It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 28

Episode Date: April 2, 2022

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

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you,

but you can make your own decisions. Robert Evans here, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how things are falling apart and how to maybe put them back together. Obviously, the biggest story probably in the world right now is the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. And a major corollary of that story is how dramatically things in Russia have taken a turn for the totalitarian. The country has become increasingly isolated from most of the global community. This is due to a mix of sanctions, to a lot of businesses pulling out just because of the social consequences of not doing so, and of policies that have been put down by Putin's government in order to crack down on dissent and further remove Russia from any kind of contact with the West. As a result, it's kind

of difficult to get in touch with people who are resisting Putin's government from within Russia. to get in touch with people who are resisting Putin's government from within Russia. Anarchist activists in particular are not easy people to reach. However, we did recently sit down with one of these individuals and talk to them. So this episode will both be an interview with that person and a bit of history about the anarchist movements within Russia. Russia has actually a very long history of anarchist organizing. Two of the men generally considered foundational thinkers in anarchist political theory, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, were both born in Russia. Both lived and agitated under

the Tsars. Bakunin was an advocate and a major theorist of political terrorism. He fled the country, was returned, and ultimately spent like 10 years in prison there. Kropotkin was the author of a seminal anarcho-communist text titled The Conquest of Bread, and he was only able to return to Russia after the 1917 revolution. He died there in 1921. It's also worth noting that Peter Kropotkin is canonically the ancestor to Tommy Pickles of the Rugrats, but that's something you can look up on your the ancestor to Tommy Pickles of the Rugrats, but that's something you can look up on your own. Now, while some of the most influential anarchists in history were Russian, and anarchist organizing was a potent part of pre-1917 Russian political history,

the success of the Bolsheviks after 1917 led to the movement's near annihilation. Emma Goldman was yet another major anarchist activist and thinker who was born and educated in Russia. She immigrated to the United States in 1885, where she promptly helped try to assassinate a steel magnate in revenge for his brutality against striking workers. Goldman grew to prominence as a labor activist and women's rights activist in the last decade of the 1800s. In 1901, her work helped inspire Leon Chogosh to assassinate President William McKinley. While Emma Goldman had no direct connection to Chogosh, she defended his actions by saying, as an anarchist, I am opposed to violence, but if the people want to do away

with assassins, they must do away with the conditions which produce murderers. There's much more to say about Emma Goldman, but for our purposes, what matters is that she was arrested for opposing the draft in World War I and eventually deported back to Russia right after the revolution. Goldman was initially psyched that the czars had been deposed, but quickly became disillusioned by the violence of the forming totalitarian Soviet state. She considered this a betrayal of the revolution and wrote a series of articles for the New York World that have gone down as one of the first exposés of conditions in the Soviet state. She considered this a betrayal of the revolution and wrote a series of articles for the New York World that have gone down as one of the first exposés of conditions in the Soviet Union. Goldman's work was criticized by many left-wing intellectuals outside of Russia, but she was

correct about political repression in the new Bolshevik workers' paradise. Matters did not improve for anarchists in the first 20 years of the new regime. In 1937, in his History of Anarchism in Russia, E. Yaroslansky wrote, In the union of socialist Soviet republics at the present time, the anarchists no longer enjoy any influence over the masses. They are met with only as isolated individualists. The fall of the Soviet Union, the coming of democracy, and the slow rise to power of Vladimir Putin did not enormously alter the state of affairs. Russian anarchists still exercise relatively little influence over the masses. Most of them struggle towards autonomy as isolated individuals. In March of 2022, in the third week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I sat down with one of these people.

week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I sat down with one of these people. We'd been chatting online through Reddit for a couple of weeks, and the process of setting up a proper audio interview was difficult, to say the least. Repression of all political dissent under Putin is extreme. More than 13,000 people were arrested at anti-war protests in the first two weeks of the war. So you will understand why our source was paranoid about his identity. I had to download a secure app I'd never even heard of before, and he only agreed to speak with me while using a voice-changing application to further disguise his identity. Due to the difficulties this created, I will be paraphrasing him and quoting his words myself at a couple of points here in order to make listening to this a more comfortable experience. But here he is.

in order to make listening to this a more comfortable experience. But here he is. Okay, well, we've been kind of in politics for more than 10 years. I was never in, like, California or something like that. So it's basically speaking with the problem of the same conference because my initial cell, when I was in the wake 10 years ago, was 50 folks. So just to make it clear, he's saying that he's been involved in anarchist organizing for more than a decade, since around 2011. The initial cell he organized with was affiliated with an umbrella organization called Autonomous Action. We'll talk about them more in a minute, but it's important you understand that his cell,

at about 50 people strong, etc., like tickets, whatever. There were like 400 or something like that marching over. But of course, in the larger cities, there were more homes, more people there. But for a provincial town, a province town, almost 50 an anarchist was rather risky. As a result, our source actually started his career in activism on his own, as a single protester. He would stand out in public places, sometimes during other protests, sometimes on his own, holding a sign that said, in Russian, Peace to the World.. Now I'm reading you the English translation of what he put down. The literal Russian words that he had on his sign were a reference to a famous Soviet slogan,

officially adopted in 1951. The phrase actually has a much older origin in the country, which begins under the Orthodox Church and grew more popular among revolutionaries after the February Revolution. The first leftist to use peace to the world as a slogan in Russia may have actually been A.F. Kerensky, who headed the brief democratic government that ran things after the Tsar stepped down. In our source's case, his sign was an act of protest against a number of things, including the recent Russian invasion of Georgia and almost nothing in effectiveness or organization or whatever, but somehow we managed to do it. Not entire winter in the main square, but for a couple of weeks at least. Or a few more days, if we remember correctly. And then they followed me somehow. That's it.

After he'd been seen doing this for a while, members of a local anarchist cell found this person and started asking them questions. Hey, who are you? What are you doing? What do you think of this and that? He was not specific about the individual political questions they answered,

and we probably don't need to get into that. They invited him eventually to a building where a number of them tended to gather and prepare for actions. In short order, they started organizing together. At the time our source started organizing as an anarchist, the most notorious recent action was the Khimki Forest Conflict. In brief, Khimki is a forest with a long history as a nature preserve. It's kind of outside of Moscow. It's so densely forested that in the 1600s and then in the early 1800s, when the Russians were resisting Napoleon, it was used by partisans and insurgents as a base of operations. When the Bolsheviks took over, it was preserved to act as a sort of open-air therapy center for tuberculosis patients. In the early 2000s, local city planners

started to advocate for a toll road to be built through the middle of the forest. Their argument was that a large amount of traffic passed through the Leningrad Highway, and that had caused huge amounts of air pollution in the city of Kymki. Since the forest was protected by national environmental codes, turning it into a road was a long political process. Activists protested, arguing that it would be an environmental disaster, which, spoilers, it was. Like anarchists in the United States in the period before the Green Scare, Russian anarchists carried out a series of occupation actions to try and joined the sales water. For what? For what it stands, it was straight, the governments tried to cut it out. It was illegal.

Ecologists were against it. Activists were against it. For what time being, it was like violent, dire election with antifascists really hitting the shield. Everyone was trying to get there to do their job, I guess. There was patrols and stuff. But in the end, it was like the government saw it anyway. In 2012, shortly after our source began participating in anarchist demonstrations,

the government carried out a major crackdown against certain anarchist activists. They focused primarily on groups and individuals who were doing things like making Molotov cocktails and engaging in property destruction. Now, our source participated in food not bombs and other non-aggressive

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

whose families had abandoned them due to crushing poverty. Even though these things were not illegal, they had to maintain intense security culture to avoid being part of future crackdowns. Do you remember one of the leaders said, please wear a mask, don't talk to anyone, you know, like, about the structure of the organization and stuff. But still, we communicate with people, but don't give them information more than they need to know. One longstanding tradition among Russian anarchists was a sort of defensive isolation. People gave each other as little information as possible about their real identities. As a result, despite the fact that he has participated in multiple protests since the invasion of Ukraine, and people have been arrested at those protests, our source insists

that he doesn't know if any of his comrades have been taken into custody. Now, some of this probably has to do with the fact that he's not organizing in a major city. But a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that he just doesn't particularly know any people by name. Polls, which are imperfect but cannot be entirely discounted, suggest that most Russian civilians support the war and their military. Even so, the scope and scale of the anti-war protests in Russia have beggared anything from recent memory. in Russia have beggared anything from recent memory. Our source says that this has actually helped to mitigate some of the despair you might expect Russian anarchists to feel given the titanic increase in state repression. At least in our case, if maybe one are lots of action, there are lots of preparation for what I understand, not only air case, but all the radical groups who are gathering

in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Obviously, because the most epicenter of everything will be there, not in the regions, I guess. So, it's probably time that we talk about Autonomous Action, or AD, the Revolutionary Anarchist Federation that our friend and his comrades are affiliated with. AD actually has members in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was founded in 2002 and briefly had affiliates in Armenia before they disbanded in 2005. That's a story in and of itself. AD advocates direct action in order to, quote,

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

unfree system and to spread revolutionary sentiment and weaken the state. Much has been said in the West of Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician who, whatever else you might say about him, is certainly not controlled opposition. He has survived an assassination attempt by the Putin regime and is currently incarcerated after leaving his exile in the West to return to Russia and fight the sham case against him in court. No one can doubt that Navalny possesses significant physical courage, and it seems fair to say the man believes in what he says. 80 activists, from what I have seen, do not fault him in his willingness to suffer for his beliefs, but they believe that he is, at the very least, deeply misguided.

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

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

Putin is there to support him. There are no elections in Russia anymore. Even the most moderate attempts to change something results in criminal cases and persecutions. I do not believe that the result of this, yet another round of threatening declarations and building up pressure is a full-scale war. But as the conflict is not disappearing, a full-scale war may start after five to 10 years, even as a result of a cycle of escalation,

even if no one really wants it. And in case of a full-scale war, we should be on the Ukrainian side. As Malatesta said, for me, there is no doubt that the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only from the educational point of view, than the best of dictatorships. Neutrality in a war between Ukraine and Russia

would mean neutrality in an invasion of a democracy by a dictatorship. Now, our source concurs with the extant evidence that Russian citizens still broadly support the war, as I stated earlier. At least from what I see and hear from people, even my ex-colleagues are supporting people like Karol. Do you think that NATO attacking Russia with biological weapons is better than that? Something like this. So, people still believe in propaganda. He was certain to acknowledge that there's still a great deal of propaganda,

largely pro-NATO propaganda, on the anti-war side of things. Given the information situation within his country, he admitted that he'd had difficulty parsing some things out. While acknowledging that his side also lacked perfect information, he felt that their stance against the war was safe

because, in the end, it opposed bloodletting. Both can claim each other under some kind of propaganda, or in the Western, the Kremlin, whatever. Even if you're under some kind of propaganda, even Western, it's basically the case as well. You still have this morality on your side because you don't want people to die.

That's it. He did admit that a number of people in his life, family and close friends, knew about his political sympathies. And he claims that the outbreak of war and the massive totalitarian swing Putin has taken over the last month have caused some of these people to be more open to his beliefs.

So I'm kind of open, but I just don't think I'm going to allow for them to be one of them. I don't know how to approach them. Or my friends. I don't know people that much, but all of my friends, like, do you know what kind of stuff I'm into? After the war has started, they just came to me either personally or like, hey, you've been preparing for this, like, for years. You've been telling us all this for years. I thought you were paranoid, and now I understand you're right.

What do we do? So, no, I do have people who know about me, about my views, and now they see the picture. At the moment, the political situation within Russia is tremendously uncertain. All manner of dubious sources have claimed that a palace coup is in the offing or has been attempted. Some have even spoken of the possibility of a revolution or at least a massive protest campaign that forces Putin from office. Our source did not consider that likely. In the unlikely event the government collapsed entirely, he was not particularly optimistic about what might result. Imagine a centralized government has fallen to you, and there is no big winner or conqueror.

Once again, they just wake up again. He mentioned to me that a number of his loved ones had come forward recently to ask what they ought to do. I asked how he responded to that question. Right now, we try to organize and help each other because there is a chance our parents will cause nothing and we'll just all need to survive. That's the first thing. Self-humanization and interactions are more valuable than any currency right now for a while.

I see it that way. Second thing is that we need to use the training stocked I guess there is a term in English or other cases when you have all the infrastructure basically for now

we need to have enough and we can train even with the forearms. enough food and the police will can treat even with the firearms. He particularly mentioned the revolutionary importance of finding some way to either smuggle or produce medical supplies

and medications. He knows one person who already had to flee the country because his wife could no longer get the medicine she needed. He mentioned the sanctions levied against Russia as a major issue for regular working people. But when I asked what he felt Western countries could do in this conflict, he was actually quite focused on something else entirely. He believes the United States has access to high-quality satellite images of what happened in the immediate lead-up to the

Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin's government justified much of their invasion on so-called attacks from the Ukrainian government that they claim had escalated against the separatist regions. Our source believes his government is lying about this. because you're working in a... Fast-forward law. It was started by many states, and it could have stopped, but it didn't. So here's the same thing. Yeah. We need to come up with...

What did the... ...in going. we need to come out i don't believe that ukrainian powers are being always let's say the less military power compared to russia machine stuff. Yeah. So we do need those things covered and published and released. Maybe not as soon as possible because there's still more going on,

but at least it will help people to get their minds a bit more clear from Kremlin's propaganda. Since the invasion, it has gotten notably harder, but not impossibly hard, for Russian citizens to get information about the conflict that does not come from the Kremlin. Our source explained how he does it,

a combination of using VPNs and understanding the nature of authoritarian propaganda. In short, even when the government is lying to you, you can get an idea of what the truth is by understanding what they want you to believe. to South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, some independent stuff as well. I don't really believe any official posts, messages, because at the very best they say what's going to what's they're trying to get into but if you have enough okay let's put it this way uh when uh russian or ministry of foreign Affairs is selling us. They are working on a peaceful solution. At the same time, we hear that Syrian mercenaries are going to the real world. For me, it means one thing. They want postpone all the fighting to get some time.

So, official sources are still so crazy. He felt that one way U.S. activists could be helpful to Russian activists was by continuing to document and study the different munitions and tactics used by police in cracking down on demonstrations. He noticed that Russian police used similar and sometimes even the same weapons to the ones that the U.S. police used on crowds in the 2020 protests. He believes the documentation done to study these weapons is helpful to people all around the world. He expressed some frustration at friends and colleagues of his who,

after years of failing to truly grapple with the degree to which Putin had centralized power, were now fleeing Russia to avoid living under an increasingly totalitarian state. oh, it's so weird, this stuff is going on, these political repressions. Well, yes, if you're not into politics, that's something for you. I'm not trying to blame him for not being into politics, but it's how it's been. And that's why we were against that before, against the war.

Like, against the government. He has decided to stay and to resist. While he has admitted to now studying martial arts and military tactics, he did not have high hopes for any kind of confrontation with the Russian state. And as a generally peaceable person, he has decided that he will continue to resist in the way that makes the most sense to him, by helping people and providing them with things that they will increasingly need as the economic situation in Russia degrades further.

For me, helping people was kind of a life sense, kind of a sense of life, meaning of life. Yeah. I've been struggling with that for at least six years. I wouldn't say it was depression, but it was having me. But then I understood that one simple thing about anarchists

and why should I call myself an anarchist? Then I should make one simple thing. I need to believe in people. If I don't believe in people, what am I talking about then? Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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awards. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where this today I sit down with my buddy Jake Hanrahan and we talk about Corsica. Jake, how's the show? How are you feeling? Yeah, I'm all right, thanks. I've got a bit of a flu, but otherwise everything's really good, man. you just took a little reporting trip down to the island of Corsica, which is not a place I know much about. And I'm going to guess not a place most of our listeners know much about. So why don't you, why don't you start with kind of like what,

what brought you down there? Yeah, no, that's a really good point. A lot of people don't even know it exists. I sent the documentary made with popular front to a friend of mine today. And he said, bro, that's the first time I've ever heard

of Corsica like yeah like a lot of people don't know about it so it's a very old island you know more than 200 years people have inhabited the place but generally for the last kind of 200 years there's been an on again off again independence movement there people that don't want to be under the control of france or whoever they want control of their own island because corsican is quite a specific culture um it's very different to french culture it's different to italian culture they even have their own language called course um unfortunately it's kind of dying out as you know a lot of languages do in kind of contested areas if you like um but yeah so so they've always kind of wanted to be independent in some way not everybody not the whole place i'm sure you'll find some corsicans that will say they're corsican french but

generally the majority of people if you go there and say what are you they'll tell you we're corsican we're not french we're corsican so in the 1970s that kind of coalesced was rebirthed if you like with the backdrop of you know guns bombs and independence movements across europe and a group called the flnc formed the um it was a nationalist liberation front for corsica and they arrived with 21 bombs on the island in one night I mean not arrived you know they were already there of course but they they bombed 21 times in one night mostly French infrastructure and they were all very very well armed there was literally hundreds of members and at one point I have to I don't't want to say this 100% because it's been a

while since I looked at the research. But if I'm right, at one point in the late 70s or early 80s, the FLNC was actually the most active militant or terrorist group in the whole of Europe, even more active than the Provisional IRA. Now, the Provisional IRA killed a lot more people. The FLNC, their targets weren't really to kill people. They were to blow up holiday homes, blow up French infrastructure. They did have open gun battles and they did assassinate the highest ranking French officer

on Corsica on the island eventually. But yeah, so there was this real backdrop of very militant independence. When I say nationalist, it's not what we might associate with like far right nationalists. You know, when an independent movement doesn't have its own country, you know, the ultra nationalism in their sense comes out in a very different way. It's not we want to ban everybody else from here. It's simply we want our country. You know what I mean? So when I say ultra nationalistnationalist, that's not to be confused with fascist ultra-nationalist. It's very different. Not to say that Corsicans all believe in leftist causes. That wouldn't be true.

A lot of them do. There's a big socialist element to the cause, and there's also quite a right-wing element to the cause. But ultimately, they all kind of want the same thing, autonomy or independence for Corsica. So, yeah, so that's the kind of history, very briefly, of militant independence movements in Corsica. In 2014, the FLNC put down their guns. And recently, one of the FLNC or suspected FLNC militants who shot this high rankingranking French official that I told you about. This guy is called Ivan Kolinar. He was arrested after the shooting in the 90s and sent to a French prison for life.

And on March the 6th, I believe it was, he was, no, sorry, March 2nd, he was attacked in a French prison by a jihadist inmate and beaten into a coma yesterday or two days ago now he died of his injuries ever since he was beaten into this coma the youth would just kind of lit the place on fire you know they were really clashing very violently and for for the last kind of seven years since there was a as a was a relative calm on the island in terms of political activism and militancy the politicians the more moderate parties have tried to do this politically and for the first time in a while the youth have gone no

fuck it we're not playing that anymore we're going to knock the place about we're going to smash the shop up and basically it's kind of worked which we can go into but yeah sorry to go on a lot but there's quite a lot to it because obviously like you said a lot of people don't know um but one thing i will say is Corsica is just one of the most beautiful places anybody will go to. Like objectively, it's idyllic. It's not really had this horrible holiday home vibe there, because genuinely when when some contractors tried to kind of gentrify Corsica and turn it into the next Ibiza, I believe one of the quotes was from one of the people doing this. The FLNC kind of waited for them to build their homes and then blew them all up, blew up all their hotels.

So it was like, you're not going to do that here. A lot of these companies were infringing on the environment, which is beautiful there. And yeah, so there's a lot more to it. But generally, you know, this all kind of revolves around militant independence. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think it's fascinating the idea of targeting like the degree to which a lot of this seems to be focused on stopping this place from turning into another vacation destination where like rich people's second homes push out the population that's born there. where rich people's second homes push out the population that's born there. I think there's a lot of places that organize or complain about that sort of thing. But I'm not aware of anyone who's gone to these kind of lengths to stop themselves from turning into another Ibiza.

Yeah, yeah. And honestly, if you go to Corsica and see how beautiful it is, I mean, it's one of the few places in Europe where you can see the mountains from the beach you know yeah incredible island I've been obsessed with this place since I was about 24 years old firstly from the nature and the beauty there but secondly I was very interested in the militant group there um because the culture there was so different but yeah if you look at the place you go there you realize like right this place is very much worth preserving I don't want to act like there hasn't been businesses doing

their thing there there definitely is but certainly it feels preserved there's no high rises all of the old buildings are still there they're still intact and you know when these big businesses came in and a lot of these businessmen were almost showing off, like, yeah, we're going to turn Corsica into Ibiza, which as a Brit, I will apologize to anyone living in Ibiza because we're one of the worst exporters ever. Having sex in the street and throwing up at bars and everything when we go there. Yeah, it's kind of been turned into one big, not the great club. Yeah, not the great club yeah yeah not the great club definitely yeah so so you know it's it's one of these ones where it's like yeah i kind of understand i'm not saying anyone should bomb anywhere certainly not but i do understand the sentiment there and one of the one of my course friends said um some people were calling it like

the cold bed policy so you come to our island, you buy a holiday home. And if you leave that bed cold, as in you're not even living here, it's going to get blown up, you know, if you like. So very militant, very violent, but effective. I mean, it doesn't mean that you have to agree with it, but no one can deny that it hasn't been effective. But at the same time, there's a very big mafia presence on the island as well. So that, you know, it's not to say mafia presence on the island as well. So that,

you know, it's not to say that everything is all for the people. Certainly not. I'm going to guess that the mafia is more or less on the side of, you know, turn this place into a vacation destination because that's where the money is. That would be my assumption. Really? That's interesting. No. So unfortunately, the independence movement, not all of of them but there is an element to it that is very hand in hand with the mafia most definitely interesting perhaps some people that were independent militants are now mafia if you like um and people have been killed on the island quite a lot there's quite a lot of you know unsolved murders there it's quite sad. But no, they were more for keeping their own interests. We have this island.

We can run the docks. We can run this. We can run that. And whilst what you said makes sense, right? You would think, oh, no, they'd be for this money. I think what they want, they're still nationalists at the end of the day. They want control, but they want control in their own way. And if a big business comes in

and starts saying oh yeah we're doing this and that and the other and we're bringing all these people in by the docks i guess they lose control of that essentially so they were very much on the side of yeah do what you like sort of thing and i think fascinating behind a lot of it yeah so yeah very unique very specific place yeah you mentioned at this action you showed up for people bombed uh 21 targets uh was it 21 21 in one night yeah in one night yeah when you say bomb are we talking like your standard molotovs or were were they were were they kind of like more um elaborate devices shall we say how would you describe what they were using yeah no it's a good question i mean when you think of 21 in one night you think right like molotov small right something simple yeah yeah no no there weren't even pipe bombs you're talking

fertilizer bombs oh wow yeah like blowing up whole buildings you know um not all of them you know there were some smaller ones but some very significant ones um and very very big the way corsica is the way it's laid out like I said it's a small place I think only like 300,000 people live there roughly and there are mountains there are beaches there are very rural communities it's an island it's quite far away from France actually it's very close to Italy and Sardinia is just to its south and it's just for them if you you couldn't ask for a better location if you wanted to be a kind of guerrilla group you know you really couldn't it's just for them, if you couldn't ask for a better location, if you wanted to be a kind of guerrilla group, you know, you really couldn't. It's kind of built for them. So they just got away with it.

You know, farmers, whatever, they went into the mountains, build bombs, drop them off. And not to say that everybody was for them, but there is some it wasn't just we want independence. There was there was subjugation by the French, you know. Firstly, they're like, we don't want to be a French colony or whatever you would call it anymore, which I think anybody that wants their determination to not be held by a former colonial power is fine. Or current colonial power, if you like. I think, yeah, fair play to them. But secondly, they're one of the most poorer regions, despite having all this holiday stuff, despite having a lot of produce, despite having a lot of reasons to be there so there's definitely something I won't claim to know too much about the

law situation and I'm sure a lot of French people get angry whatever but it is genuinely doing very badly in many different aspects is that mismanagement by them is it because of the French I couldn't tell you I don't know enough about it but I certainly find it very weird that all of these beautiful things that are happening on the island and they're constantly in you know the lower bracket of situations economically culturally they're getting kind of sidelined a bit so I do I do understand and certainly when the clashes or even protests happen in the 70s the police you know French police I'm sorry but they're some of the worst fucking police ever oh yeah um you know and i i've been in front of turkish police like french police are fucking up there they're horrible and they beat the shit out of a lot of people in corsica just for

peacefully protesting you know so it didn't come from nowhere you know what i mean there is there is more to it than just nationalism and independence there's a lot more to it they want to they want to they want to deal with their own affairs a lot of them you know yeah most people probably now want to do it democratically but like i said the youth were said no fuck that we're not getting anywhere and they've actually it's actually worked because the day after the riots that we filmed on uh march 13th the the interior minister of france basically said, we're willing to discuss this with you. We will go as far as autonomy. That's literally a quote he said, which is quite significant.

Yeah, after seven years of basically stalemate through the politicians. So the youth, in a way, one of the very few examples of this, specifically in Europe, the youth, what they're doing kind of worked. You know what I mean? Yeah, direct action got got some goods it's got at least started the process of getting the goods hopefully absolutely yeah it has and the thing about the Corsican youth is they're very intelligent they're very they're very authentic in their political activism in the sense of it's just they're born into it it's in them you know

from the age of like 12 13 they're understanding it they're getting told about the legends of blah blah you know um there's this militant group and whatever whatever so it's very much in them in that sense kind of in a you know like the Kurds are kind of you know not on the same level but that kind of vibe so when they go to students when they go to uni and they become students they're not really forming their political opinions they already have them they already got them and then they they sort of hire they sort of germinate together so that's from what i understood anyway that's from what i gathered and you know your average trendy young man and woman on the street there is very political it's

kind of like greece in that sense like it's cool to be political but in the sense of not the kind not like um you know not not something you bought into as a teenager something that was already there and then which which there's nothing wrong with it you know most people form their political opinions in unis or whatever but for them it's already in them you see what i'm saying yeah so they already have they're already united in that sense you know so when they get to the uni they get there it's like okay well we all want independence or autonomy but then the other things are lesser so you know for the in that reason in that sense i think that was quite interesting and we saw like 8 000 9 000 people marching maybe and then when the clashes started you know israel but like normally it's like what

100 300 people stay you're talking like 2 000 people wow full pelt clashing and men and women like young girls young men like many many you know so it was really i was like wow okay i want one thing that i've never i haven't seen for a very long time. I've very rarely seen it. Normally when the clash happens, everybody, you know, your grandmas, your working man, you know, the people that support what's going on, but are not able to clash or don't want to clash, they normally step back. In the Corsican protests, everybody just stayed. Like we were getting tear gas next to like 50 lads with balaclavas on next to like grandma or auntie you know we were

like helping people into the side street to get away from tear gas it was very weird and they they just didn't leave they just were there the whole time wow yeah it's weird when you're talking about like tactically what is this how are these kind of bombings being pulled off as you so you've got like this huge crowd and they're just kind of like marching from target to target um so the youth are not really i mean they have some small kind of ids you know what i'm saying the youth student the youth protesters but generally it's molotovs bricks burning barricades but they very clearly know the island inside out they know their streets you know obviously because they live there and most of the police from what i understand are actually french called in from the island

from the mainland sorry to the island a lot of the crs riot police thousands of them were brought in there was that they were actually completely outnumbered they had to retreat at one point in in the evening uh to go back to the prefecture the kind of cultural french administrative building where main the main target of violence was they had to retreat to get more ammunition because they just they just shot so much tear gas yeah um they just couldn't you know they couldn't do anything there were some teams like the youth um some of them had green armbands or green leg bands so they were very clearly like a different unit and they were very well organized they didn't have walkie-talkies mind you normally that that

shows a closer sign of organization but some of them were like that some of them were just turned up to fight and some of them were splitting off into different groups you would see one come in they'd fight fight fight and then they'd leave and as they're leaving another load would just come in in a line it was it was really quite interesting you know they'd really thought about it um it wasn't just a free-for-all which it might look like but you know after a while of covering riots there's certain things you notice where you're like ah okay they're planning this they're planning that you know what i'm saying so it was quite interesting in that sense. But yeah, man, it's yeah. Thousands of thousands of youth fighting. It did get messy. I think 44 police were injured, 13 protesters and one pedestrian. That was the official figures.

I saw at least three pedestrians injured and I think probably more protesters and definitely more cops, I would say. Yeah. I mean, obviously, it also depends on like what your rating is an injury for that sort of thing. Yeah. And a lot of folks probably are avoiding the hospitals and being dealt with at homes and whatnot because they were committing some crimes. Yeah. Just like, you know, at home with super glue instead of stitches or whatever. Yeah. Do you have a sense of like how long what the kind of the back end of this was the preparation process was for this? Yeah. Do you have a sense of like how long, what the kind of the back end of this was,

the preparation process was for this? Yeah. So the clashes have been ongoing before we got there for about a week. So Ivan Kolonar was beaten into this coma. He was attacked in prison. There's some rumors that he said some kind of Islamophobic thing to the inmate. I don't know how true that is, but all we know is the guy was actually, you know, a convicted jihadist. It's not kind of hearsay. The guy, the inmate, was a convicted jihadist because obviously Ivan Kolinar is in the type of prison

where what the state says is terrorists are there. You know what I mean? Anybody terrorist is there. So it makes sense. He's amongst these people. And I think he was attacked in the gym when he was on his own and he was strangled and this this is where yeah yeah this is where there's a weird point of contention he because of the special status he had as such a violent uh militant whatever he shouldn't have really been on his own like that and some people speculating did something happen

but generally most people we spoke to were like it was probably just negligence you know they weren't very conspiratorial there was someone like oh the french the french planned this i doubt it it doesn't make much sense to do this right now like you know they knew what would happen to ivan kolonar uh to the people sorry if ivan kolonar was hurt because he's a big name there. There's also some maybe interesting arguments around the case, the way he was arrested. Apparently the gun doesn't match up. I don't know.

I didn't really get into that. But either way, people there love him. You know what I'm saying? He's like a martyr for them, even though he shot this guy in the back in cold blood, essentially. essentially but for them that was a political assassination whatever so so for about a week the the youth were fighting and i i saw a video i'm or anything that happens in corsica i'm like right i'm looking at it and i was like okay this this is a little bit different uh okay molotovs are out again hasn't haven't seen that for a while and then the next day and then the next day and then it spread one night to like five different cities or like sorry

three different cities like big big places and then they burnt like a very specific monument so that was like oh it's on so at least for at least a week they were they were planning something you know and there was enough kind of momentum there, I think, for them to organise. Certainly we know that there was people from Ajaccio, the capital city, in Bastia, where we filmed, and like a lot of people drove in. They came, you know, specifically for this clash.

So that was quite interesting. I think the youth movement have a very strong network there. And there's also quite a big football ultra scene there. So the day before the clashes, Bastia and Ajaccio had a derby. So obviously, I imagine a lot of the ultras, or at least I know a lot of the ultras, were also part of the independence groupings and part of the clashes. So I imagine that a lot of the football ultras kind of organized, match the day before, or at least the week before. So I think there was quite a lot of organization there. What do you feel like is next? Do you get the sense that because the

government has announced their willingness to sit down and talk that maybe folks are going to wait to follow up this? Or do you get the sense that they're going to kind of keep the pressure on? Well, the thing is, there was one option before Yvon Collinard died. And now there's a new option that he's died. You see what I'm saying? Right. Before he died, I think what you're saying would have happened. I mean, I don't know, but I think the youth would have, they would have held off the fact that the interior minister of France, who answers directly to Macron within one day or less than one day,

said we're willing to go as far as autonomy in these discussions. If we stop being violent, I think the youth were smart enough to realise, all right, let's stop stop let's see what he's got to say i'm sure if things faltered if things didn't move quick enough they would have very quickly stepped up the stepped up the violence again however now that ivan kolinar has died i don't think that they're just gonna wait now from what i understand from speaking to contacts and friends in corsica there's a period of mourning right now. You know, his funeral, he died in a prison in Marseille.

He wasn't even transferred to Corsica to die. So for a lot of them, that's incredibly offensive. That's the kind of spark that started these clashes. It's all about independence and autonomy on one level, but the thing that drove this and sparked it was Yvon Collin's attack and and the fact that there's a lot of Corsican prison prisoners which are political prisoners are in prison in France anyway so now that he has died I really think that there will be a moment of calm due to the funeral and respect for Ivan Kolonar and whatever and then I think maybe a week after this week

I think it's almost inevitable that we will see some form of violence again i've spoken to some people that are maybe going a bit far maybe being a bit dramatic i don't know but they speculate that there'll be a little bit more than just clashes one one person i know said i think they're going to blow something up again do i think that probably not but certainly when we were in the streets they were using uh there's there's photos of it as well they were using very crude but very small improvised explosive devices now when a group even starts to do that you know okay it's a very small device it was in a kind of like a basically a tennis ball type thing with it with whatever in

it but it was fucking loud um it wouldn't really do much unless it probably blew up right next to your foot but when they're even considering that in my experience that tells you that people there's an element that are ready to go further up the ladder to the next level does that mean they're going to blow somewhere up i don't know i don't see it personally you know these these young people are very clever i think that would be an insane decision because it would france would have no option but to basically flood the island with a lot more police and maybe even military type police i don't know maybe not but um but yeah anyway we'll see what happens but again my point is not not that i think this is going to happen but there's that talk which we haven't seen that kind of talk in corsica for quite a while you know what i mean and there's actually

people now genuinely worried like okay where's this gonna go um which can never be a good thing i guess the the french state really has to be careful here and i think the fact they've now said we're gonna go as far as autonomy maybe they at the very least have to be shown to be doing that very quickly i think you know otherwise for a lot of people in corsica it's like even calling a colonel died in vain i guess and it's not just the youth it's everybody even people that perhaps really don't like that the youth were fighting really don't support that level of violence, they still support Ivan Kolonar and are very sad he's dead.

You see what I'm saying? And the way he died. And even Bastia FC, the football team, one of the main football teams in Corsica, they said, oh, we're very sad that he's dead. A hero has died, that kind of thing. So he's seen as a martyr now, definitely. Yeah, I mean, that's a predictable outcome from killing a guy who's in prison.

Right, right. Right, right. So we're kind of in this, like, waiting to see what the next step is, then, I guess. Like, it's kind of this weird sort of, like, political liminal space, I guess, where the next steps are, there's a number of things that could happen. Um, that's the perfect way to describe it. Yeah, definitely. It's this very, everything's in transition. It's, it's very, it's, it's either calm before the storm or it's calm that turns into something positive. Um, but I, I just don't see it you know after almost two weeks of extremely violent clashes very well organized after seeing them on the ground as

well these are brave lads these and women as well these are not your kind of average weekend warriors they're very very up for it um you know how people clash in paris like french people they're very up for it as soon as oh yeah fine they'll fight you know um it's like that times 10 from what i experienced because it's got the the kind of incubated nationalist identity separate from france but whilst also having kind of fiery French culture and fiery Italian culture influences and fiery Corsican culture. Not to say that they're not very nice people. Everyone was absolutely lovely, very, very friendly.

But you can tell they're, you know, they're a fiery people. They're active. They're about it. They mean what they say. So I don't think that the youth will just go quietly from this. Essentially a political prisoner, a martyr now, and then for them to just go, oh, okay, we'll just relax now. I don't see it.

You're talking from like, you know, probably in the full week of clashes, maybe 4,000 or 5,000 people together throwing rocks, burning barricades, throwing small improvised devices at cops, to then just to go to nothing after even colonel dies i'd be very very surprised i think the only way that that would happen would be for france to go okay here's your autonomy and then that energy could be turned into a celebration yeah i'm saying that should or shouldn't happen i just think theoretically that's the only way that it could avoid violence because the energy is there now you see what i'm

saying yeah not on like a esoteric level. It's just the level of like they're revved up. They're ready. You know, and the attitude, the kind of it's in the air. It's in the air right now. So you published just a couple of days ago, your little documentary, like short documentary from Popular Front, which has footage. Yeah. A little dispatch, which has footage from this, which people should definitely check out, especially if they'd like to see some of the tactics that we've talked about

on this episode so far. Is there anywhere else you might recommend they go for further reading on this subject? Not to be, oh yeah, only popular front, but it's just something that I've just been specifically fascinated and

obsessed with for a long time so when the time came i was very well prepared um everyone has said like oh you know this is this is crazy like you know you how did you understand all of this so quickly because i've been reading about it and and the problem with a lot of the french reporting is you know it's it's naturally very French skewed. It's a little bit sneery, like all the island people are kicking off again. Whereas it's like, no, come on. This is an incredible, beautiful place. Of course, they want to preserve it. Of course, they want to control it in whatever way they want to.

So, again, it's very difficult. But I will say that there are some really good reporters there. There's a friend of mine um from Corsica Lionel Dumas uh he runs like a thing called um Corsican Passport or he used to which was kind of um kind of humorous but at the same time you know news about kind of Corsican related um patriotic stuff and then who we worked with, Jean Collinard, he's not related to Yvon Collinard. It's quite a common last name.

Exactly, yeah. To us, it sounds quite, you know, oh, right, you must be related. But over there, it's like, not Smith, but it's quite common. So yeah, Jean Collinard, he's great. And there's also the local papers in Corsica, Corse Martin. They there's also the local papers in Corsica,

Course Martin. They're really good. You might have to translate stuff, but they're very on the ball. You know what I mean? They're focused on everything. So if people are interested in it, honestly, I would say like,

seek out local French reporters. From what I gathered as well, there's a quiet, but really thriving kind of youth media. I wouldn't say it's a movement's a movement but there's something growing there you know i spoke before i went out i spoke to quite a few reporters really nice people really enthusiastic um really you know love loving their island but not full of hatred or anything like that that's something that i've seen a lot of french people say oh corsicans are really full

of hatred they're racist they're blah blah and it's like i didn't experience that and at the same time uh it's like have you been to paris yeah you've seen a french riot yeah it's like yeah you know like it's like at the end of the day i think the whole region probably has an issue with that but certainly the youth are very open-minded very nice um and like i said this isn't just me basing it off of one trip i've been fascinated with this place for about six to eight years and i i have not experienced anything like that sure you'll hear the old comment like oh you know very yeah it's europe yeah it's europe exactly exactly it's europe

not to minimize it but like it's not just corsica exactly you know for fuck's sake whatever but generally you know for a small island it could be way worse and yeah so i had a lot of french people like they're really nasty they're really violent and it's like they're not actually like they're very angry but they don't hate they don't hate the french in that sense of like oh you're a french person kill you it's the same thing as we hate the state you know like and at the same time they have a very quite a few people brought up ireland and the basque situation and sardinia and so they have this they have an internationalist mentality as well actually and in fact years ago there used to be a youth conference

in corsica hosted there. I don't think it goes on anymore, but it was hosted in Corsica by what was a very well organized radical socialist youth movement in Corsica, where people from Northern Ireland, people from the Basque country, people from. What's the one in Barcelona? Oh, Catalonia. Yeah, Catal yeah catalonia yeah people from there would come you know all people from different breakaway regions or or whatever and they would all come and they would all meet in corsica and they would talk about tactics and politics and whatever so it's a very very interesting culture place amazing history fucking napoleon is from napoleon is from there you know that's all you want um so yeah it's

a really cool place and you know we only documented one side of it a very radical side of it because that's what was happening that weekend yeah it's a dispatch but there are a lot of moderates as well there are a lot of like political very smart political moderate moderates that are like look we don't want violence but we do want autonomy we. We want something. And they said, oh, you only showed the militant side of it. It's like, well, you weren't on the street that day. You know, these kids were. So obviously, that's how it works. But yeah, to answer your question again, sorry,

I would say just if you're interested in the region, check it out. And there's a film, if you can find it in English subtitles, send it to me. But there's a fictionalized film about the FLNC. I think it's called a life of violence. That's actually like quite good. It's a bit romanticized,

but it's quite good in terms of explaining the situation there. So if you speak French, check that out and just check out like course Martin and all these, these other kinds of local reporters there, people act like, Oh, it's too hard to find them it does feel like that but once you find them you find them all so yeah awesome well jay canrahan thank you so much check out the new popular front dispatch on corsica um on the youtube by the way to yeah youtube yeah yeah so check out all the popular front stuff on youtube you've got a great documentary out also about the territorial defense militias in Ukraine that you filmed right before shit went.

Yeah, it's coming. Where it is. Yeah, we're still editing it because we're a bit like, how do we make this most relevant? But it's coming. It will be quite interesting. I'm excited. Yeah. The perspective beforehand.

Yeah, the shit you were posting on Twitter was really interesting. Yeah. So yeah. Check that out when it's out, check out all the popular fronts, other stuff. And yeah, thank you,

Jake. Let's we'll, we'll, we'll have you back on soon. All right, man. Thank you very much. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his

mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new

Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me

in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast. The podcast. The podcast where we go, ah, every episode. When you open too many podcasts, you lose the ability to open podcasts. Anyway, St. Andrew, this is your episode, so I'm going to let you take it away.

Take us on a journey. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Hi. Good day. Good afternoon and good night. Today we just wanted to cover a rather broad topic. I don't even know if it's going to be released before the end of February, probably not. But in honor of Black History Month, I wanted to cover the history of Caribbean resistance to slavery and the different ways that manifested across the Caribbean.

For those who don't know, slavery in the Caribbean took place for several hundred years, beginning with the enslavement of the Amerindians and continuing up until the abolition of slavery in 1834, at least in British territories. Before then, there were multiple struggles against the institution, both passive and active, and in every step of the process. And then, of course, post-slavery, there were also multiple rebellions and insurrections and strikes that took place in the region. But I can't cover the,

well, there are about 7,000 islands in the Caribbean, give or take. But I can't cover the histories of all of those for the past couple thousand years. But I will try to cover fairly generally the different forms of resistance that took place. Starting with, of course, the resistance that took place in Africa.

I mean, even before enslaved people were put on these ships, even before they were captured, there were measures that were taken to protect themselves from enslavement. There was, of course, flight in the sense of running away.

But there was also evidence of Africans moving their villages to inaccessible areas like mountains or um or deeper into the forest where it's less accessible for enslaved people um sorry for enslavers to try to capture their people. One of the more famous enslaved people, Oluwada Ikwaino, he founded a society in Britain after being enslaved and taken to the Caribbean and eventually moving to Britain after becoming a freedman and starting the Sons of Africa abolitionist group. He had written his own autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oluwadah Ikwaino, in 1789. And he detailed some of the horrors of slavery from an enslaved person's perspective.

And so a lot of what we know about slavery and how it occurred uh comes from his personal account among others of course so he spoke about some of the measures that were taken in his own village to defend against capture but um he after being captured of, from the Kingdom of Benin around 1745, he ended up being taken on the slave ships, separated from his families, and carried with 244 other people across the Atlantic to Barbados. And then eventually taken to Virginia. And then from Virginia, being bought by a Royal Navy Lieutenant and eventually being freed. During the voyages that occurred, and they were

multiple during the whole triangle trade, it has been said that one in ten of all atlantic crossings through the middle passage had some kind of rebellion whether it be through taking control of the ships and attempting to sail them back to africa with the assistance of the crew or without or of africans battling against other ships um or in one case in Amistad in 1839 some Africans were taken captive aboard a cargo ship and they freed themselves killed the captain and the cook

and forced them to take them back to Sierra Leone but instead the owners of the ship ended up taking them to the United States where they were captured by the Coast Guard. Jesus. Yeah, it's a lot. because he saw all the but first of all he saw the horrible conditions that were present on those ships in the middle passage where you know hundreds of people were shackled together and crammed into

these tight enclosed dark wet infected spaces for weeks on end while being taken across and of course a lot of the so-called cargo the people who were on route to be enslaved were killed by the conditions present on those slave ships however despite the fact that you know so many people were dying from So many people were dying from the terrible conditions of the ships. The slave trade was so profitable for the enslavers and for the economies of the colonial nations that they were still not only able to break even but profit massively from the excursions and even though the middle passage got more and more dangerous for crews as rebellions became more and more expected production for more shackles more weaponry to keep captives secured arose in england and helped to secure some of their um travels of course there were also times where africans would burn the ships they were on or where they

would jump off of the ships as i'm sure many people remember killmonger's famous final words in Black Panther. And from what I remember, the first enslaved people who arrived in Hispaniola immediately ran away and were able to escape before being recaptured. Once enslaved people arrived in the horrible conditions at the various colonies in the Caribbean, one of the major projects of their colonial overlords was to convert them while in the process of, you know, enslaving them. Of course, a lot of enslaved people were dying very rapidly due to the

diseases and the terrible working conditions they had to endure. But for those who did survive, separated from their families, from their ties to kinship, from really their home and everything that came along with it as displaced indigenous people they had to figure out ways to maintain and protect their cultures um from you know naming conventions to craftsmanship to language to philosophy to beliefs to music to dance these are all elements of african cultures that would provide psychological support for captives who need to resist the process of enslavement because enslavement is an act of breaking the will and erasing the humanity of the enslaved practices like voodoo um in Haiti or Obia in

Trinidad and Jamaica were able to strengthen the revolutionary efforts of rebellious Africans. And so in the Haitian revolution, you know, they were fueled by voodoo and the ceremonies that occurred then and were able to eventually, you know, free the people of Haiti and establish the first independent black republic in the new world in 1804. So other forms of cultural resistance and one of the main forms of cultural resistance

was the preservation of African culture through pre-warization through the melding and the hiding in some cases of elements of african culture with um european cultural forms to create these new cultures and new languages um quiol is one example particularly antillian creole which is related to haitian creole these languages helped to maintain some measure of identity for people who were actively being stripped of it. Women, in particular, played a major role in this process of cultural resistance and cultural preservation because in African societies they were African societies were often matrilineal and matrilocal and women played a key role in passing traditions on to their daughters and other young women and to the sharing of skills and beliefs and ideas.

And so Afghan women played a major role in keeping that tradition going and that lineage going, maintaining the memory of people like Anansi and Brer Rabbit and Mamadou and Tsuki Yant and all these other folkloric figures who bear the marks of African traditions. consistent um violence sexual violence that was um being done to them by their colonial masters um abortion and um birth control um and other forms of resistance against sexual assault, resisting their masters, feigning illness. All of these things worked to not necessarily protect them, but to keep them going and try to stave off the worst elements of violence that was being done to them. As I mentioned, the Haitian Revolution and it being fueled by voodoo and whatnot, it really scared planters across the Caribbean and across the world, really. This was the first time something like this had ever happened before.

something like this had never happened before and i'm sure uh the u.s audience knows a bit about the consequences in the u.s how you know southern slave masters were so terrified by the asian revolution how france um imposed restrictions on haiti and how the US and other European powers were complicit in that attempt to strangle the first black republic. But there were cases in other parts of the Caribbean where planters, in their terror, used the Haitian revolution as an excuse to crack down on the enslaved. For example, in Trinidad in the Christmas of 1805, the Haitian Revolution ended in 1804. So in Christmas of 1805, the planters were so afraid and had already seen some acts of poisoning that were occurring on some of the estates because part of the cultural resistance involved the passing down of certain recipes

and poisons and concoctions and so many enslavers fell victim to poisoners and so they had to try to find a way to prevent what they saw was a planned uprising they basically invented this idea of a conspiracy in their paranoia that was meant to wipe out this entire slave-holding population and turn it out in one go. So, of course, as historians have uncovered, the conspiracy most likely didn't actually exist, or maybe perhaps not to the scale that the slave owners thought, but it was more so an attempt by the planters to impose greater authoritarian rule. As Christmas Day in 1805 approached, the details of this conspiracy, of this plot, started to be uncovered by the planters.

They thought that, you know, at this place called Chan's Estate estate enslaved people were organizing to launch the revolution and of course this terrified them because at that point in time the enslaved population was somewhere around 20 000 whereas the white slave owning class was like half that number. And so the authorities declared martial law and apprehended those involved, if they were even involved. Oftentimes they were not. But it does bring attention to an important part of enslaved resistance and that being the conspiracy and actual existence of slave secret societies. Secret societies are something that is common in the African mainland where tribal rights and initiations and advancements through those rites in secret groupings would occur to sort of denote

levels of rank or maturity and so in Trinidad slave society as different tribes mixed and mingled on plantations for security reasons these secret societies continued, but had assimilated some European systems of order and designation. So they gave themselves names like Major or Captain and described their societies as regiments. And the echoes, the descendants of those societies, still exist to this day in Trinidad. They are highly obscured. I honestly don't know much details about them. I just know that I have some friends whose relatives are involved in those secret societies. And in some places, like for example, Vancouver, where enslaved people seized the land and sort of held that land and kept it and passed it down across the generations, such secret societies and membership in such secret societies is not unheard of so is is what did the modern-ish versions of them do like what what what what are they doing i guess like these days if that's something that is i don't know much about um about

them or how they operate yeah and so i don't think all secret societies in Trinidad are descended from enslaved secret societies. Like obviously not. There are other secret societies, there are societies of doctors and of lawyers and different trades. There are of course, Mason groups as well. groups as well and i only know the most um superficial details of most of these groups yeah it's interesting thing that comes up a lot there's a whole bunch of like these sort of secret society groups that like wind up being part of the 1911 revolution in china but they sort of like most of them kind of go bandit like after the revolution happens and so it's interesting

to see i guess like different contexts where they don't seem to have like just overtly turned into organized crime groups right what's the so like organized crime groups descended from secret societies in china yeah the triads for example yeah i actually don't think the triad descended from them a couple of them joined the communists. A lot of them kind of got wiped out in the sort of just general warlord fighting. And then some of them kind of got stomped out by the communists because they were basically turned into their own organized crime things that were sort of distinct from the other ones that existed. Right. There were seven major rebellions in the colony of jamaica between 1673 and 1686

and several others in antigua in nevis in virgin islands in you know barbados in just across the caribbean there was continual african resistance and, and that really is what struck fear in the slaveholders at the time. In one case, in 1733, during the Amina Rebellion on St. John, which is part of the Danish Virgin Islands, or was part of the Danish Virgin Islands, the African insurgents took control of the island for six months before being defeated. insurgents took control of the island for six months before being defeated and the most slave rebellions really occurred in jamaica in fact more than all the other colonies more than all the other british colonies in the caribbean combined one of the most famous of the jamaican rebellions was one that started in 1760 by a man known as Tacky and it lasted for over a year before being suppressed by British colonial forces. Because Jamaica's population was massively, overwhelmingly black in comparison to the very small minority of large slave-holding whites, they were more likely to launch and more likely to succeed in slave

revolts um slave revolts are more likely to happen of course where slaves outnumber whites where masters are absent where there's economic distress where they are split within the ruling elite um and when you know large numbers of native one-born Africans from one area are brought in one time. Which is why they often had to split up there with people that they captured so they wouldn't be able to collaborate with their kin. We often remember the flashier forms of revolt, such as the revolt in St. Joseph in 1837, led by Daga, who was a former African chief in Guinea and the leader of the 1st British West India Regiment. He mutinied along with 240 men and although they were taken into custody and sentenced to death,

they marked just one example of the sort of bold actions that were taken by enslaved people in Tobago in the year 1770 there were numerous armed revolts over the next 11 years

from 1770 to 1801 six armed revolts one led by an enslaved man named Sandy in 1770, two in 1771, one in June and the other in August, one in 1773, another in 1774, another in 1801. And so these revolts were not concentrated in one specific area of the island, they would happen in some cases over the entire island tobago was of course separate from trinidad until 1899 where it became a ward of trinidad tobago but and so their histories the history of trinidad and history of tobago were separate running separately for the first couple hundred years of the age of colonization.

But Tobago's history of resistance is still connected in some ways to Trindade's history of resistance in the sense of the bold actions that were taken by enslaved people. Of course, not all resistance to slavery was so bold. Day-to-day resistance was by far the most common form of opposition to slavery, whether it be through feigning illness, staging slowdowns, pretending ignorance, deliberate carelessness, arson, sabotage, breaking tools, these sorts of expressions while they reinforced previously held perceptions of enslaved Africans at the time, they also were ways of enslaved people to express their alienation and to sort of carve some level of space or breathing room or to give themselves some sense of catharsis in that brutal period

and so what we see is a sort of continuum of resistance from that sort of individual level of slowing down or feigning ignorance or whatever, to the sort of broader cultural methods of passive resistance, such as cultivating and passing down culture and cultural memories to the more bold aspects of resistance, such as revolts and rebellions and revolutions. And of course, there was the practice of maroonage, both petite and grand maroonage. Petite maroonage was an effort by individuals or groups of enslaved people to escape from their plantations. Permanently, sometimes, but usually for a limited amount of time.

To escape mistreatment, to negotiate better treatment, or to even just catch a break, honestly. Grand maroonage is more commonly understood and recognized, where communities of fugitive slaves would establish communities on the fringes, in the swamps of Louisiana, for example, or in the mountains of Jamaica. And these maroon communities have been established since the very beginning, since the early 16th century, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish. They would often unite with Amerindians, whether it be Tainos or Kalinagos or Guajanatabes, and unite with them in their resistance, in carving out settlements or strongholds of safety. For example, in 1546

in Hispaniola, there were over 7,000 Maroons among a slave population of 30,000. After the island was split between the French Santo Domingo, which is now known as Haiti, and the Spanish Santo Domingo, which is Dominican Republic, in 1697, Maroons took advantage of the hostility between France and Spain to maintain settlements along the border between the two throughout the period of slavery. In addition, there were maroons in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and in some cases with Puerto Rico. Fugitive slaves from the Virgin Islands would literally set sail to Puerto Rico to settle and escape the enslavement there. In Jamaica, of course, there were many maroon communities. And in fact, there is still an active maroon community in Jamaica to this day that has persisted and maintained their traditions. In St. Kitts,

in Antigua, in Barbados, in Martinique and Guadeloupe. All of these islands have had maroon communities established. However, as European cultivation of the islands increased, as Europeans ventured further and further into the islands, into the depths of the islands, it became more and more difficult to establish maroon settlements. Because if you look at, especially some of the smaller islands it's kind of difficult to hide or to establish any sort of sustainable community on the fringes of an island that you could easily jog from one side to the other or you know walk from one side to the other of course even on those smaller islands

there were still attempts to maintain maroon settlements such as in saint vincent or dominica in saint vincent the garifuna which are an indigenous group mixed who mixed with africans preserved their depend their independence against both French and the British, and they ended up spreading to, if I recall correctly, Central America as well, and so the Garifuna community is still very much alive and well to this day. In Jamaica and Cuba and Guadalupe and Hispaniola, marine communities were able to last longer because they had um more mountainous terrain to hide in particularly in jamaica um but there were also maroon communities on the south american mainland you know in brazil there was the famous maroon community or quilombo known as palmares

which has existed for nearly 100 years from 1605 to 1694 they resisted invasion by both the dutch and portuguese and had at least 10 000 organized milit um members ready to defend their um population they were governed by a king who used the political traditions drawn from Central Africa, but they unfortunately were eventually destroyed. In the Guyanas, French Guyana, British Guyana, which is now called Guyana, Dutch Guyana, which is now called Suriname, Maroon communities were also able to establish themselves and they still persist to this day due to the Amazon rainforest

and the riverways that allowed them to conceal themselves from colonial encroachment. Of course, in the US, there were also maroon communities like the Black Seminoles of there were also maroon communities like the black seminoles of florida or the maroon communities in um i believe it was louisiana in most places of course maroon communities were not very large um or often did not last very long. They were usually small guerrilla bands led by an elected chief. But of course, these small bands maroon communities and they were guarded

and they had their settlements guarded by ditches and stakes and secret paths. And these settlements communicated with each other while remaining isolated so they could grow their own crops and hunt and fish and trade in peace, sometimes with other islands in order to prevent again capture and destruction i think there's a lot that we can learn from the different forms of resistance small and large that enslaved people undertook throughout the period of colonial. And expansion and enslavement. Elements of their. Practices that I think could be. Applied to.

Today's struggles. Do you have any thoughts. Before we wrap. One thing I kind of want to plug. Is Russell Maroon Schultz. Wrote a really interesting. I. I don't know exactly what the the name for a essay i guess called the

dragon in the hydra which is yes study yeah yeah it's called dragon the hydra study of historical study of organizational methods and it's about basically a comparison of like different different kinds of resistance to uh colonialism and enslavement that talks a lot about the maroon movement talks about sort of the the the the problems that these sort of like highly centralized top-down movements ran into versus the kind of stuff that the that these sort of more decentralized uh less hierarchical maroon movements face and it's it's really And I, it's pretty short, so everyone should just read it.

Cause it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He covers the U S Haiti, Suriname and Jamaica. And you know, how those different maroon communities dealt with their conditions.

I'm pretty sure you brought this from prison too. If I'm remembering my timeline history correctly. Yes, I highly recommend folks give that a read. I mean, I don't want to give the impression that maroon communities were these like valiant utopias. I mean, in some cases, maroon communities were manipulated against the other and often in exchange for maintaining their autonomy they were made to sign treaties where they would have to turn in

fugitives so it was not by any means a perfect situation to be in but they were trying to carve out their survival yeah I guess do you want to plug your stuff? so you can find they were trying to carve out their survival. Yeah, I guess. Do you want to plug your stuff?

So you can find me on Twitter at underscore St. True and on YouTube, St. Anderism, where I have lots of stuff. I mean, if you were interested in, for example, the details of how spirituality played a role in African resistance, I have a video on that. If you're interested in, you know, how Oluwadah Ikwainu established the Sons of Africa group and how that was one

of the foundations of what eventually became the Pan-Africanist movement. I have a video on Pan-Africanism that you could check out. So yeah, that's it for me. That was great. I didn't know there were still Maroon communities, actually. Yeah, yeah. The one in Jamaica, the one in Suriname, they are still very much alive and well.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Ah, St. Andrew, thank you for that. That was wonderful. And that's our episode for today. So go home and doom scroll for several hours, probably. Or do something productive. Or take a nap. Go outside.

Take a nap. Walk outside or something. Pet a cat. Bake some cookies. Hand out food to people who are hungry. Bake some cookies and then hand out the cookies to people who need it. Or Doom Scroll. All productive things that are going to be good for you.

Some significantly more productive than others. Yeah. All right, friends. That's the episode. Peace. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

rushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him or his relatives in Miami imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom at the heart of it all is still this painful family separation

something that as a Cuban I know all too well listen to Chess Peace the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to

audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Robert, too bad. Try harder. No, that's how you start a podcast.

This is It Could Happen Here. That's right. That's Robert talking. That's right also. With us today is Christopher Wong and Garrison Davis. Do your podcast. Yeah. Uh-huh.

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

Yes. Yes. So it's an amazing time, like an unprecedentedly incredible time to be on Twitter right now. That said, we're going to talk about Nazi catboys today. I've seen everyone's posts on the subreddit being like, why aren't you guys giving blow-by-blows about the war in Ukraine? No, no, no. This is the most pressing topic.

And we're going to talk about Nazi catboys. Previous to the Chris Rock slap, this is the most pressing topic of the 21st century, is why there's Nazi catboys. And now we're going to talk about it. Well, because, I mean, the roots of the 21st century is why there's Nazi catboys. And now we're going to talk about it. Well, because, I mean, the roots of the crisis in Ukraine are the different kinds of catboys that Zelensky and Putin

are. Yes, Robert, that is true. We'll mock some fan art up. It's going to be fine. I'm sure we'll find some horrible fan art, yes. Oh, God. Yeah, we have to figure out if Putin's ever watched Helsinging and then we'll be able to know so i don't know what that means but okay you're you're about to find out oh great

so we we have gathered here today to talk about to talk about uh the curious case of why there are nazi cat boys um throughout throughout 2020 and 2021 tiktok and twitter pushed femboys and cat boys into kind of the cultural mainstream plunging these once much more niche subcultures out of the dark depths of fortune reddit tumblr and discord and uh the the latest rebirth of these kind of gender-bending communities, it's pretty socially progressive and affirming. Generally, most femboys, catboys are lefties. There's a whole bunch of Twitter communists. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of catboys who like Stalin or something.

But they're generally more on the left. But they're generally more on the left. But, but, but, for those who've dug deeper into the history and origins of these internet subcultures, you may have found a dark, racist, and hateful underbelly. So we're going to talk about that today. I do have to note, Garrison, as soon as you said that, I found a Stalinist catboy. It's an incredible account so the their their background image for their twitter account is a picture of deng xiaoping and the ayatollah of iran having a meeting oh boy their their pfp is a lavender haired uh it's like a it's like an anime pick her avatar cat boy yeah yeah with like a soviet hat and then marxist leninist bisexual cat boy stalin did nothing wrong at north koreastan incredible

this is why the left will never win oh that's perfect i'm pretty sure this is like illegal in most of those countries it's well it's all in would have had this person shot in a the second someone tried to describe a cat boy to joseph stalin he would have had this person executed oh yeah oh wow yeah i see i see it now that is that is intense outstanding you know the thing is this type of thing is not going to be uncommon we're going to be again we're going to be going into like actual fascists who are also catboys and obviously they would have been uh would have been killed for being degenerates as well but now we're going to kind of talk about how this how this kind of came to be

and i've been writing this for like over a year actually i've interviewed a few people for this that have kind of contributed to the script and initially this was going to be conceived as a video um and you can't really talk about these things in a video format without uh dressing up like uh a silly character so i am i'm wearing uh a very actually a very very high quality cat boy outfit right now which the audio will just have to you'll have to you'll have to see it through the audio so good luck with that synesthesia um yeah yeah yeah so you are at the same time you've done that enough that i don't know that anyone really noticed i've never dressed as a cat boy for recording before you dress as something every other recording that is true i dressed as something i generally dressed as something so first section

one section one what is what is a cat boy what is what is this um so but first of all a few ground rules we'll be circling back to often um one not all cat boys and femme boys identify as lgbt or queer um and two gay people can still be racist. These are two points that we're going to be coming back to over the course of these deep dive episodes. So, first things first, let's define what a cat boy is for all of the boomers in the audience.

And if you are a boomer listening to this, how? How did you find this? Why did you choose to listen to this? Garrison, the instant I became a boomer was the first time you choose to listen to garrison the instant i became a boomer was the first time you tried to describe explain cat boys to me like i i i suddenly developed a strong opinion on hr haldeman because of because of you so that was a nixon administration joke but most simply um a cat boy is uh this what i'm doing right now so someone who is kind of

kind of boyish who uh who who sometimes enjoys dressing in cat like apparel i guess it's like cat ears it is different from furries from and we will we will get into this um that's good i mean but i'm definitely less boyish than i first was when I wrote this like a year ago, now that I'm on recreational estrogen. But nevertheless, someone who's a boyish and dresses or likes to dress in cat-like kind of outfits generally on an anime trajectory of aesthetics. Now, this is different from furries for multiple reasons. The physical cat-like attributes on Catboys are mostly confined to ears and paws, now this is this is this is different from furries for multiple reasons uh the physical

cat like attributes on cat boys are mostly confined to ears and paws sometimes with tails but it's it's iffy um whereas you know furries like to have like the full fursuit thing going on whereas cat boys they still have like human faces and they wear like human clothes so this is actually a very key difference which will lots of of maid costumes and yes a lot and the other big kind of recurring trope is that while catboys usually wear clothes is that they usually dress up

in something similar to like a french maid outfit or like different outfits that like anime girls will wear so like the tennis skirt thing but generally a maid outfit to anime trajectory. So despite the animal ears, right, despite like the furry cat ears, the cat boy or cat girl thing has much more in common with the femboy community than the furry community in a lot of instances. But more on that later. After some initial research into the Nazi cat boy meme, I decided it would be useful for tracing back the roots of this kind of odd online phenomenon to broaden the scope of research to include femboys as well, which is succinctly just cat boys without the cat part.

It's like boys or generally male identifying people who dress in like feminine ways. Not a lot of femboys will turn out to be trans. Not all of them do. A lot of femboys identify as straight. Uh, but you know, like to wear, you know, boys generally kind of in the twink variety who likes to wear skirts, dresses, whatever. So I'm about to move into section two, which gets a little bit more silly. Um, but, but yeah, so femboys more silly uh great it's excited this this doesn't get less silly as we go on but but yeah cap boys femboys femboys identify as male dress up in more stereotypically feminine ways there's a lot of similarity and crossover between femboys and capboys um but since femboys have more of an established online history uh including them in the research seems like the best way to kind of dig into the fascist femboy, Nazi catboy idea. So speaking of, section two, the racist femboy meme.

The past few years, there's been kind of a growing meme and perception across social media that femboys are really racist. And just kind of pretty fashy in general. Even really homophobic and transphobic in a lot of senses. As much as a homophobic or transphobic femboy may seem contradictory at first, but again, more on this later. So when I'm talking about this, going forward, I'm probably gonna be mixing words and terms like Nazi and fascist and alt-right or far-right. Now, not all of these racist femboys are what I would call Nazis by any means. And not all advocate for or even joke about genocide, but there were absolutely recruitment attempts from self-described Nazis. And the line between jokes and actual beliefs

is intentionally very foggy in this kind of internet subculture. So I'll kind of be lazily lumping together everything from racist to far, far right-wing folks for the sake of simplicity, because it's all like in the same spectrum. And like I mentioned at the beginning, not all femboys and catboys identify as being queer and gay people can still be racist. These are points we're going to be circling back to a lot.

So at this point, the alt-right femboy meme has kind of actually overshadowed the actual phenomenon of it happening, right? In the past few years, the popularity of leftist femboys has skyrocketed. Yet, if you still do digging on like Twitter or Discord, you can indeed find users who appear to be femboys, but are also everything from racist to just openly fascist. Now, naturally that leaves people wondering how can one have such a kind of contradictory lifestyle and belief system,

which leads us to section three, the internet. And that's it. That's kind of, that's kind of the answer. We, that's, we can kind of pack it up here.

Um, we, that's the answer. It's the internet. That's, that's why, that's why this has happened. So it's Al Gore's fault

is what I'm getting out of this yeah sure Garrison are you have you been caught up on why people say Al Gore invented the internet on where that joke came from no oh boy

you have to remember Chris Garrison oh no I was so there was like Al Gore Oh, boy. Oh. You have to remember Chris Gerson's. Oh, no. Right. You were born after 2000. I was born after 2000. I was. So there was like Al Gore was among a bunch of different people who like voted to fund some of the different government kind of projects that became the internet, right? Like you had the ARPANET and shit, all that stuff.

Like he was one of the people who like pushed that. And then in the debate with George Bush while running for president in 2000, he basically made some claims that you could uncharitably translate as him saying that he invented the internet. Cool. He didn't actually say that. It was more like he was saying, well, I supported from an early stage the development of the internet but it got turned into like al gore claimed to have invented the internet because it was funny yeah yeah yeah abstraction essentialism yes and and so now that's that's that's the joke is is even though he he didn't really he just was not you know anyway so there you go so we can we can blame nazi cat boys on on al gore great

absolutely well that that does it for us today um you can find us on wait okay we still have a few we still have like half an episode to do um that's good all right well here's here's speaking of uh of of algor and the internet here's some ads brought to you by the internet oh boy those ads were so good, they made me want to be a cat boy. Okay. All right. Wow. Moving on.

If you're in any way familiar with fascism, you are probably aware that one of its more consistent traits is that it's notoriously ideologically inconsistent. traits is that it's notoriously ideologically inconsistent. So for this project, I interviewed multiple people who have a more personal history in the Catboy and Femboy online communities than I do. So those interviews, plus my own online digging through like hundreds of threads from various forum websites. I've literally looked through hundreds of Catboy posts on 4chan. But doing all that has been very helpful for understanding kind of this intersection of politics and subculture. And since I did all this research,

you don't need to. So there you go. But one of the first kind of big takeaways I had after the research and interviews is that the Nazi femboy, Catboy thing is not actually unique at all in terms of internet radicalization. It just has some aesthetic abnormalities

that can confuse onlickers or normies, which makes the internet phenomenon seem more outlandish than it actually is. But before we dig deeper into this litterbox of hate, I would like to divide the femboy and catboy kind of racism spectrum into actually two succinct categories first. kind of racism spectrum into actually two two succinct categories first um we have we have type one which i'm calling the femme fash people who are initially into the femme boy community and aesthetic and then got introduced into far-right politics online and then we have type two the fash femme people who were already into far-right politics and only then got introduced to the femme boy community online so i i usually break down lots of instances

of fascists mixing with various subcultures into these similar two categories of people starting off with politics and then getting into the culture, then people starting off with the culture, then getting into politics. I think it's useful for understanding a whole bunch of how there's differences

between different types of fascist people in various subcultures. So these two types I'm going to be using to help talk about these different kind of strains of the fascist femme boy. For now, we're going to focus on the first one, the femme fash. So let's wind the clocks back, let's say, a decade. Broadly, gay people can't get married. And to most kids, trans people are ost say, a decade. Broadly, gay people can't get married. And to most kids,

trans people are ostensibly a myth. So what kind of person's going to become a femboy in this type of environment? Simplest answer is like a certain sect of social outcasts and anime nerds, as well as some people who maybe don't consciously know or accept that they're queer yet. Really, the only way to get initially exposed to the femboy aesthetic back then was via anime, manga, hentai, porn, and, you know, select video games, specifically multiplayer games, and random internet browsing, right? This is how you're going to get exposed to this type of aesthetic. In fact, one of the, probably the oldest example of a Nazi cat boy is from an anime called Hellsing, where they had this Nazi cat boy character

who was the source of a lot of Nazi cat boy memes on 4chan. It's a very popular meme figure, and this is, I think, a lot of where that aesthetic tied to fascism actually really starts from. But of course, there's a lot of fascist fans of anime in general.

So the type of aesthetics of femininity that anime kind of presents get used by fascism a lot, even among their more cottagecore styles. It's still that very patriarchal type of femininity that is popular among Japanese animation. So now the reasons that someone might be drawn to this specific community can vary from person to person. Maybe they just don't feel as connected to like the hyper macho masculine style that

American culture promotes. Maybe it's a way to get attention and validation, or maybe you just like wearing skirts or find it kind of hot. There's always the possibility that someone is trans or gay and they just don't fully know it yet. This is the case with a lot of these people, actually. But some of you may be surprised to hear that before our modern TikTok femboy craze, most femboys did self-identify as straight and cis.

There is a lot of reasons for this, including increased homophobia and transphobia back then, plus non-binary was hardly even a thing, uh, like culturally at that, at that point. Um, one of the people I interviewed for this project talked about how some of

the cis straight femboys he knew back then now do identify as trans or queer. Um, but back then that wasn't really the case. Um, the other person I interviewed for this called themselves a cisgender femboy at the time of the interview, but has now since come out as trans. So like it says it is definitely a recurring pattern,

but it's not a thing for everybody. Like there is definitely like a lot, like a lot of these people do call themselves straight, even still now. Um, and that is something that a lot of kind of people don't have a, don't have the easiest time kind of comprehending. That's what I'm going to, what I'm going to kind of try to get into. So let's say you're a kid, a young teen in like 2011, you're getting into anime and video games. What kind of websites are you going to gravitate to, right? You're going to gravitate to Reddit, you're going to gravitate to 4chan, especially in like 2010, right? These are kind of the cultural meccas of those types of subcultures. So what is prevalent on these websites?

Well, on 4chan, we have SlashB, which is their random channel, which also has a NotSafeForWork designation. And it was often flooded with femboy pics. And since there are so few female users of that site, you see a lot of hentai and occasionally boys dressing up like not safe for work female anime characters, just because there's people still like femininity, but there's so few actual girls using those sites that the femininity that you see is either through anime or it's through kind of cross-dressing. Then there's also the slash D page, which is just completely dedicated to hentai. So you get a lot of that type of anime style of femininity

through that type of appropriation and fetishization on the slash D page. So there's a decent chance that anime and gaming nerds that browse their interests online will get exposed to femboy stuff at some point. Nowadays, it's Discord,

used to be 4chan, used to be Reddit. So it becomes this type of figure-infinity loop of people who are exposed to something and then start propagating it, then get exposed to new people to it, and it's this continuous cycle. Because if you're a kid who discovers they kind of

like this super niche, almost taboo thing, where are you going to go to find other like-minded people? You're going to go back to online multiplayer gaming, Reddit, and 4chan. It's all the same circles. So even if you don't get exposed to it in places like 4chan, you're probably going to end up there or somewhere similar regardless. And the other thing that's important to talk about, which is going to talk about how the femboys start getting into politics, is who else is very prevalent and actively recruiting on these types of sites? On multiplayer gaming, on Reddit, on 4chan. It's Nazis, right?

The people who are into very far-right politics try to mask some of their beliefs initially in humor and memes. A large part of internet radicalization is done through memes, especially back in 2010. There's so many. Memes as a social and recruitment tool were very, very common, especially if you're on an image board.

That's the whole point, is that you're sharing images. So a big part of this over-representation of racists in the femboy community was simply the online proximity between these groups of people, between the femboys and then the fascists on 4chan, early Reddit and certain online games, whether it be like Second Life,

whether it be like MMOs, you know, all these types of places. Any place that you can like design your own character as well. You got a lot of this type of anime femboy type thing. Because a lot of these games that are made in Japan can give more feminine options for male characters. Or just have catboy ears and stuff available as a cosmetic option. like ears and stuff available as a cosmetic option so a lot a lot of this fetish fetishization that we see on 4chan and on the and in the early 2000s and 2018s is now is now applied to discord like this did kind of carry over uh 4chan's obviously not the kind of cultural behemoth that it used to

be a lot of this stuff just happens on discord now um where you can kind of cultivate online communities that are more self-contained so So throughout the entirety of the 2018s, fascism was pretty successful in festering among nerd spaces, right? Nerds and geeks of many types, whether that be gaming or anime, or these more like esoteric communities. Esoteric as in like niche. But these communities, generally they attract people who are more disenfranchised, right? And femboys generally feel disenfranchised in one way or another, which just pushes them into this, you know, less mainstream subculture. At this point, they could be pretty easy targets for fascist recruiters to start suggesting that maybe some of their problems in the world

are actually coming from feminism, immigrants stealing jobs, affirmative action, and slowly leading into talk of IQ and racism and anti-Semitism. So for those who found these ideas initially abhorrent, it can be explained that all this talk is simply edgy jokes and irony attempting to trigger the normies, which is a big part of that type of propagation of this type of humor and then politics masters humor on these sites and on these gaming chats. This isn't unique to femboys or cathboys in any way, right? The more people I interviewed and the more kind of old forums that I read, I started to actually see stuff that seemed much more familiar.

And there's a lot of parallels between this far-right femboy thing and the far-right furry phenomenon, which I know Robert and the far-right furry phenomenon, which I know Robert and the Worst Year Ever podcast put together two episodes that do a great job kind of talking about the far-right furry. The only real episode of the worst year ever that we ever got to do. Yeah. But yeah, could you, I guess, just briefly kind of talk about the furry kind of thing and how that – because there's a lot – even though these cultures are different between femboys and furries, the tactics that fascists use to get into these communities is exactly the same. And it kind of plays on the same tropes. Yeah, I mean it's weird.

Yeah, I mean, it's weird. So you've got, I think it kind of harkens to the fact that like whenever you have a fandom, no matter kind of what the fandom is about or the message of the media, it's about you're going to have like Nazis in it. And that's obviously like Star Wars, right? Where the point of Star Wars is empire bad, empire basically spades nazis bad guys and there's a whole bunch of people who have just like made that into their life and get tattoos of the imperial sigil or whatever on their fucking chest uh or you've got like disney movies where like there's these there's weirdos who will take far-right nationalist messages out of like every like everything everything has its nazis the punk community right punk music is supposed to be anti-authoritarian and kind of our audience may have missed out on aspects of.

But like early on in the internet, and I'm talking like the first decade of actual internet culture from like 1995 or 96 to like 2005 or 6, which is really the first decade of like mass internet culture, the punching bag of the entire internet was furries. Like they were the people that like it was the safest to make fun of, jokes about like killing them, all sorts of really fucked up shit. And so I think they developed kind of this very strong defensive impulse within the community. And so while every subculture has their Nazis, the furries have gone kind of the furthest in documenting and, um, working to like ostracize those people.

And they've done, they're on the level with like punks in terms of the, the degree to which they have, like that has become kind of a guiding principle for a lot of furries. Um, yeah. Is that kind of what you were looking for? Yeah.

Because a big, a big, and the thing you mentioned about like furries being such the punching bag. Oh God, yeah. That's something that Nazis even definitely kind of

grasp onto as a way to do grooming and recruitment, right? Is if fascists can present themselves as friends to these people who are always punched down upon, then they can kind of put them into their in-groups, right? They can support them,

give them a sense of validation, give them a sense of community, tell them that they belong. You're always going to be kicked out of real-life social groups, right? You can only exist here with us. We understand you, right? They can kind of foster this thing, even though obviously it's dealing with things that are not the most cis and straight thing in terms of regular heterosexuality. A lot of furries are straight, but in terms of the way they approach that is definitely different than a lot of regular people. So white supremacists and different fascists can grasp onto this kind of disenfranchisement and offer this sense of community.

Be very friendly initially, being very kind of open to these people and start – the term would be like red-pilling them, right? To talk about that a lot of their social issues are actually the fault of SJWs, talking about all of these Jewish bankers. You can start crafting the propaganda very carefully if you're friends with them first, and then only start slowly introducing them into your more extremist view of politics. No one's really surprised

when an anime nerd or a capital G gamer starts spewing far-right talking points. But when a femboy does, that just seems off because like, aren't they also a degenerate? Right. Like, like it's like there is a bit of a cognitive dissonance there. And like, yes and no. Right.

You may be overestimating some people's commitment to the fascist cause here. Because a recurring pattern I found when talking to people with history in these communities especially if they're more of like the femme fash variety right starting up starting off with femboy aesthetics then getting into being racist and and like like pretty racist and then getting into fascism is that look looking back these people and they say like themselves and others all of their kind of parroting of racist and fascist talking points, especially online, was like they claim much more due to having to like fit in with these already pretty reactionary online spaces and make friends at seemingly one of the few places that people with similar interests gather.

You know, some people deep down don't really care about the political beliefs that much and were more so looking for a community. And it just so happened that back then in the early 20-teens, the places where these communities of outcasts found each other were also places that other outcasts used racism as a lazy, attention-seeking shock comedy and like the triggering of normies, which was basically like a sport on these forums. basically like a sport on these forums. Now, obviously, this is not excusing any abhorrent behavior or horrible things said, but that whole idea plus the act of grooming and the act of recruitment from Nazis made the nerdy outcast to fascist pipeline that we see today. That's really how it built up and became such a powerful tool around 2016 know, around 2016. But there is the other... All of this just generally more applies to the people who are into femboy aesthetics

and then got kind of railroaded into nationalism and to fascism, right? It's because they're femboys on these platforms. There's also racists on these platforms. So these things start to kind of mix. But there's still that other type of femboy Nazi, the one who started off online with far-right views and then discovered femboys and started to feel things. We'll be starting by talking about them next on part two. But I guess,

does anyone have any questions, at least to close off part one, about the more kind of fem-fash variety of people who are generally kind of more regular politically um but are into into like femboy and catboy kind of aesthetics and then and then get put into into into more reactionary ideas hmm uh stay off the internet yeah that's not a question but yes that is that is a that is a yes, that is a good mission statement. But yeah, in terms of like the – this topic can – whenever I bring it up, I thought about this a lot when I try to explain it to people. There is always a bit of like, how? That doesn't make any sense.

And I'll be getting to some of the more kind of semantics of it um in in part two but at least at least for like the initial initial kind of dive into how the online community aspect is used as such a powerful tool for people who are feeling so alone uh that just the the idea of there being an online community whether it be racist or not, is just super appealing. Because if everyone thinks that you're weird and an outcast, if these other people who are also weird and outcasts start kind of trying to make friends with you, then it can be a very powerful recruitment tool. Which then, of course, there'll be people

who eventually try to take them out of the whole femboy aesthetics in a lot of ways. But a lot of fascists also get into the femboy aesthetic because of the proximity issue, right? Because these things are so next to each other. Well, and the thing – the kind of important broader realization there, and this is something that a radicalization scholar named Scott Atron has been talking about for 10 years now, probably more, is that people get radicalized in communities. People – like when we talk about radicalization, like why – like I guess the other half of the explainer that I started this with being like every subculture has their Nazis. It's not because – like the reason every subculture has their Nazis is that subcultures are – like people get radicalized as part of communities, as part of subcultures. They don't get radicalized as individuals. Just like people don't – aren't just walking out in the world and decide to become a Nazi.

They become a Nazi because a Nazi reaches them in something they're already into, right? Like that's just the way it happens. reaches them in something they're already into, right? Yeah. Like that's just the way it happens. Yeah. There's definitely a large part of this is like a group of like group dynamics, especially on places like forums where you're, you know, trying to trying to get like this like attention battle.

And I guess the other big part about the femboy kind of idea, especially on image boards, is like it is such an attention seeking and validation seeking place, right? You you want you you want to you want to post things that get you a lot of comments likes upvotes whatever the kind of the metric is yeah um so people will do things that get them visibility even if even if half the people interacting with you are calling you a degenerate at least there's people still looking at you right at least you feel seen um and then the other half people will be like no it's actually fine you know so as long as there's that visibility and that sense of community then a lot of the more cognitive cognitive dissonance aspects can kind of be passed by but we'll we'll

get into more of that for for we sure will for for part two um anyway uh you can find us on twitter and instagram at happen here pod and cool zone media you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia you can find me talking about Catboys occasionally on Twitter at HungryBowTie and sound happy about it Garrett well it's you know I've been trying to edit down this episode

because the script was way too long I've been trying to make it more succinct the past few days so my my I am pretty going to be trying to make it more succinct the past few days. So I am pretty excited to close this Google Doc at the end of the day. Well, congratulations on all your hard work, Garrison. And listeners at home, go dress like a cat boy. And don't be a Nazi.

Yeah, I mean mean that's also important welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

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they're nazi cat boys um what is this podcast garrison it could happen here i'm talking about the that the shit together the the cat boys of nazis which did which did actually happen here they're actually we'll talk about how they actually happened um uh but before we before we get into the topic of fascists becoming femboys via exposure, because I, I do, we're going to start off by talking about kind of, well, generally the bulk, bulk of the episodes can be talking about people who are fascists who then get into femboy aesthetics, right? Last episode, we talked about the femfash, people who are femboys who then get into fascism. Now we're talking about the fascists who now get into femboys. Um, But before we get real into that,

I think it would be helpful to get a bit more into what these online communities were like in the 20-teens. Now, all this info is like a combination of what I've gleaned from interviews, direct messages, my own pulling up of old 4chan and Reddit threads. It may not necessarily reflect your own experiences perfectly, but it's the most in-depth I can do on an audio-only medium. Some won't be thrilled about this, but we do need to discuss traps and their place within the online community at the time. Okay.

Which means we must define – which means we first must define another term for the blissfully unaware. It's really heartbreaking, Gary, because when I was a child Garrison I know trap was just a house where you hid your drugs it is not a trap house this is a different type of trap this is before trap house turned into a podcast and a bunch of New York people

didn't know what a trap house was this is great heartbreaking but the term trap as we're using it here um at least when the internet originates in the early 2000s on image boards um specifically 4chan um and it got to be as it as it got more popular as a term got more kind of widely recognized as a slur specifically usually a slur against trans women um or a slur for uh, specifically, usually a slur against trans women, um, or a slur for like any like feminine presenting, uh, person who was assigned male at birth. So it's, it's, it's use and origins, at least on the internet comes from, uh, uh, people posting pictures,

usually from anime of very like feminine looking boys, um, alongside of admiral akbar saying it's a trap right so this this this is how this idea of the trap kind of started at least online i talked with some like other trans friends of mine they say that it definitely they in their opinion they they they remember it being a term even before the 2000s on the internet of being kind of more of a slur towards trans women um i can't find any kind of stuff online about that specific angle, but the term may be older than that offline, but at least the online use of it really comes from the Admiral Ackbar meme. So, of course, the it's a trap idea kind of implies some form of deceptions at play, right?

With these drawings that appear feminine, but may actually be depicting adolescent males or, you know, worse, transsexuals, right? Woo, very scary. So this soon got transferred over from being applied to anime drawings, to being applied to pictures, and then in-person encounters of real femboys or trans people. So, you know, it's as in, like, if you found someone that looks female enough, as the meme would go, to be attractive and later found out that they were actually a boy or they were a trans woman, the idea was like you were deceived. Thus, you must be on the lookout for any kind of potential attractiveness of femboys or trans women or else you too might be trapped. might be trapped um so this again this is it's it's often it's a very transphobic and it's like it's comparing femboys to trans women because these are these are not the same thing um

obviously this is very very hashtag problematic for a lot of reasons um but there's also the uh the the meme of the of our traps gay which is referring to a kind of like satirical debate around whether or not it's gay to find a femboy a male crossdresser or even a trans woman attractive um now the meme does riff on the whole like fellas is it gay thing um and gee whiz am i glad the fellas meme has surpassed the r traps gay meme uh yeah obviously obviously not only is the r traps gay thing pretty homophobic and transphobic um it's also tied to a lot of like real world violence against trans women by men uh all of the trans panic defense right the the whole the whole trap idea kind of does tie into the trans panic defense a lot of you know

men who claim they simply had to attack or kill trans women once they found out that she had a dick, right? Or maybe used to have a dick, not even anymore, right? It doesn't even matter. It's more commonly or commonly called the trans panic defense. Yeah, yeah. So, and like the mere thought of that was so scary that they just, they use the trans panic defense in court when violence against trans women is enacted. Now, They use the trans panic defense in court when violence against trans women is enacted. Now, this is also much more – attacks against trans women in this vein are much more common on trans women of color than white trans women. That's another important thing to mention. But circling back to 4chan, Nazis, and femboys, in the 2000s and 2010s, trap was almost like a badge of honor and

self-descriptor for many femboys as well. Like, being able to trap or, like, you know, pass for a woman while having a dick was, like, the highest level of femboyness. It was, like, top-shelf femboy was being able to achieve this feat. Usually this was, you know, for the purposes of taking, like, lewd pictures of yourself and then having them this was you know for the purposes of taking like lewd pictures of yourself and then having them be you know well liked or spread across online forums um in my interviews with people from these online spaces longer than i've been around um it was it was like described to me by them that being like femboys are just trying to look feminine whereas traps are really trying to look like girls. And that is kind of like the distinction in these places at the time.

Now, you know, all while calling yourself trans was heavily discouraged and ridiculed in 2011, you know, 4chan, it was hard to be, it was hard to even be openly gay, like let alone transgender. So, but being self-described as a trap was a much more accepted. So a lot of these people would actually self-describe as this, or want to be self-described as this. So you like want to be at the point where they feel like they could say this. Um, and it's,

it's interesting. It's like a lot of, a lot of the attraction to traps, um, was in, in a lot of ways, genuine, but also all wrapped in this like joking,

ironic kind of exterior being like, oh, it's all like a bit that we're all in on the joke for, right? That's kind of how this was explained away. Another quote from my interviews is like, quote, if you actually admitted to being actually romantically attracted to traps or femboys, you would be heavily ostracized. People would say things like, oh my God, you actually admitted to being actually romantically attracted to traps or femboys, you would be heavily

ostracized. People would say things like, oh my god, you actually did it. Like, you actually did the thing. Because it is, it was like wrapped in this sense of irony. And any hint of sincere attraction was masked in this like ironic joke-like facade.

So at this point, 4chan is basically an amateur porn-filled cesspool of anime, uh, gaming, edgy jokes, and increasingly bad politics with pole really taking the shape of like the Nazi machine that it is today. So close proximity and probability is all it's necessary to make these racist

and femboys have this, you know, uncomfortable awakening. Uh, once they start seeing a whole bunch of pictures with people with dicks wearing, like, maid outfits. So with all these, like, edgy, ironic, and not-so-ironic jokes, the racists populating these chans, forums, and online spaces, it's only a matter of time before they get exposed to boys posing in Japanese tennis skirts and pink wigs, which helps create

this infinity loop idea of like femboys who get into racism and then fascism and then fascists who discover they like dick girls and when boys wear dresses. And then it's because these things are happening right next to each other. It's this whole phenomenon of self-contradiction that just keeps itself going. So we're now done this section, thankfully. I did not want to get into having to talk about all that stuff because I know people don't like talking about it. It plays on a whole bunch of extremely transphobic tropes,

but it is a big part of this kind of phenomenon. So now we're going to the next part, which is incels, Gamergate, and anti-feminism. So I'm not going to focus a lot on the idea of repressed queerness here, the idea of raging homophobes being secretly gay, because I think that idea gets a little too much attention when we talk about this sort of thing.

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

most individuals involved not only identify as straight and cisgender, but are also very homophobic and very transphobic, despite their overly queer behavior. Because it is queer in the original sense of the word. And I think there's much more interesting ways to analyze this beyond the repressed gay trope. We've already talked about some femboys and femboy appreciators adopting reactionary and conservative social beliefs to fit into the larger culture around 4chan and parts of the online gaming community to find this sense of belonging and, you know, shared community among

other people. But in order for the fascist femboy to be such a lasting meme and trope in and of itself, in my mind, there needs to be a bit of a stronger justification for the inherent contradictions beyond just finding community itself. And we will talk about that when we come back from our break. Here's some ads that are hopefully about how you too can go on amazon.com and buy a maid outfit and we're back okay we're gonna talk about incels um what of what am i good yeah yeah it's uh um incels or like involuntarily celibate people whatever i i assume people who are listening to this know what incels are um but the incel movement gained traction in the mid-2010s

alongside gamergate and the growing kind of anti-feminist and alongside a mass shooting it's probably worth acknowledging multiple mass shootings there's been yeah there was many there was there was also the toronto attack when uh the incel ran over people in that van there's been multiple mass acts of violence tied to the incel idea and how they why a lot of us just call them horny isis i've never heard anyone call them that before well they are i mean admittedly also this is this is also the same period where just ISIS is on Twitter. They sure were. Oh, those were the days. You just argue with ISIS. I would really want ISIS to chime in on the Will Smith debate.

No, you don't. I would love to hear. That shit sucked. No. I'm waiting for the Taliban's take. No. No. No.

No. No. The internet sucks enough. is violence against comedians justified the taliban weighs in at six yeah the taliban you could get the taliban arguing with isis k by god it could be done what a what a what a better world that would be especially if trump was still on twitter and could mediate oh god that would have been so funny oh if trump had been around on twitter it's the only time i've missed him just like oh yeah yeah that would have been that would have been the good shit

anyway um yeah incels there it's a pretty like ostensibly violent movement because it's all about making young men disenfranchised about their future, right? It's this fatalistic idea that they were promised things and now those promises are no longer being kept by society. So you are kind of doomed to live a pathetic life forever, right? So it is a very fatalist idea that really kind of encourages acts of violence. it is a very fatalist idea that really kind of encourages acts of violence. But the incel movement was gaining traction around this whole time, right, right beside Gamergate and the growing anti-feminist movement.

And I think the key to putting this puzzle together is in the hatred and resentment of women itself as like a thing. I think, think this is actually a key part of why the femboy and femboy fascist thing kind of caught on. Most of the loose organizing of these movements were happening on 4chan and Reddit, right? Eventually, eventually Discord as well. These were the same places that were home to the anime posting femboy amateur porn community. And one of the most common viewpoints at the time was that feminism is ruining women, right? It's disrupting the natural patriarchal order that many boys were taught existed, you know,

with promises of girlfriends and wives that are like rightfully theirs as some kind of obligation. Yeah. I mean, this is when we talk about like men being promised women, we're generally talking about like the way in which fiction kind of implicitly promises women as a reward for heroics or just being good. It's specifically like a cultural idea that is – Probably the best example of this, Star Wars, Luke Skywalker becomes a hero and gets to kiss his sister, you know? Yes, which is the driving motivation of many incels. Instead, they too can one day kiss their sister.

Thank you, Robert, for that succinct analysis. I used to be a films reviewer, Garrison. So if you're taught and raised thinking that something like this exists, this correct patriarchal order, it's almost like this exists, right? This correct patriarchal order. It's almost like this righteous truth. And if you then discover that that's kind of a lie and that

women are actually individuals with value not tied to the ownership by a man, some men have a very unhealthy, often volatile reaction to this realization or confrontation so some people then decide to do mass shootings some people uh kill people some people just do you know some people might just do you know like um uh intimate partner violence right say that they do

get a a partner at some point and it's not going the way they want then they just become abusive right so there's a whole bunch of ways this type of thing can manifest um so faced with the work of like not being a dick and trying to combat this ingrained misogyny and then having to like actually put effort into being attractive and desired a lot of men instead opt to either like attack outwards or withdraw inwards and sometimes a mix of both so with the with the fascist femboy thing a lot of this is like withdrawing inwards right a lot of these people are too introverted and too kind of cowardly to actually do like a mass shooting which is like that's that's that's that's probably good um but then with them and drawing inwards we're gonna it's kind of manifests

in this in this in this different way so when dealing with with this almost misogynistic nihilism, a lot of dudes really lost hope in the prospect of a future romance with women. So instead of putting in effort to adjust their personality, adjust their behavior, change their patriarchal outlook, and improve their physical appearance, many guys instead will retreat to their online communities full of other guys facing similar issues. It's easier to live in front of a screen and not have to face other humans in person these these people don't really have much substantial experience in real life interacting with the opposite gender um so these perhaps you know these these so-called straight guys that were drawn to femboys also

may have had just had like bad experiences with women they may have faced rejection and that rejection may have really brought them down um and then they assume that they're always going to be rejected by women because of like a few bad experiences and the kind of guys who are on these chans forums and reddit online gaming they tend to be generally more socially outcast people who aren't necessarily super physically naturally like attractive and masculine right you have like people everyone almost everyone can be attractive you just have to like put in work if you if you just never do that like a lot of boys are never taught how to actually make themselves look good so they're just kind of like just like well and also like attractive is is a much like they if you go on these incel forums they'll

focus a lot on like well i have you know there's these folds in the creases of my eyes or like the way that my nose is built makes it impossible, physically impossible for a woman to be into me. And it's like, no, like more than people, like there's all sorts of different preferences people have for physical things. But overall, like the number one thing you can do to be attractive is is to be a person that people like be confident and be like their life yeah like have like a good personality like learn how to do a variety of things and yeah just like have have a life a lot of these guys like oh that seems neat they think that they can achieve you know they think that women should flock to them even if they put in like no effort at all right if they just do what they're doing they feel like why is

this not working or the effort they put in is like ellie again elliot rogers the perfect example of these kind of people like the effort that he put in was he like made his dad buy him a really nice car and he dressed in expensive clothing and it's like well that's actually very few people are attracted to that and yes the people who are attracted solely to someone having a nice car and clothing probably have really weird specific like physical things they're also only looking for. Yeah. But that's because you were like, like that's not making yourself attractive as opposed to, I don't know, learning how to cook or learning a foreign language or

being an emotionally available person who's not purely viewing relationships in a transactional nature where you're paying for sex by being friendly. But you know what's easier than doing all that is just hating women. That's a much easier thing for these people to do. Oh, boy. So they often default to this. The internet's taught me one thing. It's that it's quite easy to hate women.

So while these alt-right hellholes like 4chan and Reddit, online gaming, right? Online gaming is full of misogyny. All these places really hate actual women. They still heavily fetishize femininity, right? It's still viewed as this glorious thing that's put on a pedestal, even though they hate actual women themselves. So feminine dudes can be femboys or cosplay anime to garner attention or social praise, you know, amidst some, you know, standard, you know, like people like, oh, you're faggots, you're disgusting comments.

But you can, they can still like cosplay and dress up and post pictures without being totally shunned by their fellow edgy alt writers, because it's kind of funny. And some of them may actually find it cute cute even though they may not admit it. Femboys often do have, I generally think, cute and effeminate features. For these people, a big part of the goal is to trick the brain into thinking that you're just looking at a girl that might just so happen to have a penis. So therefore, when viewing these pictures,

these guys are also getting a sense of familiarity with girl-like imagery while thinking that, like, they also might have a shot with interacting with this individual because they don't have a vagina. So that makes interacting with them, like, easier because there's, like, more things to relate to, I guess. you would see a lot of like role-playing and like role-playing of sexting and like role-playing of dating girls through this femboy framework uh just actually a really common occurrence as like and it was it was explained as like as like a sort of practice for imagining their future of dating women it was like it was like they're doing this to like practice interacting with women um so they're just gonna be role-playing dating femboys while being nazis but they're doing it so that it's like a practice so that they'll be better at dating women in the future it's like so that that's that's actually a really common thing um or like yeah like sexting

as as like yeah i'm just doing this for practice like i'm doing this so that i will be good at sexting in the future just doing it with these femboys on you know discord on 4chan whatever um because like all of like the whole femboy thing is still dealing with the patriarchal views of beauty right it's it's femininity as this sort of performance put on for the enjoyment of others and because it's about that like appreciating femininity itself it's seen as a lot safer than full-on homosexual attraction right because it's it's allowed if you're if you can appreciate the femininity then that's allowed to propagate despite also kind of being degenerate because the person generally femboys usually

self-idea is male but because it's wrapped in this feminine package, it's allowed to be appreciated. And for the people that did eventually come to terms with their queerness, the 4chan femboy thing allowed them to safely dip their toes into exploring homosexuality, bisexuality, exploring gender-bending, without abandoning the typical masculine feminine roles that were kind of raised to be comfortable with right it's still in the regular masculine feminine

like role sets but it's approachable because it's allowed to be done through this both both this like ironic joke but then also it's still it's still based off these patriarchal views of feminine beauty so it's it's it's it's a weird thing um it's it's that's a it's the other part of it that i like to explain to people because you're like oh that is like trying to picture fascists fake dating each other online so that they'll be better at dating women in the future it's just a very absurd idea it's i it's, I'm actually fine with this. But like, it makes, like, it makes sense. Like, like, it, like, I understand it. And you can, like, yeah, I, I, I get it.

And it did help a lot of people eventually realize maybe I'm not the straightest stick in the shed. Or maybe I'm not the straightest stick in the fascis. Yeah, I mean, everyone needs a safe space to figure out what they are. And I guess that even includes fascists, maybe because like, not because I want fascists to be fascists, but because maybe some of them through this weird role playing role will like get over some stuff and just like recognize that like,

oh, maybe I'm just like gay and I need to not be, like work on myself. And like, maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree with all this Nazi stuff. Yeah. No, because like, amidst like the Gamergate

and the height of the incel era, these guys felt more comfortable exploring their burgeoning sexuality in these male dominated online spaces right it's easier to relate to other males when they're when they're all like growing up coming of age dealing with dealing with these like feelings of like abandonment loneliness right if they

do this in these male spaces they feel a lot safer to express themselves you know whether or not they're full of fascists or other people who are very reactionary, because at least they can understand male desire, and they can relate to that and interact with people who are,

they can interact easier with people with dicks while wrapped in this feminine package, which is so much easier than the much more scary and much more elusive like females out there right it's it's that's kind of the framework that this was propagated through it's it's really interesting that it's like you have these people who like they're they're like they're they're transmisogyny is such that like they've escalated to a point where it circles back around yes it is so intense

it is such a there's so much going on yeah yeah it's like it becomes this like like I don't know it becomes like the

the fact that it's like conceptually impossible. For them, for just like a woman to have a dick like that has like circled back around and just completely come to define how they have gender in such a way that someone who is like just is performing gender like as a woman like to the extent that like they're trying to like they're trying to have people use like anti-trans slurs against them yeah there's it's an interesting there's there's so there's so much going on because yeah it's rooted in a whole bunch of it's people exploring gender in this weird way while also like relying on heavily like misogynistic uh trans misogynistic homophobic kind of ideas but it's it's also it's like it's very queer in this in like the way in the way they're going about it um because it's a whole bunch of like self it's a whole bunch of like self-justification it's a it's a whole bunch of like stuff around like what they view as feminine what they view as masculine what what they view like being a woman means um it is it is it is uh it's it's a lot yeah because like as as

like a more as like a genderqueer trans person i like i like look at them go through all this work and like wow i they could have bypassed a whole bunch of bullshit if they just were like less of a dick like if they're just less of if they weren't as horrible people they could have experienced these same things but again like they were they're in their own isolated communities they're they're dealing with these same ingredients just from this weird backwards way so like it's it's obviously very transphobic in a lot of senses but a lot of a lot of these people eventually realized oh maybe i'm actually trans so it's's this, it's like, I don't know. It's obviously not great in a lot of ways, but I don't know how to discuss it when saying like,

yes, it's obviously not great for how like trans misogynistic it is, but they're all working through some stuff. Yeah, one thing I will say about this is like, yeah, like if kids were actually allowed to be queer normally, like this shit mostly would not happen. Like, you wouldn't get so many people who get locked in these, like, who

are queer who get locked into these spaces, but then also, like, the only way that they could express themselves in these, like, narrow, isolated, right-wing spaces is through, like, this shit, or they're into the, like, just let people express themselves normally, and this, this, you can deny the fascist recruiting ground.

Like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting. Like, it's like when all, all these people are looking at interacting with fem boys,

I think a lot, a lot of the reason why they, they were able to play with these ingredients is that they did not experience the same like anxiety or like heightened stakes or native or like negative connotations in their mind that, that they normally do when thinking about women uh because women are just so other so especially like if you can rationalize this attraction to femboys as simply a prelude to dating like quote-unquote like real women in whatever like fantasy cottagecore future they might imagine then this idea is way more approachable garrison you're gonna need to explain cottagecore for the listeners.

I am not. We are having an ad break. In brief, it is this like return to tradition obsession you see among like chunks of the far right who are obsessed with the idea that if culture was the way it was in the 50s or in like the 1850s.

Even pre-50s, yeahs they would live on they would live on a small farm with their wife and children who would be utterly submissive to them and everything would be perfect but like the only thing in between them and happiness is that they're not able to live in a in a in a small like farm with a woman who they essentially own that's the gist i will say a lot of cottagecore syndics are also used by liberals and people on the left as well, just as like an aesthetic thing.

We all want to live on a small farm in the woods. The thing that makes it, the cottagecore that we're talking about is specifically the idea of, I want to own a woman and own my children and have like no power capable of like stopping me from doing whatever. Yeah, because like cottage on TikTok is pretty sanitized

and pretty much more of an aesthetic thing, less tied to those patriarchal kind of structures. But anyway. Like everything we're talking about, there's the version that's Nazis and there's the version that's like, boy, it sucks living in a $4,000 a month apartment in New York City that I share with nine people.

I sure would like to live on a cottage in the woods. Anyway, speaking of living in a cottage in these woods, if you buy these products, it'll get you closer to your cottagecore lifestyle. So here, give it a listen. We are sponsored entirely by the concept of living in the woods. By Big Cottage. Yeah, Big Cottage. Yes. The cottage industrial complex. All right, we we are back and now we're talking about the point of the nazi cat boy debate that everyone i think who is familiar with this topic knew was coming no no breakdown of nazi cat boys and the nazi cat boy phenomenon is complete without talking about nick fuentes and uh cat boy cammy so nick fuentes yeah this is uh this this is probably the part of the show that everyone's been waiting for um i don't know that most people would know to be waiting for this

but yeah nick fuentes is broadly recognized by our audience so in short if george lincoln rockwell has the permanent body of a 17 year old boy um that would that's nick fuentes uh as many of you know nick fuentes is a white nationalist live streamer and political activist that runs the fascist america first organization uh he's known for fostering a farther right conservative base than say ben shapiro or turning point usa um and has pulled stunts like sending his fans called Groypers to Turning Point USA events to take over the Q&A sections and basically ask Charlie Kirk why he isn't more fascist. Yeah, so he runs this organization mostly known by doing his daily live streams. He's been doing this since he's like 16 or 17 years old. nonsense and it's kind

of a running joke or widely acknowledged secret that Nick is kind of gay based on the way he talks about women and based on what he said about his own dating history and snide comments from fellow homophobic Nazi friends has led a lot of people

to this conclusion that Nick may not be, again, the straightest stick in the fascists. Nice. Thank you, thank you. You did good there, Garrison. Thank you. Proud of you.

Proud of you for that one. And a significant contributing factor to this questioning of Nick's sexuality is due to his 2018 to 2020 Catboy arc. is due to his 2018 to 2020 cat boy arc um so so this this arc begins in january 2018 um finally giving our audience the important important news this is what you need to know people that month uh nick created a cat boy themed channel in his own america first discord server hell yeah he did uh with nick mess with nick messaging post cat boys in here please with god with weird capitalizations throughout the throughout the thing so nick cheered on along with other people

posting pictures of various cat boys from pop culture and catboy edits of nick fuentes himself um one america first server user posted catboys are trad and which means like traditionalist in kind of the sense that like Nazis are traditionalist. That's what that person is saying. He also posted which is very funny. He also posted cat boys more like cat boys. Oh god. So like again

Fuentes is like a Catholic fascist. Yeah. So that's the joke. Sorry. I'm losing it. I know. This is so funny you're you're out of control right now this is it is so i've i've looked through this nobody's arguing this isn't very funny i've looked through this discord server multiple times for the for the screenshots of i know you have when you have the catboy channel and it always makes me happy it is

it's one of the most funny things I've ever seen. As your friend, I'm always warring between wanting you to be happy and worried that this is a cry for help, but please continue. Eventually, Nick faced some pushback from inside the server for fostering degeneracy.

With others defending the Catboy channel by saying brotherly love is christian amazing outstanding see this is this is this is exact this is the good shit this is what we've been building towards as a civilization right here baby other people other people other people defended the catboy channel by saying women don't respect christianity your tribe's thottery always leaks out eventually good god yes uh that's that's that's the good stuff i got i got no comment just just perfect thank you but but because nick is fundamentally a coward he did cave under pressure and deleted the Catboy channel.

And we lost, I think, the America First movement today could be so different. This is why the cause of Americanism is doomed. This kind of cowardice. But as we will see... We'll cuck shit from Nick. Oh, absolutely. This whole section's about Nick Fuentes being thoroughly cucked. But as we will see, Nick continued to use the exact rhetoric I laid out in my incels, gamergate, and anti-feminism section while defending what he calls attraction to traps.

And we can, of course, we can apply this defense broadly to catboys and femboys, as Nick does. I'm going to try to I'm going to try to play a video about Nick Fuentes. Are traps gay?

Yeah, traps are gay. I've always maintained traps are gay, of course. You have sex with a man, it's gay. There's no getting around that. Now, that said, look, it's gay. I get it 100%. I agree. Now, that said, we're in times where women are not really meeting their obligations.

So I'm not saying you're not. Look, if you have sex with a trap, you're gay. No doubt about that. You should be ridiculed. you should be made fun of but it's a little bit different than if you did it like 20 years ago that's all i'm saying if you in the 1960s in the 1960s were banging a trap i would say what's wrong with you like i would say that now i would say that now i would say well you're some kind of sick freak we have all these beautiful girls and they're normal, you know,

and you have sex with a trap. What's wrong with you? But in 2019, it's like, well, it's a different circumstance, different options. I'm still disavowed. I disavow, it's condemned, it's gay, it's all that, but, you know, it's just different. I think everybody understands that.

Oh, my God. But I'm still disavowed, and I'm just saying we just have to have a little we just have to have a little nuance all right it's just a little nuance all right different times it's a different time i maintain strong disavowal strong disavowal do not do not do that it's gay it's immoral you're going to hell and it's weird and it's gross oh my god what's wrong with you yeah i haven't heard that one in a minute pearson i'm upset that was horrible you're i haven't heard femoid since the davis arini days which i know at home if you don't if you if you missed davis arini you missed the one brief moment where the far right was purely funny.

That was bad. So, yes, being attracted to traps makes you gay, according to him. But not really, because the female race isn't carrying their burden like it once did back in the 60s. Back in ye olde back in the 60s it's like it's like they've back in back in back in the old days of the 1960s it's like they've like almost gotten back to the like the the i mean i guess it probably still exists somewhere but like the the the thing you got with fascist sometimes where they were like yeah like i fuck dudes but i'm a top so it's not gay it's like they're like so close to getting back there.

Sure, buddy. Like, they're so close. And it's like... It's that, like, Roy Cohn kind of clueless. Yes. Yeah. And it's like, I think, like, I think once we get, like, just slightly, like, maybe, like, 20 more years out from, like, the evangelicalism,

I don't know. I mean, maybe it's research is going to be, like, a big enough heyday thing. more years out from like the evangelical evangelicalism as i don't know i mean maybe maybe it's research is gonna be like a big enough heyday thing but it's like i think i think if you had like 20 years where the right wasn't completely dominated by sort of evangelical homophobia like i think you would just get back there and well we oh we're already on that way and i mean it's but the the nick front has catboy saga does not stop here no no no no no i i am it is it is funny maybe the wrong word but fascinating that we are heading inevitably barreling towards this future where simultaneously homophobia is still a massive part of conservative

politics and conservatives are gay as hell like yeah that's absolutely something where we are speeding towards like a drunken family on the back of a four-wheeler about to break all of their necks at once in a crash in the woods so nick fuentes loved tweeting about catboys he did it a lot he sure did and for a while nick's catboy jokes and like memory was tolerated under his banner of like irony poisoned reactionary comedy but every ironic joke has its tipping point and that makes that makes enough people wonder is is this actually ironic uh and for fuentes that moment came when he live streamed a 10-hour date with a fellow fascist live streamer who went by the name Catboy Cammy. Now, first, let me explain who Catboy Cammy was at the time.

Then we'll get into the date. Thanks, Garrison. Glad we're doing this. Then we'll get into Nick Fuentes' brief alt-right cancellation. so tor brooks aka catboy cammy uh formerly going under the the username lolly socks so that's fun um is an australian fascist live streamer uh who first came to prominence by uploading clips of himself harassing users on the popular video chatting site oh mogli ogle me i never know how to say this one mogli mogul. A moguli. Yeah, I have no help for you here. People will know what I'm talking about. It's this randomized chatting

app that does video chatting with the randomized users. Yeah, it's O-M-E-G-L-E. I never know how to say it, but it's this. He would upload himself, videos of him harassing people via this chatting app.

In one of them, he dresses up in blackface while brandishing guns. He was trying to find black kids to taunt on this platform. Another one, he dressed up as a policeman and kneels on an effigy he made in likeness of George Floyd. He is pretty gross. He's a pretty horrible person. But for a long time, his bit was dressing up in anime costumes and dressing up as a cat boy

to then talk about neo-Nazi rhetoric while dressed as a cat boy. This was his funny bit that he would do. At one point, he streaming like 24 hours a day uh for 10 days for like for the days and days on end um and he was earning thousands of followers in places like us and russia uh and he became the seventh highest earning streamer on d live and d live was the popular live streaming platform used by fascists um in so in late 2019 was when Catboy Cammy popped up in America, initially catching the attention of Nick Fuentes. Over the course of a few months, he kind of made friends with various people in the American far-right internet sphere,

like Milo, Richard Spencer, Baked Alaska. But Nick Fuentes was his original kind of entry point into this Nick saw his videos online and was interested in what he was doing Nick said that he had a good sense of humor and he's good looking and demonstrated his repeatability that he's able to achieve viral moments

and retain a streaming audience so Nick became friends with him because he thought Catboy Cammy would be like a growing internet presence and wanted to kind of move his type of pretty racist and horrible joke pranks and try to give them more of a platform

to kind of frontline reactionary ideologies. So when Nick was getting familiar with Catboy Cammy, Cammy's online activities were mainly consisting of nick was getting familiar with catboy cammy cammy's online online activities were mainly consisting of dressing up as an anime catboy to do random like political debates or live streams or show up at like anime conventions to harass people um and doing like various gags and pranks uh one of the most uh infamous incidents as uh was when he was uh deep throating a massive horse cock dildo hooked up to a bucket of fake semen.

Good. Okay. Yeah. So in December of 2019, Catboy Cammy flew from Australia to go visit Nick. Where did they get the horse semen, Garrison? No, the semen was fake. Oh, oh, okay.

Gotcha, gotcha. It was a massive horse cock dildo hooked hooked up to a bucket of like fake semen right okay so just like cornstarch and i'm happy yeah if we want to go over recipes later i'm sure we can make it a whole episode but no i know how to make fake cum in uh december of 2019 catboy cabbie flew from austral Australia to go visit Nick Fuentes and then just proceeded to live stream the 10 hour totally straight hangout session with Catboy Cammy dressed up as a catboy the entire time. I mean, this does sound very straight to me, Garrison. They go to an arcade. They play games together.

They get food and milkshakes. They go clothing shopping and try on matching outfits, all while laughing and giggling the entire time. While driving and listening to extremely gay pop music, Catboy Cammy says to Nick that he reminds him of an ex. It's great. And by the end of the 10-hour stream, it's implied that they share a room for the night. Sure. I'm sure they did.

And it's 10 hours of pure, horrible Nazi flirting. And it's a thing. It exists. So as news and details of the live stream started to circulate, a wave of a wave of infighting among the alt-right and the groper's spawned some amazing articles and headlines from neo-Nazi news sites. There's a headline from the Daily Stormer called The Groper Revolution is Canceled After Nick Fuentes Reveals to be a Catboy and Gay Faggot. Which is pretty is pretty astonishing. Yeah. That sounds about right. Other great headlines.

We have Fuentes disavows cat boy after pressure from Trad News. If you're sitting down and for your movement that you want to take over the government, typing down Fuentes disavows Catboy, perhaps you need to think about some things. We got another headline as Catboy Cammy versus Richard Spencer. Because Richard Spencer tried to cancel Nick for this. Because Nick was getting more popular than him. And we have another great headline which is

Nick Fuentes' catboy BFF is a mockery to his sexuality anyway it's pretty good there's this great bit from one of these articles which I'll quote it starts off by saying, Is Nick Fuentes attracted to women?

If you trusted the plan, you wouldn't ask such questions. I will say that I don't think the 10-hour livestream helps King Nick of the Groypers at the moment. He had a good thing going by trying to promote

a more Christian and normal-presenting nationalist movement and was gaining a lot of traction until he ruined his image by associating it with this none of his various enemies did this to him either he did it entirely to himself so yeah um but like obviously like the point of this is not to like not to like put nick fuentes's sexuality on blast like, I do not care one way or the other.

It's not a problem. The problem isn't that Nick may find Catboys incredibly hot, but the problem is that he's, like, a Nazi and stuff and calls for the extermination of gay people while also doing all of this shit. And, you know, Nick still maintains that he isn't gay and gay people should be exiled from society and he would never associate with

homosexuals, blah blah blah blah blah. All while doing all this incredibly straight behavior. For an update on Catboy Cammy, later in 2020, Catboy Cammy made multiple appearances at Trump rallies and various other political events, going viral multiple times for screaming incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and openly fascist rants.

You probably saw footage of Catboy Cammy in 2020. He was just dressed as a regular person. But there were a few clips of him at Trump rallies that went very, very viral. there was a few clips of him at Trump rallies that went very, very viral. Um, and Nick even, uh, disowned,

disavowed cat boy, Cammy for bad optics, uh, during, during, uh, during these incredibly racist rants, he would,

he would go on at, at, at Trump rallies. Um, and then of course we have America, America first and, uh, and Nick Fuentes then being,

you know, an escalating part of the protests in D.C. leading to January 6th. We have the person alleged to have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop being in those America First Discord servers and grooming young boys by dressing up as a cat girl. So all part of this... part of i we this will get talked about later in like news articles and stuff this has not been talked about some people already

know about it but but yes um so it's all part of this same like nick fuentes cat boy sect of things of these these like people who call themselves trad cats who then do all this weird cat boy shit and yes the the person who stole nazi police laptop who was like an open nazi um was was grooming like minors on on discord by dressing up as cat girl by by dressing up as a cat girl um yeah so there's a whole bunch of this whole sphere of stuff you can find some incredibly dark dark corners um but nowadays in 2021 uh in the year of our lord 2021 uh femboys are way more of like it's oh like generally acknowledged to be like a kind of like a leftist like communist thing almost um like and i think the reason why this debate got so

i think the reason why the fascist like the fascist femboy debate got so kind of heightened in the past few years like ever since like tumblr banned porn uh there's been a migration of tumblr users onto twitter and a part of a part of this migration is not safe for users and content um including femboys and people who fetishize femboys and even fetishize racist femboys moving moving onto twitter right twitter, right? Twitter has become the new de facto Tumblr in a lot of senses. So the past few years, more normies have been exposed to these types of like off-the-cuff people. Then of course, TikTok has sent femboys into the mainstream because TikTok is also, it's not an image board, but it is a visual medium, right? Where you're

posting small videos of yourselves. So a lot of Catboy and Femboy content on TikTok. There was even this horrible article from August of 2020 by Vice called Introducing Femboys, the Most Wholesome Trend on TikTok as if Femboys were invented in 2020. Which is a mind-boggling article. But yeah, Femboys are now much more... If you take the Vice article as an example, Femboys are now fully mainstreamed, right? Femboys used to be a small subculture, but among Gen Z kind of culture as a whole now, femboys are very popular.

They are kind of, they are one of like the hot new Pokemons to collect. And I'm going to- Garrison, Garrison, that's cultural appropriation from millennials. You're not allowed to talk about Pokemons. I don't care. We own those. Just to talk about scale of memes here, I have some Google Trends on Nazi Catboys and Nazi Femboys.

And we see the biggest spike in Nazi femboy is January of 2021, which makes sense. That's when I started writing this script, actually. So yeah, for Google Trends, we had a massive spike in January of 2021, and it's kind of been decreasing since then. But still, you would see blips every once in a while. There was a small blip of Nazi femboys in 2017, a small blip in 2018, and then a small blip at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020.

Because people are alone and isolated, so they're doing this instead. And then, yeah, January of 2021, massive, massive spike. Same thing with a very similar to racist femboy it's basically the same exact trajectory uh we do get a pretty big spike in racist femboy in june of 2020 um and then another big spike of actually of november 2021 is the highest is the highest uh searches for racist femboy so it's still very much an ongoing meme of like a thing of being like yeah femboys are pretty racist it's still completely completely ongoing oh thank god yeah it is don't worry this is not this is not a closed case and that's good garrison i was really worried for a second no people people and this like i think i think if you're not extremely online you probably even

you like you might not know about this like this is like this is an actual discourse on twitter like oh yeah like this there will be like a week where the only thing people argue about is whether femboys are inherently racist which obviously they're not like it's it's i don't know so and the last thing i'm going to mention here is i don't know is in the is in the unicorn riot uh discord leaks when they leaked a whole bunch of information from lots of different fascist channels we have over a thousand mentions of catboys inside the unicorn riot fascist discord leaks

garrison i have a question for you yes do you think god stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he's created here on earth. So if you want to have a fun time, you can go to discordleaks.unicornriot.ninja slash discord slash search, then put in, put in Catboy. You don't need to do this.

It's not going to make you happier. Scroll through thousands of posts from these Nazi channels. It is not going to make you happier. We got stuff from like sargon of a cod the we have the discord channel domestic terrorism planning discord we got a catboy channel we of course have uh we of course have nick fuentes we got every whatever you would look for you can find it here um and that is that is the curious case of nazi cat boys so there there you go any any questions class garrison uh why did why did you do this to us because i thought it would be funny it it is on the on the inside it's funny i'm anyway happy well that is uh so yeah now i hope i hope you all have

a better look into why the fascist femboy meme exists and how people can have the cognitive distance in their own heads in terms of you know fetish fetishizing feminine attributes while still hating women and then leading into the nick fuentes cat boy craze that has swept the nation as a whole. So just OK, just just just be queer and a leftist. You don't have to do this shit. You do not have to wrap your brain in fucking 17 layers of bullshit of like weird misogyny and trans misogyny. You could just you don't just be gay and a leftist. No.

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

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

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