Rev Left Radio - The American Nightmare: 20th Century U.S. History, Red Scares, & Fred Hampton

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Breht and Arjun from Deep into History join forces to have a wide-ranging discussion on 20th century American history, with a focus on the underlying racial and class dynamics of early to mid-century America that led to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and then the Black Panther Party - specifically their preemminent organizer and leading revolutionary from Chicago Illinois, Chairman Fred Hampton. The conversation naturally takes many interesting and worthwhile detours along the way!    Check out Deep into History's episode on Fred Hampton: Fred Said... Check out Rev Left's episode on The Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rev Left Radio is 100% listener-funded! Please support the show and get access to our entire patreon backlog as well as hours and hours of bonus patreon exclusive content every single month: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to a collaboration between Rev Left Radio and deep into history. This is a very exciting episode that's long overdue. I've long been a fan of Deep Into History, both of the sort of social media platform voice as well as the actual history of the podcast itself. So it's very cool to finally, you know, hook up with you and do a collaboration with you. And we're going to focus on somebody who is a giant in American history and communist history and black liberation history, somebody that has inspired you and I very deeply, which is Fred Hampton. So we're going to discuss the historical context that gave rise to the Black Panthers and eventually Fred Hampton. We're going to talk about Fred Hampton.

And then we're going to see where the conversation goes. but for people who might not be fully aware of you and your project, can you sort of introduce yourself and introduce deep into history and give people a little idea about what it is you do? Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on, Brett. I've been a huge fan for a very, very long time, so it's an absolute honor to be here. Thank you.

I host the podcast Deep in a History. I create historically accurate narratives and synthesized them into class. that are akin to fairy tales but are all fact so that history becomes accessible so that once you hear it it's and you can reference it so that it sticks with you and I've found so often that history is used against us and this history has been used to divide us and that's just because we can't recall it because it's very hard to recall a name or a date sometimes but you can always recall emotion. So I try to bring out the historical resonance of events ranging back from ancient times to our modern era. And you do it incredibly well. And yeah, like the element of storytelling and how that is in art and a science in its own right is something I think that really manifests with your work in particular, how good you are at it. And I think we're both focused

on, and I've always thought of Rev. Left this way as well as like there's the intellectual knowledge that we need to know, but this is not dry intellectual, merely intellectual stuff. The stuff we're talking about, it comes from the heart as well. And so if we can infuse our history with the emotive force of emotions, of pain, of compassion, of love, of rage, you know, just knowing human beings and how psychology works, those emotional iterations, when they're not cynical, when they are authentic, can help flesh out the intellectual stuff and make you remember it. more. You know, our memories and what we actually internalize are deeply connected to our emotional states and the most emotionally intense things you've ever experienced are often the things you remember the most about. And so, you know, I think it's really important and something that you and I both try to do and you do very well, which is to infuse the history with the emotional

stakes that this history is about. This is not just dry, dead stuff. We're going over in a monotone voice this is our history this is our tradition this is humanity fighting and it should be imbued with the emotions that um that that that deserves and another thing i wanted to say up front too is um you are a friend of of michael brooks and michael brooks uh we're coming up i believe as you told me before we started recording on the three year anniversary of his death um and so i think both of us talked about dedicating this episode uh to michael brooks who was a really principled a voice the left and in the YouTube space in particular. We're just a good guy.

And we don't want to forget one of our own. So we salute Michael Brooks and we keep him in our memory. Absolutely. Absolutely. Rest in power, brother. Totally. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get into the topic at hand. So again, I think this first half of this conversation, as it is on your wonderful episode of Deep Into History entitled Fred said, the first half is really this historical

contextualizing, the several decades leading up to the civil rights movement, leading up to the Black Panther Party, and the rise of figures like Fred Hampton and many others. So let's go ahead and start wherever you want to start. You can usher us into this historical context part of the conversation. Okay, awesome. Well, I just, yeah, I wanted to, I like the, I like to give context so that we can understand not only, you know, on any given subject, not only what someone did, but why. they did what they did. And the only way, especially the closer we are to our time, the historical resonance is much stronger. So, Brett, if it's okay with you, I'll kind of tie things together

that kind of defined Fred's life. Yeah. Okay, so where my episode begins and where my research really began and was the 1917 Russian Revolution, which obviously the communist revolution that overthrew the Tsarist government sparked quite a reaction in the bastion of capitalism in America because the idea that Russian peasants and workers could overthrow

a monarchy gave the 1% the capitalist, the ruling class in America great fear that their peasants and workers could attain the same kind of solidarity and revolt against a very unfair system and you know there was quite a panic which led to the the passing of something called

the Sedition Act in 1918 which basically gave the government carte blanche to crack down on anything in essence seen as subversive but particularly there was one clause in it where that said that any action that interrupted the production of war material could immediately be cracked down upon. And in the context of that era, most at that time, there were many different ideas going around about how to organize the government, and I'm talking not just internationally, but in America. There were, you know, communist movements, socialist movements that were gaining credence, but most of them that were, you know, left of center, were all centered around. union organizing.

And the capitalists saw the union organization as basically a stepping stone to communism. So this was played up in the media to a big

to a huge level. And the attorney general at the time, Palmer launched a series of raids which basically is called the first red scare the idea that

if any kind of socialist communist idea or any really leftist organizing principle were allowed to exist then America would become communist a ridiculous assumption of course history has proved that

but at the time in the context of that kind of fever dream driven by fear the politics of fear and the media narratives driven by fear it really took hold and for in the context of the civil rights movement

this resulted in a series of raids the Palmer raids that cracked down brutally on union organizing I'm like literal torture of people and of course the very very sad

and tragic red summer of 1919. So during World War 1, tens of thousands of African Americans served in the U.S. Army fighting in Europe and racist through politicians and

their collaborators in the media created this narrative that African American soldiers who had returned from Europe were in essence communist agents. Like they had been influenced by communist agents. And with the prevailing racism of the time, those two kind of married each other, resulting in horrific race riots.

And we're not talking just like in the South, we're talking about cities across America, north, south, east, west, everywhere. But the thing is, because these brave men who had gone and fought in the First World War, these veterans, they knew how to fight, and they knew how to organize because of their army experience. So for the first time, African Americans, it was disparate, but in city centers across America, they organized their communities and fought back. And that kind of pride and shedding of some fear allowed the, form the roots of the civil rights movements as we know it. Yeah, so let me jump in there because I think that's incredibly important. One is the pathological fear that is inculcated in a white supremacist apartheid state where, and this happened in Haiti, this happened all throughout the colonial world. It certainly happened in the U.S. where, you know, there would be these outward articulations of why slavery is justified, why white people are superior, race science, etc. But deep down, this repression of the shame and the understanding.

that this is all bullshit on some level, whether that's conscious or not, and the pathological fear and paranoia and suspicion that emerges from it has always been a hallmark of these racialized apartheid states. And when you have a bunch of, you know, black soldiers, well, we need them now to go fight these wars, right, for us. They're people we can send over and die for, you know, U.S. interests. But they're also going to different places, going throughout Europe where in some places, at some periods of time, they're much more racially accepting. So you get a little taste of what life could be outside, especially if you're, you know, somebody who's lived their entire life, let's say, in poverty in the deep south, going to Europe.

It's certainly not perfect. There's hardcore racism to this day in Europe, of course. But in some instances, it was a little different. I mean, James Baldwin, decades later, would find that fleeing the U.S. to Paris was where he could truly be. himself and he could get out from underneath the yoke of all of the stuff that came with not only being a black person in the u.s but a gay person a gay black person that spoke out against injustice right this is the DAC is stacked against somebody like james baldwin here in the u.s and he found of paris france to be a sort of a getaway so that's just interesting so they're all coming back

from these wars they have military training organizational training discipline etc and the rampant paranoia and fear of the white majority starts galloping. And another important thing is how, and this will probably be something we discussed throughout this episode, how anti-communism is tied deeply to anti-blackness, how anti-communism is tied deeply to anti-working class politics, the targeting of unions, for example. This is the time in the 19th teens where the IWW was rising to prominence in part through their rejection of this idea that unions should only be white, right? They started breaking down

the color line, accepting black workers into their unions, which was anathema at the time. They were ran by people who were explicitly and vocally communist and socialists. And then just outside of all of that, they're unions, right? They're fighting for working class politics against the politics of the bosses. And so once the revolution in Russia happened, you have not only this pathological fear of, you know, settler, colonial, white supremacist, apartheid state, white reaction, but now you have this fear of the specter of communism solidifying into a concrete form in the form of the Bolsheviks in Russia. And we saw with the Russian revolution how these unions and eventually these Soviets were

crucial to the victory. So the ruling class, especially since the late 1800s, when there was a shift away from like the brutal robber baron railroad times to, you know, more and more union activity. They knew they had to put the kibosh on this stuff. And after the Russian Revolution, the need to put the kibosh on it just ratcheted up to 10. And all of the pathologies of white reactionaries in the U.S. came out in full force. And that's just one example of that.

Yeah, absolutely. It was, and it's important to note that during that red summer, it wasn't just like the worst reactionary elements. like ordinary the fear the fever pitch the hysteria had grown and was was fostered to grow to a point where it was ordinary you know someone you probably wouldn't even consider like racist in the context of the day ordinary white people attacking black people because of that fear like it's almost as if you know we'll get to this later but it's almost as if that um uh the idea of our modern our modern concept of race only exists because capitalism exists, right? Because it was only, it only exists to justify the slave trade and the, you know, exploitation and murder of subject colonies around the world. Yeah, really quick, just to add to that point, yeah, the idea, the modern racism that we experienced today of white, you know, supremacy of anti-blackness, this is not merely just

ideological foam on the on the surface of the ocean of history this is forged through the material processes of first colonialism which is of course the primitive accumulation phase of the development of capitalism so after colonialism then comes the slave trade and then get that those two things colonialism right the stealing of land the extracting of resources from the global south and the free labor that came with the chattel slave trade was the impetus and the catalyst that allowed capitalism to come onto the scene as a world historical force. So, yeah, just the idea that racism, as we think of it today, was forged through this material process of colonialism, which was the primitive accumulation stage of capitalism, shows that this is

inexorable from the entire process of capitalism. And that is why it still lives on with us today. Absolutely. Yeah, it's divide and rule tactics, like very similar to like, you know, a more primitive form, but like Caesar used in Gaul or Philip of Macedon used to subjugate the Greek city states. You keep people, you know, divided amongst, based on very, very superficial reasons when they should be united. Now, when you look at it on a global scale in the context of the colonial era and the rise of capitalism, what is the easiest thing you can point to for differences? between people and its skin color. Yeah, exactly. But there is an upside

because what happened was after that horrible red summer of 1919 and in 1920, in 1920, the public hysteria died because it was large, the red scare was seen as largely something, you know, that was quite literally, you know, propped up by the media

because people saw that not just what happened to the black community, but what happened to union organizers and socialists and communists. And you know what? Honestly, like what we would call like a progressive today. Yeah, yeah. Just for speaking out against what the government were doing, they faced such horrific consequences that something good happened. The ACLU formed and got the repeal of the Sedition Act in 1921.

And more insidiously, J. Edgar Hoover proved himself to be the lethal right hand of concentrated capital and would soon be rewarded with the creation of the FBI. And so just to move it along, we enter the era, obviously, the stock crash leading in 1929, leading to the Great Depression. and FDR, we entered the New Deal era. There's a lot to be said. I mean, on your show, my show, a lot of shows have talked about the details of the New Deal, and it's wonderful to learn all that stuff. But what I've found that is often missing

is the concept that the new deal itself was a social contract to save capitalism, from itself. Yes. Because they needed to curb the rise of popularity of socialism and communism that was rising abroad and again at home after that first purge during the first red scare. And societal solidarity had congregated around FDR and his mass coalition to the point where I believe in one election, they had 83.

percent or 93 percent of the vote. I have it written somewhere. They had, let's just say, the vast majority of everyone voting in the United States voted for the Democratic Party and this is where

the whole idea of the Republican Party as the party of big business came about because they were such a small minority, quite literally. The only people who supported them were the

elite because what the new deal did was basically give everyone a slice of the proverbial pie and proved, you know, that the lie that we're constantly told that, you know, wealth isn't a zero-sum game. Well, it absolutely is. If you don't allow capital to concentrate at the top, everyone else gets some of it. Yes. Really quickly just to jump in. This is also the time when there was a business-led, attempted coup in the planning stages against FDR. The far right called him a communist, but he saw himself as, you know, a representative of like the liberal, progressive, but still fully capitalist class as a defender of capitalism against communism. And now communism also has this double-edged approach to the New Deal because domestically, you had these radical unions,

these socialists, these anarchists, these communists, who were, you know, rallying, giving voice to the depravity of the time leading up to and then through the Great Depression. You know, this bottom-up organizing work is also putting pressure on the government to respond, but also externally, with the rise of the Russian Revolution, there's a real concrete fear out there that this whole system could be toppled and taken over by communists. Look what they did in Russia. And so this dual internal and external communist threat and agitation actually forced the ruling class into the New Deal, which was then, you know, seen by them as a protector of capitalism, protecting capitalism from its own

excesses, and as a way to get through the acute crisis of the Great Depression and, you know, then eventually World War II. But what we've seen since then, and this is very important, is that anything granted under the system of bourgeois electoralism, under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie can be and will be clawed back. So what is neoliberalism, if not, the ending of the New Deal era? It was a clawing back of the gains made during that era. And today, when people say make America great again, ironically, and I've made this point many times in different places, ironically, what they really mean deep down,

whether they know it or not, is they want to go back to that time of prosperity. specifically though we have to mention because of the racial differences of the new deal this is like white middle class people were very much helped out and in fact part of the compromise was that a lot of these programs would not be extended to to black people and so we you know we can never forget that that element of it but when they say make america great they kind of want the prosperity that was undergirded by this economic you know sort of left wing populism of the new deal but because they don't have a critique of capital because they're on the right and that's definitionally true. They want to go back to that time through cultural means, right? They want to re-res resurrect the racism and sexism and homophobia of the time, thinking that if we can reintroduce the cultural norms of the 50s and early 60s, we can somehow get back the prosperity that was undergirded by the New Deal economic policies. And this is not a conscious thought on their behalf, but if you look underneath the surface of what they're saying this is what they're trying to do but the main point

i wanted to make not only the racial differences of how the new deal actually helped you know certain communities while leaving other communities more or less out in the cold um but also that the new deal was this um response to an acute crisis that was then over the several decades afterwards clawed back by the ruling class with the uh reagan period being that period of of completely dismantling the new deal era of you know political safety needs net that we had. And if the first Red Scare de-radicalized some of the unions, right, with the Sedition Act, and they took the IWW to trial and threw a whole bunch of charges at them, and then after the IWW was more or less destroyed, you still had unions for several decades,

right? Strong unions, but they were often very like labor aristocratic, very, you know, white supremacist. They went back to maintaining the status quo instead of challenging it. So this first wave of attack on unions during the teens and 20s was a de-radicalizing of the unions, taking out the communist and socialist leadership. And then with Reagan and the neoliberal order, it was, okay, we don't even want these unions to exist at all. And so it was this two-phase, multi-decade approach where you first de-radicalize the unions and then eventually by after you've done that, decades later, you just undermine union participation altogether. And that's sort of the wreckage that we're living in today. Sorry if that was long-winded.

no that was amazing and you're absolutely right because um you know the people today when they say make make america created it again they're obviously talking in culture war terms yes right the end like you said they have absolutely no critique of capital or class analysis and um it's very funny to me that uh you know basically everything that they're against would actually make their lives materially better yes but it would also make the lives of like poor black people material better and like blue-haired college kids materially better and that's the that's the insidiousness of racism as you were talking about earlier the divide and conquer thing right because a huge part of like libertarianism right with barry goldwater and this whole idea of states rights used

during the jim crow era used during slavery is the is this idea that we don't want any of our resources going to these people and so we'll even shoot ourselves in the foot we'll hurt poor white and working class people in order to prevent black people, people of color, or anybody we deem, you know, not sufficiently American or human from getting any help at all. And that gave rise to what is called like drained pool politics during desegregation. Public pools were desegregated as well, allowing black people to swim with white people. And what white people did after pouring bleach in the pool and trying to terrorize black people out of public pools is simply shut down their local public pools and open up private pools with private pools.

membership so that only white people could be allowed in. Now, what did that hurt? It also hurt poor and working class. White people who couldn't afford the memberships at the private pool. They just lost their public pools, right? But it's worth it for the white middle, upper middle, and elite class to keep people divided and to maintain white supremacy and segregation in their areas. And so you really cannot understand like libertarianism as well as reaction without understanding this idea that they do not want, you know, people that they deem less than to get things. And they'll prevent even people who look and think like them from getting things, as long as it also makes sure that those people don't get them as well.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a very strange, twisted worldview that, that's so fanatically adhered to when they fundamentally misunderstand the entire premise of their argument. It's kind of mind-blowing, and I can't help but think that it's just ignorance of history. Yes, yeah. And the pathology of whiteness. Absolutely. And I think, I think to a large degree, it's so systemically reinforced that I, like, you know, I love people. Even, even, even, I'll talk to, like, I've helped deprogram, unfortunately, a friend's parents got into Q and on. And I kind of deprogram them when I ask them, like, do you know about the New Deal and the conspiracy to unravel it? And they went

down and, you know, I use that same terminology. Do your own research. You can ask me questions, but do your own research. And they kind of figured it out on their own. Like, it's not, it's not, it's not hard. And it's actually more compelling. Totally. Because when you actually go into the actual story of our history, it's dark. The closer we get to our times, the darker it gets. I've always maintained that. It gets. It gets. It's darker. in the sense that it gets more evil because it resonates harder and it's harder to see us making the same mistakes over and over again. But it's the only way path forward. We have to face our societal demons. Yes, there's no shortcut. The only way out is through and we have to have

a thoroughgoing confrontation with all of the injustices of society if really we hope to solve any of them. Because, you know, as we've seen throughout American history, when you try to solve a problem but you want to exclude certain people like in some sense the New Deal did based on a compromise between different political factions that you don't actually solve the issues that give rise to these big crises

and so what happens is especially in American society we live in these doom loops we cycle through the same shit over and over again as we are being begged to face our shit and deal with it so we can move on but we never do and so we have to keep living through these reiterations

of the past and yes they're they're at higher levels right the the the experiences of black people today is certainly better than a hundred or two hundred years ago and that is not because white people had it in their heart to help them out it's because of the bottom up struggle that black people and other marginalized people have waged ever since before this country was founded like during the slave times before 1776 there were revolts there were uprisings you know the the umastod or whatever that ship was called when um you know there was a revolt on the slave slave ship coming over coming back over to north america um you know the resistance has always been

part and parcel of the oppression that has been inflicted on people and it's in that tradition that i think we can really find pride not in this kindergarten ass i pledge allegiance to the flag this is the home of democracy and freedom bullshit but actually looking at the people who have occupied this land from the indigenous people to the black people to working class people of all colors who fought back against this system at home and abroad that is a tradition that we can truly claim as our own and be genuinely proud of exactly i mean that was so beautifully said freedom is not a word is an experience and it's an aspiration that we have to work towards it it's not going to be given to anyone no matter how loud you shout it

it's it's it's a fight it's been a fight for all of human history amen but yeah if you want to you'll get back on track and keep bringing us through this wonderful history is really important. Well, I just wanted to say that. You're absolutely right. FDR, the New Deal, was wonderful if you were white. And as long as you weren't too dark if you were Italian. But for everyone else, it wasn't because they were basically left out of it.

And as you said, it was interrupted by World War. two and the subsequent death of FDR, thus leaving the social contract incomplete because there were elements that were supposed to come, including universal health care and other regulations and things like that, but it immediately stopped with President Truman, who actually initially initiated at the end of World War II, the second Red Scare. it's very important to note that the first red scare the hysteria more or less died if we're talking on a mass scale right right it was a lot it died on its own because it was wrong what makes red scare two so different is that that

in in a very real way the hysteria has never been allowed to die um the second red scare happens in the context of Harry Truman instituting a loyalty oath to all government officials that they have to swear that they're not communists. And obviously

they had a Republican party back then too and they took that and ran with it. Because whenever the demo, I don't know if anyone notices this, but whenever the centrist or even the leftist give the right an inch they'll take a foot and this led to the famous um um senator mccart led by senator

mccarthy senate hearings and the house on un-American activities committee um basically gutting american society in general of anyone who had socialist or communist leanings and i should point out that in the meantime, the FBI had been established domestically, and the CIA was just established during the Red Scare, Red Scare 2. And the way to look at it in the context, those two organizations in the context of class struggle are as the CIA as the international and the FBI as the domestic cat spas of concentrated capital. Because Brett said, if you look at subsequent history, basically all of it, even to today

when you hear words like deregulation or the death tax, it's all clawing away the last vestiges of the reforms of the New Deal. And of course, Red Scare 2

happens in the starts in 1947 and goes through the Korean War and again it's hard to, I'll move this along, but it's hard to fathom like how far the anti-communism went. It went to the point where it was like a state religion. Neighbors were reporting neighbors.

It was, it was, we often focus on just kind of, you know, the Hollywood Union crackdowns and things like that because those made headlines in the context of the Senate and the House committees, but it was happening everywhere across society, in essence. anti-socialism and anti-communism had become de facto state religions. But again, after the Korean War, people started, the fever broke, and people started saying that, you know what, why are we going after these people who were just trying to live their lives? Our neighbors, our, you know, friends, coworkers, colleagues. But this time, J. Edgar Hoover had become a master of all things, you know, domestic surveillance, all things that we consider evil created something called

or A but V at the time the fifth column plot But before we move into the fifth column plot I just wanted to make a point as well about Red Scare 2 Because you said Red Scare 1 Eventually died down in part because what people really saw When the rubber hit the road Was that like just regular people or union people

Were being swept up and accused of this stuff There was no communist revolution There was nothing close to a communist revolution So people eventually stopped believing the nonsense. Red Scare 2, I believe in, correct me if I'm wrong here, you've said, I think in this episode and others, that it never quite died down. And a big part of that is the broader geopolitical and material context of the Cold War. So after World War II, of course, once the Nazis were defeated, immediately, without even taking a breath, we moved immediately into the Cold War era where the Soviet Union was this real concrete threat. And this period of Cold War lasted several decades.

The acute McCarthy sort of witch hunts, there was a turning against that, right? The acute McCarthyism was eventually, you know, more people than not turned against it and saw it for what it was. But the ambient anti-communism that gave rise to McCarthyism was still incredibly present, was still incredibly useful for reactionaries and for the elite. as we said earlier, anti-communism can be used to destroy unions. Anti-communism can be used to target and label and harass and kill black revolutionaries of various sorts. So anti-communism is a really helpful tool that the elites use. And even they can convince good-hearted liberals to hate it too. And that's one of the most pernicious effects of anti-communism is that good-hearted progressive liberals are brainwashed from birth to be like, yeah, we want freedom and equality.

and everybody should be treated equally, but like not scary communist authoritarianism way. So, you know, once you can get anti-communism to be a baseline assumption in all of society, even that element of society, which pretends to be the progressive edge of society, is imbued with these anti-communist ideals, which make them denouncers of the one thing

that could really threaten the global and national ruling class, socialist and communist movements. And once you've done that, like you've really, you've really completed the circle because now the people who are the progressives in society are just as anti-communist as are the hardcore reactionaries and that's very very very useful absolutely it's be and and um apropos of what we were saying earlier it's because the history is left out yeah there is no there what when you hear uh forget msnbc but even like uh like a like

you know a i don't know a centrist podcast or a YouTuber talking about um uh uh uh uh You know, a popular one talking about the New Deal. They always leave out that, you know, there were major communist and socialist movements at home and internationally abroad that required the New Deal to happen. Thus, their very progressive existence would be impossible without those communist and socialist elements. Absolutely.

And it's very, like once you learn, which is some, which is some, which is some, I'm so thankful for Rev. Because, like, once you learn the background to these things, you can see how our supposed, you know, guardians of wisdom or collective wisdom are completely uninformed. And it's really, really sad that they don't even know where their own values come from. Yes. Could not agree more. but yeah we were talking about the um the fifth column plot i think this is really important yes the fifth

column plot is is devious and and and you have to it's okay i i hate j edgar hoover i i'm not a fan of any of these institutions like the cia or the fbi however you have to um understand in the context of class struggle you have to understand how ingenious this is the red scare two would not be allowed to die. So Hoover created this fifth column plot, which basically he presented

evidence to the president and the National Security Council, I believe Eisenhower, and said to them that there is a mass infiltration of communists

from Eastern bloc countries that are posing as Americans and are coming here to infuse our institutions so that we turn basically you'd have so many government employees that were secret communists that one day you wake up and it would be America would be communist because the government is run by communist the deep state is run by communist a completely insane plot but what's crucial here is for the first the evidence he presented showed the complete level of surveillance that Hoover's FBI had over basically everyone. And it suddenly came clear to every, you know, basically politician or political appointee in the room that he had dirt on anyone and everyone because he had been illegally wiretapping.

everyone civil rights and civil liberties weren't a thing for hoover and the fbi i'm so um the president authorized the counterintelligence program or as i'm sure everyone knows it uh co-intel pro um which was a government sanction basically giving hoover's FBI sanction for all the illegal activities they did before as giving an official sanction and thus releasing what in essence was a covert war on its own people.

Hoover knew I said it in my episode and I'll say it again because I love saying it. At this time 1955 it because of what happened during the New Deal and how

many reforms were achieved and then Red Scare 2 happened and a purging of communists it was literally becoming quite more likely to be trampled by an elephant than to actually know a member of the Communist Party at that point in the United States what Hoover's actual plan

was was to release it against the burgeoning civil rights movement And he did so in 1968 and then expanded it with the explosion of the Vietnam War, which takes us into the 1960s where it was released on anything that you would consider remotely progressive or, you know, obviously anything left of center. And, you know, they threw in just for good measure to make it look like they were. doing, you know, God's work, they threw in the KKK and a couple of truly awful organizations, but it was basically directed against its own people. Yes. And, yeah.

So, yeah, so let me bounce off that and have a few thoughts that come to mind. Again, this theme that anti-communism is so useful comes up again, right? Because even to this day, when you talk about universal health care, when you talk about universal housing, when you talk about free education, the first thing that you were met with, and I've been met with this my entire life is that's socialism, that's communism, right? So now it's gotten to a point, and this is all the history that leads to this, where anything good in society is now labeled by the elites in the center and the reactionaries on the right as socialism and communism. And that's enough and has been enough thus far to prevent those things from coming to fruition. I think things are changing with the younger generations because we, not because young people are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and inherent.

more progressive than older people, but because millennials and Gen Z have grown up in the U.S. under material conditions that have been nothing but steep deterioration and decline from the two insanely cruel, brutal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the 2008 economic implosion up through the resurgence of fascism, the election of Trump, the pandemic, and into today were now the things that, you know, I was, I remember talking about the stuff during the Obama administration, wealth and equality, the homelessness crisis and the need for universal health care. And a lot of people, that was just even, even back in the 2010s and early, in late aughts, that stuff was just like, you'd still get an eye roll. You'd still be like, that's, you know, that's insane. And now, even on MSNBC, you can talk, you'll hear people talking about class. You'll hear people talking about the homelessness crisis, et cetera. But I just wanted to focus on that part about anti- communism undermining goals today even like trying to address the climate crisis is immediately called communism and socialism this is how the communists are sneaking in communism through this lie of global warming and the only way to address it is to you know challenge the capitalist

system itself so literally just trying to make our planet livable is now called communist and socialist and you wonder why young people who have heard from the day they were born that everything good and meaningful and that would be helpful to them in their lives being slandered as communist and socialism. And now all of a sudden, over 50% of millennials in Gen Z identify as socialist and communism. It's kind of funny how that works. But I also wanted to say that the anti-communism and the idea that that communists are in the government, right? This right-wing fever dream paranoia that's always present. You know, this conspiracy thinking. Communists are in the government. What that quickly translated to,

especially through the 80s and 90s, was this notion of Zog, right? The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of a Zionist-occupied government where it was no longer communists who were in the background and in the shadows trying to grab the levers of power, but now it was Jews, right?

And this fits perfectly in line with right-wing conspiratorialism. When you don't have a critique of capital, all you're left with to explain reality is conspiracy thinking. And one of the big conspiracy movement, that came out of this McCarthy Red Scare 2 era was the John Birch Society. So the Senate censored McCarthy and sort of marked the end of McCarthyism around 1954, 1955.

By 1958, the John Birch Society is now on the scene, a direct product, I would argue, of the McCarthy era and a hardcore anti-communist and conspiratorial group that still lives on in organizations like Turning Point USA. in the fever dream conspiracy theories of what just is right-wing politics, right? Different conspiracies, but almost everywhere you go on the political right today, you're being bombarded with conspiracy theories. The John Birch Society was a predecessor of QAnon, I would argue. And so we can see how this period of history that we look back on and think we're separated from, this Red Scare 2 and McCarthyism, actually gave rise to these movements that still live on to this very day. that are still embroiled in anti-communism, still embroiled in conspiracy, fever dream politics, and that gives rise and that gives rise and sort of cements reaction of all kinds.

So, you know, tying the dots, connecting the dots, tying things together, this is like the dialectical analysis of history, where we don't see things as like this happened on this date and then this thing happened on this date and then this happened, but hey, that's all in the past now. We're in a totally different circumstance. No, we trace the present back through the past and we see that the conditions we live in today, the dominant ideas, the political factions, the pathologies of American politics are deeply and inexorably connected to decades and centuries of American society, which is white supremacist, which is slave and Jim Crow, which is the genocide of the Native Americans, which is anti-communist and actually elevates property and private ownership of property. to the status of a god and and these things are not disconnected they are fully connected and they live with us to this very second excellent side and that was amazing and i just like to add if you

ever if anyone wonders if you any of these organizations that bret mentioned are you know intrinsically fascist understand that their critique through conspiracy is blaming one person or one group therefore the end conclusion of that is that the only thing they can save you from this is one person or one group, right? Which is quite literally, you know, the platter you're being served is fascism through the lens of, you know, anti-seminism, all this, all this, you know, crazy stuff. When the real conspiracy is the conspiracy to keep us divided so we can never have class of solidarity that we had

you know during the new deal especially now when we can be I mean relatively at least better off relatively colorblind societally like if we made if there was a second FDR today we would be able to make those changes for everyone

right? Yes yes hopefully fingers crossed but but basically what yeah it's divide and rule tactics to confuse, to blame, to discredit

the idea that government can actually do something for you. Yes. Absolutely. And it's become a governing philosophy. I mean, I'll argue in America for both parties, but, you know, internationally, I'm in Canada,

so like up here, we're on top of your meth lab. So the fumes have come up. And it's alive and well here too. Yeah, absolutely. The brain rot has seeped across the border for sure. Yeah, our capital was shut down by Q and on truckers. So, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Oh, yes. So, what, we were, we had just the fifth column and entered, the civil rights movement have begun, and we have entered the 60s, yes? Yes, yes, absolutely. Okay, so I'm no, like, as I, I've never claimed to be an expert in the civil,

rights movement. However, I'm well read on it and MLK in particular. And so very, very, very, very, very broadly, the civil rights movement can be seen as split into two wings. The kind of rural, I would say, more than southern, but rural, southern rural, let's call it, aspect of it, which broader brought about the, you know, civil rights bill of of 1965 is centered around Martin Luther King, Jr., right? But the plight of African Americans in northern cities were not addressed by addressing the injustices of Jim Crow laws, because it did nothing to really address their material conditions. You know, I make this point at length in Fred said, but I just want you to know that we we often look particularly mainstream media will look back at that era and just hold up martin luther king and that was it no there were different factions different groups representing different geographical eras not to take anything away from from from m lk right um but this is when fred hampton is really becoming a politically um you know conscious he's he's very young at this point um and i think he's he's he's he's he's he's 12 in in 1960 and uh um at age at age 18 as the 60s go along um we we are noticing um i mean

assassination after assassination and if the way i look at it is that uh any person who had come to perhaps not synthesize the view if fred's views the way he had but anyone that seemed capable of creating societal unity as I hate to replete myself but during the New Deal era if they were able to replicate that again they were killed in the 60s

we know the major assassinations but I assure you through my reading about Coincol Pro there were hundreds if not thousands of more people just eliminated or discredited or ruined and destroyed because they merely

presented the possibility of allowing solidarity to happen. Really quickly, interestingly, and this might be a little ahead of us, but I think everybody's heard this phrase, the black Messiah, right? This is what figures like, you know, MLK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton were at various times described as by the FBI and co-intel information that, you know, that these are black messias. And I just wanted to point out the irony here that almost everybody who would talk in these terms are Christians. And the idea that what the Messiah is is a figure that comes back and saves people, right? It's a holy good figure in the Christian tradition. And then without a sense of irony whatsoever, these Christian white men would talk about the Black Messiah and how we need to crucify them so that they do not save the world, as they were no doubt have crosses dangling from their necklaces, right, talking about how the Black Messiah is this thing.

threat that we need to kill, taking literally the position of the Roman soldiers and the Roman power complex against Jesus, and now just, you know, putting Jesus in the figure of Malcolm X or Fred Hampton, and then, you know, virtually doing the exact same thing, crucifying that figure. I mean, it's just wild, yeah. It is wild, and I think they, when, I don't, I don't want to give anyone too much credit. However, you have to understand the architects of the 1%, and particularly the architects of this plan, and it was a plan Coenzo pro was a plan

MH chaos was a plan all these programs we know about they were well organized, well thought out even as chaotic and crazy as a lot of the aspects of they were it was planned and I cannot help when I hear the term black Messiah if they're not

actually referring to the fact that a black person would be actually be able to be a Messiah not only to blacks but to whites. Someone in the, particularly in the case of Fred Hampton, I think that program was

with the historical you know, hindsight was actually targeted specifically for someone like him, someone who completely obliterated the notion of race to the people he talked to.

Yes. And it's really what you said was amazing in it, but it's just it's so evil and it's so dark which is why I like staying in ancient history mostly I do want to say one thing it reminded me of this killer Mike line now killer Mike's politics are all over the place I'm not I'm not you know saying thumbs up to everything killer Mike believes or says but he has this one line in one of his songs where he's like

if Jesus came back where you think he'd be he'd be in these streets with me and and I I see like Fred Hampton for sure Malcolm X for sure but MLK especially as a sort of Jesus-like figure for America trying to redeem us of our sins, trying to save us all, you know, as equals under the eye of God, literally coming out of the Christian tradition and, and, you know, immediately being, you know, not immediately, but eventually being killed by, by white reactionaries. And this idea that if Jesus came back today, he'd come back as, you know, this is the idea in these like white evangelical and white reactionaries' minds, that he would be this blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan freak that would all of a sudden be like this multi-million

dollar pastor in a megachurch or some shit? No, if Jesus came back, he would come as the figures in society that are most hated by those with wealth and power and money. It would be a poor, you know, black or indigenous woman in American society today that would be most likely the form that Jesus would take if he came back. And again, I say that if Jesus literally came back in America in a form that was, you know, commensurate with who Jesus was, it would be white Christians with crosses dangling around their neck who would crucify him once again. And so that's always, that's always stuck out with me. And the fact that they're explicitly talking in terms of the Messiah just like really, really drives this point home, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've all,

I've long maintained that Jesus could have come back a hundred times in the last 20 years and he's probably dead. The cops probably shot him because they thought he was a crazy person. Definitely. Okay. So, Fred, even at a young age, had, he's from Maywood, Illinois,

which is a suburb outside of Chicago now, small town at the time outside of Chicago. He was a student, student organizer, extraordinarily well read. This boy, read every single thing in his library, he basically came to the concept that Brett and I discussed earlier, that our very idea, our very modern concept of race was driven out of a need to create wealth. Thus, capitalism came first and racism came second.

and that that once he realized that and was able to kind of verify that through historical fact he began to formulate his um political opinions um and he saw society as a mountain valley and was and basically came to the conclusion that unless you are at the very very top of the mountain so you're at the peak then it doesn't matter where you are on the slope you are the same as everyone else. So, you know, today we have successfully, you know, implemented things like the PMC and in all kinds of things. Understand that, yeah,

I know we'll probably never reach PMC people because of their relative level of material comfort, but you always have to take an account the fact that FDR was an elite. And it's not, that those people won't listen to your ideas or that they should be hated. It is that they most likely will only act once they know that their material conditions won't be completely destroyed by any kind of revolutionary concept. And Fred Hampton got that across extraordinarily well.

um and before he joined the panthers he had um woven into his speeches a word that was um made famous in america um you know in jamaica and in other other places haiti but uh babylon he would use the word babylon in his speeches and as he was talking starting in very very small like small rooms in churches to eventually filling up a few pews in churches to filling churches to giving speeches in parks suddenly he was speaking not to African Americans

but to the entire racial makeup of the city of Chicago and soon people were coming in from beyond now the Babylon the way Fred said it and the way Fred used it was very different

how she says it he projected a vibe Babylon is not a place it's an aspiration it's to the aspiration to fulfill the political promise of mythical Babylon where no one went hungry and the problem

of one was the problem of all and they stand in for communism right a sort of rhetorical flourish stand in exactly the thing that was great about fred i think was that he didn't by using babylon as the stand in he didn't have to use demonized words exactly particularly communism he hits socialism hard but when he hit it um it i i read um so um just uh for anyone who hasn't uh who's going to listen i um tried to recreate the vibe and I used Fred's own words which is why the episode is called Fred

said so he's I just did my best to portray him I hope I got it across but Fred used um socialism and communism with um a particularly light touch depending on the audience that he was talking to we're going to get to that but his because those words had been so demonized for so long, much like now, right? Yeah. You hear people called Joe Biden a communist. Like, that's insane. But it was, it was, let's just, it was even more demonized back then.

Yeah. So his primary driving force was to put theory into practice, amplified by his rhetoric, of course, but theory into practice. but theory into practice so that people experience socialism and love it before they even realize that it is in fact socialism

we're going to get to that but it's quite genius are you going to talk about the I was going to mention the lady at the meeting but if that's in your notes we can do that now yeah no we can do that now

so Brett you're talking about the breakfast for children's program this is after he joins the Panthers but we'll um yes but yes yeah go no go for it yeah and you you made this clear in your episode fred said which again i highly recommend people listen to and we'll release it on rev left as well so more people can hear it it was really well done but you mentioned that this at this meeting this you know he's talking all this talk and this lady gets up and she says basically and you know you could i'm paraphrasing but i don't know how i feel about socialism and communism right i'm a little ambivalent i'm conflicted

obviously this person has been raised in american society most people your default is to hate and fear that stuff and you have to do a lot of work to come to a real understanding and embrace of it, of course. So, you know, I don't know about all of that. But what I do know is that the Black Panthers provide food for my babies, for my children. And that's all I need to know. And that is so powerful for so many different reasons. It shows that serving the people through material means, it will do infinitely more than a million hours of trying to convince people through rhetoric and ideas. But also, it still lives on today.

So I have some friends who are organized in the Omaha Tenets Union, Omaha Tenants United, that do great work, you know, helping and have for several years at this point, just helping tenants who are being screwed over by landlords of, you know, ill-reput. They go to bat for them. So if you need somebody to help you either organize tenants into a union or simply push back on a shitty slum lord who's trying to take. your deposit these people show up and one of the things um that that they've said and their experiences and i've heard in other places as well is like people would be not know not even like be against

but just not no communism and socialism those are buzzwords you know that has whatever but when they see the communists and the socialists showing up to get their 500 dollar deposit back that's more convincing that these are the good guys then again a million hours of trying to convince people talking about historical and dialectical materialism and what angles in Marx said. Those things are essential and those are the things that inform people like Fred Hampton, but it's the meeting people's material needs that will be infinitely more convincing than, you know, hours of rhetorical argument. Now, I would also say, of course, not to dismiss rhetorical argument because that's political

education. And political education is what inspires people and what informs people enough to go out and do the actual practice, do the organizing, meet people's material needs, right? But it just shows this dialectical relationship between the two. Yes, you need political education, and that's something Fred Hampton emphasized all the time. But political education without any organization, without any movement, is just talking, right? You need to actually meet people where they are and meet their material needs, and those two things then bolster each other. They strengthen one another. But if you just have organization without education or just education without organization, you are

at best incredibly limited and at worst will fall apart i mean what is a revolutionary without education he's a criminal you know what is somebody that is really great on the education but doesn't do anything they're an armchair theorist right you need you need both pieces and fred hampton was always and everywhere emphasizing that point and just that that little uh that little anecdote though about the lady standing up saying i don't know about all this communism marxism stuff but i'm 100% on your side because you feed my kids. That is so, so powerful. Absolutely so powerful.

And it just shows you that like how relatively little it takes to undo. Consider the times. Like when I said that like anti-communism had become practically a state religion, like it was true. Like literally you would have your life destroyed. if you if if brett were talking today in in in 1955 he would have serious problems folks so yeah like the thing is that you if you give people things that are fundamentally good to them good for them they will take it enjoy it love it and then you can break it to them that actually this comes through the the program that we're off

is based on socialist things so you know socialistic ideas communist ideas um through you know the writings of of of lennon marks whoever and then you can bring them into the educational system which was a huge part of friends friends things too but it's it's the carrot and then what i would call uh the bigger carrot which is like mental liberation right um um so so yeah uh it it was it like you said it was it was a great anecdote it was the and he did so much good and um well well you know what we we we got ahead let me just i'll jump ahead here so like let's go to 1968 right which i think is a kind of uh i'm going to do an episode on 1968 soon on deep in history because i think it's it was a turning point for america yes and

just like a very brief history because that was a momentous year um In January, 1968, the TED Offensive happens in Vietnam. I'm not going to go into the Tet Offensive, but it was live on television on all news networks, showing this massive North Vietnamese offensive and put the lie to the idea that Americans were winning the war in Vietnam. This sparked massive protests. So protests had been happening on campuses before, and some of them had turned violent.

But for the most part, they were peaceful and not organized to happen all at once. There was no kind of inter-university solidarity. suddenly because of this this huge event anti-war activists feminists anti-racists pro-health care

slash abortion activists started marching together it started fostering unity so much so not just in the United States that students around the world began marching in solidarity in London, Paris New Delhi

and even in Eastern Bloc countries, students were marching against human rights abuses and, you know, the abuses of the communist elite at the time. You know, long story, but we'll get into that. We can get into that another time. But basically, there were, there was a lot of abuse of power going on in a lot of the, the buffer countries, as Stalin would have called them, of the iron curtain. Yeah, and importantly, every socialist republic was very different. You know, there's a wide range of governments and ways of dealing with issues, some much better than others.

So it's a very complicated history, and any socialist and communist movement is going to have within itself enormous amounts of contradictions and issues and mistakes and failures and things to wade through. So, yeah, we don't need to go too deep into it, but suffice it to say that not every single person in any communist country who was dissatisfied with their government was, you know, know, a CIA stooge or a fascist, there were, you know, regular-ass people who, for various reasons in different places and times, you know, had problems with the government and would speak out about it. So, yeah, I just wanted to make that clear. Yeah. No, absolutely. And, you know, all of these student protests, you know, in capitalists, the capital's west, in Asia, in, you know,

communist east um was the it gave a um it really worried the powers that be because it seemed like a spirit of revolution was coming to the world again among the young particularly and if you want to if you want to understand how like the class struggle the is the one struggle that the one percent always pays attention to um you can see it in in 1968 in the reaction to these protests. Through the Coenzo pro connections fostered by a decade with local police departments, sheriff departments, and whatnot,

the rhetoric in the daily briefings that police departments changed. So for the most part, student protests, the police would be there, but they just, you know, let them march by. Who cares? Their students were just here. to make sure they don't, you know,

vandalize property, basically. Yeah. But when you change the rhetorical daily briefing, pitting blue-colored policemen against spoiled rich kids, college kids, suddenly a hatred develops. It's more of a divide. And where so often these protests had just been allowed to walk by, suddenly they were met by

phalanxes of policemen and we just live through BLM we know what happens when a phalanx of cops is in front of you yes violence ensues totally so very quickly through

through um really quick though I'm I just want to you just sparked this little thought in my head this reminder this is actually in 1970 like the Kent State Massacre was in 1970 where you know the state opened up firing on students for protesting the Vietnam War.

And there's also the hard hat riot in 1970. You're talking about pitting like blue collar workers against student protesters who were framed as like extra privilege. And we still hear that today with like student debt relief. They pretend like every person who got a college degree is some like lawyer or trust fund kid or doctor who's just going to make $100,000 next year. And we shouldn't, you know, as opposed to all these working class people who don't have that. When in reality, the people that take out student loans are like working class kids. want an education. But yeah, the hard hat riot was like the culmination of this idea where like, you know, regular-ass construction workers and office workers went out and attacked,

you know, a thousand or so demonstrators, students, you know, doing, doing protests against the Vietnam War. So it's really sad when that happens from our perspective, but from the perspective of the ruling class, nothing could be sweeter than seeing exactly this, yeah. I'm trying to like embrace my inner optimate and start saying that yeah man that would be a call for like a dry martini because yes it's divide and rule of the most delicious kind yes right literally most students are of the working class just trying to educate themselves and then to be beaten down for people your own people absent a degree that's all it is like a little bit of education that's all it is and yeah I mean, it's so easy to divide us. Yes. Right? The 1% has to do one thing.

Maintain their position at the top. That's it. All of us have to handle everything else. Exactly. Every single one of us has different ideas of how to do it. Exactly. It's dividing rule is, it's brutal. And the rich understand class struggle.

They've always understand class solidarity. They've always understood it all through history. they've understood that they share economic interest and when push comes to shove despite their differences or whether they're different industries or whatever that they're going to have each other's back and the working classes because of racism because of you know homophobia and xenophobia and every sort of you know bigotry and prejudice that is inflamed in capitalist societies it keeps us you know divided against each other and the enormity of our task is such that it's all Even if we were all on the same page tomorrow, it would still be a world historical, you know, burden for us to do global revolution or even a revolution in like a hardcore capitalist country. So as long as they can keep us fighting amongst each other. And like, that's the beauty of the two-party system as well is that they're both arms of the ruling class. But they pretend to have these vociferous debates, which turns somebody against somebody else. So your neighbor who works, you know, or your co-worker, they have the same income.

they live in the same house, they, you know, have the same interests. But now we hate each other because, you know, one guy has a Joe Biden hat and one guy has a Make America Great Again hat. And so instead of going after the elites, now we're out in the front yard, throw and fist at each other. And, you know, it's not to say that there aren't contradictions we have to work through. Of course, there are. There are real differences.

But turning neighbors on neighbors, pitting people against people, making the working class, hate other factions of the working class. This has always been the strategy. and it's always been successful, so they're going to keep going with it as long as they can. And today we see Democrats, like liberals, actually weaponizing the language of identity politics, of progressive politics, weaponizing that against people who are interested in class and anti-imperialist politics. So it's actually fascinating how the ruling class can even co-opt the language of progress and weaponize it against their class enemies. It's really, it's amazing, but it needs to be understood and studied by those of us who are interested in confronting this system. Absolutely.

And the thing is, like, it may look like, you know, and they are, they are masters of chess. But we can all learn how to play chess. Yeah. The thing is that we're playing checkers. That's what divide and rule and the politics of fear. Like all these things together, they're playing a different game. quite literally definitely

to go on with 1968 sadly there's the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy which basically

realistically made it seem that the adoption of any progressive worldview could not be achieved within the system particularly for Fred Hampton and for the students that went to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This is also, this is 1968, I just wanted to point out

that all of these organizations that we're talking about are utterly riddled with paid FBI informants and planted undercover agents. So at the end, after the death of MLK, you know, Fred Hampton isn't a Black Panther yet. But what happens is that future congressman Barbie Rush sees Fred Hampton speak and notices the fact that the crowd is unique for, you know, any African American speaking at the time, to have every culture represented in quantity. And so Bobby Rush flies to Oakland, to the Black Panther Party headquarters, and begs them to recruit Fred. He says, you like, you know, he needs some resources and he can really get the revolution going. But Fred Hampton, because of his views on, you know, race, on class and everything, he only agrees to head the Chicago chapter if he's able to be able.

to change party policy and crucially change the party constitution so he changes the word white to capitalist this the most

glaring you know change that he made and you know with the resources of the Black Panther Party I mean we could talk about

for a very long time. But the Black Panther Party gave him access to resources such as money for printing presses where they would start printing their newspapers which gave them their, which they could then in turn sell, which gave him

his own economy and literal connection to the community to start launching his programs. And in his speeches, the I call it

his truth about race that race was a lie and what it is is the class struggle. The rich versus the vast vast poor masses it spread like wildfire. It's really unbelievable

considering the fact that he was so young and all of these leaders that had come before them in the 60s had never quite hit that moat. They were assassinated despite the fact despite the fact they'd never actually said what he said. And basically re-characterized the Black Panther Party as the Vanguard Party in an international struggle for a few basic points.

Land, bread, clothing, education, justice, and peace for everyone everywhere. And that is revolution. revolution is just change taking it from everyone being the vast masses being poor to the vast masses not starving to death and being able to access things like education health care and live a life of decency

no matter what they do yes yeah and he did this by putting theory into practice and the ways these manifested were his education program which was quite extensive legal assistance which came um you know not coincidentally because it was fred through largely white progressive left-leaning white lawyers who offered legal assistance to him and what became the gold standards uh for bringing people into the revolution which was the

breakfast for children's program and free medical clinics um and it's like like like we just alluded to without using the politically demonized words of communism of socialism instead he let people experience

those systems in the context of the breakfast and the free medical care and then he let them know that if they wanted to know more

they could learn the truth by answering without joining but those classes were available political education was available to everyone and just as you said

Brett. Uh, he had pointed out, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, Papa Don't, Papadoc in Haiti, Jomo Kenyatta, um, all these dictators who had come to power with, um, you know, leftist rhetoric, but were basically, um, had left everyone, all the people uneducated. Therefore, they became tyrants themselves. Right. Yes. And it is, it's doomed to happen. And I think it was Thomas Sankara, another hero of the Marxist left in Black Liberation, pan-Africanist. His exact quote was, without political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal. And I think that applies perfectly to the Papadoc situation and the figures that Fred Hampton himself were pointing out as examples of this. So Fred Hampton in the slums of Chicago and Thomas Sankara over in Burkino Faso, coming to the exact same conclusion through their understanding.

of Marxist theory. It's just beautiful. Absolutely. And he and through his speeches, he explained to particularly understand like in the Panthers themselves even once he had he'd started his chapter and it started growing. Panthers from other chapters

came there and they would confront him saying that you know it's about race. It's not about it's not about an international struggle And then he would educate them about the fact that African-American struggle in America are exactly the same as any colonized per any society that it experienced the ravages of colonialism. Because the exact same divides that exists in America exist everywhere that colonialism happened. Like I got news for people who don't know this.

Like my parents, I was born in Canada, but my parents are from India. If you're lighter skinned in India, like it doesn't matter where you're from, you're automatically seen as higher up. You know what I mean? Like these things have become so pervasive, these cultural notions, but also the ravages that exist in the quote unquote third world are very much akin to the ravages of, you know, the inner cities in America. And now, unfortunately, many rural towns in America. Yeah. And quickly about the black nationalist aspect, this is obviously a contradiction that existed within the Black Panther Party that they had to work through.

And it's a contradiction that has existed as long as Marxism has existed, which is this fight between black nationalists and black Marxists. The thing is that black Marxists, in Marxist theory, there's plenty of room. for progressive nationalist liberation struggle. So like the black nationalist, the best of that critique and that analysis is already included in the Marxist critique and theoretical understanding of revolutionary struggle. But sometimes in the Black Panther Party and to this day there exists black nationalists who, you know, the room for class struggle is not inherent in the black nationalist project. It can be added and I think it's stronger when it is.

is, but there are plenty of black nationalists who do not incorporate, you know, proletarian struggle and the ideas of socialism and communism into their analysis. So I would just say that from that alone, again, not dismissing the importance and the progressive force of black nationalism historically and presently, but just to say that in Marxist understanding, there is already room for progressive national liberation struggles that black nationalists are interested in without all the, you know, negatives that can often come from a black nationalist approach that eschews a class struggle and solidarity. So I think that's that's an important point to make. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I mean, Fred addressed them. I don't have to speak for them.

Fred addressed those guys like, you know, and and addressed them well and brought so many of them into the movement. And he ended up forming what was called the Rainbow Coalition. he had become so popular and his message of class solidarity so intoxicating that he formed an alliance with the young lords originally a Puerto Rican street gang that had evolved into

an organization that was fighting gentrification in its neighborhood, Lincoln Park, and the young patriots who I need to talk about them. So the young patriots flew the Confederate flag as their symbol.

And these, I don't know if you've noticed, Brad, but like on talk shows like Tucker Carlson, you'll see talking heads always, when they bring up Fred Hampton, they'll say, well, Fred Hampton had an alliance with Nazis. And they'll point to the young patriots. No, that's not true.

That's to give you the false belief that there is a political horseshoe and that there is something in common between fascism and communism. There is nothing in common. What the young patriots actually were were rural white people, particularly from Appalachia,

but from all over the Midwest, that had come to Chicago for work. And the thing was that the way, you know, in earlier times, every even European white ethnic group was divided into their own little blocks and communities. So these whites, although they were white, did not have any poll or could not get jobs in the very tight-knit Polish community in Chicago

or the Italian community in Chicago. So they had congregated together and had kind of, they had adopted the Confederate flag for a sense of historical identity. Because they were treated like the quote unquote white trash by other whites. Yeah, they were groping for a symbol and the imperfect and historically weighed down symbol of the Confederate flag was sort of grasped at, you know, largely out of perhaps whatever ignorance or maybe that's what they saw is like a symbol that they could use. But what was important here and that what you just said perfectly is that it was the material economic. circumstances of them being pushed into a big city like Chicago, not being able to find good employment and therefore being deprived materially that urge them forward to try to grasp

towards something. And that's very different from being an ideological fucking Nazi who utterly replaces class with racial struggle. A core feature of Nazism of any stripe is a complete dismissal of class struggle and a replacement of it with racial struggle based on racial. science and the idea that there's Aryan superiority, et cetera. And this is not the ideological angle from which the young patriots were coming. So to say that Fred Hampton united with Nazis is not only historically wrong.

It's a slap in the fucking face to Fred Hampton who would never in a million years, you know, line up with people who are ideologically committed to the superiority of the Aryan fucking race. So anybody who says anything like that should be immediately dissoned. missed as a charlatan who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about yeah and absolutely and it's a it shows you how um history is wielded by as a weapon you know because a lot of people hear that and they believe it and they say oh okay well then maybe i can um uh be friends you know so many youtube idiots will be like oh well well then maybe we should be friends with proud boys right because they you know they also think that we should have um everyone should have a house or you know whatever the argument is yeah or this guy over here thinks he believes in medicare

for all he also thinks that trans people are subhumans and should be genocided but who cares because he agrees with us on medicare and then you let that asshole into an organizational party and then now what do you have you have that racial hatred or that you know homophobia or that trans bigotry dividing working class people within the organization so you do not let that sort of shit in the bare minimum for joining in my opinion a left-wing organization of any sort the bare minimum is recognizing that all other human beings are fundamentally equal and that we only get what we want by getting what everybody wants you know if you believe in fucking basic human dignity and equality under god's eye or the eye of the cosmos whatever your you know

metaphysical preferences that basic human equality and dignity is the starting point for us to build a coalition. If you come in saying the white people are superior to black people or straight people are superior to LGBTQ people or whatever, you need to either be politically educated out of that belief before you're let into our organizations or you need to be rejected outright. And I think that is the bare minimum. And Fred Hampton fucking knew that. He knew that a lot better than these grifters today who are completely ignorant of the actual history here and just want to broaden their personal brand and the crowd that is going to click on their shit for more money and so if you say like hey we can bring everybody in yeah you fucking don't believe that trans people should exist or that

you know immigrants should be shot at the border well you also believe that we should all have health care here in the u.s so come on in it's a big tent and then that does not go anywhere that that that falls apart immediately because you're letting people in who see other elements of the necessary proletarian class of the human community of our organization you're seeing elements of them as less than and that is immediately going to destroy any ability for real solidarity which is the glue that holds movements together right uh i like just to synthesize everything fred said there's the class struggle is all struggles because in order to achieve it and achieve victory and an equitable subside for everyone on this

planet requires international solidarity on an unprecedented scale. We have to look at each other and love one another, but understand that there's moratoriums on Babylon, right? You can't just love someone who's just pouring hate at you. You could say, okay, I don't deal with you. Move on to the next person. But what I've, what I've, apropos of what we were discussing before the show, dear listeners, we had delved a little bit into how there's a little bit of modern conspiracy.

You know, it kind of permeates our culture. The way I've found dealing with hardcore racist is usually just to call them a conspiracy theorist. And like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're racist. That's a conspiracy theory. Nice. Do your own research.

And like, they look very confused. And yeah, usually they'll figure it out. hopefully they'll eventually figure it out. But that's, you know, that's, you, you, you, you confront hate with the fundamental ludicrous proposition that that hate is based on. Yeah. Which in this case is an actual, is it the actual conspiracy of our time?

Literally a conspiracy. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So, um, I thought, you know, we'd kind of, um, wrap it up there. Maybe talk about the, um, uh, the, uh, you know, any, anything, you'd like about the legacy of Fred Hampton because I do not I did not want to do a show or an episode with you about Fred's death because understand we all know the story because all the forces were coalescing and clamping down around him and he had to die because he was actually fomenting a international level of solidarity that would have actually made, you know, it looks like

as distant a dream as Babylon now, but in the late 1960s, a sense of solidarity among all working people that could actually have fostered change to our system. And this is demonstrated about the fact that a few weeks before he, two weeks before he was murdered in 1969, he was basically snuck out of Chicago and driven to Saskatchewan in Canada, Regina, Saskatchewan, and spoke to a huge student movement there. So by his messages went out to not just who were speaking, people wrote down his words, particularly students they took them back to their universities you know remember it's way pre-enter-net days way probably even the mass proliferation of the telephone um a lot and um they had his desire to speak

and people were listening and people were believing and he had to die because he was quite literally the black messiah and um yeah he had destroyed all of he was able to destroy those all everything that had divided us and keeps us divided divided divided he was somehow able to make the people see through all that structural training and all our prejudices and everything that you know we're raised with and don't don't take my word for it listen to what fred said and read what fred says i'll post his original speeches on social media as well go through it And yeah, and I wanted to say as well that we did an episode here on Rev. Left called The Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton, where we go very deep into the life of Fred Hampton, including all the details around the death, which is grotesque on its face. Of course, what happened. He's laying in bed with his pregnant wife and is attacked by the police. And, of course, an FBI informant had drugged him earlier. And there was, you know, all this stuff between the Chicago PD and the FBI to assassinate. fascinate Fred Hampton, and we go through that in detail on our RevLeft episode, The Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton. And then, of course, you have on a deep into history, your episode that we've been referencing throughout called Fred Said, where you also, all the points that you've walked us through today, you spend some time on and go deeper into. And so we'll release that episode on

Rev. Left. We'll link to both of them in the show notes for anybody who have not heard those two episodes and are just hearing this. This is sort of, this conversation here is kind of a synthesis of those two episodes and you're going to get a little bit of each but not all of both and so if you're interested you can definitely go check both of those episodes out but i did have a couple more points as my final thoughts um to this wonderful episode and this wonderful discussion with you my friend which is um you know the idea that fred hampton was trying to do this multiracial class solidarity thing and that is a step too far for the establishment and there are three figures from the 60s that are giants in black liberation struggles in the U.S. and beyond, which is MLK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton.

And to prove the thesis that it is this move into multiracial class struggle and solidarity that is the final point that the elites will not let you cross is that in each case it's when they made that turn in particular that they were taken out. So for Martin Luther King Jr., he was now focused on the poor people's campaign. This multiracial march on Washington for basic economic dignity for all peoples of all races in the United States. That's a real motherfucking threat. He had to be put down. Fred Hampton's entire thing was about bringing together a rainbow coalition of human beings who are all materially deprived under capitalism, forming solidarity, forming real organizations that meet people's material needs, and bring people together across the identities for the class struggle,

that was his whole thing. They killed him, murdered him in cold blood at age 21. Malcolm X is a little bit of a different figure because there's an early X and a late X. And the contradiction there is that the early X was simultaneously of a real threat to the white establishment, but also a bit of a gift. Because when he, before he starts weaving in interracial solidarity

and starts taking note of anti-imperialist struggles. You know, it's very much like the white devil, this, the white devil, that. And so you can put that on the TV screen, show tens of millions of white people. You know, forget Martin Luther King. This is the real face of the civil rights movement. And, you know, that could really scare white people into even disowning the more peaceful MLKs, right? So there's a way in which early Malcolm X, he was thrown up on the TV often. And to the white establishment, again, he was simultaneously like a real militant threat who was like arguing for the militant side of Martin Luther King's peace movement, but was also a much more convenient figure for them to throw up in front of white people's face to scare them than MLK was because MLK is talking in terms of Christianity and talking in terms of, you know, a dedication to peace and Gandhi.

And, you know, that makes like, like, you know, his whole idea is like way on people's consciousness, win them over. You know, we are getting beaten in the streets. We don't fight back. We let people see how brutal this system is. And that, you know, will get us, you know, more allies, more solidarity from people seeing how brutal this system is. And Malcolm X was taking the opposite route. But after he goes to Mecca, when he comes back and he starts, you know, seeing, he's like, when I was there, I saw people of all races, you know, of all nationalities. They're humbling themselves in front of God.

And it sort of, he began seeing the error in, you know, a purely like. black nationalist white we hate all white people approach and started shifting his approach to more anti-imperialism he met with castro right he's starting to talk about white people as equals and that's when he had to be stopped as well so it's very interesting to see um the line that is drawn in the sand and how every time when these figures cross that line and start really based basing their stuff on multiracial class solidarity is when they when they go too far and when they are ultimately you know targeted for for for death and in every single one of these cases regardless of who ended up pulling the trigger there was there is historically proven FBI and police engagement

every step of the way so in Malcolm X's case it wasn't like Fred Hampton it wasn't the the Harlem police department you know that the new NYPD that came in and killed them it was other factions of this you know nation of Islam movement but those figures were deep as we found out recently in documentaries and whatnot over the last several years, deeply entrenched and engaged with the FBI. There were informants all over, so the ultimate assassination of Malcolm X cannot be said to be something wholly outside the realm of the FBI and the CIA and the state, as it were. No, the tensions that eventually boiled over into Malcolm X's assassination were deeply

entwined with those forms of state power. And so in every case, there's this unifying thread of a black mass. a figure coming along and eventually all three of these figures started off very differently but they eventually come to the same conclusion that only through coming together as a multiracial class movement and anti-imperialist movement can we actually you know make change for black people in particular and for human beings more generally it's that line that you don't cross and every one of them crossed it and every one of them were murdered because of it and I think that's one of the lessons that we can learn but also it's very telling in what we need to do because if that's

the thing that makes them kill you know that's the thing they don't want to happen so anybody who is trying to undermine solidarity anybody who is trying to separate people based on race or anything else on the liberal identity politic reduction liberal side or the reactionary right side should be at least seen with lots of suspicion but at the same time that doesn't mean that we don't take into consideration the different experiences of different identities. We have to have the respect that comes with understanding the unique experiences of being black in this country, of being an immigrant in this country, of being trans or gay in this country, understand that, respect that, and then we unite across those identities through the class struggle.

And so that's really crucial. You don't just dismiss all that other stuff in favor of class, because you're not taking into consideration how class actually operates, which is racialized capitalism, right? You have to take race into consideration, but class is the unifying feature. So, you know, we can understand different experiences and different identities, but class solidarity is the glue that brings people of different nationalities and ethnicities and races together for a common cause. That's the most scary thing to the elite, and it's also the most effective way for us to actually create the change that we want to see in this world.

Totally. So well said. And yeah, never, never get fricked into the idea that by embracing your class or the class struggle, regardless of your relative economic level of comfort, that requires you to give up your culture. Absolutely. Like if we have, we all have, history has given us all our different varieties of culture. And the beauty of being involved in the class struggle is that we can all actually begin to appreciate it, absent the. lens of um everything that they've used to divide us yes but yeah it it's it that's what i that's what i meant by what i said earlier like the closer we got to our time the more dark history becomes because it's just uh it's very sad that you know these beautiful human beings but you know everyone's flawed everyone has their own problems but i'm talking about just fred hampton in particular a beautiful human being had to be murdered to

to what so we have our crypto scams and everything's a scam now and uh you can't sign into email without it being a scam email like this is the end result for this for look around you for this yes yeah it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's and wrap it up for now. That was a wonderful, wonderful conversation. Again, I really appreciate your work. I highly encourage everybody listening who found any part of this conversation useful to go subscribe, to go like, and to go leave positive reviews for your podcast deep into history. More people should be aware of it. It's high quality. It's very well done. And as I was saying earlier, you know, I get the benefit of sometimes leaning on the expertise of my guests. You actually

tackle history and like this monologue style that is incredibly engaging, is entertaining, is very principled, is very objectively tethered to reality, and is imbued with this sense of storytelling that is really, really admirable. So I think you do wonderful work, and I can't applaud it enough, and I can't tell people to go check it out enough. It's a really, really important outlet. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's high praise. I mean, I just, you know, I'm speechless. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Like I said, I've been a huge revolutionary ref radio fan since you guys started. And I love the work you do.

It's so important. And if you guys want to follow me on social media, I'm at Deep in History on Twitter, if it still exists when this show comes out. And at Deep in the History, I'm around. You know, I'm around. Absolutely. And we'll link to that in the show notes. And hopefully this is just the first of many collaborations

between you and I, my friend. Absolutely. If your listeners would be interested, I would love to come, and just because I know you're a history buff, too, talk about the fall of the Republic, the story that people don't know, which is the story is of Marius and Sulla,

where all the norms that got torn down in our last 20 years, including the Iraq War, all these norms that apparently Trump, all these politicians broke. The same thing happened in the late Republic, and it took another four, years before it actually fell to

a dictatorship. So there's less history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And it's rhyming like crazy now with the late republic. Yes, yes. That's fascinating. I would love to get more into ancient history on this podcast.

Yeah, I think we're definitely going to do something around our love of history and do future episodes going deeper into the historical past to try to better understand the present because I truly believe you can't understand yourself and you cannot understand the present state of things without a deep study of all of human history. I think it's a pillar of self-knowledge and I think it's a

pillar of just basic understanding of what's going on today, where we all came from, where the ideas that were imprisoned by came from, and how certain patterns in human development repeat again and again and again and if we can suss out those patterns and make sense of them we can bolster our revolutionary theory and our and our strategies going forward for sure for sure and it's utterly enchanting yeah yeah definitely it's the story of us you know it's the story of us and yeah the worst i always say the worst thing about death is that i don't get to see how the human story ends because i'm so deeply invested in it and i i'm so fascinated by the entire story so far that I really wish like even before I blink out of existence if you could just

if some deity could come down and let me know the end of the story it'd be deeply appreciated make a sacrifice to Apollo that's the move okay the oracle will give you some insight it's worth a try all right my friend until next time thank you so much such a pleasure You know,