It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 37

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

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

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or whenever you get your podcasts. while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call

in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we spend all of our time talking about skincare. Now, personally, and a lot of people say this is a bad idea, I enjoy using concentrated chlorine with a little bit of ammonia. It just cleans the pores, it cleans the grout, it gets all of that pesky code out of your lungs. You know, an entire generation of British and German and French boys all agree chlorine gas does the trick. How are we doing?

What's this episode about? Hi. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we can maybe put them back together i'm garrison um i'll be i'll be leading leading this sode um with me is is chris and uh this this random person that we brought on uh from the street named robert yep um and we'll be talking about some things that are not great and kind of current problems. We sure will. So I spent a lot of my formative youth lurking, studying and kind of documenting some of the bad places on the internet,

you know, Nazi chat rooms, chan sites, Facebook hate group, you know, whatever, all the things. And, you know, growing up in Portland, Oregon, in like the 20 teens, this was this was something that felt kind of foisted upon me as a kid discovering my own queerness and coming out of an extremely homophobic, like insular Christian community. Meanwhile, in Portland, having, you know, self described fascist march alongside gay hating Christians on my city streets, Nazis murdering people on our public transit.

That put a lot of fellow scrawny gay kids to put on black hoodies and balaclavas to mace and fight far-right extremists that were like two to three times their size. fight far-right extremists that were like two to three times their size um but the problem is of course uh what what 100 pound depressed teens aren't aren't necessarily the best brawlers um under under some circumstances although they can handle a a fire extinguisher filled with paint pretty well that's true um but a lot of us also started doing like online research and stuff um to find like the names and addresses of like fascists and members of hate groups and all that kind of stuff. I still remember the kind of the thrill and the buzz of my first like big find as a baby online lurker. It was, I think it was, it was the leader of the hell-shaking street preachers who was living in Tillamook, Oregon at the time.

Oh, God, that fucking prick. That was the first guy he did. And I remember being very excited because, yeah, he was a massive asshole. So, yeah, he's like an extremely homophobic, quote-unquote, street preacher. Just a big old chode. Yeah. homophobic quote-unquote street preacher just a big old chode yeah but a lot of like this like online research work wasn't wasn't just cross-referencing social media posts with the white pages property records and voter registrations to send nice postcards to hate group members uh

time was often spent tracking the use of like memes and cataloging and sharing uh fascists plans for projects and events, keeping tabs on their current propaganda trends that online white supremacists were trying to push. And one of the things that I came across about two years ago was called Operation Pridefall. This was one of these, like, it was an organized campaign ran by people on 4chan, Discord, and Telegram. I came across it a few, a few days after the plans were published online. And if you already know what Operation Pride Fall is,

or have heard that term before, and if you're, you know, like me and we're on similar online spaces, you've, you've probably found the past few months of anti-queer propaganda, the massive increase in the gay and trans people are groomer shit and the shutters kink at pride discourse to be all very, very predictable, strangely familiar, like the worst case of deja vu

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

Because we haven't actually discussed the groomer stuff in depth on the pod yet. We sure haven't. You know why we haven't? Because I hate it. It sucks. It's just true. I mean, whenever horrible things happen in the news, I try to push back on just releasing an episode

immediately covering it in case we have something actually good to say. So we've kind of waited to talk about the groomer discourse stuff for a long time. And I think now is totally fine to do so because we've had months to let it simmer, look at the types of things they're encouraging, look at all of the physical action they're trying to do. And with Pride Month approaching, we're going to see a resurgence of it in the next few weeks here. So as mentioned in our week-long War on Trans People episodes, which was released like right before the new wave of the groomership accelerated. But in those episodes, we talked about the long history of conservatives and evangelical

organizations promoting the false narrative targeted at parents and, like, concerned citizens that gay people, especially gay men, are more likely to be child predators than their heterosexual counterparts. Along with the idea that queer people are out to, quote, groom

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

very least, if they use grooming within the context of turning your, again, absolutely, completely heterosexual child into a gay person, thus they would begin to hate you and resent you as a parent for your godly Christian values. They also consider that grooming. It's not actually just – As a general rule, the attitude is if they do not turn out to be the exact kind of weirdo Christian as their parents, they were groomed by somebody, and it's merely a matter of picking the topic, the person to blame. Yeah, and all of that sort of rhetoric was extremely popular through like the 80s, the 90s, and the early to blame. Yeah. And all of that sort of rhetoric was extremely popular through like the 80s, the 90s, and the early 2000s. But then came the noughts in the 2018s. And this kind

of had an attitude shift. And some of that started to go away. We got Queer Eye, we got Ellen, the rate of conversion therapy started to decline. It was getting banned in more states. There was more queer acceptance in certain sects of the church even. Of course, gay marriage went national in 2015. And eventually, being aggressively homophobic became not a good look. It was not...

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

gets passed down to the next freak down the line, which is trans people. So with that, the adage of like, the disgusting groomer freaks are going to turn your kids gay turns into the gender ideology freaks are going to turn your kids trans. It's all the same stuff,

just passed on to the next thing. And so we have that anti-trans and therefore anti-queer hate festering for a few years. And this inevitably opens up the door to just a revival of classic homophobia. Even liberals like Friend of the Pod and J.K. Rowling and lots of the original TERFs got to apply the same homophobic rhetoric to trans people and gender nonconforming folks, which then obviously results in that propaganda and rhetoric being used to attack LGBTQ people on a whole once again. So it's resurrecting these old homophobic tropes and just applying it to a new generation of queer people. tropes and just applying it to a new generation of queer people.

And so for this next part, we're going to talk about Libs of TikTok because they did play a big part in what some current discourse is today. And I promise we'll get to Operation Prideful here shortly. Just hang in there with me. But before we talk about, again, other friend of the pod, Libs of TikTok, do you know what else wants to turn your kids gay? Oh, are you talking about the Washington State Highway Patrol? Because yes, they absolutely do garrison. That's the one guarantee the Washington State Highway Patrol makes. They'll make your kids gay.

Okay. Libs of TikTok joins the fight. God, let's just take a moment to acknowledge how fucking frustrating it is that we have to discuss seriously Libs of TikTok. That it matters. I know. The worst. It's terrible. It's terrible. People always criticize the show for being like, why do they talk about all these dumb social media things?

So like, yes, I know that they're stupid but the the bad part is is that they actually matter yeah i mean maybe yeah we talk about it because of the 17 year old trans girl in texas who just got assaulted by like five dudes because she was blamed on the shooting and she was blamed for the shooting because in part of a lot of shit that libs of tiktok helped to stir up stir up they proved there was a market for it, that if you're like a right-wing shit grifter, attacking trans people is a great way to get engagement. Anyway, sorry, Garrison. Yeah, so Libs of TikTok is a social media account turned social media campaign started in April of 2021 by a Brooklyn- real estate agent named Chaya Reichik,

who, by the way, attended the January 6th attempted fascist insurrection. When violence broke out that day at the Capitol, she actually tweeted a play-by-play on a previous Twitter account of hers, posting videos from the crowd and talking about tear gas and rubber bullets being shot right next to her. And then after she left the riot, she tweeted on Twitter that the event was peaceful compared to a BLM protest. So that's – yes, anyway, five people died. We've now reached the part of – we're in tragedy of as farce of the thing that happens in every single state that goes fascist where all the fascists try to do a coup and it fails

and then nothing happens and then they take over the state like yeah years later except our version of that instead of like i don't know weird fascist yakuza guys it's the libs of tiktok it is the libs of tiktok so the libs of tiktok was around like the third attempt by RightChick to start a viral social media account. You know, they're saying third time's the charm. But in this case, it actually was. So the account's gimmick is reposting and often grossly misrepresenting select clips from quote unquote libs on TikTok. Big, big shocker. Big, big, big surprise. But more often than not,

that really just means posting videos of queer kids and trans people, captioning it with something reactionary, and then leading a targeted harassment campaign against those individuals. On May 31st, 2021, so just about a year ago, she made her first grooming-related post, just tweeting, STOP GROOMING KIDS, in all caps. This is the first time she tweeted anything related to grooming. The day before that, she tweeted a video of a trans person alongside the vomit emoji and a caption that just says,

Men should not wear dresses. you can't change my mind. Her first super viral video related to LGBTQ people was later in June, next month, during Pride, by posting a TikTok of a kid explaining the concept of gender fluidity, a pretty basic concept. But LivesUpTikTok commented, this is so messed up in so many ways. Her post racked up half a million views and indicated to her that the way to grow her little social media project

into a right-wing viral sensation was going to be with homophobia and transphobia. This is how she decided to continue her online career, essentially. She called the prominent LGBTQ youth suicide prevention group, The Trevor Project, a grooming organization. And towards the end of 2021 and into 2022, she kept using that term, grooming, groomer, at an ever-increasing rate, right? It starts in like May and June of 2021, continues throughout the summer and fall. And then in the fall and winter, she starts really kicking up all of the stuff around grooming and queer people. I mean, all of her posts are already mostly about trans people and like trans people at schools. Obviously, she was a big part of like the whole school board thing from last year. So

towards the end of 2021, though, is when the groomer thing started becoming more of a recurring trend. Quoting Slate, toward the end of 2021 and into the new year, Rajchek found her rhythm with memes and videos calling LGBTQ people and those who supported LGBTQ youth

quote-unquote groomers. She has even attempted to smear one of the most prominent gay men in the country as a groomer. In a deleted tweet, Raycheck's account accused Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's husband, Chastin, of grooming kids for his work at supporting LGBTQ youth organizations. This isn't fair, but I hate that his name is Chastin. I know. I don't like that name. I don't like that name. I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with anything.

I'm not a Chastin stan either, but yes. Oh, it's so shocking. But yeah, it's like finding the most prominent lippy gay man and being like, hey, these people probably groom kids. And that obviously riles up their base. Yes. kids and you know that that obviously riles up their base yes um she's she's called for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be quote fired on the spot uh which actually has happened since then uh sure has this has happened multiple times since since since this account has been has been launched um the account's popularity grew alongside uh last year's

racist homophobic and transphobic attacks on school boards across the country. She would often post videos of queer teachers and lying about them grooming kids into being gay or whatever. She was promoting organized harassment campaigns against those teachers, interspersed with tweets and screenshots of news articles about teachers who sexually assaulted students importantly not posting the article but just like a screenshot of the headline along with comments like funny how this keeps happening which is like neglects to mention that like all these incidents are from heterosexual teachers uh or like that one story from last year of a cop and

his wife who was a teacher working together to sexually abuse children like none of them are actually about gay people it's all i mean i'm not certain if a school resource officer has ever stopped a mass shooting but i know that something like 50 of them have been fired for molesting kids yeah so it's it's it's really it's really insidious because she's she's posting all this stuff about teachers grooming kids, queer teachers grooming kids, posts both of those things so it's like a to like to have this correlation for her audience despite them not actually being related because yeah lips of tiktok sure ain't posting about how cops should be kept away from kids for the safety of the children um they're they're never going to post about how many people who do the grooming

stuff have been arrested because like several of the organizers of this whole like gay people or like grooming kids thing like have been arrested for child abuse since this started, which. Yeah. No, it's not. It's never it's never going to matter. But, you know, posting and lying about queer teachers grooming children next to headlines about teachers sexually abusing kids to manufacture this correlation, which is of course false, but it's still highly effective. Now, believe me, I would love to not talk about Twitter nonsense, but unfortunately, Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok actually do play a massive role in shaping offline conservative politics. Libs of TikTok was very soon being interviewed by New York Post, being boosted by Joe Rogan, going on Tucker Carlson. Other Fox

News hosts like Jesse Waters began featuring content straight from the Libs of TikTok Twitter feed, and Tucker encouraged his viewers to follow the account before it's banned if you want to know what may be happening in your child's school. Last March, when Libs of TikTok posted a video of a woman teaching sex ed to kids in Kentucky, like, you know, preteens or whatever, she called the woman a predator. And the next evening, the same clip was featured on Laura Ingram's Fox News program with the host saying, when did our school, any of any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals? grooming centers for gender identity radicals. So yeah, this is just content straight from Liz's TikTok being put onto the most watched news programs in the world. And as we'll see, also being taken in by some of the most powerful conservative politicians. Mainstream conservative politicians quickly joined in in the tooting of the Libs of TikTok

grooming horn. Obviously, Ron DeSantis is a big, big part of this. One of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' top aides and press secretary is a huge fan of Libs of TikTok and is in frequent communication with them. Quoting the Washington Post, quote, by March 2022, Libs of TikTok was directly impacting legislation. Ron DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pershaw, credited the account with, quote, opening her eyes and informing her views on the state's restrictive legislation that bans discussion of sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, referred to critics as the Don't Say Gay Bill. The bill has been, unquote.

So this bill has already been used to get middle school teachers fired for saying that they are not straight. And you'll notice that middle school is not in kindergarten through third grade. So remember when we were all saying, hey, it actually doesn't matter that the bill says it's only up for kindergarten through third grade. It's just going to be applied for anyone. Yeah, it turns out we were right. that the bill says it's only up for kindergarten through third grade. It's just going to be applied for anyone. Yeah, it turns out we were right. So the bill's already been specifically cited in the firing of multiple teachers from Florida for just not conforming to the heterosexual Christian hegemonic worldview.

And Libs to TikTok is still currently among the most prominent influencers affecting actual material conditions and shaping both the rhetoric and propaganda while impacting legislation. A friend of Libs of TikTok and DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pershaw, has said, quote, the bill that liberals inaccurately call Don't Say Gay would be more accurately described as an anti-grooming bill. If you're against the anti-grooming bill, you probably are a groomer, or at least you don't denounce the grooming of four to eight-year-old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats.

This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn't make the rules. So yeah, see how that works? You call the Don't Say Gay bill an anti-grooming bill, so then anyone who criticizes it is now a groomer. Isn't that a fun way to play with words? Isn't that nice? That is a fun way to play with words, Garrison. I love it. So the past few months, we've seen this queer people are groomers meme reach seemingly never- seen heights and at the very least is the highest and most memetic it's ever been in the past two decades.

And it's really building off of all of the kill your local pedophile shit, right? It sure is. Robert, do you want to briefly talk about kill your local pedophile? I mean, it's a bunch of bumper stickers. It's a slogan. Like I know dudes who are not at all fascists and say that because they're like new dads and they're horrified at the but like the whole like the core of it is this right wing. sort of libertarian gun nut communities, but it's really used a lot as sort of, it's a group that you can talk about doing anything to. You can talk about killing, you can like fetishize murdering. And if you can then like define other groups as inherently pedophilic, then you can do anything to them, right? Like that's the basic idea is if you get people saying, it's always okay to use vigilante violence against this group um and obviously no one's gonna fucking defend child

molesters but then you start making the case that people who are not in fact molesting children are somehow pedophiles or you know or somehow related to pedophiles and then suddenly it's okay to kill them it's okay to do violence massive social groups like yeah all of gay and trans people so yeah if you conflate these two things you're able to make these things represent the same thing kill them it's okay to do violence massive social groups like yeah all of gay and trans people so if you conflate these two things you're able to make these things represent the same thing in someone's mind that makes homophobia now not a bad thing but like a moral imperative like you have to be homophobic because these people are grooming children yep and you can get you get this interesting thing too which like there are people who are like not quite as far in

who will do who will say i see things a lot where it's like someone's like oh well i don't have a problem with gay people but like they shouldn't groom kids and it's like yep this is that's not what's happening bro yeah no i do you know do you know what else doesn't groom kids i mean the washington state highway patrol definitely does but let me tell you if you want somebody to groom your children the washington highway state highway patrol will do that but you know what they won't do is protect those children in the event of danger because that might endanger them so look look sometimes sometimes right someone is someone is killing your kid and you need to get pepper sprayed

and yeah when that time calls you you will beg for the washington highway state patrol well you'll beg for a different police department but when those police get in trouble because of their failure to act then the washington state highway patrol will show up to protect those cops anyway here's here's some ads we are back um so as the queer people at groomers shit was reaching the most memetic and the highest rate of of trending that it has had in decades this past april at the height of the recent increased wave of anti-queer legislation and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, this is when some terminally online teenagers tried to start kink at pride discourse once again. And I do not want to talk about this, but I've written stuff about it, so I'm going to. This was legitimately when I was thinking about, like realized i was gay and i was like oh

my god i should come out and then i would like one of the things that i spent a long time thinking about was does this mean i have to do kink at pride discourse and this is like a serious for a long time i would have said no of course not i'm never gonna do this but here we are so anyway uh doing kink doing kink at pride discourse then and even still now, while the anti-queer onslaught is accelerating at the highest pace it's had in years, sure seems to be like dumping fuel on the fire. What's up with that, kids? Why?

So anyway, the discourse itself revolves around whether kink apparel or paraphernalia render the pride space unsafe for minors or quote-unquote non-consensual observers. Heavy, heavy quotation marks there, by the way. rooted in assimilationist and respectability politics and a push for LGBTQ people to be seen as more acceptable or more normal while still existing in a heteronormative society. And now, obviously, I'm not a fan of this discourse happening in the first place, especially now. Like, why are you doing it now during all the groomer stuff? Stop it. That's, stop it. Don't do that. Quit it. Why are you doing this? But first of all, I also want to point out how this entire discourse runs on the same train of thought that fuels all of this Grudemir stuff in the first place. It's picking at the same part of human brains. Here's, I'm going to read this post that went super viral about a month ago that sparked the new wave of this much, much frustrated discourse. Quote, LGBTQ youth being uncomfortable with kinks at pride is not homophobia.

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

well less than they were they're getting bullied less somewhat depending on where you live yeah but it's also kind of it's made people forget the whole like uh like gays bash back or gays don't bash back but shoot first like it's forgot we don't have that's not as a core component of queerness anymore because queerness is now able to be kind of more safe and sanitized uh and it's it's a right it's like it's and it's it's it's a personal identity in a way that it's it's not just about who you fuck anymore it's like this like personal identity aspect um which i'm not saying is bad it's just that there's this thing that's happened that's changed the way we talk about sexual orientation. Hey, quick pause, this is Garrison from the future here, just popping in to clarify a bit on what I mean regarding this note on

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

through the lens of brands and like brand recognition, which is definitely made worse by social media, dating apps, personal profiles, and personal bios. And it's part of this cultural push to like have everyone create their own personal brand. And like, I don't want to identify as genderqueer. I just am genderqueer. I don't identify as gay. I just like catboys, therefore I am gay. It's a different ontological framing, and one that I think is less susceptible to heteronormative assimilationist ideas and like the capitalist marketing to queerness as a brand or as a market demographic. If your queerness is a personal identity that's more sanitized, more approachable for a

heteronormative society, then you get to use your identity to attack gay people whose queerness is more based in deviant sexuality and alternative communities. I'm going to read the follow-up tweet to this thing that sparked the new discourse. Quote, Not even all LGBTQ adults are comfortable with seeing kinks at Pride. Quote, not even all LGBTQ adults are comfortable with seeing kinks at Pride. There's nothing stopping you guys from adjusting or having after events strictly for adults who want to partake in that. Y'all need to adjust so that every LGBTQ person feels comfortable attending.

So let's just do some, like, queer history here for a sec. The first Pride was a riot on that night in June in 1969. Nice. The police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the largest private gay clubs in the U.S. at the time.

The patrons of the bar, you know, trans women of color, homeless queer teens, drag queens, lesbians, and leather daddies fought back.

Lots of trans teenagers threw bricks at cops, and a fair number of those trans teenagers were also sex workers. Kink, including leather daddies and lots of aspects that we now view as kink or BDSM, has been a part of Pride since its literal inception, way back in 1969. has been a part of Pride since its literal inception, like, way back in 1969. And while, like, while drag isn't considered kink now in 2022, it still is considered sexually deviant. But back in, like, the 20th century, in, you know, in 1969, New York City still had laws that prohibited cross-dressing. So drag used to be way more kinky than it is now. And basically all queer sex used to be unacceptable kink.

Yeah, it was illegal. It was literally illegal. Or just a crime. Yeah, it was a crime in Texas until 2003. I think the law is still in the books. Right around when I graduated high school. 2003 was when the Supreme Court said that it's no longer an enforceable

law also it might go back to being illegal again what and it's illegal it's still illegal to own more than five dildos yeah is it six or is it five i think it's five but it might be six so like all queer sex used to be unacceptable kink and many logistical aspects of gay fucking used to happen in public. I'm gonna quote an article from them.us. Quote, for some people, gay rights and gay liberation do not hinge on particulars of sexual desire. For years, I've heard that we aren't just our erotic identities. But for many of us, it does begin there, and it does revolve around the ways we organize our erotic choices. Before LGBTQ plus people had pride parades, our community spaces were not just bars, but cruising spots like bathhouses, dungeons, and public restrooms. It should be no surprise that many queer folks find their sex

lives and their sense of community to be intertwined. BDSM, subversive sexuality, and leather culture have enjoyed a long history within the LGBTQ rights movement. They are inherent expressions of queer culture and sexuality. Being free to signal your sexuality out in the open within a queer context is the entire point of pride." Unquote. So, like, all of this discourse around pride and kink of pride reflects a modern but regressive idea that sexuality is inherently damaging to see, experience, or think about in a public context, especially if that sexuality is inherently queer. And there's this other idea that we see a lot of in this type of discourse and it's mirrored a little bit with like the groomer stuff too that if you see someone quote-unquote engaging in kink

and like in the case of pride that's like what wearing a collar a harness or a pup mask that just the act of observation is somehow a violation of consent. And it's really frustrating because indication of sexuality in a non-vanilla sense, while in public, is not a violation of consent. Like, I didn't consent, quote-unquote, consent to see the rainbow cops, right? But public indication of sexuality is not a consent violation. And again, indicating sexuality is like the entire point of pride. Weaponizing, quote-unquote, consent to call out people that we see but don't interact with, who are, quote-unquote, dressed too sexual in our own mind, is bad for multiple reasons. It also potentially dilutes legitimate claims of non-consent in cases of actual sexual violence and it's it's like this thing like if you look at someone in a pup mask

there is no consent violation there that's a really weird thing that people that people talk about and it's not it's not like i i'm not trying to start fights on the Internet with like these tender queer children because like and I don't want anyone to find like these like, you know, months old posts and start harassing these people. But that post has like over 30,000 likes and thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets. And it basically just repeats like old queer bashing talking points that conflate kink and queer visibility with public sex that endangers children and like conflating gays being visible and semi-clothed with being like dangerous to children are the same talking points that it gets used for book bans conversion therapy and they don't say gay bills right this idea that if you look at a gay person shirtless that's dangerous to a kid that's the same that's the same

underlying motivation that fuels all of this grimmer discourse uh it's it's the whole thing where it's like i'm okay with gay people i just don't want to see it right it's like that that that idea in and of itself is like is still like exists on that you know i didn't consent to look at it type of thing. You know, this is other tweet from somebody being like, forcing people to see kinky stuff without consent is really weird. I'm sorry, but I don't want pup masks at pride events for families. I saw that shit in real life and it made me uncomfortable.

Don't involve other people in their kinks if they don't consent. And like looking at someone in a mask isn't involving you in any of these kinks. If you're looking at someone in a leather mask, like if that makes you uncomfortable that that's your problem you don't have a right to not be uncomfortable with how people look or are in public look every time i go out into the world i see something that makes me uncomfortable um i see a lot of people with children now do i think it should be legal to have children yes we do i do think that it should be legal to have children? No. Yes, we do. I do think that it should be. It should be illegal. Exactly. So I, like, look, we all have to deal

with things that make us uncomfortable. Look, we have a clear solution here. The way to deal with events not being family friendly is to get rid of families. That's exactly right. We have to eliminate the concept of the family. Yeah, come on, come on. Communist Manifesto. This is 101 shit, people. We can do this. on, come on. Communist Manifesto. This is 101 shit, people.

We can do this. You were quoting from the Communist Manifesto, huh? Okay, that's interesting. That's not where I got it from. But I feel like a lot of these people, many of them like young teens, who are complaining about being forced to look at quote-unquote inappropriate things at Pride,

have never actually been to a pride yeah because most of most of modern pride is like really sanitized and chill like it's like it is it is overrun with corporate sponsors politicians and cops like you you are you you are way more likely to see armed police at like a pride march then you're then you'll be likely to see like tits or like gags or whatever like most i it's funny to me because like i started going to these and this is before the internet was what it was or moral panics were what they were but like in texas i would go to these events where there would be people of all ages and families these are like little burning regions people would be like at like uh and families. These are like little burning regions. People would be like,

at like on the big night when people are doing like the fire shows and the fireworks stuff, people would be like fucking and like manning flamethrowers like while having sex. There were like, there was a whole chunk of it that was just like the kink row

and you could walk down it and watch people get like whipped and fuck a Sibian and stuff. It was just like, I don't remember any of this fucking, like the only discourse was like, well, okay, we should probably like make sure that people know where that kind of stuff mainly happens so that like they don't have to walk around it if they don't want to.

But like it was. But yeah, it's like this idea that like not even full nudity, but like semi nudity within a queer context is inherently more dangerous to children if it's in a queer context than a straight context right we have all of these even like queer kids can like complaining online about being forced to see things at pride just like they would see way more skin if they went to like a beach in the summer like it's it's there's it revolves on the same homophobic idea that like if if you look at these things in a queer context that is like more adult than looking at it within a straight context yes um it's i don't know frustrating it's frustrating and like another another reason why that i think many of

these like baby leftist tender queers are who are who are crusading against kink at pride and complaining about like leather and or like sexy underwear um lots of them even uh first of all most of them i think lots of them haven't been to pride because there hasn't really been pride for the past two years and lots of these people are like 15 years old um but a lot of them also just like admit to never going to pride because they're too terrified to see a pup mask. Like they openly say like I've never been because I don't want to see these things. Like sure, you're allowed to do that. But then don't make – don't like – don't campaign against King of Pride, which will result in your posts getting used by like homophobic trolls and bigots.

I don't go to Chicago because I don't want to see a deep dish pizza bigots i don't go to chicago because i don't want to see a deep dish pizza but i don't try to ban them like i understand that that's the thing you people like like the first time i saw a pup mask was at fucking comic-con like it's like like you like it's not you don't see like ban pup masks from comic-con like what like these these people like these kids are are basing their fears off of like a few viral photos that are often shared in a disingenuous context now we'll talk about these photos in a bit but you know these these people are like 15 years old have never been to pride and are just like simply terrified of like actual sexuality like they they enjoy they they engage with queerness

as like a personal identity and stuff. But once they get into like the nitty gritty of like sex, that makes them really uncomfortable because they're teens, because they're kids. That's okay. You can be uncomfortable with sex. That makes sense. That is, that is appropriate for your age, but then don't make your entire online presence about trying to shut down this massive aspect of queer history. Because, like, the kinky stuff that I've seen at Pride is, yeah, on par with what you see at Comic-Con. I often will see more nudity at Portland's Comic-Con than I will at any of the Pride events I've been to. Like, all of the more, like, openly, like, fetish folks or kinky folks are really responsible and act pretty appropriately at Pride. And the people who, like, say otherwise

online generally just have not actually been to Pride in their entire life. Because, like, this complaining about, quote-unquote, like, inappropriate fetishes or, like, kinky conduct is basically code for I am uncomfortable with you being positive about the way you view sex. And I want you to not show it. And I want you to not talk about it, which is the same underlying thought process that people use to be homophobic. It's the exact same thing. Now, a lot of this discourse oversimplifies kink and BDSM, Now, a lot of this discourse oversimplifies kink and BDSM. Que all exclusively about sex. To a large extent, they're also about community building. And I just think these earnest think-of-the-youth arguments are very silly.

Because even when it comes to youth, because if you're uncomfortable with things, that's totally fine. But in a lot of cases, queer teenagers also have sex, generally with other queer teenagers, sometimes even in a kinky context. And that's okay. Pride is about celebrating everyone's individual ability to do that. And I don't like it when people just rehash old homophobic talking points, especially during all of this grimoire discourse. all of this groomer discourse because a key part of kink, a key part of queer sex is consent.

And once you start conflating what consent is by saying that me looking at you wearing a collar is a violation of consent, once you start undermining what consent actually means, that's not a good thing. That is actually a bad thing, especially right now, during all of the groomer stuff. So that is, we are, we've gone kind of over on, on time here. Um, but we're going to make, we're going to make this a two-parter. In

the next episode, we'll talk a bit more about like tender queers and we'll actually get into the, the plans of Operation Pridefall and talk about how we kind of got to this point because, man, there's a lot of kids sharing pictures online. And oh boy, do those pictures originate in some dubious places. So that does it for us today. We will see you tomorrow. Pride's fun. We should not police what other people do. So yeah. Anyway, bye. Bye. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows

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Welcome back to Get Up and Hear. This is part two of our discussion on Operation Pridefall and the Kinkapride discourse and the groomer stuff and how they all combine in this really horrifying, really way that I wish they didn't because it's pretty frustrating. So last episode, towards the end, I talked a decent amount about tender queers. And I actually would like to define this term here and kind of get into why these people are boosting these specific talking points that are just kind of regurgitate old types of homophobic stuff.

They claim it doesn't, but like it does. You're using this exact same logic. You're just kind of reframing it. So tender queers are this type of like, they're kind of like an in-joke for like the queer community of this like personality type. Generally, the tender queers are like a, you know, typically a Gen Z or a millennial queer, more likely to be like femme, whether that be like a woman, non-binary or femme person, lesbians, you know, femme, bisexuals, pansexuals, or like queer soft boys kind of. They feature this like combination of personality, designation, and aesthetic.

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

queer community of a queer person who presents themselves as being sensitive, hyper vocal of their feelings, sometimes thought of movements that aren't necessarily about them. They prioritize ineffective methods of self-care. They utilize gaslighting and dumping the emotional labor of dealing with your own self onto others. onto others. Like, tender queers are kind of, they're known to mask toxicity and manipulativeness in the performative language and aesthetics of social justice. They have this performative, soft hypersensitivity

and use identity politics to kind of call out or avoid things that make them uncomfortable and will publicly declare those things as problematic in an attempt to force others to conform with their own will. So that's why I describe a lot of these younger teens who use these talking points against quote-unquote kink at pride as tender queers,

because they're people who are really sensitive about what makes them comfortable, and they try to avoid or campaign against anything that makes them uncomfortable. And they use all these performative turns of phrase and talking points to avoid having actual discussions about it. It's this weaponization of their marginalized identity as a shield to avoid accountability or to deflect against people challenging them for abusive behavior or in the Pride case, this internalized homophobia.

There's these little tweet exchange from some people on the super viral Kika Pride post from a month ago. I'm 14 and I don't want to see a half naked person in leather straps in a gag and an event i take my family to and someone replied like try glancing at a mardi gras or even a public beach before you apply homophobic double standards

and then they the poster replied you think i'm homobic? I'm literally a trans non-binary lesbian. So again, this is what I mean when I talk about talented queers, right? Someone's calling them out for applying this homophobic double standard on how they view like public semi-nudity, right? Not even like full nudity, just like how they view public semi-nudity like a bikini or something right and then they respond by saying i'm literally a trans non-binary lesbian um and then went on to say also people at those don't wear kink shit and it's why i don't go to mardi gras or large public beaches it makes me uncomfortable seeing a bunch of adults in kink shit being sexual just physically makes me ill people at mardi gras and public beaches don't act sexual or wear kink shit being sexual just physically makes me ill people at mardi gras and public beaches don't act sexual or wear kink shit and so like i feel like you haven't been to mardi gras but that's

you will see way more skin at a public beach most kink shit like requires covering your body and a lot of extra stuff like if you're wearing a harness or like, a latex full leather outfit, you're like, showing way less skin than someone wearing a Speedo or a bikini. So maybe you're just uncomfortable with people expressing their sexuality. Which in case,

don't go to Pride, because that's what Pride is all about. That's the entire put. But yeah, the whole point, like, I'm literally a trans non-binary lesbian. Like about that's the entire putt but yeah the whole point like i'm literally a trans non-binary lesbian like that's like such a perfect encapsulation of what the tender queer kind of trope is um and like not not not many people like self self identify as as tender queers it's kind of this joke that the more kind of punky uh queer community has kind of it's like in we're putting a label on this this behavioral trend that we've observed and it's it's kind of a joke right i'm not trying to call out specific

people i'm not if if you are soft and emotional sensitive cool whatever do whatever you want i'm fine just don't don't use these things as a shield to justify forcing your will onto other people these things as a shield to justify forcing your will onto other people it's cool to not it's totally fine to like not like pub people being publicly affectionate or like doing public like it's perfectly fine to be uncomfortable with that it's perfectly like that doesn't mean anything bad it doesn't mean you're a prude it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you but like there's nothing wrong with people wanting to be public with that at a public event celebrating the fact that it's they are now less oppressed for doing that thing. Like, yeah, or a beach or Mardi Gras. And like, make sure you're cognizant if you're engaging in any kind of like socially normalized ideas of like straight stuff is inherently less sexual than gay stuff.

I advocate people being able to get into their own head and figure out why they think certain things. It's this idea of metathought, trying to think about why you think about things. If you're more uncomfortable with

two men kissing than you are with one man and a woman kissing, you should think about that. You should be like, even as a trans non-binary lesbian, if you're more uncomfortable looking at two men kiss, you should think about

what social conditioning has caused this to happen. Because that's something that people have been pushing for a long time, is that, yeah, gay stuff is more adult or more mature than queer stuff i think that's a big part of of of these types of things being at pride it's like pushing back on that idea um so like i think and the reason why we see more of these now is like there are these baby tender queers who grew up in a world where you were less likely to get fucking assaulted for being gay. While also growing up on the internet in the age of Tumblr and Instagram, right?

These kids were able to construct their own comfortable, safe, bubbled versions of reality online. Only being exposed to what they want, when they want, right? They get to only view things that they find aesthetically pleasing. And the pandemic certainly heightened this, right? With people being forced to solely exist in their self-catered online worlds. So now with the outside world opening up, some of these soft baby tender queers are going through puberty and are dealing with their quote-unquote uncomfy feelings. And the added notion of being exposed to things that you have specifically not sought out, like that, that causes them to be uncomfortable.

Right. If, if you're, if you're, if you're a Femi person who's just attracted to other Femi people, having to, having to look at dudes be affectionate may not be your cup of tea, but,

and you may not like enjoy it, but that's like, it's just as queer as you are. So if you shouldn't, you can't prioritize your queerness over somebody else's. It's like there's this collection of baby gays that gets uncomfortable being reminded that people, like especially people whom they are not personally attracted to, have sex. It's like if they're reminded that this happens and they don't like it, it's like it feels like they have this sort of like anxiety

just about just looking at something that they perceive as sexual in nature, right? And for them, this includes other, but differently queer people, wearing leather or being semi-nude, like dudes being shirtless or women being shirtless. That's a whole other double standard that should be pushed back upon. But again, pride's not any more naked than people at the beach. So it's not actually – they're very selective in the types of things that they will focus on. in the types of things that they, that they will, that they will focus on. And it plays into this notion that's used by all like anti-gay legislation, that gayness is inherently more sexual than being

straight, right? It's, it's, it's, it's more sexual, it's more mature, it's more adult. Uh, because for a long time, uh, being gay was exclusively seen as like a hypersexual deviant act. And now, especially among Gen Z baby queers, being queer is now less tied to specifically the act of sex, right? Queerness is much more of an, like an overarching personal identity now, especially as it intersects with like gender and stuff, right? You know, whether that be non-binary,

other stuff like pansexual, bisexual, what have you. But to kind of circle back to the kink at pride stuff people want us dead for being queer uh it doesn't fucking matter if someone's parading around in a collar if you're uncomfortable you should maybe learn to fight actually fight back against people who actually want to kill you like pride was a riot you should you should sort out your uncomfy feelings elsewhere or direct your uncomfy feelings at the people attacking us. So maybe you don't prop up kink at pride discourse when accusations of queer people being all groomers is at an all-time high. And there's fascists organizing to shoot us at pride marches.

So maybe consider that before you do discourse on Twitter.com. I'm going to do one little quote and then we will have an ad break. I'm just going to end this section with a quote from them.com again. Quote, kinks, sex, and protest are all inherent parts of pride. One of the core tenets of pride is liberation and working against cultural shaming. Calling to quote, not perform your kinks and fetishes at pride because some minors are there and kink can, quote, sexualize the event, unquote, implies that celebrating sexuality and kink is openly bad,

and normalizing these things should be a goal of Pride. BDSM, subversive sexuality, and leather culture have enjoyed a long history within the LGBTQ rights movement, and such public displays of sexuality are driven by much more than libido or countercultural impulses. They're an inherent expression of queer culture and queer sexuality, and as such, deserve a place at Pride as much as anything else. Okay, and now it's time to actually get into what the title of this episode is about. The Operation Pridefall stuff. We're gonna talk about this thing that sucks. So whether you're looking at the conservative groomer discourse or the tender queer kink at pride discourse you'll see a lot of the same logic as well as a lot of the same photos we've we've talked a lot about memes on the show and i'm not

gonna get i'm not gonna get into like the powder memes very much right now. But suffice to say that a picture can stick in your head a lot easier than a bunch of words can. And throughout the Groomer and Kick It Pride shit, there are a few select photos that people use to demonstrate their opinions on how gay people are a threat to children.

Either they're just pictures of adults in kink-associated garb, usually full latex bodysuits or pup masks. Or there's these two specific pictures of kids just standing next to adults who are wearing pup masks that get used a lot. There's also a lot of pictures of drag queen story time. And whenever I see any of these very specific pictures, I flash back to when I first came across the original Operation Pridefall 4chan thread back in 2020, because these are actually all of the exact same pictures. So Operation Pridefall was a cyber harassment campaign started on 4chan targeting the degeneracy of the LGBTQ community

by attempting to sway public opinion against queer people by linking being gay to grooming and pedophilia. So checking back in in 2022, oh boy, oh boy, has things happened. So initially organized on 4chan, Discord, and Telegram right before Pride Month, the campaign set out targets and methods to flood the social media platforms of gay venues, pride sponsors, and LGBTQ people or supporters with spam, anti-gay memes, and media, usually photos, intended to imply a link between being openly queer and the grooming of children, and operating online under the banner of Operation Pridefall. The campaign started on May 10th, 2020, when an anonymous 4chan poster posted a thread on poll

outlining Operation Pridefall, which was pitching it as a crowdsourced campaign aimed at damaging the LGBTQ community during the month of June in 2020. The plan centered around, quote-unquote, month of June in 2020. The plan centered around, quote-unquote, red-pilling users in the comments sections of companies that support LGBTQ causes on social media. The 4chan post read, quote, every June, hundreds of massive corporations band together to smother social media in posts in flavor of Pride Month, a code word for the degeneracy that is LGBT activism. Many of these accounts are rather small and get very little engagement, yet they continue to post without backlash. Beginning on June 1st, the goal of Operation Pridefall is to get on Twitter, Instagram, etc., and drop a shit ton of disturbing red pills on homosexuality on the comments of the

lesser-known pages. The bigger pages are okay targets, but posts tend to get unnoticed in the sea of other comments. Commenting on smaller pages, ones with less than 100 likes and so, means anyone who views it will see the posts, and companies will reconsider their pro-pride posts afterwards." So, if you scroll through the archived initial Pridefall thread, you'll see a crowdsourced collection of pictures that they intended to flood the internet with in the comments section of posts discussing Pride or discussing LGBTQ activism or whatever. Q activism or whatever. So in this crowdsourced collection of photos, we see a lot of drag queen storytime stuff. But many of these pictures and memes are now the same ones used both in the recent groomer thing and in the past two years of kink at pride discourse. It's the exact same photos. There's hundreds of them. There's hundreds of photos of people in pup masks or whatever waving pride flags.

There's a lot of them. And the specific ones get used for so much of the groomer shit. And they really started to gain much more visibility during 2020 after the Operation Pridefall thing got launched. The Operation Pridefall 4chan thread also instructed users on how to set up fake phone numbers, to make burner accounts, to comment on these social media pages. There's another really interesting part that the Operation Pridefall planning stuff detailed was on Discord on the Operation Pridefall servers and channels

the users were planning to repurpose cringy TikTok videos while relabeling them with anti-LGBTQ captions and hashtags. Here's a quote from their planning Discord. An additional idea

we can Redpool Zoomers on TikTok and literally build a fucking puppet army to fuck the shit out of millennials. We should expand this operation to as many social media outlets as possible in order to maximize effort. Let's operate like this. On TikTok, convince any Gen Z sibling

or relatives to do some kind of shitty jester charade slash whore dance dance and then add LGBTQ critical captions on top of it and repost it under trending hashtags. So you see elements of this exact strategy mirrored one year later in libs of TikTok by getting videos of people being, I don't know, kids and like kind of cringy because kids are kind of cringy. But videos of kids on TikTok and mischaracterizing TikTok videos and adding LGBTQ talking points on top of them to sway the public opinion of queer people. It's the exact same strategy.

setting up fake dating app profiles to not only spread their anti-gay kind of grooming memes, but also to farm viral content by catfishing gay people and getting them to like be in embarrassing interactions. Another quote. On Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr set up fake profiles with legit

convincing images and descriptions that criticized LGBT. So it's trying to catfish queer people and like then I guess, spam them with pictures of these grooming memes and see what their reaction is, then post it, right? So the whole Operation Pride and Fall strategy might appear pretty simple, right? It's basically glorified shitposting, setting up a bunch of fake sock puppet accounts and demonizing queer people in the comment section of small corporations and influencers. But there definitely is a lot more to it than that, right?

There was this element of like planned escalation, starting off first as like appearing as reasonable commenters, right? Acting in very good faith, just as somebody concerned by kids being exposed to sexual materials, whether that be, you know, people in drag at a library reading books or people at a pride parade, right? So instead of immediately going on like full 100% gay bashing, saying that we should, you know, kill all deviant trans people, which a lot of conservative commentators just say now, like Elijah Schaefer, who just posts memes about wanting to kill trans kids. These bored fascists on 4chan tried to coordinate a slow, more insidious approach, which they would hope would just gradually turn the tide of public opinion against queer people. Here's a snippet from one of the Pridefall organizing chats, quote,

Keep it normie, palatable, and friendly. This means no Nazi or Hitler shit. The goal is to make them question whether what they're supporting is really the right thing. So as Pride Month progressed, the Pride Fall participants coordinated on 4chan, Discord, and Telegram to slowly increase the frequency and intensity of the campaign. Another quote from the organizing chat, quote, think about it as waves. Day one is simply questioning homosexuality. And then as the days goes on, it will get worse and worse until the end of Pride Month. So in terms of physical things they actually had, I believe Operation Pridefall resulted in a few gay events getting shut down.

There was like this event at, I think it was like it was like a, like a, at a queer nightclub in the UK that got shut down. There was a few other like, like obviously like material results that they had by doing this harassment campaign against venues and corporations. But I think they're just, they were more successful in first of all, spreading specific mimetic images that are now commonly used in the grooming stuff and in the kink of pride stuff, some of which these images were not really used in discourse before but now are commonplace. I think that that's really where more of this idea succeeded. So over the course of the month, they wanted to get more regular people to start associating members of the LGBTQ community with pedophilia. And in order to do that, the way they see it is by just gradually shifting this discussion. And then as public opinion alters, they hope that brands will distance themselves from the LGBTQ community and stop doing more pride shit. That was another big part of what their intention was.

right it's like that was that was another big part of what their intention was and they may not have done all that stuff immediately like they may not may not have succeeded in that but they definitely did succeed in the prevalence of the images that they were trying to intentionally spread because that absolutely has happened do you know who else loves uh implanting ideas into your brain? That's right. The products and services that sponsor this podcast. Woohoo! Go buy their product or get a job at one of the... You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, here's the ads. And we are back. Wasn't it fun reading about operation pride fall didn't that just bring bring joy to your ears i'm so happy me too joy to so many parts of me yeah so as we mentioned a big part of their attempts to sway public opinion is by spamming photos and memes that attempt to showcase just how dangerous gay people are to children, whether that be drag queens doing story time at a library, photos of gay people doing quote-unquote kink at Pride. Basically, they're trying to say,

how could any reasonable person or corporation support Pride? It's essentially a grooming parade, right? That's the thing that they were trying to implant. And one of the things that Operation Pride was successful in was popularizing a few of these Kink at Pride photos, many of which were then subsequently used last year during Kink at Pride discourse, and used this year as well,

mostly by some, like, anti-sex people on the left and some of these young tender queers. And, you know, the same photos are used in grooming stuff and in prideful stuff and kink at pride stuff because it's the same big psychology at play, right? The idea that sexuality in a queer sense is dangerous and way more deviant than sexuality in a heterosexual context, right? Like straight people kissing is rated G, gay people kissing is rated PG or PG-13. It's that idea, but accelerate it. Another correlation between the openly homophobic groomer talking points and the tender queer stuff is this idea that I'm only comfortable seeing expressions of sexuality that I can relate to or also find attractive.

that I can relate to or also find attractive. And another interesting thing about a lot of these photos is that a lot of these photos that they use aren't actually photos of pride. A lot of the photos that they use are actually from the Folsom Street Fair, which is like a kink festival that takes place in San Francisco every year. And it is hard to exaggerate how horny the Folsom Street Fair is.

So it's very horny. But also, obviously, because gay people have sex, gay people also exist at the Folsom Street Fair. They may even wave a pride flag. Shocking. So a lot of these photos that they use in the grooming stuff and in the Kink at Pride stuff are actually from the Folsom Street Fair. They're not actually photos of pride parades. And of course, anyone who's been to pride would kind of know that because pride is not like the Folsom Street Fair. They are very different events.

And that's another good indicator of how a lot of these people who prop up this discourse online have never been to pride either because they're sharing photos at the folsom street fair and saying it's pride um obviously lots of these nazis on 4chan have never been to the folsom street fair or pride uh but they they also share these same photos because hey it's people who look gay doing sexual things in public. That means it's at Pride and it's a danger to children, even though a lot of them are actually at the Folsom Street Fair. So if then if if you're a queer person and you're reposting these Folsom Street Fair pictures and claiming to be claiming that they're from a pride parade to bash kink at pride stuff, reconsider that.

Because you're basically just doing the work that neo-Nazis wants to do. You're just doing it on your own time. You're repurposing the exact same photos that they were putting out there within this context and just not even knowing where these pictures are from. So stop. Stop that. this context and just not even not even knowing where these where these pictures are from um so stop stop that i can consider not uh if if you have to like if you're gonna go to all of this work to denounce queer people for like existing maybe you should consider why you're doing that

because wow that that sucks because calling the f Folsom Street Fair a pride parade and then demonizing it because – and then demonizing pride because there's people who act, like, pretty kinky is not great because that's not what – anything is happening. None of that is accurate. None of that is accurate. So that's, it's really frustrating to look at all of the ways these things combine. Because you get tender queers sharing Folsom Street Fair pictures. You get conservative politicians sharing them, all calling them pride stuff. But again, a lot of the stuff you see there isn't even, a lot of them isn't like a lot of pictures don't even have like full nudity. So that's not necessarily like. It's not even super abhorrent, but it's you're conflating these these things in a really disingenuous way.

And you're just repeating the exact same things that Nazis have been trying to get you to repeat for years. And you should consider why that happens. to get you to repeat for years and you should consider why that happens so all of the grooming stuff obviously has gotten has gotten worse in the in the past few months uh definitely definitely ballooned around the around the don't say gay bill and this got tied into a whole bunch of stuff happening in florida with the disney corporation and a lot of the grooming stuff got tied to conservatives attacking disney now and calling disney a grooming organization uh we've had we've had far-right candidates show up in front of in front of disney world to do protests we've had nazis show up in front of disney world to do protests we've seen a lot of mega people show up at disney world to do protests um all against

disney's grooming of children by including anything not straight in any of their materials which is already like so little um which is also like just extremely funny of like imagining you bring walt disney walt disney and he's like what is it come on man like guys we're all on the same side here like yeah and like i don't know like do you i don't know if i really actually think that like do do all these all these people actually think that millions of teachers democrats corporate entertainment creators are all complicit in a long-term planning of like to sexually groom minors some some might believe that right that kind of that kind of overlaps with some q anon stuff and the paranoia around like child trafficking but i think others understand that they're kind of being hyperbolic and they're being inflammatory to get people angry and to get people like very,

very like active in their, in their hatred of gay people, right? They need to old school homophobia kind of became a bad look. They need to find a new way to rebrand it. And now it's with this groomer stuff and like a gay teachers, trans teachers, right? Gender identity stuff, right? A lot of it is now wrapped up in like trans issues. But I want to read this quote by a right-wing writer named Rod Dreher. It was cited in The Atlantic. And I think it's actually a really good look at how the people who are smart on the right, how that they are intentionally using this grooming label. Quote, about the term groomers, it's usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning.

An adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not be specifically to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take them on a sexual slash gender identity at odds with the norm, which really, I think that quote quote that quote really showcases what's going on in their brains there yeah and this is something i think like drear like rob drear in particular doing this i think is a really bad sign because there's people who don't know who rob drear is he's like a weirdo catholic guy um he's been like a right-wing like

catholic uh i think he's a right-wing catholic sort of columnist for a long time and like you know if you go back to like 2017 his big thing was his whole was this thing called the benedict option which was basically like okay so like secular societies become corrupted uh like christians should just pull out of it right and go live with their own communities that could be sort of like like you know if we like we we've we've lost this world we have to like create a new world which we can live around sort of like christian truth or whatever and he he was in this long-running kind of like battle with uh a sort of like i guess like openly phalangist kind of of like openly fascist. I mean, not quite openly fascist, but like people,

people who are reading, like, what's his name? People who are reading Schmidt and like the Nazi lawyers who were like, okay, well we, you know, instead of,

as opposed to this thing of like, we're Catholics, we're going to pull back from the world. Their thing was, we're going to use, we're going to use like the state to enforce christian doctrine and drear had sort of like fought that and the fact that drear is now just full-on in this grooming shit right that is really bad yep and and looking again and you know if you want to go

back into history right like this is this is the kind of flip that happened that brought the evangelicals into the political scene right like you have this flip from like people being like well the rapture is coming and society's impure so we're not going to become be politically engaged to oh hey look we can use the state to just like destroy our political enemies and create the kingdom of heaven on earth and yeah this is this is not good this is yeah but i think specifically that quotes a really good insight to how the smart conservatives who like know what they're doing like they know it's not actual grooming but it's if they can if they can use that word within the context of being like it's about getting it's about getting kids to

adopt a non-normative sexual identity again it's like non-normative, right? It's confusion in them, turning them against the institutions in society, right? All of these things that is mirrored across lots of the Grimery Discourse, the Kink and Pride Discourse, all this kind of stuff. It's the same thing. It's like a non-normative sexuality is more sexual than a normative sexuality. sexuality is more sexual than a normative sexuality it's this whole idea man and it's not great because it's not going to stop with kids either uh it's not going to uh we i talked with i've talked with this a lot how how once they ban you know trans health care for minors they're going to bump it up to age 25 then they're going to bump it up to no one has it at all and 25, then they're going to bump it up to no one has it at all. And I have, I got, I got an update on that front. So first of all, for recent legislation, there's the Alabama felony healthcare

ban for trans youth, which forcibly detransitions teens across the state. That, that, that, that, that's got enacted. And in Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works, officially titled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act. And it applies to individuals younger than 18 years old. And it would inhibit Missouri physicians and health care providers and prevent them from providing gender-affirming health care to patients. And it turns out Missouri law lawmakers a few weeks ago were debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care for minors. And

they also suggested that access to medical interventions like hormones be withheld from transgender and non-binary individuals until at least their 25th birthday. During public hearing a few weeks ago in Missouri for House Bill 2649, Lori Haynes, a psychologist, testified that she believes young adults under the age of 25 are unable to fully comprehend the dramatic and drastic and irreparable changes

their body will go under if they receive gender-affirming medical treatments like puberty blockers or hormone therapies. Hayes also said that she supported getting conversion therapy for trans kids. Yeah, I'll bet she thinks that 18 year old should be able to buy AR-15s though. Join the military. Join the military. Become a cop. So it's already happening.

We already have lawmakers and we have psychologists being brought in to testify that this is the case. This is going to be the next thing. They want this to happen. Now, I'm just going to say, obviously, a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that receiving gender-affirming care, including purity blockers and hormones between the ages of 13 and 20, is associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression, and 73% lower are odds of suicidality. Another study published late last year by the Trevor Project found that among transgender and non-binary minors, hormone therapy was associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression

or a suicide attempt over the last year, and a lot of the effects of puberty blockers and even hormonal replacement therapy actually are reversible and are not damaging. So, I mean, but we all know that. There's that horrible Matt Walsh trans documentary coming out soon. Oh God.

Yeah, that, yeah. And I know in the trailer, he says that one in the trailer he he says that uh one of the drugs used to give puberty blockers to minors is also used as a chemical castration for sexual assault uh perpetrators uh which is kind of true but it's castration in the sense that you need to take the drug always for it to work it is like it's a hormone blocker it stops testosterone from from being produced if you go off of it it's gonna happen again it's not a permanent castration it's gonna suppress

testosterone you know what a popular medication for people with heart problems is also a highly explosive compound oh no yeah it turns out things can be used in different ways yeah like 100 of cancer victims are found with dihydrogen monoxide in their system like so but yeah anyway this we're gonna see a lot of we're gonna see a lot of lies about hrt coming up soon because this matt walsh documentary is gonna be stupid but again he he doesn't understand the science obviously he's he's a propagandist. But the last thing I want to talk about here is what's going to be happening in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. So taking their cue from the... I'm going to quote an article here by uh by daily costs uh they did a really a really really good write-up uh david newart wrote it uh david david newart for the record like the thing that uh he has been this beat

that that we're in like writing about these people david's been doing it for like 30 years he's he's amazing he He's incredible. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from him here. This is the last thing we'll close with. Taking a cue from the incoming tide of far-right fear-mongering about grooming and an LGBTQ agenda in schools and libraries, a group of Idaho biker militiamen are planning to show up to confront people celebrating pride at an event in downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in a public park next month. Two men from the leadership of Panhandle Patriots, a militia-oriented bikers club based in northern Idaho, Justin Allen, the group's vice president, and Jeff White, its sergeant at arms, told a recent gathering at a church hosted by Republican State House member Heather Scott that they plan to have a gun-driven event next month in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, the same day as the city's pride celebration at a park less than a mile away, and they planned a confrontation.

I'm going to play a clip of them announcing this. And yeah, give it a listen. These parades are government funded. Many of you aren't aware right now in Coeur d'Alene on the 10th of June, there is family day. And in family day, they are promoting family values,

activities and everything. The very following day, they're having gay pride day in the very same park, the very next day where they're having Gay Pride Day in the very same park the very next day, where they will be allowed to parade through all of Coeur d'Alene, drag queen dancers, education hour, making all this material available for all the kids in a park that is designed for kids. We are having an event the very same day. That very same day, we actually intend to go head-to-head with these people. A line must be drawn in the sand.

Good people need to stand up. As she was talking about the repercussions, we say, damn the repercussions. Stand up. Take it to the head. Go to the fight. If you can, possibly. We know a lot of you are in Bonner.

We live in Bonner County. We are fighting in multiple counties. We are asking for all of you to come stand with us. Our event is advertised as Gunda Lane because it's an anniversary of when we stood to protect our community We're standing again to protect our community We shifted our date to be available to go head to head with these people They are trying to take your children This fight is not just paper

It's not just words. It's not just politicians They have to see people standing in their face saying no more. So, wow, that sucked and is entirely entirely expected. So the. The meeting at this at this church read by a Republican house member was titled the game plan to remove inappropriate materials in our schools and libraries. It was, it was held at a Calvary chapel in a small town North of Sandpoint, Idaho.

Scott is a long history of associations and identifications with the far right Patriot movement, specifically in Idaho. And it was bad. Heather Scott, the Republican Statehouse member, about an hour into the night, Scott invited the two militia dudes up to the podium to speak, and they said that.

So, yeah, it's in a flyer posted by the Panhandle Patriots advertising their planned confrontation at Pride, a flyer that they made shows a drag queen reading at a public library and urges people to join in and standing up against the indoctrination and grooming of our children. And if you don't protect children, you are part of the problem. So, yeah, they're planning to take a whole bunch of guns the same day as a pride parade and we'll see what happens um I love that that's that we're just gonna see what happens yeah and I

very incredibly deeply hope we're not reporting on the result of that because yep yeah so anyway before you share can't get pride discourse think this is what happens this is what happens Yep. So anyway, before you share King at Pride discourse, think this is what happens. This is what happens when you engage in this type of rhetoric,

that queer sexuality is inherently more dangerous to kids. Because anyway. I'm sad now. Yeah, this isn't really an upper of an episode. You don't say. But it is important to talk about. So if you're going to Pride this year,

please be careful because there's a lot of worsening attacks on queer people. Bring an IFAC. You shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to do this. But you should bring an IFAC. Anyway, well, that does it for us today it could happen here hopefully it doesn't happen here um

but it could welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal 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.

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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.

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 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 Jacqueline 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 comm 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. welcome to it could happen here a podcast about something that did happen that sucked enormously um i'm christopher wong i'm i'm the host also with me is garrison and sophie hello we just morning just really starting off positive there. It's, look, it's this episode, the next episode. I mean, I guess this episode kind of ends in a high note, but that's great to hear. I'm so happy.

I totally believe you. It kind of does. All right. Yeah, Shereen is also here hello hi sorry my fault keep going no worries so this is this is the the 33rd anniversary of the tiananmen square massacre um tomorrow's episode i think will actually be going out on i guess the day that it started kind of it starts like the night of like june 3rd um and okay i'm curious what you two's like i don't know like received like cultural memory of tiananmen is because i don't know i think i

got a kind of weird one like being from a chinese family but as a white canadian i have zero amount of my knowledge about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, nor really about Tiananmen. It's just, yeah, that is something I never, never have really learned about. Yeah, I know that it happened in 1989. That's the American lesson we got on the history of that massacre is that it happened in 1989 really mediocre yeah okay well today and tomorrow we're gonna go well we're gonna talk i think less about what happens there specifically and more about the sort of broader history that's in, but I guess let's start out. So sometimes there's, there's really three Tiananmen's there's,

there's the student protests that's inside Tiananmen square itself. There's this part of Beijing, like around the squares, like a bunch of blocks are taken over by workers. And then there's a bunch of protests in other cities. And unfortunately we're not gonna be talking about the protests in the other cities because like basically nothing is known about them other than that like they happened but the people who would know aren't talking so for somewhat obvious reasons um yeah and the students themselves i think like the the the normal version of tiananmen is like there's these students and they're like pro-democracy protesters right

but they're way weirder than that there's there's like this weird ideological grab bag thing going on um they're they're basically what they're pissed off about is that this thing is called the reform and opening like isn't going fast enough and we should talk about what that sort of is so reform and opening is like this period in china in sort of the 80s and something like the 90s um and on the one hand you have these sort of steps to like ease restrictions on speech and like rehabilitate intellectualss and allow for a broader public discourse. But the other half of it is that they're bringing markets back to China, right? And this is a shit show in a lot of ways.

If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing debt peonage in about five years um go listen to my bastards episode the poison milk scandal it's a it's a trip but on the other hand you have you know so you have kind of like opening up right you you have just more discourse you're they're not persecuting intellectuals again sort of they're they're they're de-persecuting the intellectuals that they had persecuted um but on the other hand you get this absolutely draconian sort of like set of crackdowns in the social sphere you have the one child policy you have this like really powerful tightening of one man rule in the factory and you have the sort of the destruction of these for what we'll get into this more later but like

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

and so you know and that that's how you can lead development and this stuff like that stuff like neo-authoritarianism survives the protest it goes on to become like a pretty major faction in the ccp itself in the 90s and 2000s and you know this is this is where things just get weird right um the student movement itself is very hierarchical and it gets to the point where like by the end of the student movement they're these the student leaders are like kidnapping each other over like who has control of

the microphones and like the stages in the square it is it is extremely bizarre and you know in terms of like the protests actually like if what they're trying to do is they're trying to like influence this factional fight inside the ccp over like the speed at which reformers are going to go and this it doesn't work it's like stunningly ineffectual the guy

they're trying to defend like winds up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life so okay so those are the student protesters but the the part and that the student protesters are the part of this that like everyone knows partly because some of those people escaped to hong kong and you know they're very influential sort of shaping the memory there but there's also the workers that i mentioned earlier and the students basically like hate the workers um for for most of the time this protest is going on and this is this is months right they they literally won't they will not let any of the workers go into this into tiananmen square like they have they have this whole system and like

in order to get into like increasing like like closer to the center of the square you have to be a student and then if you get to the center of the square you have to be like a member of the leadership it's very weird and you know and like one of the school, you have to be like a member of the leadership. It's very weird. And, you know, and like one of the things that workers are trying to do is they want to carry out a general strike. And the students are like, no, absolutely not. Do not do a general strike because largely because. OK, so if these people start doing a general strike, like that's not something that's not under our control. And, you know, OK, so this raises the question, like if the relationship between the students who are at Tiananmen and the workers at Tianiananmen are this bad like why are the workers even there um and there's a few answers to this question the sort of the simplest and most immediate one is that like the workers

are initially they come out because they're pissed they see how badly like the the the cops and sort of like the party is is treating the students in the square so they get mad but but but there's there's other stuff going on too the late 80s is the late 80s in china is sort of a mess economically there's rampant inflation and the the sort of rapid increase in prices is a threat to you know the sort of like cheap supply grain which is like the the sort of main subsidy that if you're an urban worker that you get and meanwhile you know you have marketization happening so at the same time that the prices are increasing for everyone and they can't get access to stuff that they need uh you have just

like ccp princelings like racing down the street and imported sports cars and like these are like the only these are like the only cars right like people people i don't know like like people are starting to get bicycles in mass sort of in this period but then you know it's like hey here's here's this like party boss guy who has a sports car they're like spending years salaries like gambling at racetracks and people just get pissed off so they they start organizing and i'm going to read from a section of a piece by johan zhong about what what they were doing. During the struggle to obstruct the military, workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self-liberation on an unprecedented level.

A huge wave of self-organization ensued. The Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation's membership grew exponentially and other workers' organizations, both within and across workplaces, mushroomed. The development of organizations led to a radicalization of action. Workers started organizing self-armed quasi-militias, such as picket corps and dare-to-die brigades, to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi-militias were also responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Beijing became a city self-managed by workers. It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self-armed workers organized in the Soviets in the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the same time,

Beijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications on the street. In many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns, a possible general strike was put on the table as well. Many workers started to build connections between factories to prepare for a general strike. And yeah, like this is the part of it that like people don't talk about because it wasn't in the square. And I mean, the other part, the other faction, like factor that's going on here is that like,

so the press corps is like sitting in the square. And this is why Tiananmen is like, this is massive spectacle, right? Because all of this, everything that's happening here inside the square is happening like in front of the entire Western press corps is, like, sitting in the square. And this is why Tiananmen is this massive spectacle, right? Because all of this, everything that's happening here, inside the square is happening, like, in front of the entire Western press corps. And, like, people are, like, you know, like, people are just, like, pointing cameras at their window, right? And, you know, but on the other hand,

the people outside of the square, like, the workers outside of the square are, the workers are getting more organized, and this is this is like this is absolutely unacceptable to the party and so yeah on on the night of june 3rd the army just starts killing them um they there had been a couple of attempts earlier to clear to to to clear the sort of fortifications and it hadn't really worked but this time like they time they're able to bring in military units that aren't from Beijing, or aren't from around the area,

and they kill an enormous number of people. Yeah, and I think it's important to note that both in terms of the killings that happened immediately and the political persecution after that, it's mostly the workers burying this, especially in the initial massacre, most of the killings that happened immediately and the political persecution, like after that, it's,

it's mostly the workers burying this, especially in the initial massacre. Most of the killing happens as the army's like fighting its way into the square. And, you know, I mean, they kill people in the square too, but you know,

and eventually they, they, they get into the square and this is where you get like tank man and like the, the sort of the famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point, it's basically over, right? Because one of the other things that's happened is that over the course of this protest, a lot of the students have left because they sort of gave up after the like factional conflict like stopped. But so most of the people like who are there are on the outs, are like other workers on the outside of this girl trying to

defend it and when those people get killed and the army gets the middle of the square it's the whole thing's already over and you know these protests get crushed and you know before the last bullet has been fired everyone everyone left standing is trying to create their own narratives but what just happened. The most common one is that Tiananmen is this, like, clash between democracy and authoritarianism. And, like, okay, to some extent, that's not wrong. Although, I mean, you know, we've already mentioned that there are a lot of neo-authoritarian students there. But, like, you know, okay, this is kind of a fair interpretation of what's going on like there's a lot of other pro-democracy movements in this period like in the region

most famously there's taiwan south korea um but the actual question of what's happening here is is is really a question of of what kind of democracy that these people are fighting for. The students at Tiananmen, to the extent that their democratic principles are sincere and not a cover for a sort of like deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that's demanded by a sort of new class of intellectuals that receive market reforms. To the extent that they actually believe in this, right? They believe in a very narrow conception of political democracy and you know this this democracy is sort of political democracy operates at the level of the state right it's based on free citizens who are equal before the law participating in elections to choose representatives who like pass laws and you know oversee and manage state bureaucracy but you know this model of political

democracy which is you know this is the one that we live under right it it relegates the workplace to a a separate economic sphere into which democracy doesn't extend the capitalist firm or its state-owned equivalent remains the absolute dictatorship of capitalists and advantageary of flunkies and even even the sort of progressive wings of the pro-democracy movement in like Taiwan and South Korea, like maintain this private dictatorship. You know, if you're a worker

in one of these states, right, you get rights, you get, you know, you get the ability to form unions, you get access to the welfare state, you get these sort of limited protections from the worst like physical and psychological abuses

that your bosses can inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movements actually are the legitimate the jesus sorry the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses which was not up for dispute and you know to to these sort of pro-democracy movements right pro like democracy means a democratic state and not a democratic workplace. And this is the huge divide between what's happening at Tiananmen and what's happening like everywhere else in the world. The workers at Tiananmen are the only people left in this entire sort of like run of pro-democracy movements that disagree they they are standing against not only that like everyone they're standing not only against their own government against a lot of

the the students who are who are also like at these protests they are standing against literally the entire tide of history itself by by you know by applying the principles of pro-democracy movement to like their own concerns right which is skyrocketing inflation mounting debts like rampant corruption to government officials like spyrocketing and spiraling inequality and petty bureaucratic oppression beijing's working class had reinvented a old and now like largely forgotten tradition of democracy in the factory that i'm gonna i'm calling it democratic worker self-management because there's no good name for it and they're all kind of clunky fair i mean this is based on who these people were at the time it makes sense that all of their names for things were pretty clunky yeah well the thing is they they don't name like like this and this is one of the things about okay one of the real

problems with studying tiananmen right is that like okay so we have really good accounts from the students right because some of the students flee and they're able to make it out. We have jack shit basically from the workers. We have – what we do have is we have some of the documents they produced and we have a lot of interviews that were done with people there. And they – I don't know. They have very, very idiosyncratic ways of expressing what they believe. And so you'll get things where they're like, okay, wait. We believe in and it's like, what? Because, yeah, the thing that they're doing is, like, they're synchronizing this new, they're synchronizing, sort of, like, a political

tendency that's trying to address the sort of dual dictatorships they're dealing with, right? Like, because they're dealing at the same time with, like, this political dictatorship the party has, and also the fact that their bosses now, like, completely control everything that they do. because of this they you know they they wind up being

like the last or i guess technically second to last because argentina happens so that that's sort of convoluted mess in itself but they're they're in the 20th century like they are the last people who are fighting for democracy in the factory. And this, to a large extent, is what Tiananmen is actually about. It's the culmination of a century-and-a-half-long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement and every single other ideology that exists. And these guys, over that century-and-a-half-long span, they're going to fight communists. They're going to fight capitalists. They're going to fight liberals and fascists and monarchies and republics and social democracies and theocracies.

And at Tiananmen, they're going to lose one more time. And that defeat, the fact that they lose here, the fact that these people get slaughtered, the fact that they're crushed so effectively that no one even remembers what they were – no one even remembers they exist like much less like what they were fighting for this defeat is the origin of the modern world that one man rule in the factory like the the the individual single boss who has total control and power over you is in in its sort of thousand forms is the author of the hell that is the 21st century and uh when we come back from this commercial break uh we are going to look at the international part of the struggle that Tiananmen is sort of like the conclusion of so here's some ads maybe from Amazon

working at their distribution center that seems like a good paying gig and we're back to look at why you too also must live in the absolute one man dictatorship in the factory so it's it's not not not not as much one man it's the one algorithm you have to you have to

listen to what your ipad tells you when you're walking through the amazon distribution center that's true yeah they have it is funny because it's like we they've somehow made a worse version of it it was like okay yeah it's like it's like yeah it's like okay now now you are ruled by a computer whose job it is to make one person an extremely large amount of money it's even further like depersonalized and further disjointed from actually being a human yeah it's it's i don't know there's there's the the there's some metaphor here which if i wasn't like sick out of my mind uh about how like power depersonalizes and dehumanizes you until the point where you're replaced with a machine that you can make here but uh i i don't know one in one in every two days the rumor randomly starts spitting on me. So I can't do that.

The lesson here is that when you're thinking about factories and how bosses suck and how it's not great to work in a factory, just have a boss that tells you what to do. The lesson is that it can always get worse because it could always be a computer. Anyway, continue. the lesson is that it can always get worse because it can always be a computer yeah anyway continue so okay to get a sense of like what this fight is and like how we got to Tiananmen we need to go back to the revolutions of 1848 which is

at first glance not like not an incredibly obvious place to start um okay if you want like a really detailed like blow for blow account of the revolutions of 1848 uh go listen to the revolutions podcast uh it it's good i am not gonna do it here because oh my god there's so much stuff but the very short version is that so in 18 across Europe, there's a bunch of revolutions that are collectively known while sometimes known as the springtime of the peoples. And this is the first wave of revolutions where socialists are a real thing. Frederick Engels, that Engels, the Marx and Engels, Eng is like on a barricade with a rifle fighting in Prussia.

There's like – yeah, I'm not going to – sadly, I can't get into August von Willitsch here. But like go Google August von Willitsch. He's wild. There's a huge revolution in France where they like – they finally depose the king. And there's this question here at – as these revolutions look like they're winning, there's this question of how far democracy is going to go and what it's going to mean. You have a large thing – this is in a lot of ways very similar to what you're dealing with in China in 1989. Inside of France, you have the split right you have the split between you know like the people who are like who are like french radicals but in the sense of like the original french revolution who are you know okay they they they want like they they want an elected democracy they absolutely

do not want to like deal with the fact that the that the workplace is not a democracy and then you know and you have we have a bunch of socialists and the socialists are like hey can we do something about like property relations and like the fact that there's a bunch of poor people with no jobs and you know and the socialists get slaughtered but you know they they don't die i mean okay you just said they get slaughtered well okay so a lot of these people get horribly slaughtered but a lot of them escape and like the ideology lives on yeah well the ideology lives on and it's a lot of the lead well i mean there's an interesting story here like a lot of the leaders like live on a lot of these people like for example so a bunch of people flee to the u.s and they wind up being like the like a lot of the officer corps of the union army in the civil war is made up by these by these socialists who like had to

flee after the revolutions failed and like prussia and stuff but yeah so but many of them do in fact die yeah it doesn't go great for them it's and and you know and you you you get to see one of the other things that's going to happen a lot, which is that, okay, so, like, the sort of, like, the French, like, the French radicals who are, like, pro-capitalism but also pro-democracy, like, ally with the conservative factions. And then they also all get killed when Napoleon III takes power. But, you know. Man, it's really hard to root for someone here and that yeah i know it's like this is really like like the the revolution produces his own gravedigger shit like oh hey what did you expect was gonna happen when you allied with like the landlords and i napoleon good thing this mistake will never no be made again nope uh good

thing we're not about to talk about this yeah yeah pay no mind to the rest of this episode yeah anyway continue so yeah you have the split between people who want electoral democracy but you know dictatorships in the workplace and these people who want like democracy in the workplace and this also prefigures a split inside of socialism itself um for you know for for the and this isn't even i i'm i i like in my script i say like for for the most radical factions of socialism you know like control over the means of production which is like the thing that you want means that like production is controlled either by like free associations of workers like you know direct democratic unions this is later called syndicalism or like workers councils and that that's you know i say it's the most radical like that that's a very popular conception

of like what this is going to be like if you read marx like marx is like oh yeah free associations of workers sure but you know as as the sort of like 1840s roll into the 1860s and the 1870s there's this faction of the movement that becomes just like obsessed with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. And they watch the state really get involved in the economy in a way that it kind of hasn't before. And over the course of sort of industrialization, they watch with like incredible envy as they see like these incredibly elaborate like planning schemes. They see the state building roads and canals and railroads and then entire cities with like these like complex electrical grids and like gas lines and plumbing systems and especially trains, like specifically trains. This drives them all completely insane. them all completely insane and they become they they begin to believe that like a single centralized planning body like non-democratic association of workers like a single centralized state planning body can like you know bring about the long sought after like cooperative commonwealth of socialism

and all these people get they get obsessed with like central planning right and this becomes this starts to sort of like consume more and more of the left um in in germany which is home to like the powerful german social democratic party which is like probably the most powerful socialist party in the world at this point the socialists become divided into two camps there's the revisionists led by edward bernstein who like he like renounces marxism and revolution and like entirely in favor of reforming capitalism in the state from like within and then you know you have these orthodox marxists that are like led by karl kotzky whose whole thing is that he hates bernstein and like the only thing that these two people that these two groups agree on is that i

think the only thing they agree on is bureaucratic state planning is the thing you're supposed to be fighting for and not like democratic workplaces and this leads the sdp to like they they they do a lot of things that are like disastrous um one of the things that they wind up doing a lot is like actively working with the bosses to like destroy the like workplace autonomy for their own unions so like there'll be things where it's like like i don't know there's a famous example like there's like a like i think they're like a they're a metal workers and i think they make knives or something and they have a lot of control of the production process right they can control like how much stuff gets produced the process like how it works like what they're actually doing

and the sdp is like no this is bad because it's inefficient and so they like basically crush their own union and this this goes in really disastrous directions but we're still uh the single person who becomes like the most obsessed with like the potential of bureaucratic state planning is uh one very very very obscure guy named vladimir ilyich lenin ah who i don't expect anyone to have heard of friend of the pod yeah i just said lenin oh that's funny keep's funny yeah so as david graver points out uh lenin's obsession with like the german postal service is such that like okay so he writes a very famous book about like what a future socialist state is going to be called state

and revolution and like almost all of it is a lie but he also says this in it um a witty german social democrat of the uh 1870s called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system this is very true at present the postal service is a business organized along the lines of a state capitalist monopoly blah blah imperialism is this whole thing but like imperialism is making everything off of this uh but so to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that the technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials that receive no salaries higher than a workman's wage, all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat, this is our immediate aim. And if you think about what this means for about five seconds, right, what he's saying is that socialism is the entire economy being planned by a bureaucratic state and you know this this like this sits off this like massive

series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who you know like want to control the work that they do and you know like like make i'm like you know the people who like who think that like the revolution means that they're actually going to be able to make decisions over their work and not you know just like work for like a slightly different set of bureaucrats and this struggle between you know this the sort of like new socialist bureaucrats and like democracy and the workers movement is you know it's it's an enormous part of the struggle that happens here and there's like another version of it happening between the workers movement itself and the capitalist state like in in the 1880s um the workers

movements in like in italy and germany and like france to a lesser extent that they have these they they form these parties that are called like states within a state. And these things are these massive networks of these workers' institutions. They have like free schools. They have workers' associations. They have like fair, friendly societies. They have libraries. They have theaters.

They have like unions. They have co-ops. They have like neighborhood associations. They have tenant unions. They have mutual aid societies. And these things are all run democratically by like by by the workers who form the associations and you know and like the people who are doing this are like you know the the hope is that like this is going to be the basis for the new social society right it's like okay we we can just come together and like do this stuff and we can do it democratically and

we can administer this stuff ourselves and the and these things are enormously popular um and you know and this like terrifies this sort of old ruling class um and audubon bismarck who's the guy basically running the german state in this period like he his solution to this is to create like bureaucratic state-run versions of like all of these things so he he creates like state-run libraries state-run theaters like state-run welfare services and he's using these as as like a replacement to the sort of workers institutions and he has this great line where he tells an american observer quote my idea was to bribe the working classes or shall i say to win them over to regard the state as a social institution existing for their own sake and invested in and interested in their welfare and like this works this is this is an enormous success this is one of the greatest propaganda crews ever because like it it's it's so successful in convincing people that the thing

that they're fighting for is like the state bureaucratic version of this thing and not the version where they do it themselves that like when the socialists like take power they confuse bismarck's like literally the welfare state bribe thing that he like made to buy off the movements like they confuse that with socialism itself and like to this day everyone believes this it's like it's it's i don't know i lose my mind constantly over this because all of these things that bismarck developed like specifically to destroy the socialist movement everyone was like oh my god this is socialism it's like no no please stop and you know and this is really effective particularly on the leadership of the movement

but like the actual like people in these parties like in these movements don't forget it and and as as the sort of like 20th century draws to a close and you get like the sorry as as the 19th century draws to close and you get like the 20th century the workers who are like doing the uprisings are are not sort of like like the you know the the workers who are doing the uprisings haven't like drinking the kool-aid and the thing that they do immediately when they start doing uprisings is they start building these democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils. The most famous of these are other workers' councils that form sort of spontaneously in the Russian

revolutions of 1905 and 1917. These are like... They're called Soviets because Soviet's just like the word for council in Russian. And these things are originally these like ad hoc strike committees, and then they eventually become these like ad hoc strike committees and they eventually become these like like formalized like like elected bodies of representatives from like

the various factories who are like coordinating a strike and okay so 1905 they they lose and they all die but in 1917 uh they they they do this again and they form the soviets again and this time the council start to take like a larger role in coordinating production directly and coordinating between different factories and industries, and they turn into this sort of counter-power thing to the new government. to argentina between the the different socialist factions who like people like the different factions of this movement who want democracy in the factory and this like a lot newly formed like anti-democratic alliance of like social democrats bolsheviks and capitalists who like you know are like okay well some of them are in favor of like you can have democracy okay there's a whole range of this thing right like the thing that unites all of these movements, the social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, the capitalists, and later the fascists is that they like emphatically like do not want democracy

in the factory and they're willing to put aside their differences to make sure it doesn't happen. But, you know, there's still, there's still a huge fight that happens here between, between 1917 and 1920, you get workers councils in, you get workers councils in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, Ireland, and Ireland. 1920 you get workers councils in you get workers councils in germany poland austria ukraine ireland and ireland there's there's these like two giant revolts by syndicalist workers unions in brazil and argentina and these all get crushed um in italy italy has like one of the most intense conflicts between these like a lot of syndicalists in the italian state they they have this this really famous like set of factory occupations where instead of like so like before this people would go on strike right you go on strike and you

leave your factory and in in italy they were like okay what if we just stayed in the factory and took it over so that they couldn't like just like restart production with scabs and we now control the factory and there's this huge wave of it in in italy in in the late 19 19 like teens early 1920s and you know it looks like for a little for like a bit like it really looks like they're going to bring down the government but the factory occupations get crushed but they don't they don't get crushed by the government they get crushed by the italian socialist party and like their union the general confederation of labor and like this is how fascism wins in italy like to a large extent it's that like when when like you know and this happens in germany too it's like when

when when when sort of the social democrats and the capitalists are faced with this possibility that like workers could take over the factories the social democrats turn on them and just kill them all and the problem with that is that like okay well who who who do you you do the killing with the answer is the fascists and then the social democrats like themselves all get exterminated by the fascists it's it's this like you know it is it is a it is a terrible cycle that we're going to see like literally over and over and over again um yeah it's bad um that sounds not great, yeah. Yeah. Do you know who else will slaughter your factory council?

Oh, no. Oh, I actually know this one. All right, Garrison, go. We have a few options here. There is our good friends at the Washington State Patrol. If you're trying to set up a highway business next to the highway and run it via workers' council, State Patrol, come up and be like, not on this highway, and you're

done. Probably also like Amazon or something. Who knows? Yeah. And we're back to see... You know, okay, okay. We are back to see the worst defeats that they're going to have, that, like, the people who want, like, a factory council are going to have this period, which for once actually has nothing to do with Amazon or the capitalists whatsoever.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who, I don't know how many people sort of, like, know the history of the Russian Revolution, but, like, the factory councils are the people who, like, basically put the Bolsheviks in power in the first place. Like, to a large extent, like, they're the people who, like, were the shock troops of this. And, like, literally the moment Lenin takes power, he starts undermining the Soviets. He publishes this thing, like, three or four days after the october revolution he he publishes this thing called the draft decree on workers control which is like you know he's he basically is like he's trying to like shift power from these councils to the bolshevik party in the state and this doesn't really work initially because these groups are like pretty powerful but in it you know he he publicly lenin's like no we draw we drive our power from the soviets like we're we're the people who support

these councils but then like lenin's he's like shipping away from them and then in 1918 he writes this thing he writes this this this uh paragraph from the immediate task the soviet government which is like one of the wildest things I've ever read in my life. I was going to read this. Which is saying a lot. It's wild. It is. Jeez.

Okay. Unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large-scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands in the interest of socialism that the masses unquestioningly obey

the single will of the leaders of the labor process. Which is like, what? Like, what? How, how about you explain to our good viewers why that is so bonkers?

Like, okay. Some of them might just hear that and be like, oh, leftist words. Cool, moving on even just the first two words unquestioning yeah makes me like that part like a questioning submission the whole thing about like the masses must unquestionably obey the will of the single leader like what no this is like like what is happening this is you know and the thing that's happening here is that lenin lenin is being really candid about what it means for there to be a boss like what it means for there to be

someone whose position is above you that can order you to do literally whatever they want and if you don't obey them like bad things happen and you starve or get shot yeah he he's he's he's incredibly candid about this, right? This is what, like, having a boss means. It means, like, questioning submission to the single will of a leader. This is how I talk about Sophie all the time. Yeah.

Well, shaking her head, I'm with you, Sophie. Can't believe you just said that. Yeah, you're welcome. Whatever you say, Sophie. Thanks, Gare. God, I'm thinking about this. There's this line.

It's sort of potentially related to the story. I read this thing once about the workers who took over the Sorbonne. actually i think it was the students serve the a bunch of students like take over this uh like like the the like the like the big academy in in paris in 1968 and they send this like i think it's a telegram to like the chinese embassy and like the end of it is what i think if i'm remembering the exact words correctly it's uh the the revolution will not be complete until the revolution will not be complete until the last capitalist is hung with the entrails of the last bureaucrat. Oh, that's incredibly hot. Yeah. 68 was wild.

That's that's the thing this brought to mind for some reason. But, you know, going back to sort of Lenin and his unquestioning submission to the single world, he's more candid about what one-man rule in the factory or having a boss you have to obey means. But the system he's describing isn't different than any other political system. Like, Bolshevik rule in the factory isn't really different than capitalist, social democratic, or fascist rule. really different than capitalist social democratic or fascist rule and you know the movement for democracy in the factory as as you know as as as these people are crushed especially in cross in 1921 like the movement for democracy in the factory is faced by four implacable enemies who are willing to put aside all of their ideological differences to ensure that like no one ever like gets to control their workplace and you know and as as as the twenties blend to the early 1930s, like the movement seemed

to have disappeared, but they didn't, they absolutely didn't. Even though, even though they got murdered by the fascists, the communists, the social Democrats and the capitalists, uh, they're going to be back next episode to do like 12 more revolutions. And yeah, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that come, come come come back tomorrow for us talking about like why these revolutions happens uh what the ruling class did to stop them and then yeah the the lead up to tiananmen square to see the sort of like the final stand of the chinese working class and yeah like get to what tiananmen actually was What a cliffhanger. Woo!

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and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasts. Yeah, that counts as an intro. Look, yes, we've now started the podcast the podcast that we are starting is it could happen here and i it's me because for long i'm i'm doing i'm doing the host thing and i have a bunch of other people with me who do a lot of things i have garrison yes i have shireen yes and i have sophie our lovely boss sophie lichterman all praise on high your words bow down your words not mine

weird i did not enjoy that at all chris want to take over so so sophie unfortunately fortunately unfortunately lacks the sheer ruthlessness to uh crush the workers movement well we will see yeah that remains to be determined so oh i don't buy it so sophie sophie is very sad i'm sorry sophie um but so when we last left off lenin lenin has like in theory crushed last sort of remaining factions of like the workers who want democracy the factories but unfortunately for the leninist like literally no many how no matter how many workers they kill and they are going to kill enormous

numbers of workers the demand for democracy in the factory like just refuses to die but for over 100 years the development of this sort of mass factory system a logistical infrastructure that you need to support it maybe most importantly coal mines and railroads that are used to transport stuff generate this incredibly militant working class that sees you know democratic control over the workplace is like the fundamental aspect of its liberation um ideologically this is you know this is this is manifested in like a series of interlocking beliefs about like the nature of the working class and like what class society is um all of which are sort of necessary components of this like what becomes this like

incredibly like this like instinctive formation of workers councils the moment like an uprising happens and this is something that's very interesting about about the 20th century is that like yeah like whenever there's like a crisis someone's someone's like like everyone in the factory is like okay we're like we've taken control of the factory now like we we were forming a council we're forming a giant assembly and like we don't do this anymore and we're gonna come back to like why we don't do this anymore but like this hasn't happened like the last time it happened was like in argentina in 2001 and i don't even know if garrison garrison might have been alive for that. Thanks. But like... I will say the other time it does happen

is when after a recording session when our boss Sophie leaves me and Chris will stay on the line to talk. That's true. Usually about Star Wars. And that in a way kind of is a workers' council just for the factory of podcasting. Yeah.

We can talk about star wars in front of me i feel so bad for so many next the next time we will puppy face it's okay thanks shereen

your petite bourgeois tactics won't work on me oh god we've all all the people on the subreddit who think that we hate Your petite bourgeois tactics won't work on me, Sophie. Oh, God. All the people on the subreddit who think that we hate Sophie are going to just have a field day with this episode. That is my favorite recurring conspiracy theory bit. That's a real conspiracy? Oh, man. Oh, man.

Wow, I have a lot to catch you up on. You do not. No. You do not because it's not true run away so meanwhile meanwhile so in in the period when people actually like did this seriously you know there's a lot of sort of ideological things that come together to make it so that when people like you know like when when bread prices increase too much this is what people do um and a lot of this has to do with the physical experience of what being a worker is in like you know the 19th 20th centuries like you have these like these

these these these incredibly rapid like technological expansions and you know the the people who are who are doing this stuff like see themselves as the creators of the new world right like and this like literally this is happening like these are the people who are literally like they are building the cities right like all of the sort of the infrastructure of the modern world is physically being created by them and this creates this you know like if you are the person who is like who has transformed like this fishing village into this giant industrial city, right? You see yourselves as the creator, like literally physically the creator of this new world that's being developed. And then the second belief that it produces that drives this movement is that the people who produce this world should be its inheritors.

drives this movement is that the people who produce this world should be its inheritors and so and this this this sort of this is what drives the workers movement in this period which is that like okay so the if if you if you are literally physically creating the new world and you think that because you have created it should be yours uh the next the thing that you do because it's not yours right like you don't like yeah you you know like the the people who build cities are not the people who own the cities and you know if you see this yeah like yeah okay like the city is actually owned by like three real estate speculators and like a bunch of cops and more applicable examples like the people who build the podcast does not own the podcast yeah no we don't own the podcast like we we are exactly applicable result that you know that kind of that you know

everyone understands that example yeah yeah i actually don't think the people understand that we don't own the podcast it's actually unclear to me i i people people have weird things about how podcasting works but yeah we don't own the podcast we just create it and we do all the work and then sophie sits in her leather chair looking down at all my leather chair look at all my podcast creations i have created and then all of us how could you think i could sit here on an 85 degree day in a leather chair if you're going to in sylvia at least get your facts right my word a leather chair continue chris okay so for for the for the people who are like actually

watching their boss like sitting around smoking a giant cigar in a factory while they pound, like, hammers or, like, work at a hospital and get a watch, like... So he's just starting to have a massive cigar and a comically large cigar. Robert actually left this for me to give to Prop, but... Robert actually left this for me to give to Prop. Because for the record, whenever I do hang out with my other boss, Robert, he often does sit in some chair smoking a cigar. And I do think it is, in fact, leather. Okay, so we're describing Robert. He forces me to slave away on my laptop writing scripts and just sits in his chair. Look, we work in the podcast minds.

Yeah, it is it is really hard out there yeah and you continue so okay so like the the the belief that you produce the world and that if you produce you should own it is like this this is not unique to the part of the workers movement that like you know thinks that also you should like have a democracy in the factory and like you should have the autonomy to decide how you do your work and what needs to be done uh that those beliefs like broadly comprise the ideology of like the entire workers movement and and by you know but by the 20th century the workers movement is really really broad right i mean it stretches from sort of like really mild social democratic trade unionists to like the intellectual heads of these like Leninist vanguard parties but what makes a

democratic wing unique is that their concern is the fundamental alienation of factory life and this I mean originally like it is very much factory life but like this gets expanded out as this goes on into sort of the like the fundamental alienation

of labor itself which is this condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who use you as a tool to do something. And this is a concern for everyone in some sense, but for the Leninists and Social Democrats, alienation is just like a product of ownership or distribution, right? If that's what you believe, the way you defeat alienation is through the working class and productive capacity, not in sort of like any kind of like innate human – like humanity or creativity. Like all you have to do is like, well, okay, you flip a switch, right? And the factory is now owned by the state instead of being owned by like JP Morgan or something. And like now your alienation is gone. Uh-huh.

That's how it works. Yeah. morgan or something and like now your alienation is gone uh-huh that's how it works yeah or anyway and your social democracy it's like well okay so you you you you flip a switch and taxes get higher and now you have a union but you're still working for gold you're still working for the goldman zacks but you know but for for for for the wing of the workers movement that you know actually cares about democracy this doesn't solve anything right like as long as the the fundamental relation of being the like of being an object right as long as like you fundamentally the worker are not are not a human being who has agency and control and autonomy over their life as long as you're just an object that you know like you're you're you

like you you you are a living human tool that the one-man ruler of the factory can wield around to do whatever they want. As long as that persists, changes in ownership structure and health benefits miss the entire point. And this kind of – the degradation that comes from just being a tool can only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class. just being a tool can only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class and that means like actually giving the class control over the production process and you know in in 1936 in spain workers are like fuck this and decide to take the entire thing into their own hands and they do this by just seizing their workplaces in mass and this becomes known as the spanish revolution um and it is one of the most extensive sort of experiments in like workers' democratic self-management or like whatever you want to call people making their own decisions in the their bosses have been like you know chased from the premises and like flee in terror uh these workers set about like transforming the entirety of spanish society along democratic lines like they pooled their

resources together collectively and that they allocate them democratically for the benefit of you know like society as a whole and for a brief moment this works they have this incredible like this triumphant experiment democratic self-management and output increases dramatically and social services are expanded and like in in in in the span of two years in the middle of a civil war uh like the workers of spain are able to create a universal health care system that expands care into like like rural areas of spain where like you couldn't get it before but you know the problem is once again is that this is happening to the civil war and and a lot like you know using sort of like nominally anti-fascism like as as they're sort of like you know they're using the threat of the need

to oppose fascism as as a sort of front like a a front for what they're actually doing you get this alliance of liberals liberal socialists and st Stalinists who just like brutally stamp out any attempt to do democratic self-management. And like, like you, you have like Soviet cadres and like NKVD, like Soviet secret police guys, like literally leading Arby's into,

into these cities and like, like kill, like killing the workers. And then physically like taking control of these factories that people had seized and giving them back to the bosses, which is, you know, this is, this is great communist stuff and yeah the you know and this this this ends exactly how you would expect it to end with oh yeah like this the stalinists get everything they want they murder all of the the people who want like a factory council and

then they all get killed by franco but you know undeterred by sort of the casualty tolls of these like massacres by people who want bosses uh this just keeps happening and you know by the time you get to the the 1950s 1960s like all this stuff is back like there's there's factory councils again in hungary you get them in italy in france and like chico savaki in 1968 there's like like they're There's like – there's councils being – there's communes being formed in like Vietnam. There's like – we against sort of the soviets in in 1956 that's it gets a lot of the same liberal mythologizing that you get with tiananmen but like kind of more egregious here so i don't know i i think like i i i got taught this revolution in in school this is like one of the few ones that we actually get and they taught it as this like

this is like the hungarian revolution was this like kind of nationalist like liberal democratic revolution for people who wanted like democracy and freedom and like free markets and then like you know if you go read about what the people were at the people actually doing the revolution were saying you get quotes like this this is a direct quote from a member of one of the Hungarian workers councils. The time when the bosses decided our fate is over. And it's like, huh? Huh? These,

these guys, these guys do not seem like, I don't know. These guys don't seem like liberal Democrats. So something weird is happening here. There's something that's actually happening. Is it like Hungarian workers, like seize control of their factories and like the workplaces and they form

workers councils, the others of the government, and then the Russian slaughter them all them all but you know like this is not a liberal democratic revolution at all this is a revolt against the dictatorship in the workplace and there's an identical revolt to break out across both the capitalist world and the communist world and in the newly decolonized society you start seeing them too and you know and to the sort of like dismay of both the communists and the capitalists who are both like oh my god why is everyone keep on workers councils like this

solution to alienation like it's not like an ideological thing right like it's it's not that there's like a group of people who are like secretly infiltrating these countries and being like okay you need to form workers councils this this is this stuff is happening in places where there's just like none of that so like what one of one of the sort of like movements that that does stuff like this is is the revolution in algeria um you know and the the like they're like algeria like does have a pretty high level of political education but the political education they're getting is from like it's from the national liberation front which is like insofar as it's any one thing it's like it's a nationalist vanguardist movement which is you know they're the people who like fight the fresh colonizers and beat them and their ideology like insofar as you can describe one ideology like the thing that they want is like the state

having this decisive role in national development but you know immediately upon taking power ahmed ben bella who's algeria's first president like discovers that you know he he's not actually going to be the one like making the decision about what the country's economic structure is going to be because he takes power and a whole bunch of like french people who live in algeria flee and basically what happens immediately after is that all of like all of these this property that had been originally like held by by by French sort of like colonists. Like it gets immediately seized by the Algerian working class and, you know, they build their own workers councils. And, you know, Ben Bella is like, OK, I guess I guess we have like workers councils now.

Like, I guess I guess we have sort of like autonomous democratic production and ben bella is like kind of trying to undermine them but he doesn't really get a chance to because once again there's a military coup and ben bella like he i think he escapes and doesn't die but like the fact that the councils all sort of get dismantled again but like the number of times this has happened is getting just like completely out of hand and it's like yeah okay the the it's like yeah okay so every time this happens they murder everyone but like you know the revolutions keep happening and they keep happening and they keep happening and you know even even as late as like the, the late 70s, like, it's not clear that, like, it's not clear that the people who want one man ruling the factory are going to win. Like, there's this moment in Italy in 1977 where it's, like, this, like, giant student worker coalition almost takes power.

50 years of of like franco and like the the fascist dictatorship like the the cnt which is the anarchist union that had done the revolution like reappears in the 70s again even though everyone thought it was gone and like you know this is a real this is a real source of strife for especially the sort of capitalist managerial elite who are you know they this stuff keeps happening it's like okay like it is an unacceptable risk that one of the one day one of these groups is going to win and so they start looking for a way to like dismantle this sort of like systemic things that like create that cause people to do this but you know but they're trying to do it in a way that doesn't involve them giving up their power um so yeah as vicky also well points out this sort of like this like instinctive embrace of like democracy in the factory like as a political program is only

possible as long as factories as long as like the factory functions as a point of encounter um her i think it was her term for it when she calls it a dark agora which is like so agora is like like the the sort of like the greek marketplace in the center of a town everyone goes there and you like talk about things right and the factory serves as this kind of like it's this sort of like dark version of it where like on the one hand you know it facilitates these interactions that allow people to sort of like identify with each other and like you know create collective meaning by like identify with each other and create collective meaning by interacting with each other. But on the other hand, it exists to exploit you, and it's terrible, and you're just getting physically and socially destroyed every moment you're in it. But it still is a place where you can assemble an identity.

You and a bunch of the people around you can go like hey like we are workers right like we are the working class and this this is like a shared political identity that you have that allows you to do things and so the the thrust of sort of the attack against this takes the form of this attack on like the shop floor as like a site of like formation of identities that can allow you to like mobilize stuff and so this takes like a number of forms um most famously is there's it's de-industrialization and this sort of like spatial relocation of factories so like like part of what's going on right is that you have a you have a bunch of people who work in a factory and then they live like around like right around the factories right they work in a coal mine everyone lives in a town around the

coal mine and this means that everyone sees each other constantly and they're like constantly like running into each other and like physically talking to each other and you know this is a really good way to create radical politics so what what happens is you these factories get sent out to the suburbs and this allows you to create places where you know workers are isolated from each other and you know the other thing you can do is you turn workers into homeowners and you sort of like buy them off with this combination of like cheap credit and this promise that like their houses will not be a financial asset and so as the sort of 80s rolls on the the sort of the the the like the heralded democratization of finance replaces democratization in the factory as sort of the, the, the, the, the, like the heralded democratization of finance replaces democratization. The factory is sort of the capitalist class.

Like the other thing they do, that's like really insidious is they, they, they, they, they tied like the remaining union pensions into the stock market. And this is stuff like, like you see this today with like 401ks.

And it means that like, if, if you want to like have a retirement, you are like physically, literally invested in the stock market, which ties, you know market which ties you know which ties everyone sort of like into the system and corporations start to turn workplaces into these like enormous propaganda apparatuses you get like like walmart in particular has these like

like these mass ideological like programming things that they run that are designed to sort of like get you to identify with like the corporation itself and not with like the other people you're well you know like the other people you're with in the class as a whole and you know like the other thing that they're able to do is the fact that capital is mobile and workers like aren't allows you know combined with like logistics advances and it means that like if workers ever start getting an upper hand somewhere capitalists can just leave and the process that you see is that as the sort of the total number of people working in in the like in industrial work keeps decreasing as a percentage of the population it keeps decreasing and as this happens capitalists are just like okay screw it we're

gonna we're gonna pick up our tools and leave and this spits out like enormous populations who are just like kicked out of the traditional workforce entirely. And these developments, this is what actually like eventually destroys the classical workers movement is the ability to leave and the sort of destruction of the factory is like a site of stuff. But in order for this to work, the one thing they need is a place to move to, right? They need somewhere with this large exploitable labor supply that is been

like crushed enough that it won't revolt against them and the capitalist class finds that in our products and services and we're we're back we're we're we're back and we're back to china and okay so i've been talking about the way this sort of like this this whole system like this whole factory system mass production stuff like develops but china's weird because this is the one place where the factory system works like really differently than everywhere else um and there's a lot of reasons for this one of which is that like so chinese like state-owned firms it's like almost impossible for them to fire someone because i mean there's a lot of reasons for this and one of them is that like people's entire sort of social sphere is built around their work unit and like their work unit is like it's

the company you work for and there's this whole sort of like legal apparatus built around it and it like you know and like this like unit gives you everything from like your retirement like it like feeds you like there's often like entertainment stuff's like tied into it like you get health care you get like child care from it and the ccp also gets rid of the peace rate system which is this like this is this thing that like i mean it so there's a lot of capitalist places to work with this where it's like okay so the peace rate system is you pay people for like every unit of something they produce so like you get paid by like i don't know like how many like how many pounds of like cherries you can pick and so the ussr brings this back because the ussr and the

us are really not that different but china is like nah this like sucks this is capitalism and you know okay like i'm not gonna say the fact chinese factory system is great but like because they don't have the peace rate system is because they can't fire people uh you get this very you get this weird thing where it's like the people who run the factories like don't have very good ways to force people to work and because of this they like they sort of like have to allow this like degree of participation in the worker process in like in the labor process that like you don't really see most other places and everything they have that luckily uh garrison and i also have this is

we have the ability to criticize our bosses although we we have more of this yeah one day yeah what do you got go ahead uh i'd one one okay we we've got it we don't we don't have our big character poster yet but like one day garrison and i are going to show up to the office with like giant big character posters with your faces on it that like have specifically roberts are going to have a list of crimes on it great my favorite part of like big labor protests is when they make those giant like puppets yeah if we just make a giant stick puppet version of robert and sophie that we just create around the office now that as long as mine's bigger than robert's that's fine we can do that great great full support so we we gotta do this in china it's it's weird like you have the ability

to do this but like it's like run through the party. And so if someone gets unpopular enough, like the party will like start a campaign about how bad like that one boss is. And then you can show up to like the meeting and go like, Hey, I hate my boss. This guy sucks. But then they just replace him with like another boss. Right.

So it's not like, it's not actually a democratic system really, but the way that it works ensures that like the people who are managers are like pretty popular at least to some extent like are popular and people don't like really hate them and this means that you know because there's all of this stuff that makes the chinese factory system different from like the other systems uh and also because of like structural stuff in maoism that i i mean i could talk about that but i i don't like talking about maoism but basically the the product of this is that like you have in china during this period a lot of demands for democracy but they're really deep they're not they're not tied to the workplace at all they're they're mostly like political demands for like democracy in the party or stuff like that and that means like you know at least in the cities

this system like kind of works okayish until the cultural revolution where everything falls apart and this means that it is at long last time for me to do the cultural revolution rant which is something i have been planning for like yeah i'm very i'm very excited about this i've been waiting for an excuse and i finally have one okay so the cultural revolution rant is that everyone gets the cultural revolution completely wrong like everyone every like it's like it it's one of the rare events where like it's misinterpreted in like exactly the same way by both people who support it and the people who oppose it um and okay the first thing to understand about this right is like okay so the the the initial the very very beginning of the cultural

revolution like it's basically a bunch of like teenagers kind of like it's like middle schoolers essentially and they're attacking these they're attacking like other kids at their school and these kids are kids who have what's called a black blood background like black blood which means that like they're they're the children of people who were from like quote-unquote, bad class backgrounds. And this is really weird for a number of reasons. One, because you have a sort of pseudo-class system based on who your parents were, right? You have people who have red blood, who have good class backgrounds, or your parents are workers, or your parents work with the party or something. And then you have people who are from bad class backgrounds, quote-unquote,

who are from, like, bad class backgrounds, quote-unquote, who, like, are persecuted. And, like, okay, like, I don't really care that much if you're, like, persecuting, like, a Shanghai oligarch who, like, collaborated with the French and Japanese imperialists or whatever. But, like, A, this extends to, like, the children of these people. And a lot of the children of these people, like, weren't even alive when their parents were, like, you know, like, doing stuff that was bad. And the other thing is that like the term bad class background this is really loose like i i know people whose families were declared like declared like black class backgrounds who have black blood and like you know they weren't allowed to hold in the government position and the reason that this happened to them was that her dad had made bird feeders before the revolution and they considered that like petite bourgeois and it's like this is

like this is like this is like like what like what what are you doing like you you you've reproduced like you've turned class into like a pseudo race thing that's like her like you like inherit from your parents even though like their parents don't own property anymore because you've done social it's it's really bizarre and and what's what's happening here is the kids from the red class backgrounds are, you know, they're the kids of the new Chinese elite. And they're just, like, picking on and attacking the kids who are, like, now this sort of, like, minority class. And so what this amounts to is the beginning of this is a bunch of privileged rich kids who are, like, attacking the bunch of kids who are being persecuted for stuff that's, like, not their fault at all. And, you know, part – and the other part of this, this like this is the part that people i think get it's like mao is trying to like play power game inside the party blah blah

blah but you know things get more and more chaotic and you get you get circling his attacks on like ccp bureaucrats and cadres and stuff because mao is trying to like mao's trying to solidify his place in the party and he's blah blah there all this stuff that's happening um but then it gets really interesting um so so this starts in 1966 right and at the very beginning of 1967 there's something there's something called the January Storm which is where a bunch of rebel workers just seize control of Shanghai and like they run the party out they run the they run I think they run the army out too and you know and now like they they control the city of shanghai and this is like an oh fuck moment for mao because you know now he has to like deal with this city that has been taking over by its own working class and and i found this this incredible line from joan lai who's

having a meeting with mao and they're trying to figure out what to do about the fact that Shanghai has been seized by these workers. And I'm just going to read this. When asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Zhou Enlai replied bluntly that, quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct elections of the Paris Commune type. develop if we immediately implement direct elections of the paris commune type and i think this is like this is this really incredible like like thing you can find right because it's like okay well there there's two things that can happen here one is either like okay you you you give these people democracy and the ability to vote right and joe and lion mal look at this and like that would be anarchism

we can't do that and the second thing is you don't do that and you repress them and they take the second line and you know okay like it takes them a bit to get this ramped up right it takes a bit to get the sort of kind of revolution thing they're doing to like stop all of this rebel stuff that they've started to to get it takes about a year but but by 1968 the students and the workers who had like you know done done this sort of uprising stuff start getting slaughtered like just massacred killed on an unimaginable scale uh the the and this is this is where everyone gets the cultural revolution completely wrong because everyone the entire memory of the cultural revolution is from basically the first two

years of it. Right. Which is like all the stuff about like, like, you know, like professors being marched out onto the street and dunce caps and like students, like humiliating the professors and like,

like party officials being like marched around with like placards on them. And like people like that's the stuff. And like the, the chaos of the revolution, like that's, that's stuff everyone remembers. That's the first two years of this there's still like i mean you you can art like there's there's the short the short the quote-unquote short culture revolution which is

like the high point of the activity goes from 1966 to 1969 and then there's like a longer one that goes to like the death of mao depending on how you want to count it. But almost all of the actual violence in this period happens in the third phase, which is the first phase of the initial uprising and then the rebel groups are fighting each other. But then phase three is when the state cracks down on

and starts trying to crush this rebel student factions. And I'm going to read from Walder who did a uh so there's a guy named walder who who went to he did a bunch of work in the chinese archives where he like went and like found the death tolls and i'm gonna read like he he like he goes to a bunch of archives he goes to a bunch of state archives and he like like tracks down the death

certificates and like tracks down like who died where and this this is what he wrote about it more than three-fourths of all documented deaths and local animals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase and then more than 90 percent of those persecuted for alleged political crimes so what he's saying here is that 75 percent of all of the deaths in the entire Cultural Revolution weren't done by like the revolution parts. They were done by the state murdering the workers faction,

the rebel factions. And not only that, 90% of the actual political persecution was done by the state and not by the rebels. And when you actually look at what this means, like this means everything, everything anyone ever talks about the Cultural Revolution is completely wrong. It wasn't like the thing that happened and when when you actually look at what this means like this means everything everything

anyone ever talks about the cultural revolution is completely wrong it wasn't like the thing that happened in the cultural revolution wasn't that sort of student radicalism got out of control and they started killing everyone it produces all this violence the thing that actually happens is that there's a student like uprising right but what happens is that the the sort of conservative and state factions just slaughter them and i walter estimates the total number of people dead it's somewhere between 1.1 and 1.6 million people and again like 75 and i think it's actually slightly higher than that like percent of the people who were killed in this are killed by the state and you know this this has an enormous effect on i mean just everything that happens in chinese

society from then on because on the one hand the popular memory of the cultural revolution persists as this thing that was like this is what happens if you like if people outside the party and like students and radicals like start like making trouble is that you get all these people dead but then you know you you have the people inside the state who like know how many people they had to kill in order to hold on to power right they they kill they kill probably more people than like the you know there's there's a very famous massacre of like communists or like suspected communists in indonesia that doesn't get called a genocide because it was technically on political lines but like was one of the worst anti-communist massacres in history and they killed more people than that in during this period.

And that like that level of violence and the fact that the people running the state understand what they had to do. It means you get, you get an elite that's incredibly paranoid about like anything that like smells like organizing happening outside the party. And the other thing that happens is that like the most radical students and workers of this period just get they're all dead right they killed they killed like they they killed like a million people the you know for for for every one person who got killed there's about 19 people who were like persecuted in a lot of way and that's

like a lot of people are tortured a lot of these people are like sent to prisons they're like like really horrible stuff happens to people and this process keeps going like through through the seven like there's a huge spike in like state killings 1970 and but by by the end of the 70s like anything that sort of like could have cohered into into like a movement that like wants democracy in the workplace, for example, is just gone because all of the radicals like – and anyone who like wanted – anyone who wanted democracy in the factory, any of the people who were like even sort of like just sort of rebellious, like these people have all been killed. And the consequence of this is that throughout – through the 80s, you get this politics that's drivenian and really successful attempt to just like reestablish the state's like patriarchal control over the household and strips and the 80s, it looks like the Chinese ruling class has succeeded, right? Like they finally destroyed, they finally destroyed like any opposition to them. But then, you know, things get very weird, which is that Tiananmen happens. Tiananmen happens and

by 1989 as a rule in general everywhere the classical workers movement that was demanding democracy in the factory, they're basically done and so they're unable to do their own revolutions now the only thing they can do is latch on

to other stuff but the problem that the party has is that they'd had a lot of measures in place to try to make sure that you never got these kind of movements in china and they kind of worked but when it went through the 1980s like china starts implementing a market economy right they said they start they start like cutting this the welfare state they start like destroying the sort of like limited control that works has had in the factories and they kind of like unknowingly reproduced the conditions that have

been producing these revolutions in every other country and you know as this massive inflation wave hits they turn china into this powder keg and this you know and this combined with sort of like the liberal democratic students moving gets you this really interesting and weird ideology that these workers have. And I'm going to read it from an interview with one of the workers who was at Tiananmen. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom? In the workshops, does what the workers say count or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same. One man rule. Our objective is

not very high. We just want workers to have their own independent organizations. In work units, it's personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at 5 p.m., but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonus. This is a personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone, and then afterwards, anyone who violates it will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of legal system. I think it's a really interesting sort of like fusion of a whole bunch of stuff, right? Because on the one hand, like the sort of like ruling discourse that's happening, the things the students are talking about is like that we need democracy, read the rule of law. But the workers in these factories are looking at like the situation they're facing and they're like, huh, we don't have a democracy like here either, right?

huh we don't have a democracy like here either right and so you get this you get what's a really conservative framing of the sort of this a very sort of very classical like critique of one man rule in the factory that has been happening for like you know like a hundred years but what's interesting about this is that like any actual attempt to like do this right get gets you to workers control like democratic workers control in the factory and as walder who walder also wrote um another like he's a guy who went and interviewed a bunch of the people who had been of workers who have been involved with this and as as they point out like this And this – unlike really like any other time in Chinese history, like the people who are part of like the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation are – they don't have an intellectual class. Like these are just a bunch of workers, and they have very little connection – like they have very little like political connections, right? Like beforehand, like to the liberal circles.

They're just sort of hearing what they're reading. And this means like what you have here is like it's not like an intellectual movement. Like this is just a bunch of workers. And for like one final time, their instinct when the revolution sort of like starts is to demand democracy in the factory. And this demand like above all others is completely politically unacceptable and you know and when when the army marches on beijing it's it's these workers that they wipe out and they wipe them out so thoroughly that the fact that this is what these people were fighting for is it's scrubbed for the record of the ccp it's scrubbed

like the pro-democracy movement doesn't remember it even though their entire thing is memory and yeah and this this ensures that the meeting of these actual events what these people were fighting for what they were trying to do has been almost completely lost and i think at this point we can finally ask what actually was Tiananmen. And in some sense, in the Chinese context itself, it's a transition between two different Chinese working classes. These protests are sort of like – this is the last political sort of mobilization of the old Chinese working class, which has been these people who had been in the cities, who had like they they'd been the beneficiaries of this old sort of like socialist period welfare state and these people in in in the streets around tiananmen they mount the last attack of the classical workers movement and when they lose this entire class like this this entire urban working class that had been around since like

the 20s that had been sort of the the driver of chinese radical politics that had been like that had been fighting and striking for like 70 80 years they they're gone they're completely destroyed and over the course of the economic restructuring in the 1990s, they ceased to exist as a class. And they're replaced by a new Chinese working class, which is drawn from sort of these rural and sort of semi-urban underclasses of the old social system who are dragged into the cities from their villages, from their towns. and who now fill actually well i don't know what the numbers are today because it's weird because of covid but like in in 2019 there were 277 million of these people of this enormous market worker like force who formed the backbone of like the entire chinese working class and these people who they have rural housing registrations and this means that they don't get any of the benefits like the sort of like welfare benefits that you would get from living in a city and this means that they're you know that they they constitute like an entirely new

class of of of workers and instead of you know like whatever sort of privileges had been like carved out by the old working class this one gets nothing and the other thing that they get is this entire raft of sort of capitalist ideology that's baked into like every aspect of the workplace culture this this is massive attempt in china to get people to buy homes and you know the like when where the old working class could at least like posit the factory is like a place where you could have democracy where like life could be improved by like different controlled factories like this new working class like the thing that they want the most is to leave the factory and become a business owner and you know like this this probably sounds familiar to like us right like this is this is the old joke about um like about the you about the american working

class which is that everyone sees themselves as temporary temporarily embarrassed millionaires and like yeah you know in modern china it's like yeah okay it's like people consider themselves to be like temporarily embarrassed small business owners and this stuff this this this ideological self-conception of like i'm gonna work in the factory that i'm gonna become a business owner is completely inimical to the formation of like the classical workers and there hasn't been that kind of formation in china's sense and this this is not really a unique thing right the the death of that workers movement has seen a sort of like complete and total collapse of the demand for like democratic self-management like everywhere across the entire world and you know incredibly stubbornly like the working class like refuses to sort of cohere itself in the

factory and so in this sense china is really just sort of late to the game they they they got slightly early they got they got slightly later to the point that we're at now you said there was going to be a a happier ending oh the happy ending was last episode oh this episode is this episode's ending is really depressing well i mean okay they're they're they're okay there's a slightly less depressing note kind of okay the thing that's less depressing here is that for my entire literally my entire lifetime has been the u.s lurching from one economic collapse to another and the world the world like the international economic system like i think i was born in like the middle of like the dot-com collapse and then i got 2008 and then like there's been a bunch of economic collapses in the last like three years and you know the the whole system has like lurched from crisis to crisis to crisis and that means that there's been an incredible just like a rapidly increasing

number of revolutions everywhere even though the sort of like darker gore of the factory like has ceased to be this thing that like creates the working like the identity of the working class and this means that you know okay so in order to have some kind of mass movement you you need some kind of collective identity to to mobilize around and you know if if you can't make this in the factory the place where it's going to be made instead is the street and this means in the last you know like 20-ish years like with without the sort of positive identity in the workplace to to to cohere itself around workers are really only able to sort of mobilize

on a mass basis like indirect opposition to a threat that can that can that can confront like everyone at the same time and this is the only thing i could do this is really the state and you know the state has the ability ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, and that becomes the only available enemy. And so yeah, if you look at what revolutions have been in the last 20 years, it's a constant fight against the police because fighting the police is the only thing that can allow you to create a new social identity, sort of collective identification. collective identification and you know and so this means that collective like modern revolts like everything we've seen over the last like four years the form that it takes is mass street movements and you know continuous confrontation with the police and you get to literally see this with with occupy right occupy was originally like the the the the like the slogan occupy was about the argentinian factory occupations in in 2001 but then you know that stops like that's the end like just one like that that's that's the end of

the whole cycle there's there's no more factory occupations um actually that's true you get one in bosnia-hezegovina which is funny because it's like they they occupy a bunch of factories but like they don't know what to do with them and so you get just like a regular like occupy like in like in the sort of like square occupations you'd get in like new york or whatever where everyone's sort of like sitting in a circle talking about stuff but it's happening in a factory but but they're not like trying to run production they're not trying to do any of that stuff they're just sort of like they're in it the factory isn't is no longer this sort of like space of like creation and possibility that that could be turned into something new.

It's just a place where you go that's indistinguishable from a square. And for the last 10 years, it's like people – originally, it was like – it just left, right? So everyone's occupying squares. But by about 2014, people have figured out that you can't – it's almost impossible to hold a square if the police attempt to run you out. And so this gets replaced with running street fights with the police. But this places everyone who's trying to do this in this incredibly dangerous bind because the old workers' councils were able to bring down states. Largely, they got crushed by outside militaries, but they were able to bring down states because, you know, there is an enormous amount of power

in being able to control production. But the problem is that, like, you know, if you're in a square, right, like, you don't have the ability to do that. And without the factory occupations alongside them, there have been a lot of general strikes in the last four years. There's one in Peru, there's one in France,

there's one in Hong Kong and Sudan. And every single one of them has been crushed. But this is a real problem, right? Because the current labor conditions aren't going to produce another wave of factory occupations. And so the way forward for anyone who wants to have a democracy in the workplace is completely unclear. And I think that's the actual legacy of tiananmen the workers who are assembled outside tiananmen square had already left their factories and you know for for all that they spoke the language of the old workers movements right

they spoke of democracy in the factory and one man rule they stood and fought and died like we do in the streets. They're this bridge between sort of the classical workers' movement and us. And, you know, they face the same revolutionary crisis that we face, the crisis of Papua and Palestine and Colombia and Iran and Myanmar and Hong Kong of this crisis of victory that's just beyond the horizon, can't be grasped. You know, I don't think the people at Tiananmen have any answers to give us. I don't think they do. I think they ran headlong into the crisis

that we ran into and they all died. I think expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those who before and after us died fighting for liberation. All we can really do now is find our own way. When with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. It's on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right.

An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story 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. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day.

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