statistics here. The average pensioner in the UK has on a fixed income, it's making 17,000 pounds a year. Nice.

Which is, I guess I'm guessing. 17,000 pounds of what though? Oh, they're gold, Robert. Gold. You take your pounds to the Bank of England and they give you gold in return. Not anymore. Actually, interestingly, if we go on a side note for a minute, one of the ways Britain achieved greater democratization when the middle class were excluded, but landowners

were included, was that the middle class had cash money and the landowners had wealth in the form of property, right? So the middle class threatened to tank the entire Bank of England by taking all their pound notes and asking to have them converted to the gold that they were supposedly pegged to and there was not enough gold to actually do that for the entire money supply so they could have tanked the Bank of England. So yeah, bit of 1868 reform act history. They're no longer, they're decoupled now from that, so you can't do that, sadly.

But 17,000 pound is not a lot of money, right? Trust has just announced that the energy bill for an average family is going to be capped at 2,500 pound a year, which is a decent chunk of your income, right, if you're making 17,000. Before that, the previous plan limit had been 3,549 pounds for an average family based on average consumption, which is a very significant chunk of your 17,000 pound a year, right, especially if you're renting on top of that, right, the cost of housing, the cost of rental housing has gone up in the UK. This is a rise, again, the cap had already been risen in April, right?

It's not a price cap, right? This doesn't mean that you, as a family, are guaranteed that you will not pay more than this 2,500 pound number. What is it's a unit cost limit? So not all families are typical, not all homes are typical, but the cost is, for those who are interested, 10 pence per kilowatt hour for gas, 34 pence per kilowatt hour for electricity. So what this means is that we've capped a little bit of the cost, and in response, and this is pretty typical of what the Conservatives do, right, they'll do this thing where they

give the appearance of caring, and then at the same time, they bundle it in with a bunch of incredibly, the best way to understand these people is that they view the free market as a religion, and they believe that the only way out of anything is to cut taxes, whether they actually believe that because they think it will genuinely make the situation better or they're just trying to get as much as they can for them and theirs, I think I'm leaning towards the second one, right? So she bundles this with the UK is going to lift its ban on fracking, right? The UK ban fracking in 2019 after a series of earth tremors near Blackpool, which there's

a lot of cursed things about Britain, but until recently, we hadn't added earthquakes to that list. So thank you, Liz. It's very funny. Warwick Business School published a study in 2020 in Portugal. It is widely recognized that the open and liberal nature of the UK's gas market means that the market price, the national balancing point, is unlikely to be influenced by shale gas development.

So shale gas is fracking in the UK. So the UK is going to start fracking, which is great. She also proposed removing the top tier of income tax, which is reducing the amount of tax paid by people who earn more than £150,000 a year. Right now, they pay 45% tax above that. This announcement caused a pound to fall to a historic low against the dollar and for trust to find herself in open beef with the woke scolds at the IMF. So the IMF said, new economic measures laid out by the UK government will likely increase

inequality. And they added that the IMF does not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture. So she also, during this, she promised that she was going to cancel a planned rise on corporate tax and scrap a proposed cap on bankers' bonuses. This has been one of her big policy things, along with Simon Clarke, who declared a new age of austerity at the time they announced this, right? But there's this constant, like everything Britain does is only one way in which conservative

governments can move, and that is taxing the other people who went to the same schools and universities as them, less. So I kind of want to take a step back here and talk about the ideology that underpins a lot of what trust is doing. And it's that she and Chancellor Dix, Jack O'Quassie-Quarteng and Preeti Patel and Dominic Robb, who are all in her cabinet, I think, are part of this free enterprise group within the Conservative Party, and much like you have caucuses in the American Senate. In Britain, we have these groups, and they wrote this book called Britannia Unchained,

which I don't know if people are probably not familiar with, right? I've heard of it, but I know very little about it. Yeah, it's just like a series of short essays, just like doing a Milton Friedman, like an unreconstructed free market fundamentalism. It's very different to what the, because the American right likes to talk about markets and libertarianism and stuff, right? But in general, their entire politics is just kind of owning the lips, right, like these sociocultural grievances, and then when they get in power, their spending is largely just

about, one might argue, staying in power, right? Whereas the Conservatives in Britain are genuinely committed to slashing government, including slashing services, including slashing any kind of social safety net, right? It does have these amusing consequences sometimes, like Britain continually cuts the number of police it has, which is great. Yeah, it's genuinely really funny. Yeah, it's very funny. It's very funny that like our most right-wing party, I'm going to guess not our most right-wing

party if you've got some proper nutters, but we've defunded the police just by not wanting to spend money on them. It is also, okay, by funny, I'd be incredibly depressing that like Corbin was running on adding more cops, which is like the most cursed, like the British left like always, they always find a way to destroy themselves, that they've been doing this for like 200 years, it's really impressive stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's incredibly, it's incredibly depressing to watch like, yeah, the British left just tear itself to pieces, not that the American left doesn't tear itself to

pieces, right? It seems to be a thing on the left, but yeah, when the British left had a serious run, making a serious difference in 2019, instead, we decided to just absolutely like tear each other to shreds, and here we are, right? Here we are with the number of children in poverty going up by 600,000 since 2012, with the number of, from 2019 to 2012, the number of children who rely on food banks for their food security has tripled by the end of this year, the National Health Service, National Health Curve, which is our Nationalized Socialized Medicine System, right?

The budget will have been cut by 24% compared to 2016, that's despite the fact that we just went through a pandemic. The poorer socioeconomic groups in the UK are experiencing a fall in life expectancy. For the first, like we, we have life expectancy has pretty much continually trucked up since the Industrial Revolution, but we're now finally slashing that down again. Well, I wonder, I wonder why. Yeah. There's no way of explaining it, it's just happening.

The only solution is a free market, a free market. A freer market, yeah, to pump more things into the air, yes. Yeah. Meanwhile, here I'm going to take a puff from my inhaler because my lungs are dying. Yeah. Well, that's because- Yeah, the pollen is outrageous right now. You're not getting fracked hard enough in the Pacific Northwest.

Yeah, more fracking will fix the pollution and air quality. The fact that people are literally dying younger than their parents did. The Tories don't, they have these, what's very important to them is the performance of patrician care, right? We saw this with Theresa May's burning injustices, which of course remain burning injustices because you don't do anything about them. Boris Johnson's leveling up agenda of people familiar with his like- Oh my God.

I can't believe you have a minister, you have a shadow minister of leveling up. Yes, we do. I just, like, at what point do you just go, none of this is real? And like, if they start sending cops, you just keep beating them up until everyone else is forced to concede that they're like, no, there is not in fact a shadow minister of leveling up. Yeah. I don't know.

That is the big question that I want to ask is at what point do we realize that there is not a shadow minister of leveling up and that we don't have to open new pork markets and that maybe that isn't the solution to us dying younger than our parents and that we don't have to do what these people say when they are just very blatantly like trusses very obviously doing, like an extractive speed run on the British economy, right? They, I tell you what, you know who else will do an expected street run on the British economy. Is it the products and services that's allowed to show?

It is, sadly. Yeah. All right, we're talking about extractive speed runs, we're back. So with Johnson and even with Theresa May, right, who is the prime minister before him, there was this important performance of caring, right, being like, oh, we're going to make life better for the poorer socio-economic groups, the poorer people in the UK. I think what's changed is that like the nature of consent from the governed is this thing that maybe we need to elucidate more, right, like in Britain, there was this kind of consensus

that like the governing party will pretend to care and will pretend to do things and sometimes they would let you have nice things, right, little treats and trinkets and in return you would largely not kick them out, right, like either physically or electorally, although it's very hard to kick them out electorally because of Britain's ass backwards, electoral system, which is another relic of a previous era. Now they don't seem to be bothering to pretend to care, right, like when you're looking at a system in which like when trust came to power, old people were going to die, we were looking at a system in which people are dying younger than their parents and old people

were going to die in the cold this winter, like I've got friends, I remember this was years ago, but it was when utility prices maybe started going up when my grandfather passed my grandmother lived on her own and her being really afraid to heat the house because of how much it cost, right. And I've got friends who I've spoken to this time who are like, well, we're preparing to have our grand come live with us so that we can, we can heat the house or like if we just move into the downstairs parts of the house, then we can keep those warm, right, or like, you know, we're going to go back to having fires and we'll just go, we'll warm

our house with a wood fire, right, lots of houses in the UK still have fireplaces that are functional. Yeah. My house growing up was heat with a wood fire. It's great. It's, it gives them a good coating that they could then use in the rest of your life to repel other pollutants. Coal fires are great inside the home, highly encouraged.

So like people were really making these like, it's, it's, it's a sort of stuff you, you associate maybe with like, like the hard times in the Soviet Union, right, like, like sort of being like, well, we're going to go to the food bank and we'll line up and get food and then we'll, we'll all huddle in one room to stay warm. And these are the plans that people were making, like this, this summer looking to this winter and Liz trust responded to that with like, okay, well, the way to fix this is lower taxes for high earners and no cap, but removing the cap on bankers bonuses so that the financial services industry will relocate to the UK, which it won't because the UK has left the

European Union, right, and it's now kind of a pariah in that sense. So like, I don't really understand how the UK, how the British government abstain obtains consent from the government anymore. And I'm partially interested to see how this goes and partially obviously like appalled to see the costs of this, like they're not even trying to care, they're not even pretending anymore, they're just going to take what they can and then presumably bounce to some tax island where they can, they can survive and thrive while the rest of us freeze our arses off over the winter.

So what I want to, I guess, finish up with is this idea that like, so in America, you have fixed terms of elections, right? So every, we're having midterms next month and then we'll have the presidential in Britain, we don't write in Britain, the, the government has to lose a vote for no confidence, which is when the majority of MPs vote, they no longer have confidence in the government or the Prime Minister, I have to warn theory, the monarch cast a corn election, right? So I guess King Charles could just, because they didn't let King Charles go to the climate summit recently, which is another amazing thing that Liz Truss has managed to do within

like a month of being in office. She's already like openly in beef with the monarchy, which is the one thing that conservative people might like more than white people who tax rich people less. They wouldn't let King Charles go to a climate summit because conservatives are more or less climate change deniers, or at least sort of climate change, don't give a fuck because we need to extract more money. So like at some point, like I don't know what the withdrawal of consent looks like anymore, right?

It's the people who British politicians see themselves like see themselves as governing for like their constituents are seemingly like columnists in the telegraph and the people who are the CEOs of these big companies in London, which have grown and grown and grown and grown based on this endless supply of free money that is now drying up, right? So instead of dealing with the root cause of that, they're going to try and look at other ways for those people to continue to grow and extract finance. And I don't know what that means for the rest of British people. Like I don't know what the withdrawal of consent from a system which so obviously doesn't care

about the material conditions you live in looks like, but if we want to talk about collapse and collapse is a thing that gradually happens rather than a thing that kind of we click our fingers and it's there, I think some of this is what it looks like. Like people refusing to pay their power bills is becoming a thing in UK, right? I should mention the energy companies are recording record profits throughout this time period. Maybe it looks like protests in the street that Britain has had these like they had big tuition fee protests and we had the quite and quite London riots, right? Which were incredibly harsh to put down and people went to jail for a long time for like

stealing a bottle of water from a Tesco. So like, I think it's worth watching for people who are not in the UK. Like what does it look like when you're governing elite stop pretending to care about you? And what does the withdrawal of legitimacy or the withdrawal of consent look like? And like I say, I don't know. It's looked different every time it's happened, right? It looked different in the Soviet Union to the way it looked in like I'm trying to think of other like regime collapses in South America.

But like we say that a regime is consolidated when the rules of the game are more important than the outcome of the game. And I think we're getting to a point in Britain where maybe the outcome of the game is going to be more important than the rules of the game. So that might mean some serious change. It might not. I mean, you know, we put a new dude on our coins and everyone puts bunting up industry and we do nothing fundamentally different and just acquiesce in living conditions getting

worse and worse and worse and more and more people are dying because they're poor. I don't know. But yeah, Garrison's just nodding, but yeah. I think that last one's going to be the one that happens. Yeah, maybe we'll do it Olympics and we'll spend the next what was London 2012, the next decade just reminiscing over how great that was. And then we'll just not notice that, you know, our grandparents are dying unnecessarily because this trust his friends have to make more money.

I have I have an enormous amount of faith in the British people to just do nothing. Like they have they have they have an unbelievable ability to just be like, eh, things are getting worse. Like, I don't know who cares. Like we're still British. Like they like they can't even really effectively do imperialism anymore. But it's like everyone's so wedded to the like imperialism machine that everyone that like, you know, everyone, everyone will constantly vote against their class interests.

Everyone will constantly act against their class interests. Everyone will constantly just sort of like literally let hundreds of thousands of people die around them. Yeah. Yeah. Because flags and sports. I think Corbyn has an energised a lot of people into realising their class interests, perhaps more than they were before, because there was briefly a parliamentary alternative.

But right now there isn't. Like Keir Starmer is not Jeremy Corbyn. But then, you know, but it's also the British, right? Like it's like, well, OK, so they sort of re-consolidated the left. It did nothing, got owns and then imploded. And now it's being split between like just complete pure like people arguing that Starmer is doing socialism, like pure Labour Party hacks. And then like a bunch of people just doing nothing because it's the UK and it fundamentally

never gets any better. Yeah. Yeah. There is like, I take a little bit of hope from like, have you seen the the where people are to be deported from the UK? And then there are like mass mobilisations to prevent that happening. Yeah, those are really cool. Yeah.

That gives me some hope, right? That's a lot of people willing to give up their Saturday or their Sunday to shout immigration opposites. And like, that's something that didn't happen by and large in the in the US, right? Even with the the like gross abuses of the immigration system under Donald Trump. People didn't stop that happening. So some of that it did happen in places like there are a lot of flights that got blocked and stuff.

Yeah, I guess. I guess. Yeah. It was visible then. Yeah. In a different way. Some people here did. So like in 2020, I think there was an icing and Barry O'Logan and it got run out of town.

So I shouldn't say that. But that gives me hope. It gives me hope that maybe some people will realise that like the solution is not to vote harder, right? And the solution is to is to organise and then to do things in an extra parliamentary fashion and not trust the people who are participating in your exploitation to live you from your exploitation, which has maybe been our mistake for too long. Yeah.

Yeah. We everyone in England needs to take a page from the Harry Potter books and arm the children to murder government officials. If I'm remembering how those books ended properly. Form a guerrilla army of you and your friends and attempt to overthrow the government. Yeah. Is that what happens in Harry Potter? Probably.

Yeah. Let's say yes. That's the plot of the Order of the Phoenix. Okay. Yeah. I remember it now when they do a car bomb. Yeah. That's it.

That's our message for you today. Read Harry Potter to a car bomb. There we go. There we go. That's a really binding message for you today. Non-actionable threat. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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