It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 54

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

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

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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. It happened somewhere else a while ago and also somewhere else now-ish several days ago what a great title for a show i love i love how snappy and remember and memorable that is yeah that's great we can we we can go in we can go into it a tiny bit of pulling back the curtain which is that you can't do too many good intros because if you do too many good intros and everyone expects you to constantly have a good

intro so every once in a while you have to just make you have to lower the overall quality of the intro so that when you are truly desperate and have just been dragged out of bed at like 3 a.m and you have to record a podcast your sort of atonal noises will be considered normal that's why i script all my intros i but i'm just i'm just i'm just built you're built different. So this is what could happen here. What are we doing here today, Chris? We are talking about... Well, actually, admittedly, we had planned this episode before this happened. Yeah, we planned this episode before the referendum in Cuba about the new family code. But yeah, today we're going to be talking about the kind of code but yeah we're today we're gonna be talking about

the the kind of bleak but sort of gets better history of homosexuality in cuba and how things went from very bad to getting a lot better and then also how a lot of american leftists like picked up a version of the history of this that is just sort of nonsense. And here with us to talk about this is Andres Petiera, who is, well, doing many things, one of which is studying for a PhD in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Andres, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So, okay, I guess the place that I want to start is

I want to go back to the 60s. And I want to go back to something that I don't think a lot of people understand very well in terms of what happened in – it just happened in various ways over a lot of sort of these new sort of revolutionary socialist states, which is that you get this attempt to like form a like – sort of like a new revolutionary subject. Sometimes it's like – I mean the Soviet one was like the new man. There are sort of different versions of this across the sort of various socialist revolutionary states. I guess I wanted to ask you to talk about how this kind of got really, really homophobic

in Cuba, like pretty quickly. Yeah. So, I mean, and one of the interesting parts about the story in Cuba is that it actually is, in part, imported from the USSR and ideas in the USSR. And that's actually one of the connections which, in the literature, in the academic literature at least, isn't always that well explored because Cubanists tend to be very insular. We don't really tend to learn Russian. I'm kind of crazy. actually am learning russian but um uh but no so so um you know there was all basically lots of homophobia lots of you know all like lots of bigotry against lgbt people before 1959 not unlike the united states of the 1950s. Like you could live privately or maybe in

certain safe spaces, you could live a kind of okay life. But, you know, it was definitely a very marginalized position, lots of bigotry and lots of personal danger in addition to a lack of basic rights. After 1959, you know, you have this jettisoning jettisoning of the catholic church and kind of religious reasons for being bigoted uh with the coming of the revolution which is a secular communist revolution um but what what ends up happening is they uh and this is something that Abel Sierra Madero's recent book on these policies talks about a lot, is this kind of attempt to remake human men into the man that's needed for this communist society in the future. And as part of this, they engage in a sort of social hygiene. We don't want people who are lazy. We don't want people who are degenerate, bourgeois degeneracy, that kind of stuff. And within this, a persecution of people who are seen as either as gay or at least as soft. And they need to be made into real macho men for the revolution. And this started out in a very series of

isolated things right you would have like uh virgilio pineda was who was a dramaturg he was um he was jailed uh and he basically he was being targeted because people wanted his house and so if he was jailed and his belongings were separated from him then like someone could get to keep his apartment like that seems to be why he was originally targeted and he was detained twice for basically walking while gay that's how basically what the incident boils down he was walking effeminately and people and he was detained by the police and he was freed because he had like he was an important person he was you know he had some he was an important person. He was, you know, he had some protections. But then as the decade rolls on, as the 1960s roll on, that's like that's 1960, one year after the revolution. 1965, you have the creation of a series of forced labor camps.

And there's not really any way to get around that. We don't know exactly how many were sent there. But it seems to be in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Again, we don't know because the government hasn't declassified that information. So it's still a conjecture, but it's not because people don't want to investigate the details. And these are thousands and thousands of people who are being sent for all sorts of reasons. Jehovah's Witnesses, people who listened to rock, people who were seen as hippies, Elvis Preslianos, so Elvis Preslians,

so people who listened to Elvis Presley because they were seen as too effeminate and too Yankee. And so they were sent to the camps and to do forced labor, but the camps weren't just about forced labor. They were about remaking through labor these men into real men because hard labor, proletarian labor would, you know, remake their spirits and their ethics. And I mean, it's kind of not unlike what we're seeing in the 1960s in China, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a very explicit like one of the things well

yeah one of the things that is this going on during the cultural revolution also yeah it's like that they they have they have this sort of re-education through labor thing that starts and it gets it does get yeah like i've seen conflicting accounts of the extent to which like people were directly targeted for being gay i it definitely did happen and there's a yeah and you get a lot of this sort of same thing of like these people are like spiritually unpure and like they have to be like re-educated and they have to be sort of like turned into like proper like subjects and there's a lot of especially like there's a lot of sort of like there's a lot of people like being forced to hold signs that say sodomite and shit yeah which is although funnily enough and the weird part about this is that like in the chinese

case so the cultural revolution is like not a great time to be gay but there's also this thing it there's this thing kind of like it's kind of like like 1920s berlin where like there are there is some really bad stuff that happens but there's also this sort of like there's a kind of general political chaos so you can get away with some stuff to there's actually there's another campaign in china in starts about 1983 yeah it's called the strike hard campaign interestingly there's there's actually two strike hard campaigns so there's one in the 80s that's supposed to be this campaign against like crime and stuff and so like they target a bunch of people who are like supposed to be like social criminals and then that winds up being a lot of like there's there are just mass arrests of gay people they're in prison for a

very very long time um yeah under although that one's also interesting because it's like you have very similar kind of reasoning but it's like but it's in this sort of like dang like counter revolutionary like phase where it's like instead of being in this sort of like dang like counter-revolutionary like phase where it's like instead of being instead of being a danger to the revolution they're like sort of a danger to like traditional chinese values which is interesting and bleak yeah well because like because this is one of the things one of the things happens in china right is it like in in you know there there is an attempt to sort of do more egalitarian like gender relations during the culture revolution during the sort of like revolutionary period and then when dang takes

power part of his thing is like no we're going back to traditional gender relations like all this egalitarian stuff was a mistake and like this is part this is part of where the one child policy comes from but then also you get a really homophobic crackdown in like 83 like like three or four years after sort of like he's – actually, weirdly, almost exactly the same time that like the real sort of market reforms hit. It's like a year later is when the package that sort of like really brings the market back to try to happen. It's a very weird – yeah, we've gotten very off topic,

but it's a very weird and interesting sort of like social flip that happens. Yeah, for sure sure and that definitely makes me want to read more about like china during this period yeah well i think it's interesting like like the other thing you were talking about earlier that is interesting like is similar to me i've talked to like queer people from vietnam and they have a very similar story about like like i mean there was homophobia before but they have a very similar story to the cuban story about how like there is a sort of importation of like soviet homophobia and how that made everything like when that this starts happening in the 80s it gets just like significantly worse yeah no it's uh and in cuba um what's it called like the the whole idea that this is

a form of bourgeois degeneracy and the gayness gayness is specifically bourgeois uh is like was really surprising to me as i dug into this like there's comics uh i i in this thing i wrote uh i include a couple of them but it's basically like it's put up there with wanting to be in la social libre like free society in the west and so the west is it's like it's almost like reactionary i mean it is reactionary i mean it's like it's it's like a very weird weird mirror of like far-right discourse because it's like the degeneracy of the west meanwhile here we have masculine values i mean you even see that type of rhetoric with we were talking about alexander dugan recently and he he exposes a lot see that type of rhetoric with, we were talking about Alexander Dugan recently, and he exposes a lot of that type of stuff as well as someone who is, you know, a fascist writer who's pulled on some of like the national Bolshevik type stuff before.

Yeah, you can attack gayness as it's like a sign of liberalism in the West as like this like almost like bourgeois tendency yeah i forget i forget who it was there was someone on twitter who was talking about this like it's a very interesting thing like yeah like in in like in in the u.s like i don't know like being like for a very very long time it's still kind of now you get this versus like like being gay like is you know like being queer is a sign of like you're a communist you're like there's like a degenerate communist etc and then you go to like vietnam and it's like oh yeah this person's gay they're they're they're a degenerate western like kind of revolutionary and it's it's it's it's like it's always the same the the actual sort of like homophobic thing is the same it's just this like the signs are flipped of like what the other is and who you can accuse them of sort of having the values of.

I wonder if the unifying factor here is, and this is something I'm thinking of a lot because of El Sierra Madero's book, which is that, I mean, queerness as a disease. Yeah, definitely. An illness. And so like that, so it allows you to glomp onto it anything you don't like from your own ideological prism so i i also wonder a lot about how nationalism plays into it because that's one of the things that happens in a lot of these sort of revolutionary projects is like yeah like the sort of ideal of the new man is sort of like a communist thing but it's also like very specifically something that you get with like with nationalist revolutions where it's like well okay so we like we we have to like like part of part of like the

basis of our national identity is like we are these like incredibly sort of masculine hard men or whatever and then this like i don't know i it it strikes me it strikes me as interesting that the further that nationalism becomes entangled in these revolutionary projects, the more you start to see this kind of stuff. Yeah, and definitely part of this is nationalism, because it's not just homophobia in Cuba in this context in the 60s. It's not just homophobia for the sake of homophobia in Cuba in this context in the 60s. It's not just homophobia for the sake of homophobia, though there is that too, but it's also that I don't think Fidel Castro is entirely lying when he says that it was part of the need to mobilize as much of society as possible for the economy. What's happening in Cuba in the 1960s is basically the economy is going into a meltdown. The economic policies that they're enacting have not been working. They've burned through any surplus they had in 1959,

including goodwill surpluses in a couple of respects. And I think that some people point to the new man and people will work for moral incentives, not material incentives, as just this naive thing and then i think the most convincing counter argument is they didn't have anything else to incentivize people with yeah people people make this this is a this is like basically there's an identical like argument that you get about the cultural revolution where like you start to see these like incentives or like mao will like give you a mango or something or like you have these like pins that you get and like it could be like yeah it's very it's like the or something or like you have these like pins that you get and like it could be like yeah

it's very it's like the same thing of like you have these rewards that are sort of like yeah they're supposed to be sort of like spiritual almost or sort of like spiritual ideological rewards and then eventually like kind of just stops working because it turns out that's not actually a very good basis for yeah economic system

uh do you guys know the old joke about Che Guevara when he was given a sign to become the minister of the banks? I don't know the joke. I know the thing about he was... My vague memory is

the story that I heard was he signed his name really sloppily on it because he was pissed off that he had to put his face on money or something. But I have no idea if that's true. That part's actually true. He hated money so much he refused to sign his actual name. He just signed his nickname just to show his disdain for economics. But at a meeting, the old joke goes, and this is something that Che apparently liked to tell as well, even if it's not necessarily true, that at the meeting where they were deciding who's going to become the minister of what, they said, who here is an economist?

And he raises his hand and everyone goes, Che, but you're a doctor. You're not an economist. He says, oh, I thought you asked for a communist, economista, comunista. like so yeah no I mean Che and I think I've heard arguments I'm not an expert on Che but I've heard that he was actually pretty heavily influenced by China compared to the USSR he leaned closer to China

yeah that actually that actually gets I think I guess that kind of makes sense given his sort of like like the way his military strategy seems to have worked which is very very much like a lot closer to sort of like Mao the the way his military strategy seems to have worked which is very very much like a lot closer to sort of like maoist strategy than well okay i'm gonna put soviet strategy in quotation marks because oh my god is there like i i i i i have a very negative a very dim view of

so of of the military strategy of people who are of like guerrilla organizations who are taking their military strategy directly from the soviet union it's a lot of like we're gonna build up one giant army in a place and one day they're gonna roll into the capital and it's like this okay this is a great strategy yeah yeah yeah that make that make sense um okay yeah uh yeah. Reining myself in a little bit, we have these basically labor camps that gay people are getting put into. We have kind of a material basis for it, which is, and this is one of the things that people actually will use as a defense of sort of like, well, we had to put these people in these camps because of our material conditions, which I think like, I feel like that makes it worse. Like, I feel like the fact that there's a material basis for your homophobia, like makes it harder to get rid of and makes it like a more entrenched part of the system, which I don't know, bizarre defense to me. But yeah, um, can we talk a bit about like, how did this actually end? And to what extent did it end? And did it sort of like have this like half-life afterwards? Sure. So these last for a couple of years. This is not like a flash in the pan, like, oops, our bad, kind of like, you know, six months in. This is like a series of multiple work camps across the province of Camagüey, which is in central Cuba. camps across the province of Camagüey, which is in central Cuba, and they last for three years.

And there's pushback during this period, domestic pushback, international pushback, like people have been complaining about it for a while. Exactly what the definitive thing that got the UMAP closed, specifically, those are the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, Military Units to Aid Production. So the UMAP themselves, which were opened from 1965 to 1968, they do eventually get closed in 68. People are freed, the camps are closed, and people are sent home.

And there are varying stories. I have looked through, tried to trace as many stories as I can get. And even people who, like, were participants have different stories. So, like, I remember Carlos Franqui, who was one of a position figure. He has one story that centers himself in the closure. Other stories say that it was the international pressure. Other stories say that it was the Writers and Art say that it was the right lit writers and artists union the official one the state one the uniac which filed enough complaints and that convinced fidel to get it closed down um that anecdote is actually from maddie glass iglesias's dad jose iglesias who wrote about really i didn't know he was his dad

yeah oh sorry his grandfather his grandfather his communist grandfather um but uh he who actually who wrote a book about the 60s he's an interesting guy uh but anyway so the camps get closed one way or another and i don't think we're gonna ever know the definitive is, while the camps get closed, we have reports from different people, including some of the sources that are used as apologia for Fiumap, saying, wait, wait, wait, social disgrace units keep existing well into the early 1970s. And so we do have sporadic reports of things like this happening, where seminarists are sent to religious people for being atheists, or for not being atheists. You know, gay people are being sent, other people, marijuaneros, so people who

spoke to Mukpat, you know, anyone who's seen as like not conforming into this ideal new man, you're sent there and the labor is supposed to reform you and that's that's a key part of this it's not just labor as punishment it's labor as ideological reform there's even uh uh one of the people some of the people in one camp say that there was a sign that says work will make you men jesus oh oh no yeah like work will set you free yeah it's uh so so the the camps do continue seem to continue and um it's it definitely seems to be the case that uh you know gay people do continue to be arrested for being gay uh even though the intensity of this does die down by the 1970s there's something pretty bad that also happens in the 1970s but it's a slightly different project it's not as centered on forced labor so yeah and i guess so

the yeah the thing that you wrote this piece about that i should actually probably mention that is one of the things we're talking about is you wrote a very long piece about, called Factually Based, which is about sort of the kind of mythology that developed in the U.S. about, like, how these camps were closed and the sort of, like, apology around it. closed and the sort of like apology around it and a lot of this is based on leslie feinberg which is depressing in a lot of leslie feinberg people who don't know is like one of the most important like trans authors ever um wrote stone butch blues which is like if you've ever been in like any sort of like queer trans scene uh you probably know about or possibly have read and she wrote not a great account of this yeah do you want to talk a bit about what this was and how people have sort of used it in different ways? Sure. So for years, I heard arguments from this book, and I didn't know they were from this.

I just saw people sharing online and thinking, where the hell are people getting this? This is not true. And eventually, I find out that it dates back to this book called Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba by Leslie Feinberg. It was written mid to late 2000s. Really, it's not a book. wrote for as part of the lavender and red series for this uh world's uh workers world newspaper which is like this marciite sect which feinberg seems to have been a part of um real real weirdos like i they those people like they they have positions that are like bizarre even by the standards of like modern tankies like they're they're like like these are people who are like hardline on defending the derg in ethiopia

which is like stuff that's weird enough that like most most modern like idea like hardline ideological stalinists don't know what this like don't even know what this is or won't defend it because it's like it's like most ethiopian marxists are like this was fucked like it's it's yeah also this is the other thing about these guys is so if you know about the psl the party of socialism liberation they emerged from a split with the wwp yeah because the it was the wwp was too moderate or something yeah i i my my memory of it was it was a split about whether whether or not you should take money from North Korea. I don't know if that's 100% true.

That's my memory of the last time I read about it. So these are who these guys are. Yeah. No, no. I mean, there's a reason that PSL and WWP seem to have very similar lines. So anyway, so I finally get this book. I ordered it secondhand. So I'm not giving anyone royalties. And I get the book and it starts like arguing, you know, trying to, you know, defend the track record of the revolution. And really it's like, basically it seems that this book and an

article that came out before any of Feinberg's articles, an article by John Hilson in the early 2000s, are kind of a response to how, as the kind of, like how LGBT rights were treated in the mainstream in like the United States was shifting. There was like less homophobia movement towards more recognition of rights in the 2000s. And in that context, Cuba's track record on LGBT rights, which is pretty bad, you know, was getting hammered. And so they're writing this as

a response to that. And Feinberg warns in the introduction, don't expect a criticism of Cuba this far. It's factually based, but you know, I put it in quotes, factually based, but, you know, it's factually based, but it's, you know factually based, but it's basically meant as counterpropaganda to the criticisms. And the section that everyone quotes, I mean, the book isn't that long. I think it's like 100 pages. I have it over here. It's like 100 pages long. It's all these different articles.

The section that most people quote is actually like two or three pages. It's this very short section on the UMAP. And Feinberg talks about the UMAP and cites basically three people to talk about it. Basically, one of the sources is Ignacio Ramonet, who is this foreign journalist who interviews Fidel and gave Fidel the opportunity to give these explanations and defenses of his policies, where basically Fidel defends it as part of the necessity of mobilizing the entire country in the face of the crisis that it felt that was facing in the 1960s from the United States. So it needed to mobilize everyone. It was part of the economic mobilization. And it was almost a favor to gay people

because they couldn't go into the military because there was too much homophobia in the military. So they almost did them a favor by sending them off to do labor that wasn't with the military in these nice little economic productive units. And then, oh, there was some, there was some stuff, so we shut them down. And this is before Fidel actually admitted that there was persecution of

LGBT people in Cuba under his watch, which comes in like a 2010 interview. So this is like his version of things right before then. And that's what Feinberg cites. Another of the sources is Cardinal, Ernesto Cardinal, who I'm happy to expand on him, but the short version is that Ernesto Cardinal is going around Cuba in 1970 and 1971 for two short trips, and he's just basically writing down everything and anything people tell him. Some of it's very critical, some of it's very supportive. He's not actually claiming anything is factual. He's saying, I am in Cuba. This is what people are telling me. Make up your own minds like that is his stance. But it's presented as this. It's not critically analyzed at all.

And it's these two separate stories. One of them is that 100 communist youth members infiltrated the camps on hearing that there were abuses there. And they wrote reports saying that there were abuses, so the camps were shut down. And then there's this separate story, also sourced to Cardinal by Feinberg, that Fidel personally infiltrates the camps incognito. And then there was this guard who was going to cut the cord on his hammock to wake him up and get him, force him to work. And Fidel revealed himself. And and, you know, almost almost like why does thou persecute me, Saul kind of deal? Like very it sounds like a very biblical story. So it's a good yarn, but it's not doesn't sound very serious. And also the two stories kind of contradict each other. Why does Fidel have to infiltrate if the hundred communist youth members have gone you know or vice versa you know you don't yeah it's

really weird like you know like why would there be both like both of them you can't present both of them as true at the same time like they they're they're mutually contradictory accounts of how this happens very very weird exactly Exactly. And in Cardinal, they're not even presented back to back. The 100 Communist Youth members is literally a dude he saw on the street who told him this. It's a paragraph and that's it.

Like we don't have any other context. The other story that Fidel infiltrating is shared is slight, sounds slightly more credible if you really want to believe it but then if you actually read into it it's more like it doesn't it also does no water yeah it's like a guy heard from another guy like it's it's yeah he's he he's a guard it is a guard narrating this but he like he talks about what he saw until up until like half into the

paragraph and then the rest is clearly implied to be stuff, stuff he heard about, but wasn't actually present for it. And Feinberg presents him as a witness of both. So anyway, so that's, that's Feinberg's whole defense. Like basically Fidel had no idea there were abuses,

even though the very existence of the camps themselves were abuses. And then, but they were shut down and everything's hunky-dory, you know, that's, that's Feinberg's defense. And then of course, the third thing is that she refers both citations to Hilson, which I can get into in a second, but just, I think part of the problem is that Feinberg didn't actually read Cardinal. Yeah. So Hilson, Hilson is another activist.

I'm not sure if he's LGBT. I'm not quite, like that part of him, let's clear it up. But he was another activist. He died very early in the 2000s, I think, from cancer. But he wrote an article that cites Cardinal and cites both sections that Feinberg later cites. And not more, not less. And I think what happened was that Feinberg basically goes to this article,

which basically makes, more or less makes the kind of arguments that Feinberg is already making in her own work. But when she sees things that seem to exculpate the Cuban government, she basically does copy paste and a little parenthesis to give credit to Hilson and then moves on, right? She doesn't actually read Hilson. Hilson even like treats it a little more cautiously than Feinberg did, even though not sufficiently cautiously. And I think that that explains why, and at least this is a generous interpretation feinberg doesn't actually address the fact that in her own exculpatory source

there's talk of other camps like at the time cardinal is like i'm going to the camps i'm visiting the camps there are camps here like you know so it doesn't it doesn't make sense unless maybe feinberg didn't read the book like just like copied and pasted and didn't really think about it yeah or or just like went and found the one section that that was useful and then just read that part yeah which yeah not not a great way to do history as it turns out um yeah yeah i i i this i i will do my one return to Marx moment in this interview which is to say ruthless critique of all

that exists that you generally support because otherwise you wind up with this stuff yeah my god it's done the rounds this thing has been going around and around on the internet for years and years yeah and i guess we should also say that like yeah this is this is the thing

that happens with like any any like every one of these like every one of the socialist countries we've been talking about like you will get people who basically are like like ah hey look at this bad thing uh we're gonna but people who are like i don't know yeah you get like cuban right-wingers who are like also unbelievably homophobic who suddenly like discover a passion for gay rights because oh hey look at these abuses and it's like yeah it's i don't know it sucks it yeah i mean i think it genuinely is a part of the reason why this version becomes like a memory that like like this for these sort of versions of the story which like don't have are not like

really credible like become sort of entrenched in the sort of like socialist memory of of this period in the u.s because it's like well okay so so on the one hand you have a bunch of sort of like like incredible fanatical right-wingers talking about what was going on and then you have like hey here's another story from a socialist it's like well we're going to believe the socialist version it's like well neither of these people like not like but both of these groups like have an incredibly clear agenda going into what they're doing. And so you have to sort of like actually sift through the stuff yourself. Otherwise you would end up with very,

very weird and distorted histories. Yeah. And, and people just really want to believe it. I mean, I think that that's, that's my conclusion. Like I,

when I was originally researching for this, I was, I was pissed. Like I was like, this is, these are just not true. How could someone publish this? You know, it's really angry. And I kept trying to write that like a piece or based on that. And I keep kept stopping and like, this is not the right approach. This is not the right, like I kept stopping myself. And then I, I finally was like, try to,

okay, put myself in Feinberg's shoes. If I was, you know, really loved, you know, if I was like as enamored as Feinberg was of everyone and everything involved in the Cuban revolution, and at the same time, a member of a persecuted group, right? You know, and I really wanted to square this circle, like, and I saw something to let me do that,

I would probably also just glamb onto it and just not really try not think about it too much for the same reason right you want you know our defenses are low when it's something we want to believe yeah this is the ah there is an enormous amount of stuff that just sort of people i mean just yeah like everyone has a amount of stuff that just sort of people – I mean just – yeah, like everyone has a bunch of stuff that they believe because they want it to be true. Like it's not like – like we're being hard on the socialists here, but like I don't know. Like this is why half the people who believe Q-ship believe it, right? Like it's the thing they want to believe and the thing they sort of have to believe for the ideology to function so it's like it's not like i don't know like it's it's it's not that much different than like in paul wolfowitz like still

thinking the iraq war works or something right like it's it's it's it's it's the thing you have to believe in order to not like have to sort of process the complications of what you're supporting. Yeah. So I think, yeah, the other thing I want to talk about sort of moving past this is about the stuff is this is one of the places where like things actually did genuinely get a lot better than like it was and I want to talk a bit about like

how that happens before we get to sort of the stuff that's been happening the last like week or so yeah um and you know I'm happy to get into happier territories yeah cause this sucks. Oh, God, it's definitely doomer stuff to always think about the 60s. So after the 60s, it was pretty bad in the 1970s, too.

There was a purge of education and culture of anyone LGBT or suspected being LGBT because the idea is that they would recruit and influence and corrupt the minors and blah blah blah blah blah blah oh where have you heard this before uh uh someone can probably do an article comparing the the culture and education congress in 71 in cuba with with uh policies in the united states right now yeah um and but then things start to get better in the 1980s a little bit like the the throttles pull back it's not great but it's you know it's not terrible as terrible as it was and then from the late 1980s into the 1990s we really see to see

start to see a sea change both in terms of popular culture and in terms of the of state policy and of course they're intertwined because the who who allows films to be put on in theaters yeah they own all the theaters so um in terms of culture actually know one of the people who had a play played a key role in this which is senel pas and senel pas is this writer from a small town in Cuba a small village and he goes to Havana he's a writer and artist and he wrote this short story about this platonic relationship between a patriotic gay man and a patriotic Cuban heterosexual member of the communist youth who develop a respect for each other and it's like even though like the gay man is alienated from state policies because of the persecution of lgbt people he actually knows a lot more about history and culture in cuba than the heterosexual guy who's rah rah revolution but doesn't actually

know like all these important writers and artists and and things like that that are also important for cuban national identity that when that was first read in the Casa de las Américas which is like this huge building for Cuban culture people wept just openly and then it was made into a movie called Fresas y Chocolate so strawberry and chocolate uh I can explain the title if you want but basically it basically it's the same story it's expanded a bit because the original was a short story and you can actually get it in the United States I think uh Paramount bought the rights for distribution. Fox may have bought the rights. I don't know. But it was came out in like 1993. And it was a big turning point for public perception. Right. I actually have a friend of mine was who who knows who knows the author.

mine was uh who who knows who knows the author he was stopped at his building and this the wife of a colonel who lives in this building says my husband wants to see my friends like what would you make what did i do he goes up to the colonel's house the colonel says sit you want coffee or anything my friend says no my colonel says explain to me this film that's come out recently because the colonel wasn't going to see it in theaters then my friend explains the movie and guy says no no explain everything so basically my friend does a scene by scene synopsis for memory and after like an hour and change in this guy's house the colonel's just sitting there not saying anything he said if i understood this and seeing this earlier things might have been different oh it's like like thank you it's it's a huge turning point culturally and then politically you also have mariela castro

so mariela castro is daughter of raul castro so nisa fidel and she from within the government using her position of privilege really starts to push for better l policies towards LGBT people and better laws and rights. And she, at the head of the CENICEX, which is the National Center for Sex Education, she really starts to spearhead an improvement. And we start to see in the 1990s and 2000s, not just a pulling back of persecution, at least official persecution. You know, you can still have informal persecution at the level of jobs. at least official persecution, you know, you can still have informal persecution at the level of jobs. But you also start to see things like trans people can have gender affirming surgery backed by the state, you know, free of cost, like all these sorts of different protections and policies like the Senate sexual.

If there's like a homophobic incident to the school, they can send out somebody to give a talk and say, this is why persecuting someone for their gender identity or their sexual orientation is wrong, blah, blah, blah. You really see a shift in the position of the state. And that's not just Mariela. I don't want to make it about Mariela. But behind her is, of course, all these LGBT people who would not be in the position to demand this for themselves. But she definitely spearheads this. And I think she deserves some merit for that. Yeah, it's interesting that they have like that they have a level of sort of buy in from the state, because I think like that doesn't happen in like China or Vietnam.

And like, you know, I mean, like Vietnam, like there has actually been stuff there in the last like year where there's been a lot of real progress but like they like literally one month ago the government was like we're going to declare homosexuality no longer like a mental illness and like that's sort of just like a month ago yeah yeah yeah wow and this is only people, but like queer people have been fighting for, in Vietnam for like a long time. But like, and even then,

like there's this whole thing there where like people like, you get, you get this, especially if you talk to medical people in like, you talk to doctors, you'll get this thing

where like, well, okay, so there's like real, and the other thing this thing did is it outlawed conversion therapy. But if you talk to doctors about it, doctors are like, well, there are real gay people and there are fake gay people. And the real gay people, you can't do conversion therapy on.

But this rule – but these guys are like, this ruling only covers the real gay people. It doesn't cover the fake gay people because they'll do conversion therapy on. Like it's a disaster and like I – I don't know. Like it's – and like China also has been really bleak. Like I'm just'm just gonna you're talking about a lot about sort of like the effect the media has on it um i'm gonna read this thing from uh the chinese general rules for television drama content production from 2015 which okay i've seen conflicting things but i i think this is still in effect if if it's not still in

effect it was only reversed in like 2021 but i i think it's still in effect and also there have been new sort of guidelines that have been put out for movies that are about like i mean specifically there's stuff for like you you can't have gay men in movies you can't have men that are too effeminate in movies like you can't have men that look like they're cross-dressing in movies i'm gonna read this thing from the tv code um so this is this is stuff that it says is explicitly is not to be shown content which depicts or portrays unnatural sexual relations and actions such as incest homosexuality perversion sexual harassment sexual assault sexual violence etc uh this is provision that's version two version three content which portrays

and promulgates unhealthy perspectives on marriage and married love such as extra such as extramarital love one night stands free love etc this is 2015 sorry try guys not allowed yeah no like it's like it's oh god yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna do a try guys joke every episode for all eternity now kicking you off the recording the French are surely complaining that the ban on cheating on your wife is an imposition on their culture

yeah definitely that's actually extremely racist against the French I was gonna make a French film pedophilia joke but it doesn't actually ban it bans incest but it doesn't actually ban it bans incest but it doesn't actually ban like i mean i think the thing on the thing on being pedophile i think is it a different section of the code that i didn't copy here but who knows yeah and i think part of what was going

on there was like yeah like there wasn't like i mean to think things have gotten like it the the law that was being used to arrest like gay people in people in China, like, was, they abolished it in the 90s. But, like, and, like, there was a culture shift, but it didn't, like, the state decided it was going to do the same thing the U.S. state is doing, which is, like, do this sort of backlash to it. And it didn't, like, that kind of stuff didn't happen, is i think really bleak but also like is genuinely a thing that like like yeah like the good good good for good for the cuban people good for cuba like glad glad you all are doing this yes no yeah major yeah because like major win yeah because like you know like you can you can see what happens when like this doesn't happen which is all of this bullshit that exists in a lot of the

other sort of post-soviet like or post-communist countries yeah i i think that cuba would have done it eventually but i think that mariela definitely just sped it along yeah and like there's definitely a problem of a cult of mariela with like abroad where it's like all all things be great be due to mariela it's like completely cuts out all the people behind her you know who also been like please ask ask your uncle to do this for me i gotta get married someday uh but uh you know but at the same time i think we can't cut her out of the story yeah either yeah and that gets us to well i guess i guess you start in 2019 first but yeah the new family code that's

passed which also I do want to mention this because I don't think like people don't seem to know this when I tell them about this about neither China nor Vietnam is game in neither China nor Vietnam is gay marriage illegal and there's a lot of people who think that the repeal that happened in Vietnam legalized gay marriage and that's

not what happened like the thing that it did is you will no longer be arrested for having your own unofficial marriage which is a thing that could happen oh this is this this is this is not this is not the thing that is happening in cuba like i i see this with people a lot where like something good will happen in cuba and people will project it onto like china and it's like that's no like they're not the same place like don't don't don't do this with this stuff don't project the Cuban medical system

onto the Chinese medical system they're not the same please stop yeah yeah yeah okay but yeah going on to stuff that's good and the stuff but on also the sort of like yeah so can we talk a bit about like what talk about like the the 2019 referendum and the sort of, like, the stuff about sort of, sorry, I have to explain this.

Like, the story of how the stuff that's happening now didn't happen in 2019? Yeah, so. When this referendum was happening. happening yeah so so when the in the the 2010s the brawl castro who took over after fidel um he began using a bunch of referendums to decide major things major policy changes and using referendums kind of just to like because like because the national assembly is basically a rubber stamp committee like referendums really took to the fore as a way to like channelize channel support and you know show popular acquiescence to major changes among the constitution so uh as part of the they did a draft constitution they debated it uh there were debates all around the country

at local levels in in in uh in neighborhoods and workplaces and people gave feedback. The marriage equality and, and, and things connected to it, which we can get into in a second. These were part of, for the most part, part of the 2019 constitution, but there was a lot of pushback. Like obviously if, if the state has been repressing LGBT people for decades decades that part of their coalition just doesn't stop overnight doesn't just stop being bigoted overnight because of you know a change in policy so you know it wasn't just that the religious right like evangelicals there are a lot of evangelicals in cuba right now there's a growing evangelical population I'm sorry to say yeah backed by evangelical money oh no please repressing the wrong people

and and then there's the the Catholic right obviously you know much more you know discreetly but still very you know against this uh and there was enough pushback that the government was worried that I don't know if they pushback that the government was worried that, I don't know if they were worried that the referendum would fail entirely, but it did seem like they were worried that it would lower the voting percentage in favor of the new constitution enough that it would hurt the new constitution's legitimacy or something. They decided to carve off the more controversial parts about the LGBT rights and basically carve them off, push them into a referendum on the family code, which all the new

laws based on the new constitution, all the new laws governing family law and punt that down the road indefinitely. And so what's happening now, what just happened is the culmination of this referendum that they punted down the road in 2019. The original, the 2019 constitution was passed with something like 90% approval. And this was just kind of left on the to-do list. I mean, like, there's a couple ways to read this, but I think one of the most obvious is that the Cuban government needed a win, and this was an easy win they could actually deliver in an age of extreme scarcity and rolling blackouts. It's like, we can just at least deliver on this promise. And they did. Yeah, and I guess, so can we talk a bit about, like what what actually is in the new code and what like what what it does yeah so it it does it does a bunch of pretty cool things uh it legalizes same-sex marriage which is great for a lot of people not just because you know

not just because of the principle of it but also things like okay you're separating from your partner but everything is under your partner's name. You're not never legally married. What are your rights? So you like for separation, for immigration, if you're trying to immigrate and you're not married to your spouse, you know, you know, if you're trying to inheritance, all these kinds of things, you know, this is going to be, this is like important in concrete material ways. you know this is going to be this is like important in concrete material ways uh it legalizes adoption by same-sex couples which is also pretty cool yeah that was not allowed at all good sucks it wasn't before glad glad glad glad you can now do that that that's good hopefully we can still continue to do that here for like a few more years at least like yeah um it legalizes surrogacy and same-sex couples can

can benefit from can use surrogacy now uh although on a not-for-profit basis and that's that's specific uh i i'm not an expert on whether or not it is the best policy to have it as only not-for-profit um i i know that there's a lot of debate over it have it as only not-for-profit um i know that there's a lot of debate over it but the law says not-for-profit only for surrogacy but that's still another option for people in addition to adoption uh it expands civil unions to be much more inclusive they're called uh in spanish so now they are much more inclusive and also you know you know you you don't have to get married you can get a civil union if you can we explain what that is because that was a

like there was a whole thing in the u.s like in the in the 2000s about like oh like you can do civil like there was a period where it was like there were a lot of places you could get civil unions but you couldn't get married so could you explain what a civil union is because i think that's a thing that like a lot of our audience probably isn't going to like remember when that was a thing anyone talked about sure i mean like i'm i'm not a lawyer yeah my understanding is it is it is a way to recognize your you're basically partners you have some rights and it helps with some issues of like i think it also varies country to country but it's basically like a step down from the full commitment of marriage is my understanding um sorry that's less no yeah no like that that was that was my understanding

of it it was like like in the u.s it was this whole thing of like well you can have civil unions so you don't need to be married and then people were like no because it doesn't give you doesn't give you the sort of full suite of like rights and stuff but it gives you some things which i'm glad i'm glad he was doing like no you could do both of these things and then wasn't there something about like like yeah there were changes to like what like changes to what can be recognized as a family that is the part that i've seen the most like i have read a bunch about this and i'm i still feel like this is something that's not it's not entirely clear what this is going to look like in practice. So basically it expands the, the, what the legal definition of what can constitute as a family unit, uh, to be more focused, less focused on blood ties and more focused on affective ties.

So love affection, you know, caring for each other. Uh uh so that for example let's say i think like the the big hypothetical that was held up was like grandparents so like if the parents aren't around but in practice these people are the ones that raise you you know you know for for for legal stuff that has to do with kids and family law like we can consider this a family unit for legal stuff that has to do with kids and family law like we can consider this a family unit is my understanding it's still really murky and it's not really helping me feel like like that the things i've read on this also seem to be kind of like like here's an explanation i'm like that that doesn't really help me understand this at all yeah it is a little and and i've seen people running about this is like human government has abolished the family hooray and i'm like did it yeah

everything everybody it seems like it's not that they've abolished the family it's that they've allowed you to change what a family is in like in the eyes of the state which is not the same thing right right like i it's like giving you more wiggle room yeah um is my understanding but again it's one of those things where i feel like i everyone who i've seen running with it has run with a completely different very triumphalist explanation that are sometimes mutually contradictory and i'm like i'd like to see what this actually looks like in practice and like seeing the effects better uh because it's it's an under-discussed dynamic of it because like what most people abroad were looking at was like same-sex marriage so like this so that was less discussed but uh i mean it seems to be

positive the thing that the thing that that caused more controversy on the island was there was a shift to patria potestad, which is father paternal rights, basically parental rights, right? And basically the idea is to switch the child from merely being a subject of their parents will in theory they have more rights and are a subject on their own even if they're just a kid uh that's genuinely cool yeah to like prevent things like corporal punishment and things like that you can't beat your kids uh which also seems like a positive change yeah yeah i mean what would love more of that in the u.s to just like absolutely clobber the like parental rights people because oh my fucking they are they're going to kill us all yeah and i mean the funny thing is like every time that there's a leftist movement uh the the thing is always they're coming for your kids and then like oh god yeah anyway sorry no yeah

like it's the right has one thing and it's the same thing every time yeah uh those are the kind of the big things that the referendum does the one thing i wanted to talk about was like i okay so there is a thing of okay so like obviously it passed with like 67 percent of the vote i think um something like that like basically two-thirds of the vote um yeah and i want to talk a bit about like okay so something i saw okay so like okay so you have the people who voted against it because they're christian and they suck um and the other people who voted against it because they're Christian and they suck. And the other people who are just homophobic, Christian homophobes, non-Christian homophobes. But then there was also like something that I saw that was like people in opposition groups being like, we're going to vote against this as like a vote against the government.

Which, yeah, can we explain what that was about because that's yeah sure i and and i think that you also have a division there between the people who are like it's really against the government but really it's against the yeah yeah like i i think that even there it's a mixed bag of of both but um basically the idea was that um by approving this uh and voting in favor of something cooked up by the government that they were giving credence to the government legitimacy to the government uh ergo the only moral position was either abstention or voting no uh and so i mean again a lot of it's mixed up with they also really, as a rule, did not like the content of the law. Yeah.

I mean, part of the thing is, like, it's the the the opposition is in this weird space right now where they have, like, the more historical branch, which is you have like a historical branch that is like rabidly far right. rabidly far right uh and then you have there's a lot of overlap with like catholic right in there uh and the catholic far right in there as i'm sure you understand what that means yeah but but uh but then you also have a a growing prominent liberal contingent um who speaks better not just doesn't just put on a better face for international audiences, but also puts on a better face for Cuban audiences. And because like, Cuba is not a far right wing society. Like, for example, abortion, like I spoke to a right wing Cuban who left, who's like, Yeah, I like Ben Shapiro and a lot of what he says, but I don't get his obsession with abortion. That's a woman's right. Like, that's just so weird to me. It's because like, yeah, I like Ben Shapiro and a lot of what he says, but I don't get his obsession with abortion.

That's a woman's right. Like, that's just so weird to me. It's because like Cubans aren't aren't necessarily super religious as well, which is a big part of it. And so I'm into the fetus and all that. So the the so so that's so they're kind of like a but like it's like cats and dogs tied into a sack. of like a but like it's like cats and dogs tied into a sack so there's like you have these different opposition figures and i think that the really right-wing ones know that they can't be as openly homophobic as they used to be and so they need to couch it in a different way i think it's not just that i don't want to reduce everyone to that but I do think that's a huge part of that project. And then in addition to that, just people who are like anything that the government does is bad

because they're accelerationists, which is another big part of the opposite. Oh, no. Why is everybody an accelerationist now? This is the worst. I long for the days... I wonder why everyone's an accelerationist. I wonder if there's material realities which are contributing to the... I am going to take a accelerationist. I wonder if there's material realities which are contributing to that...

I am going to take a time machine. I am going to hunt down Nick Land. And I am going to stop the GRU from forming. And no one will ever know what accelerationism is. That's not... You know that's not true. Without Nick Land, someone else would come up with accelerationism.

It's a very easy thing to think of considering our current material reality. to be fair to to to be fair to nick land at least at least his version of accelerationism had to do with like at least it was everyone well yeah the version of accelerationism where like like capitalism is a human machine that's also a god that only exists in but that exists continuously in potentia and uh all all of you like the market being irresistible because because it like the market itself is a thinking machine

this is at least funny yeah the modern stuff is my god this is like they I long for the days where there was an argument where people where people would do the modern accelerationist thing and like the landians were going no no no that's not what accelerationism is this is that i hate this reality it's the worst yeah so i mean like i think i think a good chunk

of the opposition movement can be described as alex accelerationist it's not just it's not just accelerationist but i do think a lot of them are in there. Any improvement to anything is helping the government. That's why they support the embargo. That's why they don't want any improvement on any laws. They want things to be as dysfunctional as possible because they think that, like, the government is incapable of actually getting doing better. And to the extent that it becomes better and stronger, it's just going to be more repressive. better and to the extent that it becomes better and stronger it's just going to be more repressive ergo the solution is bring the country to a standstill so there will be a general strike and overthrow the government that's their plan i think that seems like a terrible plan i just gonna gonna throw that out there that's that like i i get at that at that point like why do why not

just become a terrorist like i don't know like because that's because that's more scary yeah that that's the actual reason yeah it's like yeah it's people it's people people who are too cowardly to like kill someone with their own bombs so they they kill people by trying to get sanctions through instead which is like no although there have there have been there have been turns there was the um yeah he blew up a put a frag bomb in a cuban hotel and killed a cuban uh an italian tourist um yeah actually actually my my dad was working on the extradition case to get him extradited to venezuela over that uh he was yeah he's he also committed the first act so a cuban a cia trained cuban exile committed the first act of terrorism involving civil aviation in the western hemisphere

76 that's pretty late yeah i mean maybe it was just people were just doing it in and maybe it was just a european thing and then the cia was like what if we bring this here it's like no sure surely this will work better for us than it worked for every other group who's hijacked a plane in the 1970s oh god this sucks i hope i hope those guys have a bad time and that yeah yeah well at least kicked it a couple years ago. Oh, thank God. Okay. Rest in piss, official pod opinion.

We're doing the crabs. God, these people suck. Yeah. Yeah, so. Yeah, I guess. Do you have anything else that you want to talk about, or...? Uh, I think that's it. Just thanks a lot for having me on.

It was great to be on. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, queer rights, good. Not doing them bad. Don't kill people with sanctions. Yeah, definitely. The embargo has been an utter failure at everything other rid of human misery

yeah fuck that like all right oh yeah and i guess um yeah one last thing do you have uh do you have stuff you want to plug oh sure uh that's that's a very good and generous point um so you can find me on twitter at at as peritera p as in peter er t as in tom i e r r a i also have a podcast which is linked in my bio uh i'm doing a history of cuba um as an academic but writing for a more popular audience we're going way we start with the indigenous people we don't just jump over them and we're i'm currently working on columbus and then uh let's see and i also have a sub stack called scene embargo s-i-n and then the word embargo so i yeah yeah that that's without embargo if i'm my fake spanish is okay yes it means without embargo but it also sounds like sin embargo which is i feel like yeah would be a cool band theme so yeah yeah well we will we will link to stuff and we'll link

to that in the description and yeah thank you for joining us this this has been it could happen here um yeah make bad things happen to homophobes and get good things to happen welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. 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.

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for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. belly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things

can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. hello and welcome to it could happen here today it's just me because it's early and i live on the west coast and today we are talking about uh america's drug problem and i'm joined by david mitchell from patients for affordable drugs and we're going to talk about the cost of medicines, why it's so astronomically high, why I sometimes go to Mexico to buy my insulin, and why you probably know someone who can't afford the medicines they need to survive or maybe thrive. So David, can you explain a little bit about, first, if you'd like to introduce yourself and

explain what Patients for Affordable Drugs does and the role that you play there, that would be wonderful. I am the founder and president of Patients for Affordable Drugs. We're the only national patient organization that focuses exclusively on policies to lower drug prices. We're independent. We're bipartisan. We don't take money from any organizations that profit from the development or distribution of prescription drugs. to policymakers and elected officials so we can bring home the human impact of ridiculously high drug prices on the people in the United States. And the second thing is that we recruit and train patients to be advocates. the policies, give them coaching on presentation, and prepare them to go tell their story and deal directly with the people who set policy in this country. And so we've had patients testify in state legislatures all over the country. We've had patients testify in Congress on many occasions.

Just last week, one of our patients, who happens to be a type 1 diabetic, introduced the President of the United States in the Rose Garden in a speech the President made talking about the new Inflation Reduction Act and how it's going to help lower drug prices and out-of-pocket costs for people. So that's our work. I do this work because I'm a patient. I have an incurable blood cancer. It's called multiple myeloma. It's incurable. That's not good, but it's treatable for some period of time with very expensive drugs. Right now, my oncologists have me on a four drug combination that carries a list price of more than $900,000 a year. Jesus Christ. These drugs are literally keeping me alive and I'm very grateful to have them,

alive and I'm very grateful to have them, but they're wildly overpriced. And the drug industry, drug companies exploit patients everywhere in the world, but especially here in the United States. They use us as a piggy bank to hit their targets for executive bonuses, to trigger executive bonuses, and to hit profit targets for their shareholders. And the unfairness is not acceptable. Anyway, when I got diagnosed and suddenly I found myself with a disease, through no fault of my own. It required very expensive drugs. I began this journey, and the journey taught me a fundamental point,

and that is that drugs don't work if people can't afford them. And so I retired and decided to devote myself as a patient to trying to change a system in this country that really is built to benefit the people who profit from it at the expense of the people it's supposed to serve. And I work for free as a volunteer, and I've been doing it for six years. That's great. Yeah, I'm sorry to hear about your own wealth, but I think it's a very admirable thing you've done. So David, can you explain, because it does, I think people sometimes maybe if they've only lived in the US, they might not realize, or perhaps they're extremely aware. Why are medicines so, why can I travel 16 miles, right? Go across the border,

So why can I travel 16 miles, right? Go across the border, flash my passport at someone, have a bunch of scans taken, right? Go through a bunch of machines and then buy medicines for less than half the price on any given day. Why is it like that? It's like that because we are the only developed nation in the world that lets drug companies dictate the prices of brand name drugs to their citizens. Every other developed country in the world negotiates on behalf of their citizens directly

with the drug companies to get a better deal. And we don't do that. The net result is that Americans are paying almost four times what other wealthy nations pay for the exact same brand name drugs. And the impact is that three out of 10 Americans report that they are not able to take their medications as directed because of the cost. This has a direct impact on health. And, you know, I understand that you are a type one and that you're insulin dependent. And so, you know, the struggles and the high prices of insulin. But we've had five people confirmed dead because they tried to ration their insulin in the United States of America. This happens because we grant the drug companies this incredible market power, and we let them dictate the prices to us, prices that are completely unjustified,

and patients suffer financially and worse because of their health due to these high prices. Yeah, I think it's just heartbreaking, this stuff. And I've known people who have died from lack of access to insulin, and it's just heartbreaking to stuff like and I've known people who've died from from lack of access to insulin. And it's just, it's pretty horrific stuff. And can you explain because let's get into that lack of justification, right? There's ways a drug, the things that make up the cost of a drug would be the research and development of the drug, the distribution of the drug, and the marketing of the drug, and maybe something else I'm missing. But can you explain, like, how do we arrive at this insane price for insulin, which was synthesized in a lab more than 100 years ago? Like what, what makes up that price structure? And how much would it actually cost to produce that insulin if we stripped away some of those things? Well, you're asking a very intelligent question about what should exist but doesn't,

and that is a framework to arrive at an appropriate price that will provide a reasonable return to the drug maker and ensure that drugs are affordable and accessible for the people who need them. We don't have a system like that. The drug companies charge as much as they think they can get away with, period. This was shown just last year when one of the drug companies named Biogen tried to bring a drug to market for Alzheimer's and proposed to sell it at $56,000, even though there was no proof it worked. And after it got big pushback and no one wanted to pay for it, the government, private employers, they cut the price to $28,000.

Now, was it worth $56,000? If it wasn't, then why didn't you just price it at $28,000 to begin with? Why? Because they thought they could get away with $56,000 a year for this drug. Now, where insulin is concerned, it's very unfortunate. There is an insulin cartel. Three companies control 90% of the global insulin market in the world and here in the United States as well. And some people would say correctly, you know,

you have to call it correctly an oligopoly, a small number of producers and sellers who are controlling the market. And what happens as a result of that problem? Well, insulin costs roughly $10 a vial to produce. It sells for more than $300 of aisle. It has gone up in price more than 600% in the last 20 years because of this cartel that literally controls the insulin supply in the world. I'll give you another example.

I take a drug. It's called, for my cancer, it's called Pomalyst. It's an oral drug that I get under Medicare Part D. Pomalyst costs less than $1 per capsule to make. It sells for almost $1,000 per capsule. Now, you cannot justify, you cannot tell me that there's justification for a thousand percent margin. It's just ridiculous. But because we do not use our power, our market power, to negotiate for a better deal, they can get away with it. And they do. And there are many examples of this.

they can get away with it. And they do. And there are many examples of this. Now, all of that is about to change with some new legislation that has been enacted into law. It's about to start to change, I should be more precise. And we can talk about that. Yeah, let's talk about that. One thing I want to get into first, I think, is this. I think sometimes we have this impression, certainly with new or novel compounds, that there's this massive lab and it's entirely funded by the money that's made from selling other drugs.

And in that lab, people are just all day cooking up cures to the Ebola virus or these various very deadly conditions. So I wanted you to explain who pays for the R&D for the most part, and who decides what that R&D focuses on? Because I think those are both very important topics. Yeah. Well, it turns out that every single drug approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019, every one was based on, in some part on science paid for by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health, another organization in government called BARDA, and another organization in the government called

DARPA. DARPA is who invented the internet, for example, and GPS. We pay taxpayers billions of dollars every year to finance basic scientific research that lays the foundation for all these drugs. And when a drug company sees a drug that has promise, it will try and acquire from the NIH or the other government agencies that do this work, fund this work, intellectual property, and then they'll finish the job of running late-stage clinical trials and going through the process of gaining FDA approval. I'm going to say a couple of things here that are critically important to understand to try and illustrate this. The drug industry tries to take credit for the mRNA vaccines that were developed to fight COVID-19. And these are the vaccines that are marketed by Pfizer and its partner in Europe, BioNTech, and by Moderna here in the United States.

It turns out that in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, drug companies weren't investing in vaccines because they didn't produce a big return. So the federal government invested through NIH, DARPA, and BARDA, all of them, to develop the technology that we now call mRNA. So that when the virus hit, that technology was ready for Moderna and Pfizer to run with. But they didn't make the big investment. We did. We being taxpayers to get that technology ready to go. And in the case of Moderna, we paid for everything. And I'm not exaggerating. They had never produced a drug. So we stood up manufacturing capacity for them. We paid for their late-stage clinical trials, and we signed advanced purchase agreements to completely de-risk the enterprise. But they will

tell you that they saved us. It's not true. We saved ourselves. There's a reason that the president, who cares deeply about trying to reduce the death toll from cancer, has to have this new organization called ARPA-H, which is going to be funded with billions of dollars, to try and do something to accelerate cancer research. accelerate cancer research. Why do we have to pay for that? Because the drug companies will not pay for the high-risk, early-stage research that goes into getting really breakthrough new drugs to market. So who does this? Who pays for it? By and large, taxpayers are underpinning all the basic science. Drug companies are taking drugs that show promise, acquiring the intellectual property, and then charging whatever they want for the drugs. So that's our system in the United States of America. It's completely screwed up.

Uh, we need to have a process more like what you described in posing this question, which is, well, shouldn't we look at what the government invested, what the company invested, uh, you know, what would be, what does it cost to manufacture the drug and distribute the drug, and all of that, and then arrive at a price that provides a fair return for investment and risk to the drug company, but not any price they want to dictate. That's what we have now, is they get the drug from us, and they get to dictate the price. We don't have a system like the one you referenced. Yeah. And it's much to our detriment, right? And it's interesting, you talked about how this profit-driven model tends to focus on certain conditions and not

others. And I know that you focus mainly on the United States, but perhaps we could get into a little bit what that means for neglected diseases on a global scale, right? How looking at only patients who can afford to pay these inflated prices means that we're, or drug companies are sort of tacitly saying, well, we're okay with people dying from conditions that people don't get in America. Are you comfortable talking about that a little bit? Well, we only work in the United States because that is a big enough challenge for us. I will say that drug companies want to invest only in drugs that produce a big return. They're profit maximizers, they're corporations. And we don't have a way

that we balance that out where we say, yes, but taxpayers are doing the foundational research that leads to these drugs. And these are, in that sense, public goods. And we need to figure out how, yeah, you can have a fair return, but we also make sure that they're priced to maximize affordability and accessibility. And this plays out overseas with neglected tropical diseases, which you referenced, which, you know, drug companies don't want to spend a lot of money on because those countries don't have a lot of money to pay for them. Because all the companies care about is, honest to God, you know, they want us to believe that they're all about looking after our well-being. They are corporations and corporations

by law have to maximize profits for their shareholders. And that's what they do. You know, who invests in neglected tropical diseases? The Gates Foundation and other foundations that put the money out to do that early stage research that changes the pricing equation, should change the pricing equation, changes the pricing equation, should change the pricing equation, so that we can still develop the drugs that people abroad would benefit from tremendously if only we made the effort and made the investment, which they're not inclined to do. Did that answer your question? Yes, very well, very well. I think if people are looking for evidence on this,

they could look at the speed at which we started to develop Ebola treatments and vaccines once that became a threat to us versus once it became a threat to people in the global periphery. By the way, I will say one more thing. Yeah, of course. It's not that drug companies only hurt people in poorer countries in the world yeah it is that drug companies insist on high prices everywhere and for example the disease cystic fibrosis is incurable and there are new drugs that help people live longer uh they are marketed by vertex

interestingly the gene that all of these uh drugs are built on uh the genetic component was identified by the former head of the nih, Francis Collins, when he was doing research paid for by the NIH at the University of Michigan. His discoveries were seminal, but still the drug companies wouldn't invest. So the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation raised money from its community to do more early stage research. And when it showed promise, Vertex bought the intellectual property from them and brought these drugs that are built on that genetic discovery to market. But in countries that have said we can't afford the price you're demanding

because we only have so much money to pay for our citizens for health care because we provide health care to all our citizens. Vertex will let people, kids, because it generally affects kids and younger adults, will let them die if the country, if the countries won't agree to the price that they are insisting on, literally let them die and say, look, you know, if you won't strike a deal that has a high enough price for us, we're not going to sell the drug in your in your country. So it isn't only the poor people, you know, the poorer countries around the world. It's patients who are stuck with a drug, a disease that requires a high cost drug, and maybe they can't get access to it because it's not affordable for their country or them. Yeah, it's really pretty bleak stuff in that sense. Let's get on to a little bit then of how we can make this better. And I know that there are approaches that are incremental, and there are approaches that are

more revolutionary or sort of making these big leaps. So let's start with talking about how this legislation that we've just seen, the Inflation Reduction Act, does that make a difference? How much of a difference does it make? And how does it make that difference? Does that make a difference? How much of a difference does it make? And how does it make that difference? The Inflation Reduction Act is really historic legislation that is going to save millions of people in America millions of dollars over time. It does four big things. It does many more, but four big things. One, for the first time ever, Medicare is going to be able to use its purchasing power as the largest purchaser of drugs in this country to negotiate lower prices for people on Medicare. For the first time ever, we are going to curb price gouging by forcing companies that raise prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay a rebate to Medicare.

That will curb their price increases. And third, we are going to limit the amount of out-of-pocket annually a Medicare patient can pay under the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Right now, there is no annual out-of-pocket limit. I pay for that drug I described to you before that costs almost $1,000 a capsule. I pay out-of-pocket more than $16,000 a year. In 2025, there will be a limit of $2,000. No Medicare beneficiary will pay more than $2,000 out of pocket for Medicare Part D drugs. And four, for the first time starting next year, people who depend on insulin in Medicare will pay no more than $35 per prescription per month for their insulin. to shift drug policy in this country, begin to break the dictatorial pricing ability that the drug companies have.

And I want to take a minute to explain why Medicare negotiation in itself is such a big breakthrough. Very quickly, when the Medicare prescription drug benefit was enacted into law in 2003, the drug companies in the dark of night got stuck into that law, something called the non-interference clause that said that the Secretary of Health and Human Services could not negotiate directly with drug companies, period. It got stuck in in the dark of night by a man named Billy Towson, who was then chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

And within months after doing that, at the behest of the big drug companies, he went to work to run the big trade association for the drug companies, it's called Pharma, at a salary of $2 million a year. In other words, they bought the prohibition on Medicare being able to negotiate, and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to keep that prohibition in place ever since then. Just in the last two years, in fighting to not let Medicare negotiate over any drugs ever directly with the drug companies,

they spent north of $200 million to try and stop that legislation from passing. So these are all big, significant, important changes. They are not enough. If we ruled the world, we would have written legislation that negotiated over more drugs and the pricing for which extended into the private sector and to people without insurance. But we had to do that to extend it to the private sector and people without insurance. We needed 60 votes in the Senate because of the filibuster rules.

And we couldn't get one, not one Republican vote. So it had to be passed under a special procedure called reconciliation. The Democrats used it. They stood up to pharma and they passed the bill. God bless them. We, in the course of it, had

a vote on trying to extend the $35 insulin monthly copay to the private sector. we could only get seven Republican votes. And so we couldn't take it all the way there. So there's much more work to do. But this breakthrough is truly historic. Yeah, it's good. It's good to see some progress, because there hasn't been progress for a very long time. Let's talk about the difference between a cost and a copay because I think it's easy for politicians sometimes to tweet, insulin will cost you X. In fact, it only costs you X if Y and

Z are true. Can you explain for folks what a copay is and why sometimes these claims are made about copays and those are not the same as costs? Well, the big difference is the word price versus cost in our system. We, in order to lower out-of-pocket costs for people, we have to lower price. Why? lower price. Why? If you were paying $100 out of pocket for your medicine and we zero that out to nothing, but we don't lower the price, the overall price, that $100 has to be paid for by someone. And what happens is patients wind up paying higher premiums or higher taxes or getting less money in their paychecks. You know, more than half of all Americans get their drug coverage and health care through their employers. So if that $100 still has to be paid by somebody, then we wind

up paying for it either with higher premiums, higher taxes, or getting less money in our paycheck because someone needs to absorb that hundred bucks. This is very important for people to understand. There's no free lunch unless we lower prices. That's why pharma will always say, the big drug companies will always say, well, what we need to do is we just need to lower everybody's out of pocket, make it zero and let them have all the drugs they want and let us continue to charge any price we want. But that's not there's there's no free lunch. It would still have to be paid. And so we fight very hard at Patients for Affordable Drugs to help patients and policymakers understand that we need to do both. We need to lower out-of-pocket costs for people, and we need to lower the price in order to do that. what you pay when you go to the pharmacy counter and they tell you that your share of this prescription is $5 or $10 or $20.

And lots of times employers and the insurance companies they hire to run their programs will use copayments to try and steer you to a less expensive drug, a generic. Yeah. Right? So if you want a brand, you're going to have to pay 50 bucks. But if you'll take the generic, you pay five bucks, for example. They're trying to steer you to an equally effective drug.

Generics are by definition the same exact drug. And they are trying to steer you to the less expensive but equally effective drug. Generics are by definition the same exact drug. And they are trying to steer you to the less expensive but equally effective drug. The problem with our country big time is that sometimes they are not used for that purpose. In my case, I have copayments on all my drugs, right? But I don't have a choice. I don't have a cheaper generic. I got to take the drugs they're telling me to take. And so when we misuse copayments like that, we are hurting patients. how we also need to change our benefit design in this country. If we can steer a patient to a healthier or as healthy, least less expensive option, that makes sense.

But if you're charging me for something that I can't do anything about, that makes no sense at all. And so these are changes that we at P4AD work on and will continue to work on in our benefit design in this country. Yeah, I can see they're trying to give you a price incentive to not buy your drug, in your case, or be poor or be sick because you can't afford it, which is really just not the function of the incentive, and it's silly. Can you explain why some drugs have generics and some don't? So, boy, you're asking some really good questions.

You're going right to the heart of our system. Thank you. A long time ago in the 80s, 83 or 84, a bill was passed called the Hatch-Waxman Bill. And since then, everyone refers to a concept called the Hatch-Waxman Bargain. And the bargain is this. If you're a drug company and you bring a valuable new drug to market, you get a period of exclusivity along with your, you have a patent already probably, but upon approval, we give you a period of exclusivity where for sure, no matter if your patent is old and only has a year left, we give you additional years of exclusivity where you have a monopoly on that drug.

But at the end of that period of exclusivity, generics and biosimilars. Biosimilars are the generic name or the name for generics for biologic drugs. They're more complicated drugs. But at the end of that period of exclusivity, a generic, I'm not a generic, generics and biosimilars come to market and we use the competition from the generics and biosimilars come to market, and we use the competition from the generics and biosimilars to drive down the price. When you have one generic that comes to compete, the price goes down about 15 or 20 percent. Two generics, the price goes down 35 to 40 percent. Three generics, you know, 40 to 30 percent. By the time you get five generics in the market, the price is roughly 5 to 15 percent of the original brand name price. So the Hatch Waxman bargain was you got a good drug, you bring it to market, we give you a time where you can

charge whatever you want, you have exclusivity in the market. But at the end of that, we have competition from generics and biosimilars to lower price. Why aren't there generics and biosimilars? That was your question. For all drugs, well, some drugs are still in their period of exclusivity, but the drug companies don't let competition come to market. The brand drug companies, they fight. They file additional patents. They sign deals with generic companies not to bring a drug to market, a competitor to market and pay them not to.

They make small changes in the drug and then file additional patents. There is something called a patent thicket. Humira, the best-selling drug in the world, has like 132 patents. 132, 75% of which were filed after the drug came to market. What are they for? Well, they could be for the packaging, the instructions, the color of the capsule. They patent everything. And why? Because a generic or biosimilar competitor has to fight its way through all of them to bring a drug to market. So we call them patent thickets.

If you grew up anywhere near a place where there were thickets, you know it's very hard to get through a thicket. And so in some cases, there's no competitor because they're in the period of exclusivity. But in far too many cases, there is no competitor because they're in the period of exclusivity. But in far too many cases, there are no competitors to drive down the price because the drug companies are manipulating our system. And they're very good at manipulating our system. Yeah, yes, they are exceptionally good. And that has terrible results.

OK, so we've spoken about that, the way that they've manipulated the system the way that maybe that's beginning to change one thing that i'm interested in i've written about it a little bit is these ways that are perhaps more revolutionary uh if not always as uh like a cast iron safe and one of those is obviously people making their own medicines which is uh something that we'll see, unfortunately, increasingly in this country because of bans on access to reproductive health care. And I wonder how you think that has the potential to change this. We've seen like the EpiPencil, we've seen these home brew abortion drugs, things like that. Do you think that has the capacity to change access? through abortion drugs, things like that.

Do you think that has the capacity to change access? Well, remember, I'm a patient, and it scares the hell out of me. Yeah. And the reason is there was a time in the United States and in most of the world when drug companies were not regulated. were not regulated. And they brought, you know, patent medicines and, you know, mix-it-at-home brews and sold them officials realized we needed a way to regulate this industry, which would sell poison in some cases. And they created what is now called the Food and Drug Administration. Food and Drug Administration is charged with making sure drugs are safe and effective. I'm a patient. I want the Food and Drug Administration to do its job. I want drugs and effective. Uh, I do not like drugs that are not subjected to some scrutiny, um,

to make sure that they do what those who are selling them claim they do. So remember, I'm not big on taking chances with my life. And if the drugs don't work, I'll die. It's that simple. I'll die of cancer. Not to mention I could die from a drug that's no good. Some drugs cause harm, you know. Even drugs approved by the FDA cause harm sometimes.

So I am not a fan of homebrew drugs. I'm a fan of a system that protects me and ensures that drugs are safe and effective. But that's one man's perspective. Yeah. And I think it's reasonable to say that we have a way to make drugs that are safe and effective. And it's the law, legislation, or a way to make drugs that are safe and effective and it's the law legislation or a system that's getting in between people and the life-saving medicines that they need and we should certainly struggle to fix that instead of looking for ways around it even though i understand why especially with things like reproductive health care that doesn't seem like it's getting fixed anytime soon sadly no no it is it's terribly sad it's heartbreaking yeah this whole thing is extremely and i know uh you've obviously seen

it too but in my previous life i've worked with one of uh someone who works for you now in diabetes non-profit and seen firsthand the uh consequences of this and it's really heartbreaking stuff to look at. And I wish it just seems so unnecessary in a world where like these pharmaceutical companies make, we should say like billions of dollars, right? It's, it's not as if these people are, you know, driving to work in a secondhand Toyota Corolla, like they, they are doing very well for themselves off this system, right?

Yep. People will be familiar with uh like pharma bro uh martin screlli the guy yeah yeah but this is just one example of a very problematic industry i think you've done an excellent job of explaining it david is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here? Just, Martin Shkreli, you called to mind. I want to take you back to Moderna and the mRNA vaccine and the fact that we not only developed the mRNA technology with taxpayer money, but we brought the Moderna vaccine to people with taxpayer money.

And in the course of doing that, we minted three new Moderna billionaires. You're talking about them not driving to work and, you know, secondhand Toyota Corollas. Oh, far from it. Yeah, these are the people whose yachts I see in the bay. I think that's disgusting. Three new millionaires off the back of it. Billionaires. Billionaires, God. Yeah, God, it's gross, isn't it? It can't be said enough. Not only does the NIH fund their research, but often the taxpayers will fund the lab, right, if it's at a university. You pay for it twice before you try and pay for it again. So, yeah, it's a very broken system.

David, how can people find P4AD? How can people find you? Is there a website, a Twitter, a Facebook? Where should they go? Go to our website, patientsforaffordabledrugs.org, just like it sounds. You can leave your story if you or someone you love, care about, has struggled with high drug prices, give us your email address. We don't ask patients for money, but the stories and the email addresses are our power. to make sure that the voices of people in this country are heard to counter the propaganda and lies that are put out by the drug companies.

Okay, yeah, that's very important stuff that people can hopefully do, even if they are struggling sort of materially to afford their drugs, maybe they have some time. So that's great. And it's 4FOR, right? Not the number four. That's correct. All right, great. Thank you so much, David. It's been a pleasure. You've done an excellent job of explaining a very convoluted and broken system. Thank you for taking this. James, you're a patient man. I try to be. Sometimes I'm very much not that. But yeah,

I do appreciate your time on this Monday morning. Thank you very much, David. Thank you. 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. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be

digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com Hola mi gente.

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This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. I am Robert Evans, and today we're going to talk about a specific part of Eurasia where, I don't know, things are

kind of on the edge of falling apart and maybe becoming something else. As I'm sure most people are aware, Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. It has not gone well, and the government has recently announced that they are doing a general mobilization of bringing another 300,000 soldiers into their armed forces. A significant chunk, if not the bulk, of these recruitments are coming from areas away from the – on the periphery of Russian power, you might say. on the periphery of Russian power, you might say, particularly different chunks of the Russian state where there are minority populations who have been dissident to the Federation of Russia in the past. Probably the most active of these is a place called Dagestan. Most Americans probably are not super well-versed on this area. It is the furthest southern point in the Russian state. It borders Azerbaijan. It's pretty close to Turkey. And this is a region that has a massive Muslim population and has been the site of a lot of resistance to the Russian state in the recent past. we're going to be talking about what that looks like now as the government is attempting to draft men from this part of the state and as sort of resistance has risen up significantly within Dagestan. I'm going to be talking with Karina Avedisian. Karina is a PhD studying social

movements in particularly in Russia. Karina, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So first off, I'm not an expert on Dagestan. What do you think is important for people to know about the relationship between this region and the Russian state? It's the biggest republic in the North Caucasus. And it has actually independent media still, despite the really intense repression, and the dozens of disappeared or murdered journalists from from the republic. ties are strong in Dagestan. So the announcement of mobilization and the kind of, you know, the start of the mobilization process really affects people because extended families are closed. So when someone is taken away, it affects a lot of people. So that in large part kind of explains the level of mobilization. The other thing I want to mention is that the North Caucasus region in general, but especially Dagestan and Chechnya, just kind of don't see themselves as part of Russia.

To be honest, Russians don't really care about what happens there either. I mean, you know, it's as if it's another country and there's this huge disconnect. So there doesn't really exist this kind of civic Russian identity. And the concept of Russia as a country is to a large extent held together by sheer oppression and propaganda. Yeah, that's kind of why I try to focus on like this is a part of the Russian state rather than like these areas are Russian, because that's certainly not the way it feels on the ground or the people feel about themselves. Yeah, exactly. And you can kind of see differences in the way police respond to these protests in Russian regions versus places like Dagestan. In Russian regions, and by Russian region, I mean, you know, places where, you know, ethnic Russians are a majority.

You have people or you have police kind of arresting or detaining and arresting protesters. Whereas in Dagestan, you know, the tactics of de-arresting people, you know, who are being kind of carted off is really significant because of the history of violence in the Republic. So abductions, disappearances and murder is very common. And this is something that I've heard Dagestani protest participants kind of express fear about, like, you know, people know that that might happen. You might get identified among the protesters and you might not get detained and arrested like you would, you know, in Moscow, for example, but you might get, you know, identified and then kind of targeted later. Which is, yeah, I mean, obviously very frightening. One of the things that I had read kind of about

part, some of the origins of the conflict in the region right now is that it had been common for some time because the economy in Dagestan, Dagestan is in the Caucasus, which is a mountainous region in southern Russia, and it's where a great deal of the country's fuel comes from. There are kind of folks who will say that the government of the Federation has avoided utilizing that infrastructure to the most that it can to avoid providing jobs, And it's made a lot of young men join the military to become contract soldiers. In the past, that was a good way to provide for if you had a large family, you do a military contract, you're not going to get

sent outside of the region. It's pretty safe. But then, of course, Putin invades Ukraine. And suddenly, a lot of these people who had been doing this, not because they wanted to support the Russian Federation, but because it was a job, are suddenly being sent to go fight and die outside of Kharkiv or wherever. Yeah. The other thing is, that's why there's so many security personnel kind of internally in the Republic as well. So the Republic experiences high unemployment, as you mentioned, poverty. And it's almost by design, right? So many people are just relying on the state for jobs and security services as one of the main sources of employment. But that also kind of has that double effect of, you know, being used as a tool for repression. So anytime kind of dissent comes up, even, you know, when a large part of the grievances are

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

saying is it's a statement of protest from within the Islamic community of Dagestan saying, if you go to someone else's homeland to take part in an invasion, and you die, you're not being martyred. You're not dying in a way that is, that is, you know, uh, uh, respected by Allah essentially. Is that, am I, am I interpreting that correctly? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's exactly what it's saying. And I found that remarkable, um, for a couple of reasons. Um, the first is that, um, descend in the region originally. So, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet union and then the first stretch of war, there was dissent, but it was mostly limited to ethno-nationalist movements who were very narrow in their messaging. So their grievances were, you know, just about their one

ethnic group and, you know, whatever repression that they experienced. So they kind of missed out on broader support. And political Islam became a channel for kind of representing oppositional identity. And because of that cutting across of ethnic lines through Salafism, which is kind of a stricter interpretation of Islam, which is prone to radicalization, that had much broader support and posed a significant threat to Moscow. And I want to kind of make a parallel here because mosques and religious communities across the world are actually really interesting spaces for social movement mobilization. Some of the earliest works on social movement mobilization talked about black churches in the U.S. as being, you know, key to the civil rights movement. Because you have these spaces that are kind of away from the state, away from surveillance. Although in Dagestan and lots of parts of Russian Muslim spaces are totally infiltrated by the state or they're actually, you know, state muftis, or the state's

eyes and ears are kind of there. But still, there's these spaces. And I think that's a big kind of significant key factor in how this movement has been able to mobilize. And I'm interested in, because obviously, Chechnya is another part of Russia that has a large Muslim population, there was a horrible war there, not all all that long ago that is really a prelude in a lot of ways to the kinds of violence and the kinds of repressive tactics that are being used right now by the Russian state. What sort of separates – like why didn't Dagestan kind of go the same way as Chechnya? the same way as Chechnya? I'm kind of interested in that, because it seems as if the Muftis there are much more willing to kind of act in resistance to the state still. Is it just a factor of the violence that was unleashed on Chechnya earlier, or is there more to it? I think in large part, it's, yeah, I mean, that's the legacy of violence and war

in Chechnya. But I think it's partly because of how this the legacy of violence and war um in chechnya but i think it's partly because of how this kind of historical view of chechnya as being um you know a threat a problem for the russian empire and previously and then soviet union and then now you know independent russia independent you know um and it's really the rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, which plays a really suppressing role in the republic and his security services. Chechnya has experienced post-war. I would argue it's calmer and in a strange way. I mean, I was when I was doing my fieldwork in the North Caucasus, I visited Chechnya. I was in Kabardino-Balkaria, which is, you know, a couple of republics over.

visited Chechnya. I was in Kabardino-Balkaria, which is, you know, a couple of republics over. I didn't experience war, but I remember at the time there were counter-terrorist operations in Kabardino-Balkaria where the security services would kind of lock down whole neighborhoods and kind of storm apartment buildings to go after someone who had been, you know, identified as a problem and just kind of, you know, neutralize that person. They were rarely detained. They were just kind of killed, no questions asked. Then going to Chechnya from that kind of context, that stuff doesn't happen just because the security apparatus is so strong and so intense that that kind of thing doesn't happen. At the same time, you feel that tension, that kind of fear. So I think that's the main reason why you're not seeing

these sort of protests in Chechnya. When we talk about like, what is it reasonable to hope for here? I wonder if you have any thoughts on that from Dagestan, like in terms of resistance to both this kind of general conscription order, and resistance in general to the increasing imperial aims of the Russian state? Yeah, I think it's revealing those cracks that I mentioned in the beginning about identity and then kind of this region not feeling like a part of Russia. And I think the other thing is that it's unprecedented in many ways, just in terms of its messaging. And, you know, protest movements in general are seen to kind of, when you participate in a movement,

it's sort of transforming on an individual level. You feel like you're part of something. You see all these other people on the street who are, you know, agreeing with you in a context that's so authoritarian where, and you don't, you know, have that freedom to speak out. There's no free media in general. that's so authoritarian and you don't have that freedom to speak out, there's no free media in general, it's transformative. And I think that's probably, for me, at least as a social movement scholar, the most interesting aspect.

I mean, we can't predict. We don't know what's going to happen. There might be a new wave of repression. you know, new wave of repression. But it's revealing these cracks and kind of almost providing this proof of the lie of this, you know, unified Russian state that is being kept together by repression and propaganda. I think the messaging also reflects a change in identity, think the messaging also reflects a change in identity and oppositional identity in the region. Previously, protests in the region were directed at the local leadership, so at the Republican level, right? So these are usually co-ethnics who are installed by Moscow, not so much to govern, but more to manage. And Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is an extreme

case of this. And it was a practice common in imperial Russia, right? You install your own guy, but he's local. So it sits better with the population, even if they're only there to carry out policies that are decided. So those protest movements were normally against the Republican authorities, their excesses, their corruption, you know, and again, the exception to that is Salafism, which was targeting both Moscow and the local leadership. But here, in this new wave of protest movement, the sentiment, the grievances are against Putin. And that's totally new. The grievances are against Putin. And that's totally new. And I, one of the things that is kind of remarkable is you've gotten in the wave of, and these are not just in Dagestan, but Dagestan had a lot of the protests against this general mobilization order. You actually have what, what looks to me, and you're, you're certainly no, certainly no more than I do.

So tell me if you think my analysis of this is wrong, But it looks to me like the regime blinking a little bit. Because in the wake of the protests, you had both Putin and a number of different local leaders come out and say, we... Because one of the things that was happening as soon as the mobilization started is you saw a lot of these people, including like doctors, healthcare workers, other kinds of professionals and industries that are generally protected from this sort of thing, getting pulled in by state forces and effectively drafted on the spot along with protesters. And in the wake of the outcry against that, Putin himself and a number of other local leaders have come out and been like, this was a mistake. We're releasing a number of these people. We're not supposed to be drafting people from these certain professions and whatnot. And to me, that looked like, well, maybe that's a little bit of a blink. But I don't know if perhaps I'm being overly optimistic there.

No, I agree. And it speaks to the level of mobilization that kind of unprecedented levels of mobilization on the street. And also speaks to the fact that, you know, previously Moscow, I mean, they didn't care as much when the protests were directed at the local authorities. I mean, they did, but not like this. This is, this is threatening. And I was listening to an interview of a protest organizer from Dagestan. He's exiled, but he's kind of, you know, in touch with the people on the ground. And he, And he was talking about how he felt that the reason mobilization orders have been commissioned kind of to the Republican authorities, the regional authorities, is on purpose so that grievances aren't directed towards Moscow because it's the regional authorities deciding on who's being mobilized. And it's a kind of deflection of blame that he thought was by design. And the interviewer

asked him a couple other questions. He was saying, oh, you know, we're hearing reports about the police being really brutal. And again, he was like, no, not really. Or that's not the point. That's not the question to be asking. It's actually deflecting because, again, the grievance is not to the local police. It's actually towards Moscow, who is, you know, the origin of this whole problem. And I think that's a threat. Do you have any kind of advice for people if they're looking, as kind of things continue to develop in Dagestan, as there are more protests, which I'm sure there will be, are there actually like organizations over there that can be supported by people,

including you mentioned independent media there? I'm just wondering if you have any kind of particular advice for folks who might either want to learn more about the region and what's going on or who might want to try and help the people who are protesting right now. might want to try and help the people who are protesting right now? Unfortunately, there's not much for outsiders to do a lot of the news. And I think I was kind of expecting the answer. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, it's kind of a denied context. So where I get the news is a couple of telegram channels that are only in Russian. So that probably doesn't help your audience if they don't speak Russian. There's a couple Twitter accounts that I would recommend people follow. You know, there's, I don't know if I can mention that or... Yeah, please. No, absolutely. Let me quickly find the guys. Personally, when it comes to like where I'm able to get English language news about the region,

Meduza is generally kind of like one of the places where I've gotten some. Meduza is a Russian news site or news organization that's banned in Russia. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, a Meduza journalist just got arrested in Dagestan by the state security services. But you can go to meduza.io, and that's one place where I've come across news that's English language. It's not the most detailed coverage, but it's kind of hard to find that in English about stuff going on in Dagestan. It is hard to find. And I would echo that sentiment of Medusa being a good source for that. There is a researcher on Twitter named Harold Chambers. His handle is Chambers Harold 8, the number 8. And he is an analyst and he is posting kind of more detailed, you know, in the weeds up to, you know, up to date, day to day developments

from the region. And is there anything like as I'm kind of closing out here that you wanted to particularly get into about what's happening over there, about kind of the development of social movements in Dagestan right now that you find particularly fascinating that you'd like to kind of talk about to the audience? Yeah, I think the context of the Russian war on terrorism in the North Caucasus plays a huge role here. And I mentioned, you know, the counter-terrorist operations that Russia used to use in the region as a repression tool. So they didn't have to be Salafists or kind of, you know, seen as extremists to be targeted and stuff like that, like secular Dagestanis and Chechens were absolutely targeted in that kind of, in those, in that context of counter-terrorism.

And it's really the fact that Dagestanis are really tired of counterterrorism. And it's really the fact that you, Dagestani's are really tired of the repression. People leave the Republic and move abroad because they've been labeled a terrorist and they don't want to die. And when their families send them money to support them abroad, they get labeled as terrorists

because they're helping, you know, support a terrorist. So it's also it's why, it's also why the movement is leaderless because there's really no intelligentsia or leaders left in the Republic anymore. Anyone who had any kind of critical standpoint has either been killed or exiled. So we have to see the mobilization in Dagestan as kind of, you know, with that backdrop, people are tired of the repression. And yeah, the protests are spontaneous.

And the fact that it's horizontal is also unprecedented. And it obviously means that it's much harder to repress the movement and suppress it because there's no individuals to kind of target. because there's no individuals to kind of target. That's interesting because that's obviously a global trend that we've seen in protest movements, not just against the Russian state, but around the world. Governments have gotten much better at finding leaders in protest movements, compromising them, going after them, targeting them, arresting them. And I think this has been a part of why all over the world, you've seen so many more horizontal movements leading street protests against different kinds of oppression, because it's really the only thing that can't be compromised easily by the security forces. Yeah, especially in an authoritarian context.

Yeah. Well, um, Karina, is there anything else you wanted to say before we close out? No, no, that's it. All right. Well, why don't we talk a little bit about your plugs here? Because you have a podcast that you're about to be starting. Yeah, I'm starting a podcast. It is called Obscuristan Podcast, where we'll talk about the bizarre and fucked up nature of the region of Eurasia. But also, more importantly, how it got that way. Yeah. That's what we're doing. I can think of a few more topics, more important topics for people, particularly people just where I live, to understand.

So many people have been affected. We're looking at the energy crisis hitting the UK and to a slightly lesser extent, continental Europe right now. We're looking at rising food prices in the United States, all of it tied to this conflict, which people wouldn't have been surprised by if they'd been paying attention to Eurasian history and politics a little bit more. So I think that's a commendable effort, and I'm excited to start listening. Thank you so much. Oh, yes. Can I mention one last thing? Absolutely.

So I'm sitting in Armenia and speaking to you from Armenia. So I would just encourage your listeners to find out about what's happening. We were recently attacked by Azerbaijan and we have some 41 square kilometers that are currently occupied by Azerbaijani soldiers. So I would encourage people to learn about the conflict and kind of pay attention to what's happening here. Yeah, absolutely. We continue to be big advocates for folks paying attention to that. And yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, you know, I had this brief period of like optimism when the White House started making statements and Pelosi visited that,

like, and we'll see maybe that I know there's like, there's a vote coming up right now in Congress to stop selling weapons to the Azeris, which would be at least a start. But I mean, you know, it,

the, what I think is necessary is for Armenia to have access to the kind of weapons that have been so successful at stopping foreign aggression in other countries, shall we say? Yeah. Yep. Well, all right. Karina, thank you so much for your time. That's going to be our show for the day.

Have a good one, everybody. Keep paying attention to stuff. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. You trying to conceive of a girl boss noise to me? No, I'm trying to think of something that's about Italian racism and how we should all be racist against Italians,

because now it's important. Oh, hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show where we're talking about anti-Italian racism. Yay! And also girl bosses, finally. Two great tastes that go great together so it's like mixing peanut butter and piss that's right yeah the piss being italians yes peanut butter being girl boss you usually don't say things that are that obvious but yes uh with me today is uh chris james and robert i'm garrison

and we're talking about girl boss fascism today um and uh uh it's are we gonna say georgia is that how we're gonna do it is that how we're gonna say her name georgia but i don't know georgia georgia milani georgia milani georgia milani georgia milani italy's new prime minister georgia milani that's what i was waiting for thank you there we go thank you put some italian on it yeah spice up that meter ball so since since 2014 she's been the head of the brothers of italy party which is funny because when i think of the Brothers of Italy party, which is funny, because when I think of the Brothers of Italy, I just think of Mario and Luigi, obviously. That's what most people think.

But Mario and Luigi, also fascists. So, well, they're monarchists. Yeah, they... They're monarchists. They specifically serve a princess so so bowser who's a girl boss is bowser is your standard issue left-wing uh politburo chief type leader whereas what mario and luigi are doing like mussolini is installing a royal in power, is taking... Essentially, every Mario game is recreating the March on Rome.

I have like 10 pages to get through. Where does the toadstool come into it? So, since 2014, she's been the head of the Brothers of Italy party, a party with direct lineage from the fascist Italian social movement. And Milani herself has been on camera praising figures like Mussolini. And until very recently, the Brothers of Italy party, besides being

very pro-plumbing, were pretty on the fridges of Italian politics. Here we go! Just four years ago, the party won only 4% of the votes in the last election. And now it's become Italy's largest political party, claiming the greatest percentage of the vote in last month's election. So today we're going to talk about who Melania is, what she believes, what her rhetoric is, and then also the types of ways that media has been framing her relation to fascism because there's definitely been this perception that like liberal feminists and mainstream media have been kind of soft on milani because she's the first woman prime minister of

italy um and they've kind of framed her ascension to power in like a girl boss, go get it sort of way and have been downplaying her more fascist views. So we're going to talk about kind of where this perception comes from, the few ways where it's kind of correct, and some of the ways where it's, I think, a little off base. To start off with this, one of the biggest things that uh pushed this perception into the forefront was a tweet from politico europe um accompanying an article now this this tweet sorry thank you thank you um and because i i hate basing uh our research off of things that are just on twitter this tweet has been referenced a lot on like television, on like news, like news TV has been using this tweet a lot as well.

This is, this is kind of shaped the way that discussion's happening on a national stage, even off Twitter. But the, the, the tweet, the tweet reads in 1992,

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

A lot of good girl Hitler jokes. Democracy. You even picked out president. Listen, I'm flabbergasted. Girl Hitler! No, really. I'm happy for you, honey. Wow, a girl president? How progressive. Ah, Venture Brothers.

Venture Brothers. No, uncritical support. It's just support to Venture Brothers. So takes like that, like what we just heard Dean Venture say, kind of spawned a big slew of comments. I'm just going to read some of the stuff that people have been saying in response to stuff like that Politico Europe piece. Quote, begging liberals to stop praising girl Bossolini for being brave enough to shatter the glass ceiling in the neo-fascist parties she's joined and like why is media treating this as a freaking girl boss story the girl bossification of georgia milani has been interesting to watch liberals will literally stan anybody so there's a lot of a lot of takes like that have been going around. There's been extremely viral tweets getting hundreds of thousands of likes, thousands and thousands of retweets and shares, stuff getting referenced on national TV and other kind of very soft headlines

emphasizing the girl boss nature, being like, the sweet little girl defies the odds and grows up to be the first female Mussolini. So some of these jokes are pretty funny. I think they're funny. They're fine. There is probably the worst one of these takes that I found that still got hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes was, quote, the American right and the American left. The aesthetics are different, but the effect is the same. Support for the rising tide of fascism. Communists are the only people now, as in the past, who truly oppose fascists.

It's off. Wow. Oh, for fuck's sake. now as in the past, who truly oppose fascists. Piss off! For fuck's sake. This isn't true. For those of you following along. No. Yeah, there was a terrible Meghan McCain tweet, which is very funny because people definitely were standing. We'll talk about the Meghan McCain.

Good. Can't wait. I have. Yes, we'll talk about the Meghan McCain. Good. Can't wait. I have, yes, we'll talk about our good friend Meghan McCain. But yeah, so, you know, Italy elected their first female Mussolini in a remarkable victory for both girl power and diversity in politics. And people had some good japes. So the other kind of big thing that caused this perception that, that like,

that like the liberals will literally stand anybody. The other big thing that kind of caused that was some viral quotes from Hillary Clinton talking, talking about the, from Hillary Clinton talking about the role of women in politics and referencing Milani. So some remarks from Hillary Clinton published in Italy last September. I think it was at the Venice Film Festival, actually. So some quotes from an interview that she gave at the Venice Film Festival went viral, mostly because tweets included two small clips

of these quotes when she was talking about both women in politics and Georgia. You're doing great, buddy. So multiple viral tweets circulated, mostly with two short quotes from Clinton getting the majority of attention, saying, quote, the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past

and is certainly a good thing, unquote. And a second quote being, every time a woman is elected to head of state or government, that is a step forward, unquote. Obviously, those takes in and of themselves, not very good. I don't think those are good opinions. Shocking, shocking that we are going to criticize a statement from Hillary Clinton. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This is rare for us. It's, you know, it's it's I'm surprised as well. But these kind of are slightly cherry-picked from a larger section of this interview discussing women in government and how the far right is starting to use tokenized women to uphold patriarchy

and conservatism. So, the first quote is taken from a translation of an interview that Clinton did at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, prior to Melania's apparent victory in the Italian elections on September 25th. Did she do it in Italian? Did she speak Italian? No, but it was only published in Italian. So we're translating from Italian back into English.

Double translation situation. So in a section of this interview talking about the increase of women in governmental leadership roles, a translation from her remarks in the larger section of this interview reads, quote, the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past and is certainly a good thing. But then, as with any leader, woman or man, she must be judged by what she does. I never agreed with Margaret Thatcher, but I admired her determination. Clearly, then the ideas are voted for. I admired her determination.

I know. To do what? Stamp on the neck of the working class? Fuck off. Also, does she really oppose Margaret Thatcher's policies? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I believe that one. No, that lady's dead and the world is better for it. Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power? Yes, of course.

Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland? I don't know about that. There's this thing that you get with like people talking about all of these ghouls where and it's specifically like a centrist thing where it's like, well, certain things are just admirable traits no matter about who has them. And you can admire that trait.

And it's like, no, it's not like there were a lot of men in the SS who were willing to do things that you would call brave, but it doesn't mean you have to consider them admirable, right? You don't have to have respect for them. You don't have to hand it to the Nazis. Exactly. Just fuck certain people. Their contribution to the world is bad.

You can just stop there. Margaret Thatcher being a good example. I have kind of the same thoughts on the inclusion of Toadette inside the new Mario Kart games. It's just really, it's just, you're signifying it, but it's not actually a step forward for the Toad race. So in the next section of the interview, Clinton also acknowledges...

Harrison's come out against woke Mario Kart. In the next section of the interview, Clinton also acknowledged. Garson's come out against woke Mario. In the next section, Clinton also acknowledges the conservative women politicians role in upholding patriarchal government saying, quote, women on the right are protected by patriarchy because they were often the first to support the fundamental pillars of male power and privilege. Today in America,

the right wing leaders are very much against abortion um so she she did like it was part of this section talking about how women who are on the right and running as conservative politicians actually support all of the all the things that keep patriarchy alive and blah blah blah blah blah blah well it's true centrism right it's half of a good take and half of a terrible exactly exactly Exactly, exactly. You see them moving back to back. Exactly. It's the piss and peanut butter again. So, yeah.

So, are snippets of her comments embarrassing? Re-women being a break from the past always being a good thing? Yes, most certainly. Are they taken out of context enough to change the scope of what's being said? I suppose that's subjective. But I just thought that's interesting that there was very select few quotes that were getting a whole bunch of traction and her larger statements are actually slightly more interesting um go go go read the article don't do the alex jones shit of getting

mad at a headline yeah like six seconds of clip like come on people you have to be better than this and i think still you know i see the same thing whenever i'm playing mario sunshine and there's the graffiti um and you can you can get mad at just saying there's graffiti all over deflino paza you can get mad about that but once you actually start learning how bowser jr was treated as a kid it's yeah there's actually more there's more that you actually can understand about what's going on and what leads to that behavior from bowser jr was treated as a kid it's yeah there's actually more there's more that you actually can understand about what's going on and what leads to that behavior from bowser jr very identifiable everybody understands those references garrison good work yeah i just want to say that there is

only one square in italy that matters and that is piazzale oretto and you can you can google it i just i love the the juxtaposition of Garrison struggling over every single word that's in the neighborhood of Italy and then James just perfectly saying some fucking Italian shit. It's great. My Italian is bad.

My Italian comes exclusively from... Your Italian's much better than anyone else hears. Maybe. I swear at other men in spandex. I know a couple of curse words from watching my uncles play pool when I was a kid, but that's about all I've got. I rely on that hand gesture,

which works very well. Hand gestures are 80% of Italian. Yeah, yes, it's true. Okay, so now, having now exhausted every conceivable Italian joke, we could proceed with the script. Oh, hell no. No, no, no. We can actually proceed with an ad break. Do you know what else is

in support of anti-Italian racism? Who won't kill Mussolini and hang him upside down in a square? I mean, probably the current Prime Minister of Italy. Yeah, that's true. Also, probably these advertisers. Okay, and we are back. So, there

has been this kind of perception that the media, by and large, dropped the ball on this one, and we are back. So there was there's been this kind of perception that the media kind of by and large dropped the ball on this one. And this sentiment was pretty widespread among leftists that they kind of there was a lot of emphasis on the the breaking the fascist glass ceiling and less on the fascist part. There was even people like the MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan, who ran a whole segment on his show about kind of mainstream liberal media outlets downplaying the fascistic elements of Melani in headlines in favor of the girl power angle. What's been so depressing is to see so much of the quote unquote liberal media, the mainstream media, the MSM giving a pass to Maloney or playing down her and her party's fascist roots, focusing more on the fact that she's female and less on the fact that she's, you know, fascistic. That has been deeply, deeply depressing to see. There was the Washington Post headline. Georgia Maloney could become Italy's first female prime minister. Here's what to know. Now, here's what you wouldn't know from that

headline. You wouldn't know that she has ties to fascism. But hey, she's female. There was the headline in the Financial Times. We can pull that up as well. Likely victory for Italian right portends risks, but no lurch into extremism. Don't worry, no lurch to extremism, even though they just elected card carrying extremists. But still, hers is a heartwarming tale, isn't it? I kid you not. This was the tweet from Politico Europe. Let's pull up the tweet from Politico Europe. In July 1992, a 15-year-old schoolgirl rang the doorbell at a local branch of the youth front, a far-right movement in Rome, and asked to be let in.

This weekend, that same schoolgirl could become Italy's next prime minister. Wow. Forget the fascism. Forget the fascism. Focus on the inspiration there. Then there was this op-ed in the New York Times. Georgia Maloney is extreme, but she's no tyrant. Well, that's all right then. At least she's not a tyrant. There was this op-ed in The Atlantic, which argued that the most immediate concern about Italy's new government is not any threat to the country's democratic institutions, still less a return to fascism. Did you notice a trend yet? It's not as bad as you think. This isn't really fascism. So we'll talk a bit more about media coverage of Milani's election in a bit and how I think some people are kind of desperate to see the stupid Democrat libs

shill for fascism trope especially with the whole girl boss thing that they actually kind of miss how the framing of milani's fascist ties has been perceived on a broad scale but first i want to get into who she actually is what her views are and what her election means so it leaves a home italy is home to 60 million uh people uh well people. Well. Which part of that sentence do you have a problem with, Robert? Never mind, we should just move on. And it's continental Europe's third largest economy. When it comes to

the actual election, the right-wing coalition that Melani led won around 44% of the vote, with Melani's Brothers of Italy party getting around 26% for the Senate race. So in all, around three out of four voters did not vote for Milani, and one in three didn't even vote at all. No surprise there. But overall, that means like only one in six Italian adults voted for the Brothers of Italy party. And that does make them the biggest party

in the new parliament, but its long-term legitimacy is still kind of in question because she was leading a larger right-wing bloc, but the actual party that she's in and leads got like 26% of the vote. So I think that's an important perspective on like how long she'll actually stay in power italian politics are kind of known for their kind of residing government not lasting very long there's there's usually a pretty high like turnover

rate so we'll see um yeah they it's an interesting composition right of like uh like moderate moderate-ish right-wing people and then like some more hardcore like no it's the people who used to be the league of the north i think are the second largest party so it's not like a homogenous block that she's in charge of so it'd be kind of interesting to see how they hold together yeah and i think milani can be an example of what political scientists call like gender washing uh when when female politicians adopt a non-threatening image to blunt the force of their extremism i think you can see this as well with daisy Mario Kart for the Wii. Extremely brutal character, play style, very brawly, but she acts very nice. Brawly?

Yeah, she just powers through other karts on the track. Okay. And it leads to this slightly warped perception of what Daisy actually does. And Milani's signature look involves flowing outfits in pastel shades kind of like princess peach um and to uninformed foreigners her aesthetic could look like female empowerment she poses as like a defender of women uh even though her party has rolled back women's rights just like in uh the 2006 princess peach game, she did brutal suppression of protests around the Mushroom Kingdom.

So David Broder, author of Mussolini's Grandchildren, Fascism in Contemporary Italy, wrote in Political Europe – funny, this is a very different take from Political Europe in this one – quote, Milani owes much more to the moderate forces in what Italians call the center-right alliance. They've allowed her the opportunity to present herself as part of the mainstream, not just because she's been softening her policies, at least in presentation, but also because the center-right politicians jumping on her bandwagon has given her a veneer of respectability and credibility. You can see this in super fashion most brawl when wario shows up in a biker outfit not wearing the regular italian uniform and they just let him play like mario luigi are wearing their proper outfit and warrior

just like showed up in like like a leather jacket and like ripped shorts that's not okay but it gave him the veneer of respectability because others allowed it to take place. Kind of the same thing here with Melani. At the same time, attempts by the main like center left rivals to make the election about this kind of ghost of fascism spreading again through Melani have proved unsuccessful. Voters by and large did not buy the narrative

kind of that the left was trying to push that Melani was this reincarnation of fascism. through Milani have proved unsuccessful. Voters, by and large, did not buy the narrative that the left was trying to push, that Milani was this reincarnation of fascism. They were not convinced enough to affect the election results in any meaningful way. The same way Nintendo is not convinced that putting Waluigi

in the new Smash Bros. will actually lead to more people buying the game. Italian essayist Roberto Slavino wrote, quote, The far right can succeed in Italy because the left has failed, exactly as in much of the world, to offer credible visions or strategies. The left asks people to vote against the right, but it lacks a political vision or an economic alternative. And I think these are all the kind of factors that actually led milani to win this election should we talk a little bit about the sort of

democratic party like five-star alliance thing that was happening sure if you want to do like a tldr on that that would be great so all right long ago in a galaxy far far away italy had a very very large and powerful left um and then when the Soviet Union fell, so they had the Communist Party. The Communist Party was like one of the most powerful Communist Parties in the world. That wasn't like a sort of like dictatorial ruling party. But when the Soviet, like when the USSR fell, it like voted to dissolve itself basically and became the Democratic Party. And all of their sort of militants, like, much of the militants basically turned into libs, and, you know, I mean,

and the Italian left, like, held together for kind of a long time after that, because they had, you know, there's a very long tradition of sort of an extra-parliamentary left, and, like, specifically an anarchist left in Italy, but, like, the modern, I don't know, it's kind of a shitshow, like,

in terms of actual party politics like there's there was this thing called the five stars movements which was like kind of like basically astroturf by a billionaire it was just like very weird very like early 2010s party that was like doing the whole sort of like we're gonna do direct democracy by like online polls things it has this like really weird mishm like we're going to do direct democracy by like online polls things it has this like really weird mishmash they're like the main social democratic force yeah well sort of but like they're very weird like like i don't know you'll get things from them like okay we want like like they're not a normal social democratic party right they're closer to like

the pirate party but like way weirder like so you'll you'll get people in this party who are like you know who were you are like you know, you'll get people in this party who are like, you know, who, who were, you are like, you know, sort of like old school, like, like leftist militants, because this is where sort of like the energy was going.

Right. But also like, there's like anti-vaxxers in it. It was just, it was just really weird. Iological like sort of mishmash. And then when they sort of got into power, like none of these people had ever been in politics before.

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

yeah italy's like it's worth noting as well i think that like anti-fascism is is sort of baked into the myth of the italian republic right like that's what the republic rests on that's where it comes from that's its creation myth but like much in the same way as people living in united states will be familiar with how these creation myths kind of lose all relevancy apart from like some kind of totemic meaning. Their repetition has some kind of link to that, but they don't really have any value in the contemporary discourse in terms of animating the way people act. I think you could say that that's happened in Italy, right? People in institutions talk about anti-fascism as where they come from, and it's foundational to Italy's democracy, but it's been so subsumed into structures of power that it that institutional

discussion of anti-fascism has lost its relevance from like the street fighting like anti-fascism that created the republic in the first place so that concept is kind of defanged along with like Italian liberals have always walked hand in hand with uh like business interests and the right wing right like from even previous to fascism like there was a quote-unquote liberal monarchy right so italian liberalism isn't necessarily this anti-authoritarian force it was briefly like it got made to be briefly by the organized working class movement but it hasn't been and it's going back to not being. Yeah.

I mean, I think I now think we should may as well get into Milani's actual views and what she actually believes in espouses. What she actually believes in espouses may be slightly different things, but we'll at least start. So Milani's party, the Brothers of Italy party, was formed to, quote, carry forth the spirit and legacy, unquote, of the Italian

social movement, or the MSI. And the MSI is the descendant of Mussolini's National Fascist Party. It has a direct lineage. They even have the flame, right?

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

She's made statements about George Soros, calling him an international speculator. More on that in a sec. Who says that Soros finances global mass immigration that threatens a great replacement of white native-born italians um milani shows affinity for other kind of uh authoritarian strongmen uh like the uh the the marine lipen who's the leader of the National Rally Party in France. That's a strong woman. Yes.

That's not a man. It's part of the section on strong men. Like political strong men. She's previously supported... As Joe Rogan taught me, Garrison, strong times make hard men.

And also what I've learned from Matt Walsh is what is a woman. So, yeah, strong man. But Melania's previously supported Putin, although she's kind of lowered that enthusiasm since the invasion of Ukraine. She does have a pro-Ukraine position on that publicly. But she's expressed kind of affinity for the types of other fascist leaders across Europe that we see in Sweden,

we see in Poland, we see in Hungary. She kind of aligned herself with some of that kind of trend inside Europe. Melani wants to ban same-sex couples from adopting children and possibly dissolve same-sex couples' legal children and possibly dissolve same-sex couples legal parentage over the children that they've already adopted her party has sought to ban a cartoon featuring a bear with two mothers arguing that kids should not be seeing same-sex adoption as natural or normal because it's not um so basic kind of right-wing censorship of materials that they don't like. I don't think children should be allowed to watch cartoons with bears in them.

Okay. Good for you. It's going to reduce their readiness when it becomes time to fight the bears. You're going to think that they're friends, but they're not. Milani also wants to ban gay Italians from traveling elsewhere, uh, for like surrogacy. Melania also wants to ban gay Italians from traveling elsewhere for surrogacy. So like they can't leave the country to get like to have them become parents in return. It's like it's this whole thing.

I'm going to read a quote from Ruth Ben-Gayit, a professor of history and Italian studies at new york university quote since 2017 she has tweeted repeatedly that italian identity is being deliberately erased by globalists such as soros and european union officials who have conspired to unleash quote uncontrollable mass migration um so normal normal stuff there. And more on... So, in a speech, in a few speeches and repeatedly, she refers to financial speculators and has called people like George Soros an international speculator. And, you know,

when she says financial speculators, I don't think she actually means just people who speculate about finances. I think she means something slightly different. Michael Benchloss, who is a kind of history political

person who works for NBC, MSNBC, PBS, had a really good thread on this. And I think it's important. This is a mainstream media guy. This is not coming from Antifa one, six, one on Twitter.

This is like coming from like, like in terms of like mainstream media, actually talking about this, uh, quote, the new Italian prime minister says that quote, we will never be slaves at the mercy of financial speculators. Sounds just like 1930s in Italy and Germany.

Uh, no thanks for the memories. Mussolini enjoyed publicly referring to Jewish people as financial speculators who needed to be controlled. When a fascist leader speaks, whether it be in Europe or America, never brush aside what you are hearing as meaningless rhetoric. Do not fail to learn from the history of the 1930s. History of the 1930s shows us that fascist leaders in the United States have been very eager to link us and pool resources, often in secret, with fascist leaders in Europe. Monitor carefully and beware.

And please never take it at face value when and if fascist leaders in America and Europe tell you that they have no personal or political animus towards Jews or other minority groups in society. Too many examples in history tells us the opposite. Unquote. So, that is

like, you know, regular MSNBC NBC people being like, hey, when she says this thing, she means Jews. Should we also talk about, like, the way parts of like the left on Twitter reacted to this and also the sort of history of like how some people were like,

oh, wow, she's calling out the capitalists. I saw a lot of this is like you guys are maybe the dumb people who've ever lived like she immediately like axed the she's like this is the same thing we see with people like like dugan even right

what she's saying she's not saying that you know international capital is bad because it hurts the poor people or workers she's she's mad about it because it's a because it's a threat to traditional identities it's it's it's it's a threat to the the way that you want the idea of the family. It's threatening all of these things that are about your God, family, country, brotherhood shit. It's not about actual poor people, working class people at all. That's not what it is. It's not a good criticism of capitalist modernity just to propose another form of more authoritarian capitalist modernity just to just to propose another form of more like authoritarian capitalist modernity it's it's it's it's not it's not good um the original fascists in in italy did the same thing

when they denounced like british um plurocrats it's just it's it's not it's not the it's not a good critique of capitalism well and we should point out too that like so Matteo Savini who was like the former like he basically until this election he was like the guy he was in charge of the right wing like he's a guy who got like arrested basically for trying to sink a migrant boat

like so that's actually this guy he sucks but he would do this like more explicitly he would you know like specifically use Marxist terminology to push right-wing stuff. So he had a speech where he talked about the reserve army of labor, which is this concept of Marxism that's about...

Basically, Marx is arguing that capitalism inherently produces this, quote-unquote, reserve army of labor, industrial army of labor, which is an enormous mass of people who are unemployed who've been spit out of the labor process and you know okay and like in in in like marx is like marx is pro these people which is a very important thing he's like these people are part of the proletariat but they've been spit out of like you know like the capital wage relation to spit them out and they they're yeah they're they're there to sort of like regulate

like wages when stuff happens but also they're people who're there to sort of like regulate like wages when stuff happens but also they're people who've just been sort of like disenfranchised etc etc salvini when he talks about the reserve army of labor specifically is like there is a reserve army of labor uh these people are immigrants from north africa and like the like the elites are like shipping these people into italy to like destroy your jobs and it is it is again very very important that you understand this is what he like when he's using the marx term he is using it he is using it marks racism and not like yeah marks anti-capitalism and you you need to be able to tell the difference between these two

things because yeah like especially italian politics like this this is the thing that happens like people people will use like even literally explicitly stuff that is from marx but they will use it to be like we need to like machine gun every like boat of small children trying to flee libya like it's like cherry yeah cherry picking these these bits of marxism and then arranging them into a racist as fuck collage that you use to justify your bigotry it's fashion it did that the first time. It's doing it again. Then another thing that's notable, in case people have not seen it,

there's been lots of video going around of Malani openly praising Mussolini, saying, quote, I believe Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy. And there have been no other politicians like him in the past 50 years. Now, these interviews all come from the mid-90s. She has since said that her opinions on Mussolini have changed.

She has not said what her opinions have changed to. Just saying that they've changed. Yeah, yeah. But this was, these interviews all come from when she was, when she was a young plucky girl getting into the boys Nazi club and leading the youth wing of a fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini's dictatorship. Since her own modern party, the Brothers of Mussolini's dictatorship. Um, since,

since her, her own modern party, the brothers of Italy, which was again, started in 2014, emerged from the fascist national Alliance, which grew out of the Italian social movement, uh,

which was founded by Mussolini regime officials. Um, and she still uses the same logo for her current Mario and Louise, sorry, uh, brothers of Italy party. Um, so yeah

let's have one more ad break and then we'll talk about how mainstream media has been talking about the new girl boss Mussolini and we are back oh I'm so excited I'm so excited so we're actually gonna talk I'm first gonna read some

stuff from the intercept which is not I would not say is actually mainstream media. It's a little bit outside of that, but it sets a good stage for the rest of the stuff that we will be talking about, which actually is dealing with how giving predominant billing to Milani's far-right nationalism, but numerous English-language headlines focused solely on her being Italy's first woman prime minister. It's tempting to say that her position as a woman leader should be considered irrelevant, given her and her party's vile anti-immigrant nationalist, racist, anti-LGBTQ plus policies, but ignoring her womanhood misses some crucial points about her political ideology. Being a woman, a white woman, that is, is not in conflict with Milani's fascism. White supremacy has always relied on active enforcement by white women, especially when it comes to upholding racist, pro-nationalist narratives so yeah i think that that's that's a good stage for kind of how every other headline and article we're going to talk about here uh let's start with uh the guardian the guardian ran a piece saying quote the election of italy's fascist adjacent uh

georgia milani is a public reminder that women can be just as awful as men. That's a good headline. Was this The Guardian US or The Guardian UK? This was The Guardian UK. Interesting. Yeah, fascinating. And this article was actually... That's the turf, Guardian. And this article was actually directly in opposition

to Australia's Sky News headline, Georgia Milani is not a fascist. This Guardian article was just directly in opposition to this Sky News article, which is kind of funny. NPR's Morning Edition went with, quote, a far-right group with neo-fascist roots wins big in Italy's election. A CBS Mornings host said Milani rejects the label of fascism while embracing its symbols.

Just its symbols. Just its symbols. They were specifically talking about the actual iconography that they directly lift. The slogans like Brotherhood, God, Country type things and the logo. And it was actually part of a larger thing around fascism.

We'll actually get a bit more into that on our Tucker Carlson section. Oh, good. The Washington Post headlined, quote, the mainstreaming of the West's far right is complete. And then opened that article with saying, in the land that invented fascism, the far right is back in power. Melani has a lengthy record of extremist rhetoric, has embraced the white supremacist narrative of the great replacement theory,

and has engaged in frequent dog whistling to a radical base. The Atlantic had a good piece titled The Return of Fascism in Italy, The Atlantic had a good piece titled The Return of Fascism in Italy, saying the Brothers of Italy, which Melania has led since 2014, has an underlying and sinister familiarity. The party formed a decade ago to carry on the spirit and legacy of the extreme right in Italy, which dates back to the Italian social movement. The party that formed in place of the National Fascist Party, which was banned after World War II. Now, just weeks before the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome, the October 1922nd event that put Mussolini in power, Italy may have a former Italian social movement activist for its prime minister and a government rooted in fascism. So that's like, rooted in fascism. So that's like, overall,

there was a lot of really good, like most of the extremely referenced or viral kind of articles on this had decent headlines and decent content actually emphasizing the fascist nature. Now it's funny because the Atlantic had this return of fascism in Italy one, but the Atlantic also ran an op-ed piece titled,

Milani's election win is not a vote for fascism which later changed its title to italians didn't exactly vote for fascism um which to its credit still discusses uh milani's links to fascism but it questioned how much power she actually will have to enact said fascism um so there was there was some like both sides in going on on some a lot of these news outlets they'll put one up they'll put one piece out that's actually very good about centering the fascist rhetoric another one being like eh she may be a fascist but it's not like she could do much and she's a woman i i think this is kind of like i think i think this is kind of a post j6 thing like i i i think if this had happened in like 2017 or 2018 i don't

think the media would have been like as willing to just do this i absolutely that is that is undoubtedly true um i think i think they kind of like like liberals in general kind of were shaken out of their complacency when they're sort of like beautiful symbols were under like finally actually came under attack and not just like us. Routers ran a confusing headline titled Nationalist Milani sets to smash Italy's glass ceiling and become premier, which is really just sounds super it sounds super weird nationalist melody smashes glass ceiling it's just like it's like yeah i guess the copy has never been their strongest suit it's it's what that was one of the weirder headlines because it still has nationalist in it but it has the whole glass ceiling bit which is just like why there was another guardian uk piece uh that had the headline uh italy's georgia milani is no mussolini but she may be a trump which is an

interesting article um it it has some a lot of it's actually pretty reasonable uh and it emphasizes her more recent comments trying to align herself more with the modern US Republican Party rather than any kind of form of 1930s style fascism. Quote, hawkish on foreign policies, orthodox on economic policies, nostalgic, nationalist, and inimical to civil liberties. This right-wing politics is illiberal at heart, but it would aim for respectability in what used to be called the establishment, including by not undermining the rule of law in the way that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done, unquote. So there, it kind of, I do like the,

there is some things that are worth we're thinking about in terms of how she has a lot in the past year tried to align herself more with the modern Republican party in the states which still is as we discussed in the show a lot is kind of getting more

fashy I would say so although I will say it is I don't know if you're going to talk about this but it has been very funny she managed to sort of like lose like the like really hard I would say so. Although, I will say, it is, it has, I don't know if you're gonna talk about this, but it has been very funny. She managed to sort of, like, lose, like, the, like, really hardline, like, American right-wingers because she did some sort of, like, pro-NATO-y things, and so now there's, like, like, like, like, Cernovich and a whole bunch of other people like that were posting about how, like, she's, like, an op, and she was part of some, I can't remember what it was.

I don't even think Cernovich even believes that, because I've seen much more people be very enthusiastic about her than people being critical of her who are on, like, the fascist right in the States. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, there was definitely... Especially, like, there was a whole thing

about her being, like, a member of the Aspen Institute that I think was happening for, like, I don't know. Maybe that was just a thing, like, right after she got, like, elected. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I'm kind of on this note of her trying to align more with like modern United States conservatism. In one of their newsletters, Politico included that Melani has appeared at CPAC this past year and the National Prayer Breakfast and did join the Aspen Institute in 2020. But she and Steve Bannon were filmed strategizing together as far back as 2018. And Bannon said of her back then, quote, you put a reasonable face on right-wing populism,

you will get elected. So her and Bannon have been strategizing for years. She's at CPAC. This past year, she gave a speech there that Tucker was very enthusiastic about in his segment about her. That Politico newsletter that included the bits about Bannon and CPAC also had, I think, this line, which sums up some of my thoughts on this. Quote, you've already read in dozens of headlines that Milani will be Italy's most far-right leader since Mussolini, but don't fall for the trap of reducing this far-right firebrand to simple labels like the Italian Donald Trump or Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen. Global takeaway, right-wing populism is getting smarter. It could have died off with Trump's election loss or Boris Johnson's humiliating ejection from Downing Street,

but that isn't happening. So I have a few more things here, which will lead into kind of how the right has been talking about this. There was a CNN article on the victory that headlined the conditions are perfect for a populist resurgence in Europe, which also referenced the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats who are expected to play a major role in the new government after winning the second largest share of seats in the general election last month. The party has been now mainstreamed and initially had its roots in very strict neo-Nazism. Overall, I was less happy with some of the New York Times headlines relating to Melani's election. There was the cheeky headline, Georgia Melani is extreme, but she's no tyrant, which is, again, a weird way to frame a headline. But even that piece still opens with this line saying, quote, it happened here again nearly 100 years since the March on Rome. Italy on Sunday voted in a right-wing coalition headed by a party directly

descended from Mussolini's fascist regime. Mrs. Milani is the first post-fascist leader to win a national election in Italy after World War II, and her party is the heir to the Italian social movement, the reincarnation of the long-dissolved and constitutionally banned fascist party. So, weird headline. Still, it includes stuff in the article, but in the age of social media, and honestly on news media, headlines are way more important, unfortunately. Yeah. And there was an actual New York Times article, not just opinion piece,

had the headline, Melani wins voting in Italy and breakthrough for Europe's hard right. Another Times piece read, Europe looks at Italy's Melani with caution and trepidation. Melani posed to be the country's first far-right leader since Mussolini.

So still, not the worst, not the best from the New York Times, which I mean, no shockers there. Now on to kind of the right. So the right had a really big mix of reactions based on how the left was talking and liberals were talking about this. There was a lot of enthusiasm coming from the right. A lot of people on the right questioning the fascist framing being like, I can't believe Megan. I mean, we can talk about the Megan McCain tweet.

Everyone wants a woman in power until it's a conservative woman in power. This one Breitbart reporter said, quote, calling her Mussolini just because she's Italian is racist, which is one of the best tweets about this. Labyrinth Spicer said, so everyone calls Melania fascist. Can anyone offer proof of that?

Most of the people just replied with videos of her praising Mussolini. Yeah, Twitter will ban you for the Mussolini picture. Lauren Bobbert Had the extremely Extremely bad tweet This month Sweden voted for

A right wing government Now Italy voted for a strong right wing Government The entire world is beginning to understand That the woke left Does nothing but destroy November 8 November 8 is coming And the usa will fix our house and

senate let freedom reign um great great prowls there just shouting at clouds but i i it is fresh it is actually super messed up to be praising sweden's new right-wing government because they are pretty pretty bad the wall street journal had the great headline milani is no fascist but can she revive italy's economy um which is that's that is perfect that's what that really is yeah that's the classic yeah well i'm i'm very excited in about eight months when the Italian economy is like, like, it makes the British economy look fucking great when the Wall Street Journal posts their turnaround, like, can some other random person save Italy?

That's not saying much. Yeah, like somebody further to the right, they'll just continue to be like, well, maybe it's good for the economy. The economy I have running in my Super Mario RPG game is better than the current UK economy. So again, it's not saying much. More on that later.

A Fox News headline in the lead up to the election read, Italy on track to elect first right-wing prime minister since World War II. First female to hold office. I really do. This is one thing I really need to get people on. Like, is fucking sylvia berlusconi a joke to you like the answer should be yes but also like come on man like

like i was in power forever a few days later another fox headline read malani's italian election win renews spotlight on europe's continued migrant woes. Great, great, great headline there. Yeah, that's definitely what we should be focusing on. And so now on to a friend of the pod, Tucker Carlson. So on September 26th, Tucker Carlson ran a 15-minute segment titled, We Live in a Fake Democracy and There Will Be a Revolution Like Italy. So the segment was on the election of Melani and how she's daring to address the issues

that voters really care about but aren't allowed to talk about, like the attacks on the family, immigration, the unpopular climate change policies that are ruining the economy. Aren't allowed to talk about. Berlusconi has literally been saying

whatever the fuck comes into his brain for like 30 years at this point that was that was a big thing of the tucker segment was that voters have all these issues they care about but they're not allowed to talk about it it's actually illegal in some places to talk about this that's an actual quote from what he said um and obviously tucker obfuscated her links to Mussolini-style fascism while still praising the fascist rhetoric that Melania espouses. Here is a clip from the segment.

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

They think the woke stuff is absurd. They want to say what they think. And now it's obvious because she just won. And so even in this country, the people running and benefiting from a deeply corrupt and doomed system are hysterical. Watch the reaction to that. I want to start today by talking about a politician on the right who we should all be worried about, who's on the rise today.

A politician who has brushed off accusations of fascism. What separates us from, let's say, Italy, who elected a fascist. She is from fascist roots. A far-right political party whose roots go back to post-World War II neo-fascist. A party that has its roots in Italian fascism. Its roots in Italian fascism. Define that for us, if you would, Joe Scarborough. Oh, sorry.

You're an idiot. You can't. But the point is, fascist means unacceptable. Whatever this chick is saying, you're not allowed to agree with. They're very worried that that many Italians do agree with it. So she has to be completely unacceptable. Don't read further.

She's a fascist. So yeah, that sucks. That's not great. I don't need to waste any more time talking about Tucker's segment because it's typical Tucker Carlson stuff. Pretty fascistic, pretty awful. Start chanting Nuremberg at the end of every time you watch an episode.

Anyway, so yeah, kind of the reaction was as one might expect. American right-wing operatives have celebrated her rise to power. For example, Keith Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, power for example keith roberts head of the heritage foundation drew on some of the uh familiar kind of language in terms of uh and i'll just i'll just say this this is what he said about her victory on twitter this can be a trend conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as to what it is us versus them everyday people versus globalist elites who've shown they hate us. So, familiar dog whistles and shit, but to kind of close this up, I'm actually going to do

a Guy Debord quote. One of our favorite philosophers on the show. Can we put a little French on it? Can we have Guy Debord? Guy Debord quote? Yeah. So, he wrote the situationist philosopher wrote this in

1968 Italy sums up the social contradictions of the entire world as such it is a laboratory for international counter-revolution hell yeah although hilariously they held out

longer than the French did so well what what what he's trying to say there is that it's a way to try out social change and try out the suppression of like progressive social change yeah um and it's like a model for the rest of europe um like it's like it's it's its own like miniature model that you can try out things and see how they'll react on a, on a grounder European political scale. Um, and kind of ref in, in the, in the vein of that, I'm actually going to do a quote from one of the Washington Post articles about what, one, one, one, one of the better articles about, uh, Milani to kind of, uh, finish up the types of stuff that I wanted to talk about. So, if there's been one dominant story in Western politics over the past decade, it's that the far-right is no longer beyond the pale. Indeed, it has taken over the right-wing mainstream in many countries, including, and arguably most significantly, the United States. In France, the far-right has long been the leading

force of the opposition. In Spain, it's also gained ground. In Sweden, a party originally founded by neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists will now be the second largest faction in parliament. In Hungary and Poland, the far-right is already in power. So just in terms of this overall trend of how people are trying to mainstream far-right things and how they're getting more normalized across Europe, in the United States here, and the types of aesthetics that they're using to gain such ground. paint Milani as a reincarnation of Mussolini. The way that she wrapped her fascism in contemporary US-style conservatism was convincing, and the left did not offer any viable alternatives to fix the problems that the country is facing. So she got 26% of the vote, which was enough to get a majority. So yeah, that's most of the stuff I have on the girl boss Mussolini. That's most of the stuff I have on the girl boss Mussolini.

Any other comments on how the right's been talking about this, how liberals have been talking about this, how media has, or anything at all before we close up? No. I wish her the best of getting strung up in the street. It is very funny to turn pictures of her upside down. People will tell you it's not funny. It is funny. You know, the 2020 is going to be turning into the 1920s

but like tragedy as farce version of it. But this means we can do it funnier. We can do it funnier. We can all go to Italy wearing Mario costumes. That's right. We can do it funnier. It's always possible to be more funny.

That's what we strive for. So yeah, I'm still laughing about the Brothers of Italy thing. That's pretty funny. Anyway, go have fun fighting anthropomorphic lizards who steal the princess and hang her in a cage and go race around the mushroom kingdom on your way to save her with your brother.

That is how I spend most of my free time. Yeah. In the mushroom kingdom. In the mushroom kingdom. Jumping on lizards. Yeah. Yeah. You got endorsed.

Let's let's go. Let's go. Let's go. 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.

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So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Wherever else you get your podcasts, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how everything is falling apart. And today we are talking about how the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is continuing to fall apart.

James, can I say, great job. Nailed it. Thank you, buddy. Out of the park. You absolutely just stunning work introducing this podcast. Yeah. I've bought the level of commitment that British people have bought to governing half of the world for centuries. I have my coffee cup that says, fuck it. And that's where we're at with this one. That's exactly what we wanted from you.

Yeah. I'm incredibly sad about the plight of my home country and continue to be so, but I'm going to explain the reason for my sadness to Garrison and Chris and Robert today. One of the reasons.

Hell yeah. One of the reasons for my sadness. Okay. So what I want to talk about today is Elizabeth Truss, Liz Truss. I want to talk about the British cost of living crisis. And I think more broadly, I want to talk about today is Elizabeth Truss, Liz Truss. I want to talk about the British cost of living crisis. And I think more broadly, I want to talk about like how we consent to be governed by people

who do not give a single fuck about our well-being. Well, now, James, that's an experience that only the British have. So that's correct. Yeah, it's notably not something that much of the colonial periphery experience for centuries which we fought the the the monarchy away now we're beat the monarchy garrison yeah that's a bold we garrison from a Canadian yeah that's right your people trying to stop it all we did was invade you a couple of times don't think you can sneak in there

in the ambiguity of accents. My US passport is on the way. On the way. On the way. Yeah, so was the Queen of England's. Mm-hmm. Yep. Liz Truss is going to come take that away.

King Charles is going to make it not allowed. I do have to get a new Canadian passport with the king on it now, which sucks. That was the most... I guess we all learned a lot because it's been so long since you had a change of monarch but the fact that everyone has to stop using the money and everyone has to get new passports is fucking absurd this is the worst political system i've ever heard of just wait because it's gonna get even more cursed okay chris you live in chicago yeah but here's the thing here's the thing right

in in chicago right everyone everyone like like two in in the core of their being they know that the people who rule them are robbing them everyone in britain actually genuinely like wants to be like this no nobody in chicago wants any of the people in chicago who rule us to be ruling us right everyone in britain is like pro like they they want to have to throw all their money away because some fucking 90 year old in a hat died. It's an incomprehensible level of just, oh. Outstanding. Yeah, it's a marvelous country.

There's nothing wrong with it. It will continue to be marvelous. The lowest 10% of income people in Britain now enjoy a quality of life which is substantially lower than that same income bracket in Slovenia. Yeah, the economic powerhouse of Slovenia. I just want to say we do not deserve a better quality of living

than the people of Slovenia. No, because Slovenia actually fucking rules. Yeah, it does. Great place. Yeah, it's a really nice place. Takes about two hours to cross, but it's a great country. Yeah, right, you can ride your bike across it, but that's great. That's what you want to do.

What's happening here is that maoist liz trust is like very slowly returning all the brits to the countryside she yes she's there you go she's doing a cultural revolution let's talk about maoist liz trust so uh her parents were actually a long way to her left there was a thing a little while ago where her dad refused to campaign for her when she ran for a seat as a conservative, which is based. We have critical support for Liz Truss's dad. Her mom also ran as a Lib Dem, which is not exactly like the liberal Democrats are not exactly like the party that are going to liberate the working class through glorious revolution. But it's still pretty funny to have your mom running for a different party than you and objectively amusing. She was born in Oxford. Her parents, her mother's a teacher.

Her dad is an academic. I think at Leeds, her dad, he's a mathematician. What a nerd. God damn it. Her dad is not the nerd here. Her dad is the best trust, as far as I can tell. It's Liz who we're worried about uh she described her parents as being to the left of labor which is not hard right labor just exists

to kind of these days really to have the pretense of opposition right they've deliberately purged the left from labor uh after 2019 and they exist for kia Starmer to say, I broadly support this terrible neoliberal policy, but, and then say something completely ineffectual. And I'm sure he will be prime minister soon and nothing will change. Nothing that Liz Truss has done and is doing will be walked back because Britain doesn't have an effective left opposition in parliament. It does in society and in the streets. And we'll see there are lots of movements our parliament is is a farce and continues to be a farce and it's lots of dudes who went to the same educational institutions making this funny kind of noise that there are more diverse people in parliament but i'm sure

people have seen videos of the british parliament right and everyone is like um when someone yeah it sounds just like that yeah yeah that was a soundbite. Thanks, Daniel. Americans who don't understand entirely how British educational culture works, the fancy schools that they go to, they're like Hogwarts if you replaced the magic with kids beating each other in the shower. Yeah, with repressed sexuality and violence, bullying, and being picked on

because you're the poorest kid in a school full of rich kids. So actually, it is a lot like Harry Potter. It is a lot like Harry Potter. It's actually quite a bit like Harry Potter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are still TERFs. It's very disappointing. So talking of educational institutions,

Truss went to Oxford, right? She went to Merton. I went to Oxford too. I didn't go to Merton. That's a better off college. I went to a college which is uh renowned for being poor for what that's worth within oxford colleges which are all full of rich people doing rich people stuff she read ppe politics philosophy and economics which i don't think you can really do

as a degree in the u.s right no what is that politics philosophy and economic what that yeah yeah it's called ppe three made up things well what are you saying oh other other degrees on the other hand are real and tangible and yeah of course in the physical space where you can touch them everyone knows that yep it's true uh apart from ppe ppe is so like i i went to Oxford too. I took modern history and politics, which is way cooler and better in every way. But the PPE kids, so that people understand, a vast number of British prime ministers have taken PPE as their undergraduate degree. It's like the kingmaker of degrees.

And you take it because you're an insufferable fucking dork who wants to be prime minister or like work for the British government in some way. Right. Like it is this like king and maker of degrees. Well, who wouldn't want to be prime minister? It looks like such a good job. Yeah.

They last a long time. They have universally great approval ratings. And to be fair, they do just go on to grift a shit ton of money. Like it's not. And they don't have to do it for like a fixed period of time like American presidents do. So that's nice. They can just have a bunch of parties for their friends in the lockdown and then leave,

which is more or less what Boris Johnson did. And I don't expect Liz to be prime minister for long, but it's what she's doing and what she has already sort of done that I think is of interest here. She was also president before we get off her university time at the oxford university liberal democrats um so oh no yeah yeah great stuff um the so like she's gradually drifted to the right which uh you know what are we what we she's gifted to the right you know the lib dems were a little bit more left then but labor was

very neoliberal in the 90s right when she was in um when she was in parliament so sometimes the lib dems provided something of a left opposition uh if you remember like tony blair new labor it was just kind of uh bold neoliberal like shameless neoliberalism right right? Now, Tony Blair is the one who was played by Hugh Grant, right? Is he the one? Is he the inspiration for Love Actually? I was assuming because Tony Blair was the only British politician I could name as a child. Okay.

So he must have been, right? No, because Tony Blair is completely devoid of charisma, and the one thing that that Hugh Grant character has is charisma. So maybe he does kind of, I mean, they're all white men. They are all white men. That is a very white movie. He looks like him, but then that's not exactly a remarkable thing, is it,

in this sort of homogenous British ruling class that we have. So Truss has gone through being Secretary of State for Justice, through being Lord Chancellor, through being Foreign Secretary. God, okay, Lord Chancellor is a pretty cool-sounding title. I've got to give it to him. That's like Star Wars shit. Wait, do they have a Shadow Lord Chancellor, too? Yes.

See, the thing that your people do get right is they pick the terms to make it all sound cool. Whenever one of your parliamentary coalitions collapse, they're like, the government has fallen. It just makes it all sound like it's so much cooler than it is. It does lend an air of Shakespearean epic, where what it is is these 17 people who all went to the same schools and read the same Telegraph newspaper columnists

have disagreed with each other from a minor point and will shortly be reconstituting their alliance in a slightly different way yeah but it sounds like people are fighting each other with machetes in the center of London yeah it has a game of thrones beheading vibe yeah maybe that's where this is heading who knows uh she I think if people had heard of Liz Truss until she became prime Minister it was probably from her really wonderful pork market speech which if you haven't watched the pork market speech is a study in which you should and shouldn't

pause for applause. Robert have you seen this pork market? No. What is a fucking pork market? God it's so funny. In December I'll be in Beijing opening up new pork markets What the fuck is this shit?

She's not a real person It's reminiscent of when you take a fish out of water and it moves its lips but makes no coherent noise It's like an alien trying to pretend to be human Yeah, it's wrong This alien trying to pretend to be human yeah it's it's yeah this is great this is a great leader of our people and it's like the uncanny valley of politics it is a little bit like it is almost lovecraftian and it's in its unsettlingness okay yeah right what's what's what's happening here what we're seeing is there what this is this is the this is the final result

of affirmative action for white people yes we, we're going to get into that. This is why she has this job. She benefited from affirmative action for white people. Other examples of this include Destiny. And yeah, you get the same kind of person every single time. Same, same, right? Like Destiny, I'm the prime minister of the UK. Yeah, so like she becomes prime minister.

And it's worth noting that like the way you become prime minister in the UK is different to the way you become president in the US, right? You are the leader of the majority party in parliament

or of the coalition that controls the majority of the votes in parliament. So she becomes prime minister not through a vote of the people, but through a vote of the members

of the conservative party. You can understand as like people whose dogs have girls names and whose daughters have dogs names uh that is i think that's a trash future bit i don't know where it came from but it explains them perfectly uh so these people got together and they she ran against rishi sunak right and who is eminently more capable of doing the fashy neoliberal shit that they want to do, as are many other people of color within their party.

But above all things, they are racist, right? Above even doing this kind of speed run extraction from the British economy, they are still racist. They're fine with having people of color in positions in the hierarchy, right? That's something that Britain established through hundreds of years of empire. But the idea of having someone in a leadership position is fundamentally anathema to the Conservative Party. So instead, they picked Liz Truss to just flap her lips around

and talk about pork markets, right? So that's how we get Liz Truss as prime minister. So no one per se votes for Liz Truss. No one even per se votes for like the Liz Truss agenda that we're seeing now, right? And I think that's really important. And in her acceptance speech, she talks to Boris Johnson. She said, you're admired from Kiev to Carlyle.

What? Yeah. What? Yeah. What? Yeah. Okay. First of all, bizarre. Absolutely. One thing I know about Boris Johnson is that he looks like Donald Trump.

If Trump didn't have his shit quite so together. Yes. Yeah. He looks like Donald Trump. His mom didn't tell him to comb his hair and tuck his shirt in before he went to school. Yeah. If Donald Trump couldn't have paid to have people, like, check him before he walks out the door, that's how he would look.

Yeah, yes, exactly. If he fell over in a wind tunnel, he would look like Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson, a guy so fucking rich he's never had to comb his hair, stopped being prime minister because of these scandals, right? These sleaze scandals about them having parties during lockdown, more or less that was what destroyed him. Not any of his terrible policies,

his bigoted bullshit. Him writing op-ed saying that the problem with us was not that we were in charge of Africa, but that we're not anymore. Good God. Yeah, yeah. This is a type of guy who exists

and can become prime minister. Like people don't understand. I think the British right is very different from the American right. And I think we're going to get into that. Also a guy who famously just like pulverized a small child on a trip to Japan playing rugby. Okay, you don't need to say the things that he did that are rad. He did finally discover the actual third rail of british politics which is that if if you have fun in a way that someone else can't have fun they will destroy you yes like

yeah the mere british the mere act of a british person seeing another person having any joy whatsoever like just like the the the so a switch flips in their brain and they just turn into like brits but worse this is yeah so this is like there are basically two ways that a british political party can be right one is that they enjoy themselves while they're plundering the institutions that still remain in the united kingdom and the other one is that they are like monastically abstemious while they're doing it right and labor tend to be the abstemious ones and the Tories tend to be the ones who drink the port and have the lockdown parties

and have like literal karaoke events when they're asking people not to go to their grandparents' funerals. And Labour tend to be the ones who wring their hands and go, oh no. And then fundamentally do the same shit, right?

That is a difference. Chris is entirely correct. That is the thing that irritates British people most. And maybe we'll just talk about this right now. It's increasingly like it's not the material conditions that bring down British governments because material conditions are getting worse and have been getting worse since we started this austerity stuff in 2010. It's these stupid scandals, these personal scand personal scandals, which, yes, normally involve them having too much fun

when they're supposed to be pretending to be serious while they steal all the things that still remain in Britain. I want to talk about a little later. So, yes, she said Boris Johnson was a buyer from Kiev to Carlisle. He's not. That's why he's not prime minister anymore. Everyone fucking hates him. And also, I don't think she's been to carlisle because i got family

who live there and not everyone loves boris johnson there um and i'm sure not in keeve either uh but so the uk has been having this cost of living crisis since the economy reopened in 2021 right since the end of lockdown and what this cost of living crisis is what a cost of living crisis is generally is that when the goods that you need to buy to exist are rising more quickly than the wages you get paid for working. Now, some of these causes are global, right? We have this inflation issue in the US too, but the UK has compounded this by leaving the European Union, that creating massive labor shortages and these repeated bumps in the energy price cap, right? Which is the limit that an average family should pay for their energy consumption.

It's not a hard stop. It's not a limit on how much you definitely will pay, but it's a limit on how much the average family should pay, right? So trust comes to power in the context of skyrocketing energy rates for British consumers. Gas is used for heating most homes in the UK, and it's increased 926% in price since before the coronavirus times.

Despite the fact that most British people don't pay spot prices for gas, they don't pay the going market rate for gas, there's a serious crisis in affordability. Now, it was looking like the gas bills were going to go up into the average gas bill for the average British person was going to go up more than it now is because trust has announced some capping of spot rates. We're going to get into why that isn't as great as it sounds. The big issue here is that Britain doesn't have a nationalized provider, right? It's privatized, it's energy grid, it's privatized, it's energy generation. And it ends up with this bizarre situation where one of the people you can buy energy off, and often you don't

have a choice, right? Depending on where you are, is the French National Energy Company. That makes sense. Sure. It makes perfect sense, right? It's great. And one of the notable consequences of this is that gas prices have gone up, France caps the prices that consumers can pay,

Britain allows them to charge a lot more. So British people, and this is, as a rule, one thing that British people dislike. So you're telling me that france finally won that long war i'm saying that we have been owned by the french and if that doesn't bring down the conservative government i don't know what will because there's one thing british people dislike it's french people and and so yeah britain is now subsidizing energy rates for french consumers

which is great having just left the european union because we are uh incredibly xenophobic as a nation as it turns out and and people may have seen this uh uk tv show called this morning where they did a wheel of fortune type thing where you could win a thousand pound oh god that was brutal or they will pay your energy Yeah, but for like three or four months, right? Four months. Four months of energy bills. The bloke they're doing it in is just like, it's this sigh of relief when he gets energy bills, right? And he's like, oh, massive.

Like, I'm going to have my energy bills paid for four months. It's such a relief. And this guy is one of four million people in the UK who uses what's called a prepayment meter, which I'm reliably informed that Americans don't have. So do you all, are you familiar with the concept of prepayment meters?

No. Okay. So maybe people are familiar with like pay-as-you-go phones, right? Where you go to the shop and you buy the credit. Yeah, if you're like selling drugs or you're you're you're engaged in anti-government extremism yeah you want you want a phone like that sure yep yeah yeah uh or if you're doing journalism you might want one for legitimate journalism reasons it's the same as one of the others yeah yeah uh yes true yeah here at cool

zone media uh you know you know you know who won't use a prepaid cell phone to sell you drugs? Because they're not... Wait. Yeah, they would. You think so? I think they just got enough money. They would just use a regular phone bill and have a lawyer just do it. No, I think they're deep into Boost Mobile.

It's the only thing keeping John Law off their fucking back. You know who has to go to Walmart to buy more credit to their phone so they can sell you some weed? It's the advertisers who support this show. Okay, we're back. And we are talking about prepaid energy meters, a scintillating topic. So the prepaid energy meter, you have to go out, you have to pay for your energy. So if your rates go, the reason for these overwhelmingly is that

there's a agreement by which most energy suppliers won't just cut you off in the uk like if you have old people in your house you have children in your house like they have to do this the appearance of caring is this thing that we're going to see is really important in lots of these policies right so they can't cut you off but if they have if you have a meter and you can't prepay for the electricity then you're de facto cut off right and the best statistics i could find about this was in 2017 where roughly 140 000 households 16 of the of those that had prepayment meters self-disconnected self-disconnected the euphemism for they couldn't pay right for gas or electricity in 2017 they couldn't afford to add credit to their meter right for they couldn't pay, right? For gas or electricity in 2017.

They couldn't afford to add credit to their meter, right? And they didn't have the credit, so they couldn't get the electricity. So they end up disconnecting. And if you add to this, British houses are made out of cheese. Like our houses are very poorly insulated for the most part, right?

They're often single brick. So it's expensive to heat them and they get cold in the winter and they get hot in the summer we're not we don't have like houses that are designed to deal with the extremes in temperature which we are now experiencing because we have ruined the climate so people are spending more and more using more and more electricity and gas to heat their homes it's costing more and more and increasingly they can't afford to pay it, right? And this will lead to people dying. So if we look at what the average pensioner in the UK, right? I looked up some statistics

for the Office of National Statistics here. The average pensioner in the UK has, on a fixed income, it's making £17,000 a year. Nice. I guess they're guessing. guess 17 000 pounds of what though oh they're gold robert gold you take your pound to the bank of england and they give you gold in return okay not anymore uh that actually interestingly was uh if we go on a side note for a minute one of the ways britain achieved greater democratization when the middle class were excluded but landowners were included was that the middle class had cash money and the landowners had wealth in the form of property, right? So the middle class threatened to tank the entire Bank of England by taking all their

pound notes and asking to have them converted to the gold that they were supposedly pegged to. And there was not enough gold to actually, to do that for the entire money supply so they could attain the Bank of England. So yeah, bit of 1868 Reform Act history. They're no longer, they're decoupled now from that. So you can't do that, sadly.

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

The cap had already been risen in April, right? It's not a price cap, right? This doesn't mean that you as a family are guaranteed that you will not pay more than this £2,500 number. What it is, it's a unit cost limit. So not all families are typical, not all homes are typical, but the cost is, for those who are interested, 10 pence per kilowatt hour for gas, 34 pence per kilowatt hour for electricity so what this means is that like we've capped a little bit of the cost uh and in response like and this is pretty uh this is pretty typical for what the conservatives do right they'll do this thing where they give the appearance of caring and then at the

same time they bundle it in with a bunch of incredibly like uh just like the the best way to understand these people is that they view the free market as a religion right so uh and they believe that like the only way out of anything is to cut taxes whether they actually believe that because they think it will genuinely make the situation better or they're just trying to get as much as they can for them and theirs i think it probably i'm i'm leaning towards uh the second one right but uh so she bundles this with uh the uk is gonna gonna lift its ban on fracking right um the uk banned fracking in 2019 after a series of earth tremors near blackpool which like there's a lot of cursed things about britain but until recently, we hadn't added earthquakes to that list. So thank you, Liz. It's very funny.

Warwick Business School published a study in 2020 pointing out, it is widely recognized that the open and liberal nature of the UK's gas market means that the market price, the national balancing point, is unlikely to be influenced

by shale gas development. So shale gas is fracking, right, in the UK. So the UK is going to start fr by shale gas development so shale gas is fracking right in the uk so the uk is going to start fracking which is great um she also proposed removing the top tier of income tax which is reducing the amount of tax paid by people who earn more than 150 000 pounds a year right now they pay 45 tax above that uh this announcement caused a pound to fall to a historic low against the dollar uh and for trust to find herself in open beef with the uh the woke scolds at the imf so uh the imf said new economic measures laid out by the uk government will likely increase inequality and they added that the imf does not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at

this juncture and so she also during this like she uh she promised that she was going to cancel a planned rise on corporate tax and scrap a proposed cap on bankers bonuses this has been one of her big uh policy things along with simon clark who who declared a new age of austerity uh at the time they announced this right but there's this constant like everything britain does there's only one way in which conservative governments to move can move and that is taxing the other people who went to the same schools and universities as them less um so i kind of want to take a step back here and talk about the ideology that underpins a lot of what Truss is doing and and it's that she and Chancellor Dix-Jekyll-Quarting and Priti Patel

and Dominic Raab uh who are all in her cabinet I think are part of this free enterprise group within the conservative party and much like you have caucuses in the american senate in britain we have these these groups uh and they wrote this book called britannia unchained which i don't know if people are probably not familiar with right i've heard of it but i know very little about it yeah it's just like a um it's a series of short essays just like doing a milton fried, like an unreconstructed free market fundamentalism. It's very different to what the, because the American right likes to talk about markets and libertarianism and stuff, right?

But like in general, their entire politics is just kind of owning the libs, right? Like these sociocultural grievances. And then when they get in power, their spending is largely just about, one might argue, staying in power. Whereas the conservatives in Britain are genuinely committed to slashing government, including slashing services, including slashing any kind of social safety net. It does have these amusing consequences sometimes, like Britain continually cuts the number of police it has, which is great.

Yeah, it's genuinely really funny yeah it's it's very funny it's very funny that like our most right-wing party i guess not our most right-wing party if you've got some proper nutters but uh we've defunded the police just by not wanting to spend money on them yeah it is also okay and by by funny i mean incredibly depressing that like like corbin was running on adding more cops, which is the most cursed. The British left always find a way to destroy themselves. They've been doing this for 200 years. It's really impressive stuff.

Yeah, it's incredibly depressing to watch the British left just tear itself to pieces. Not that the American left doesn't tear itself to pieces, right? It seems to be a thing on the left. But yeah, when the British left had a serious run and making a serious difference in 2019, instead we decided to just absolutely tear each other to shreds. And here we are, right? Here we are with the number of children in poverty going up by 600,000 since 2012.

With the number of from 2019 to 2012, the number of children who rely on food banks for their food security has tripled. By the end of this year, the National Health Service, National Health Care, which is our nationalized, socialized medicine system, right? The budget will have been cut by 24% compared to 2016. That's despite the fact that we just went through a pandemic. The poorer socioeconomic groups in the UK are experiencing a fall in life expectancy. For the first, like we have life expectancy that's pretty much continually trucked up

since the industrial revolution but we're now finally slashing that down again i wonder i wonder why yeah there's no way of explaining it there's it's just happening uh the only solution is a free market a free uh market a freer market yeah to pump more things into the air yes yep meanwhile here i'm gonna take a puff from my inhaler because my lungs are dying yeah well that's because pollen is outrageous right now you're not getting fracked hard enough in in the pacific yeah more fracking will fix my pollution and air quality the fact that people are uh literally dying yeah younger than their parents did and the tories don't they have these like what's very important to them is the performance of patrician care

right like we saw this with uh theresa may's burning injustices which of course remain burning injustices because you don't do anything about them uh boris johnson's leveling up agenda of people familiar with his like god i i can't believe you have a minister you have a shadow minister of leveling up yes we do i just like at what point do you just go none of this is real and like if they start sending cops you just keep beating them up until everyone else is forced to concede that they're like no there is not in fact a shadow a shadow minister of leveling up yeah i don't know that is the uh the big the big question that i want to ask is at what point do we realize that there is not a shadow minister of leveling up and that we don't have to open new pork markets and that maybe that isn't the solution to us

dying younger than our parents and that we don't have to do what these people say when they are just very blatantly, like trust is very obviously doing an extractive speed run on the British economy, right? I tell you what, you know who else will do an extractive speed run on the British economy? Is it the products and services that's going to show? It is, sadly. Yeah. All right. We're talking about extractive speed run on the British economy. Is it the products and services that's going to show? It is, sadly. Yeah. All right. We're talking about extractive speed runs.

We're back. So with Johnson and even with Theresa May, right, who was the prime minister before him, there was this important performance of caring, right? Being like, oh, we're going to make life better for the poorer socioeconomic groups the poorer people in the uk i think what's changed is that like the nature of of consent from the governed is this thing that maybe we need to elucidate more right like in britain

there was this kind of consensus that like the governing party would pretend to care and would pretend to do things and sometimes they would let you have nice things right little treats and trinkets and that in return you would largely not kick them out right like either physically or electorally although it's very hard to kick them out electorally because of britain's ass backwards electoral system which is another relic of a previous era now they don't seem to be bothering to pretend to care right like when you're looking at a system in which like when trust came to power old people were going to die when we we were looking at a system in which people are dying younger than their parents and old people were going to die in the cold this winter like i've got friends i remember this was years ago uh but it was

when utility prices maybe started going up when my grandfather passed my grandmother lived on her own and her being really afraid to heat the house because of how much it cost right and i've got friends who i've spoken to this time who are like well we're preparing to have our grand come and live with us so that we can we can heat the house or like if we just move into the downstairs parts of the house then we can keep those warm right or like you know we're going to go back to having fires and we'll just go warm our house with a wood fire right lots of houses in uk still have fireplaces that are functional yeah my my house growing up was heat with a wood fire it's great it's good for the lungs it's gives them a good coating that they can then use in the rest of your life to repel other pollutants coal fires are great inside the home highly encouraged so like people were really making

these like i don't know it's it's uh it's the sort of stuff you you associate maybe with like like the hard times in the soviet union right like like sort of being like oh we're gonna go to the food bank and we'll line up and get food and then we'll all huddle in one room to stay warm. But these are the plans that people were making like this summer looking to this winter. And Liz Trust responded to that with like, okay, well, the way to fix this is lower taxes for high earners and removing the cap on bankers bonuses

so that the financial services industry will relocate to the UK, which it won't because the UK has left the European Union, right? And it's now kind of a pariah in that sense. So I don't really understand how the British government obtains consent from the governed anymore.

And I'm partially interested to see how this goes and partially obviously like appalled to see the costs of this like they're not even trying to care they're not even pretending anymore they're just going to take what they can and then presumably bounce to some tax island where they can uh they can survive and thrive while the rest of us freeze our asses off over the winter. So what I want to, I guess, finish up with is this idea that, like, so in America, you have fixed terms of elections, right? So we're having midterms next month,

and then we'll have the presidential. In Britain, we don't, right? In Britain, the government has to lose a vote of no confidence, which is when the majority of MPs vote they no longer have confidence in the government has to lose a vote of no confidence, which is when the majority of MPs vote they no longer have confidence in the government. Or the prime minister has to, well, in theory, the monarch has to call an election, right? So I guess King Charles could just, because they didn't let King Charles

go to the climate summit recently, which is another amazing thing that Liz Truss has managed to do within like a month of being in office. She's already like openly in beef with the monarchy which uh is the one thing that conservative people might like more than uh white people who tax rich people less she wouldn't let king charles go to a a climate summit uh because conservatives are more or less climate change deniers or at least sort of climate change don't

give a fuck because we need to extract more money and so like at some point like i don't know what the withdrawal of consent looks like anymore right it's the people who uh british politicians see themselves like see themselves as governing for like their constituents are seemingly like columnists in the telegraph and people who are the ceos of these big companies in london which have grown and grown and grown and grown based on this endless supply of free money that is now drying up right so instead of dealing with the root cause of that they're going to try and look at other ways for those people to continue to to grow and extract finance and i don't know what that means for the rest of british people like i don't know what the withdrawal of consent

from a system which so obviously doesn't care about the material conditions you live in looks like. But if we want to talk about collapse, and collapse is a thing that gradually happens rather than a thing that kind of, we click our fingers and it's there. I think some of this is what it looks like. Like people refusing to pay their power bills

is becoming a thing in the UK. I should mention that energy companies are recording record profits throughout this time period. Maybe it looks like protests in the street. Britain has had these big tuition fees protests. We had the quote-unquote London riots, which were incredibly harshly put down and people went to jail for a long time for like stealing a bottle of water from a Tesco. So like, I think it's worth watching for people who are not in the UK. Like, what does it look like when you're governing elite stop pretending to care about you? And what is the withdrawal of legitimacy or the withdrawal of consent look like? And like I say, I don't know, it's looked different every time it's happened, it looked different in the soviet union to uh the way it looked in like i'm trying to think of other like

regime collapses in south america um but like we say that a we say that a regime is consolidated when the rules of the game are more important than the outcome of the game and i think we're getting to a point in britain where maybe the outcome of the game. And I think we're getting to a point in Britain where maybe the outcome of the game is going to be more important than the rules of the game. So that might mean some serious change. It might not. It might just mean, you know, we put a new dude on our coins and everyone puts bunting up industry and we do nothing fundamentally different and just acquiesce in living conditions getting worse and worse and worse and more and more people are dying because they're poor. I don't know. Yeah, Garrison's just nodding.

I think that last one's going to be the one that happens. Yeah, maybe. We'll do it at Olympics and we'll spend the next, what was London, 2012, the next decade just reminiscing over how great that was. And then we'll just not notice that our grandparents are dying unnecessarily because

Liz Truss' friends have to make more money. I have an enormous amount of faith in the British people to just do nothing. They have an unbelievable ability to just be like, eh, things are getting worse. I don't know, who cares? We're still British. Like, they can't even really

effectively do imperialism anymore but it's like everyone's so wedded to the like imperialism machine that everyone that like you know everyone every everyone will constantly vote against their class interest everyone will constantly act against their class interest everyone will constantly just sort of like literally let hundreds of thousands of people die around them yeah yeah because flags and sports i think corbin has an energized a lot of people into realizing their class interest perhaps more than they were before because there was briefly a parliamentary alternative but right now there isn't like kia starmer is not jeremy corbin but then you know but it's also the british right like it's like well okay so they sort of reconsolidated the left it did nothing got owned and then imploded and now it's being split between like just complete pure like people arguing that

starmer is doing socialism like like pure labor party hacks and then like a bunch of people just doing nothing because it's the uk and it fundamentally never gets any better yeah yeah there is like i take a little bit of hope from like have you seen the uh the um where people are to be deported from the uk and then there are like mass mobilizations to prevent that happening yeah that gives me some hope right that's a lot of people willing to give up their Saturday or their Sunday to shout at immigration officers. And that's something that didn't happen, by and large, in the US, right?

Even with the gross abuses of the immigration system under Donald Trump. People didn't stop that happening. So some of that stuff- It did happen in places. There were a lot of flights that got blocked and stuff. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it happened in a different way.

Some people here did, like in 2020, I think there was an icing in Barrio Logan and it got run out of town. So I shouldn't say that. But that gives me hope. It gives me hope that maybe some people will realize that the solution is not to vote harder, right? And the solution is to organize and to do things in an extra-parliamentary fashion

and not trust the people who are participating in your exploitation to live you from your exploitation, which has maybe been our mistake for too long. Yeah. Everyone in England needs to take a page from the Harry Potter books and arm the children to murder government officials. If I'm remembering how those books ended properly. Form a guerrilla army of you and your friends and attempt to overthrow the government. Is that what happens in Harry Potter?

Probably. Yeah, let's say yes. That's the plot of The Order of the Phoenix. Okay, yeah, I remember it now when they do a car bomb. That's it. That's our message for you today. Read Harry Potter, do a car bomb. There we go.

There we go. That's our legally binding message for you today. Non-actionable threat. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the 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.

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