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The LASIC Vision Institute, amazing vision, amazing price. Hi, I'm Ebony Monet. And I'm Rick Schwartz. And we're here from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. We're the host of amazing wildlife, a show from I Heart Radio that deep dives into the fascinating world of the animal kingdom and our conservation efforts through San Diego Zoo partnerships. So Rick, I cannot tell the difference between a leopard and a jaguar. What sets them apart? Well, I'm glad you asked that. And honestly, it is challenging to be able to tell them apart at a glance, especially. If you want to really get good at, here we go, spotting the difference between a leopard and a jaguar, remember those cluster of spots those leopards have? All episodes of Amazing Wildlife are available to stream now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. It happened somewhere else a while ago and also somewhere else now is several days ago. What a great title for a show. I love how snappy and memorable that is. We can go into a tiny bit of pulling back the curtain, which is that you can't do too many good intros because if you do too many good intros and everyone expects you to constantly have a good intro. So every once in a while, you have to lower the overall quality of the intro so that when you are truly desperate and have just been dragged out of bed at like 3 a.m. and you have to record a podcast, your sort of atonal noises will be considered normal. That's why I script all my intros. But I'm just I'm just I'm just built. Oh yes, you have different. So this is that could happen here. What are we what are we doing here today, Chris? We are talking about well actually we had planned this episode before this happens. Yeah, we want this episode before the the the referendum in Cuba about the new family code. But yeah, we're we're talking about the kind of bleak but sort of gets better history of homosexuality in Cuba and how things went from very bad to getting a lot better and then also how a lot of American leftists like picked up a version of the history of this that is just sort of nonsense. And here with us talk about this is on the race, Petriera who is well doing doing many things, one of which is studying for PhD in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And today's welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. Yeah, like I'm excited to talk to you about this. So okay, I guess the place that I want to start is I want to go back to the 60s. And I want to go back to something that I don't think a lot of people understand very well in terms of what happened in I just happened in in various ways over over a lot of sort of these new sort of revolutionary social states, which is that you get this attempt to like form a like a sort of like a new revolutionary subject. Sometimes it's like, I mean, the Soviet one was like the new man. There are different versions of this across the sort of various social revolutionary states. I guess I wanted to ask you to talk about how this kind of got really, really homophobic in Cuba like pretty quickly. Yeah, so I mean, and one of the interesting parts about the story in Cuba is that it actually is in part imported from the USSR and ideas in the USSR. And that's actually one of the connections which in the literature isn't in the academic literature at least isn't always that well explored because Cuban is sensitive. You're very insular. We don't really tend to learn Russian. I'm kind of crazy. I actually am learning Russian, but no, so there was all basically lots of homophobia, lots of, like lots of bigotry against LGBT people before 1959, not unlike the United States the 1950s. Like you could live privately or maybe in certain safe spaces. You could live a kind of okay life, but it was definitely very marginalized position and lots of bigotry and lots of personal danger in addition to a lack of basic rights. After 1959, you have this jettisoning of the Catholic Church and kind of religious reasons for being bigoted with the coming of the revolution, which is a secular communist revolution. But what ends up happening is they, and this is something that Abel Sierra Moreno's recent book on these policies talks about a lot is this kind of attempt to remake human men into the man that's needed for this communist society in the future. And as part of this, they engage in a sort of social hygiene. We don't want people who are lazy. We don't want people who are degenerate, but you know, bourgeois degeneracy, blah, you know, that kind of stuff. And within this, you know, a persecution of people who are seen as either out either as gay or at least as soft. And they need to be made into a real macho man for the revolution. And this started out in a very serious of isolated things, right? You would have like Vihiliopin Yeda was who was a dramaturg. He was, he was jailed. And he basically, he was being targeted because people wanted his house. And so if he was jailed and his belongings were separated from him, then like someone could get to keep his apartment. Like that seems to be why he was originally targeted. And he was detained twice for basically walking while gay. That's how basically what the incident boils down to is walking the effeminate like and people, and he was detained by police. And he was free because he had like, he was an important person. He was, you know, he had some protections. But then as the decade rolls on as the 1960s roll on, it's like, that's 1960, one year after the revolution. 1965, you have the creation of a series of forced labor camps. And there's not really any way to get around that. We don't know exactly how many were sent there. But it seems to be in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. We, again, we don't know because the government hasn't classified that information. So it's still a conjecture, but it's not because people don't want to investigate the details. And these are thousands and thousands of people who are being said for all sorts of reasons. Jehovah's Witnesses, people who listen to rock. People who are seen as hippies, Elvis Presleyanos, so Elvis Presleyans, so people who listen to Elvis Presley because that was seen as too effeminate and too Yankee. And so they were sent to the camps and to do forced labor. But the camps weren't just about forced labor. They were about remaking through labor these men into real men because hard labor, proletarian labor would remake their spirits and their ethics. I mean, it's kind of not alike what we're seeing in the 1960s in China, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a very explicit, like one of the things, well, yeah, one of the things that is just going on, you know, to revolution also, yeah, it's like that they have, they have this sort of reeducation through labor thing that starts and it gets, it does get, yeah, like I've seen conflicting accounts of the extent to which like people would directly target for being gay. I definitely did happen and there's a yeah, and you get a lot of this sort of same thing of like, these people are like spiritually unpeer and like they have to be like reeducated and they have to be sort of like turned into like proper like subjects. And there's a lot of the, especially like there's a lot of sort of like, there's a lot of people like being forced to hold signs to say, sodomite and shit. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, funnily enough. And the weird part about this is that like in the Chinese case, so the cultural revolution is like not a great time to be gay, but there's also this thing. It, this thing kind of like, it's kind of like like 1920s Berlin where like there are, there is some really bad stuff that happens, but there's also this sort of like, there's kind of general political chaos, so you can get away with some stuff to the, there's actually, there's another campaign in China in, it starts about 1983. Yeah, it's called a strike hard campaign. Hmm. Interestingly, there's actually two strike hard campaigns. So there's one of the eighties that's supposed to be this campaign against like crime and stuff. And so like they target a bunch of people who are like, it's supposed to be like social criminals. And then that winds up being a lot of like, there are just massive gay people. They're in prison for a very, very long time. Yeah, under, although that one's also interesting because it's like, you have very similar kind of reasoning, but it's like, but it's in this sort of like dang like counter revolutionary like phase where it's like instead of being a danger to the revolution, they're like sort of a danger to like traditional Chinese values, which is interesting and bleak. Yeah, well, because like, because this is one of the things that happens in China, right? Like in, you know, there, there is an attempt to sort of do more egalitarian like gender relations during the cultural revolution, during the sort of like revolutionary period. And then when Dan takes power, part of his thing is like, no, we're going back to traditional gender relations, like all of this egalitarian stuff was a mistake. And like this is part, this is part of where the one child policy comes from. But then also you get a really homophobic crackdown in like 83, like like three or four years after sort of like, he's well, he's so, actually weirdly almost exactly the same time that like the real sort of market reforms hit like it's like a year later is when the package that sort of like really brings the market back, it's trying to happen. It's a very weird, yeah, we've gotten, we've gotten very off topic, but it's a very weird and interesting sort of like social flip that happens. Yeah, for sure. And definitely makes me want to read more about like China during this period. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting like, like the other thing you were talking about earlier that is interesting like it's so much means I've talked to like crew people from Vietnam and they have a very similar story about like like, I mean, there was homophobia before, but they have a very similar story to the Cuban story about how like there is a sort of importation of like Soviet homophobia. Mm-hmm. And how that made everything like when that then starts up between the 80s and gets just like significantly worse. Yeah, no, it's an in Cuba. And that's what it called like the whole idea that this is a form of bourgeois degeneracy and the genius, gayness is specifically bourgeois is like was really surprising to me as I dug into this. Like there's comics. I, in this thing I wrote, I include a couple of them, but it's basically like it's put up there with wanting to be in, let's just get a leave it at like free society in the West and so the West is the bourgeois, it's like, it's almost like a reactionary. I mean, it is reactionary. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's like a very weird mirror of like far right discourse because it's like the degeneracy of the West, meanwhile here we have masculine values. I mean, you even see that type of rhetoric with, we were talking about Alexander Dugan recently and he is, he is, I suppose, is a lot of that type of stuff as well as someone who is, you know, a fascist writer who's pulled on some of like the national Bolshevik type stuff before. Yeah, you can attack, attack gayness as it's like a sign of liberalism in the West as like this like almost like bourgeois tendency. Yeah, I forget, I forget who it was. Someone on Twitter who was talking about this, like it's a very interesting thing. Like, yeah, like in, like in the US, like, I don't know, like being, like for a very very long time, it's so kind of now you get this versus like, like being gay, like is is, you know, like being queer is the sign of like you are a communist and you're like, like a degenerate communist, etc. and then you go to like Vietnam and it's like, oh yeah, this person's gay, they're a degenerate western, like kind of revolutionary. It's, it's like, it's always the same, the actual sort of like homophobic thing is the same. It's just like the signs are flipped of like what the other is and who you can accuse the most sort of having the values of. I wonder if the unifying factor here is, and this is something I'm thinking of a lot because of other Seattle's book, which is that, I mean, queerness as a disease. Yeah, it does. An illness. And so like that, so it allows you to go on onto it. Anything you don't like from your own ideological prism. So I also wonder a lot about how nationalism plays into it because that's one of the things that happens in a lot of these sort of revolutionary projects is like, yeah, like the sort of ideal of a new man is sort of like a communist thing, but it's also like very specifically something that you get with like with nationalist revolutions where it's like, well, okay, so we like we have to like part of like the basis of our national identity is like, we are these like incredibly sort of masculine, hard man or whatever. And then this like, I don't know, it strikes me, it strikes me as interesting that like the further that sort of nationalism becomes entangled in like these revolutionary projects like the more you start to see this kind of stuff. Yeah. And definitely part of this is nationalism because it's not just homophobia in Cuba in this context of the 60s. It's not just homophobia for the sake of homophobia. So there is that too, but it's also that I don't think Fidel Castro is entirely lying when he says that it was part of the need to mobilize as much of society as possible for the economy. What's happening in Cuba in the 1960s is basically the economy is going into a meltdown. The economic policies that they're enacting have not been working. They've burned through any surplus they had in 1959, including goodwill, surplusism, a couple of respects. And I think that like some people point to like the new man and people will work for moral incentives, not material incentives as just this naive thing. And then I think the most convincing counter argument is they didn't have anything else to incentivize people with. Yeah. People like this. This is like basically just an identical like argument that you get about the culture revolution where like you start to see these like incentives are like Mao will like give you a mango or something or like you have these like pins that you get and like as it's like yeah, it's very it's like the same thing of like you have these rewards that are sort of like yeah, there's supposed to be sort of like spiritual almost or sort of like a spiritual ideological rewards. And then eventually like kind of just stops working because it turns out that's not actually a very good basis for. Yeah. Economic system. Do you guys know the old joke about Jake Gavara when he was given a sign to become the minister of the banks? I don't know the joke. I know the thing about like he was my my my vague memory is like the story that I heard was like he signed his name like really sloppy on it because he was pissed off that like you had to put his face on money or something but I have no idea that's true. That's that's actually true. He hated money so much he refused to sign his actual name. He just signed his nickname just to show his disdain for for economics. But at a meeting the old jokos and this is something that Chad apparently like to tell as well even if it's not necessarily true that at the meeting where they were deciding who's going to become the minister of what they said who here is an economist and he raises his hand that everyone goes, Chad but you're a doctor you're not an economist. He says, oh I thought you asked for a communist. So yeah no I mean Chad and I think I've heard ordinance I'm not expert on Chad but I've heard that he was actually pretty heavily influenced by China real compared to the US S.R.K. Lane close to the China. Yeah that actually that actually guess I think I think I guess that kind of makes sense given his sort of like like the way his military strategy seems to have worked which is very very much like a lot closer to sort of like Maoist strategy then well okay I'm going to put Soviet strategy and quotation marks because oh my god is there like I'm very negative I'm very dim view of so of the military strategy of people who were of like guerrilla organizations who were taking their military strategy directly from the Soviet Union. It's a lot of like we're going to build up one giant army in a place and one day they're going to roll onto the Capitol and it's like this okay this I yeah yeah yeah that makes that makes sense okay yeah raining raining myself in a little bit we have these basically labor camps that gave people are getting put into we have kind of a material basis for it which is and this is one of the things that like people actually will use as a defense of sort of like like well we had to put these people in these camps because of our material conditions which I think like I feel like that makes it worse like I feel like the fact that there's a there's a material basis for your homophobia like makes it harder to get rid of and makes it like I'm more entrenched part of the system which I don't know bizarre defense to me but yeah um can we talk a bit about like like how how did this actually end and to what extent did it end and did it sort of like had this like half life afterwards. Sure so so these these last for a couple of years this is not like a flash in the pan like oops our bad kind of like you know six months in this is like a series of multiple work camps across the province of Kamaway which is in central Cuba and they last for three years and there's pushback during this period domestic pushback international pushback like people have been complaining about it so wow exactly what the definitive thing that got them the view mock closed specifically those are the Unidades Militarias de Ayuda Alaproves shown military units to aid production so the umas themselves which were opened from 1965 to 1968 they do eventually get close since 68 people are freed you know like you know the camps are closed and people are sent home and there are varying stories I have looked through like try try to trace as many stories as I can get and even even people who like were participants have different stories so like I remember Carlos Frankie who was one up opposition figure he has one story of that centers himself in in the closure other stories say that it was the international pressure other stories say that it was the right writers and artists union the official one the state one the uniac which filed enough complaints and that convinced for the delta get it closed down that anecdote is actually from Maddie Glacias is dad Jose Glacias who wrote about his dad yeah or his grandfather his grandfather his coming to scram father um but uh he who actually who wrote a book about the 60s is an interesting guy uh but anyway so the camps get closed one way or another and I don't think we're gonna ever know the definitive answer until like there's actual declassification but they're closed but the thing is um while the camps get closed we have reports from different people including some of the sources that are used as apologia for fume up saying wait wait wait social disgrace units he could be existing well into the early 1970s and so we do have sporadic reports of things like this happening where seminaries are sentenced to religious people for for being atheist or certain for not being atheist uh you know gay people are being sent other people muddy wanados so people who spoke mucpa you know anyone who's seen as like not conforming into the this ideal new man you're sent there and the labor is supposed to reform you and that's that's a key part of this it's not just laborist punishments labor as ideological reform there's even uh uh one of the people some of the people in one camp say that there was a sign that says in trá ojo or trá ojo but it's work will make you men Jesus oh no yeah like work will set you free yeah it's uh so so the camps do contain seem to continue and um it's it definitely seems to be the case that uh you know gay people do continue to be aggressive for being gay uh even though the intensity of this does die down by the 1970s there's something pretty bad that also happens in the 1970s but it's a slightly different project it's not is centered on forced labor so yeah and i guess so the yeah the the thing that you wrote this piece about that i should actually probably mention that is one of the things we're talking about is you you wrote a very long piece about um called factually base which is about sort of the the kind of mythology that developed in the u.s. about like how these camps were closed and the sort of like apology around it and a lot of this is based on Leslie Feinberg which is depressing in a lot Leslie Feinberg people who don't know is like one at one of the most important like trans authors ever um wrote stonbwich blues which is like if you've ever been in like any sort of like queer or trans scene uh you probably know about or possibly have read and she wrote not a great account of this yeah do you want to talk a bit about what what this was and how people have sort of used it in different ways sure so like i per years i've heard like arguments from this book and i didn't know they were from this i just saw people sharing online online online and thinking where the whole are people getting this this is not this is not true and eventually i find out that it's it dates back to this book called rainbow solidarity and defensive Cuba by Leslie Feinberg was written um mid to late uh two thousands um really it's not a book it's a compilation of articles which Feinberg wrote for as part of the lavender and red series for this uh world's uh workers world newspaper which is like this marciite sect which Feinberg used to be a part of um real real weirdos like i they those people like they they they have positions that are like bizarre even by the standards of like modern tankies like they're they're like like these are people who are like hardline on defending the durg in etiopia which is like stuff that's weird enough that like most most modern like ideal like hardline ideological Stalinist don't know what this like don't even know what this is or won't defend it because it's like it's like most Ethiopian Marxist or like this was fucked like it's it's yeah also this is they were they were thinking about these guys is so if you know about the PSL the party of socialism liberation they they emerged from a split with the wwp yeah because though it was the wwp was too moderate or something yeah I might my my memory of it was it was a split about whether or not you should take money from North Korea i don't know i don't i don't know that's 100% you that that's my memory the last time i read about it so though though these are who these guys are yeah no no i mean the the the the reason that PSL and wwp seem to have very similar lines um so so wait so i'm i'm finally get this book i ordered second hand so i'm not giving anyone royalties um and i i get the book and it starts like arguing you know trying to you know defend the track record of the revolution and really it's like basically it seems that this book and an article that came out before any of finders articles article by john hilson in the early 2000s are kind of a response to how as the kind of like how lgbt rights were treated in the mainstream in like the united states with shifting either there was a like less homophobia movement towards more recognition of rights in the 2000s and in that context he was cubist track record on lgbt rights which is pretty pretty bad you know was getting hammered and so they're writing this as a response to that and find berk warns in the introduction don't expect a criticism of cuban this far it's factually based but you know that i put in quotes factually based but uh you know it's it's factually based but it's you know where this is they it's basically meant as counter propaganda to the criticisms and the the section that everyone quotes i mean the book is the book isn't that long it thinks like a hundred pages i have it over here um it's like a hundred pages long saw these different articles um um the section that most people quote is actually like two or three pages it's this very short section on the umand uh fine berg talks about the umand sites basically three people to talk about it basically one one of the sources is ignacio a ramalnet who is this foreign journalist who introduced fidelin gave fidel the opportunity to give these explanations and defenses of his policies uh where basically fidel uh basic fidel defense it as a missed part of the necessity of mobilizing the entire country in in the face of the crisis that it felt that it was facing in the 1960s from the united space so it needed to mobilize everyone it was part of the economic mobilization and it was almost a favor to gay people because they couldn't go into the military because there was too much homophobia in the military so they almost did them a favor by giving them sending them off to do labor that wasn't with the military in these nice little you know economic productive units and then you know oh there was some use that they have there was some stuff so we shut them down um and this is before fidel actually admitted that there was persecution of uh LGBT people in Cuba under his watch which comes in like 20 to a 2010 interview so this is like his version of things right before then and that's what fine berg sites another of the of the sources is cardinal in nesto kattenel who i'm happy to expand on him but the short version is that in nesto kattenel is going around Cuba in 1970 and 1971 for two short trips and he's just basically writing down everything and anything people tell him some of it's very critical some of it's very supportive he's not actually claiming anything is factual he's saying i'm in Cuba this is what people are telling me make up your own mind like that is his stance but it's presented as this uh uh like it's not critically analyzed at all and it's these two separate stories one of them is that a hundred communist youth members infiltrated the camps on hearing that there were abuses there and they wrote reports saying that there were abuses so the camps were shut down and then there's the separate story also source to cardinal by fine berg that fidel personally infiltrates the camps in cognito and then there is this like a guard who is going to like cut the cord on his hammock to wake him up and get him force him to work and fidel revealed himself and and you know almost almost like why does thou persecute me soul kind of deal like very it sounds like a very biblical story so it's a good yarn but it's not doesn't sound very serious and also the two stories kind of contradict each other why does fidel have to infiltrate if the hundred communist youth members have gone you know or vice versa you know you don't yeah it's really weird like you know like why would there be both like both of them you can't present both of them as true at the same time like they they're mutually contradictory accounts of how this happens they're very very weird exactly and and and in cardinal they're not even presented back to back the the the the the hundred communist youth members is literally a dude he saw on the street who told him this it's a paragraph and that's it like we don't have any other context the other story the fidel infiltrating is shared is light sounds slightly more credible if you really want to believe it but then if you actually read into it it's more like it doesn't it also doesn't water yeah it's like a guy heard from another guy like it's it's yeah he's he's a guard it is a guard narrating this but he like he talks about what he saw until like half into the paragraph and then the rest is clearly implied to be stopped stuck he heard about what wasn't actually present for and findberg presents him as a witness of both so anyway so that's that's findberg's whole defense like basically fidel had no idea the other abuses even though the very existence of the camps themselves were abuses and then but they were shut down and everything's hunky-dory you know that's that's findberg's defense and then of course the third thing is that she prefers both citations to Wilson which I can get into a second but just I think part of the problem is that findberg didn't actually read cardinal yeah so helson helson is another activist I'm not sure if he's LGBT I'm not like that that part of the list clearly run but he was another activist he died very early in the 2000s I think from from cancer he but he wrote an article that cites cardinal and cites both sections that findberg later sites and not more not less and I think what's what happened was that findberg basically goes to this article which basically makes more or less makes the kind of arguments that findberg is already making in her own work but what when when she sees things that seem to ex-goal pay for the Cuban government she basically does copy paste and a little parenthesis to give credit helson and then moves on right she doesn't actually read helson helson even like treats it a little more cautiously than findberg day even though not sufficiently cautiously and I think that explains why and the least this is a generous interpretation findberg doesn't actually dress the fact that in her own ex-goal flotary source there's talk of other camps like at the time cardinal is like I'm going to the camp so I'm visiting the camps there are camps here like you know so it doesn't it doesn't make sense unless maybe findberg didn't read the book like just like copied and pasted and didn't really think about it yeah or just or just like went and found the one session that that was useful and then just read that part yeah which yeah not not a great way to do history as it turns out um yeah yeah I I this I I will do my one return to marks moment uh in this interview which is to say ruthless critique of all that exists yeah things that you generally support because otherwise you wind up with this stuff yeah yeah my god it's done the rounds this thing has been going around and around on the internet for years and years yeah and I guess we should also say that like yeah this is this is the thing that happens with like any any like every one of these like every one of the socials country we've been talking about like you will get people who basically are like like uh hey look at this bad thing uh we're gonna but people who are like I don't know you yeah you get like Cuban right wingers who are like also unbelievably homophobic who suddenly like discover a passion for gay rights because oh hey look at these abuses and it's like yeah it's I don't know it sucks it yeah and I mean I think it genuinely is a part of the reason why this version becomes like a memory that like like this for these sort of versions of the story which like don't have I not like really credible like become sort of entrenched in the sort of like socialist memory of of this period in the US because it's like well okay so so on the one hand you have a bunch of sort of like like incredible fanatical right wingers talking about what was going on and then you have like hey here's another story from the socialist and it's like well we're gonna believe the socialist version it's like well neither of these people like not like but both of these groups like have an incredibly clear agenda going into what they're doing and so you have to sort of like actually sift through the stuff yourself otherwise you weird up well end up with very very weird and distorted histories yeah and and people just really want to believe it I mean I think that's that's my conclusion like I when I was read originally for researching for this I was I was pissed like I was like this is these are just not true how could someone publish this you know it's really angry and I kept trying to write that like a piece or based on that and I keep kept stopping and like this is not the right approach this is not the right like I kept stopping myself and then I I finally was like tried to okay put myself in fineberg's shoes if I was you know really loved you know if I was like as enamored as fineberg was of everyone and everything involved in the Cuban revolution and at the same time one member of a persecuted group right you know and I really wanted to square this circle like and I saw something to let me do that I would probably also just go I'm on to it and just not really try not think about it too much for the same reason right you want you know our defenses are a low one it's something we want to believe yeah this is that there is an enormous amount of stuff that just started people I mean just yeah like everyone has a bunch of stuff that they believe because they want to they want it to be true like it's it's not like like what we're we're we're we're being hard on the socialist here but like I don't know like this is why half the people who believe Q ship believe it right like it's it's it's it's the it's the thing they want to believe and they think they sort of have to believe for the ideology to function so it's like it's not like I don't know like it's it's it's it's not that much different than like in Paul Wofu it's like still thinking the Iraq war works or something right like it's it's it's it's it's it's the thing you have to believe in order to not like have to sort of process the complications of what you're supporting yeah so I think yeah everything I want to talk about sort of moving past this is about the stuff that's been happening recently and about how stuff got better in Cuba because this is I like this is this is one of the places where like things actually did genuinely get a lot better than like it was and I want to talk about like how that happens before we get to sort of the stuff that's been happening the last like week or so yeah um and you know I'm happy to get into happier chair for sure yeah cuz the stocks like yeah god it's it's definitely humor stuff to always think about the 60s the um so after the 60s it did get pretty it was pretty bad in the 1972 there was a purge of education and culture of anyone LGBT or suspected being LGBT because the idea is that they would recruit and influence and corrupt the minors and blah blah blah blah but where have we heard this before yeah so I can probably do an article comparing the culture and education congress in 71 in Cuba with with with policies in the United States right now yeah um and but then things start to get better in the 1980s a little bit like the the throttles pull back it's not great but it's you know it's not terrible as terrible as it was and then from the late 1980s into the 1990s we really see to see get starts to see a sea change both in terms of popular culture and in terms of the state policy and of course they're intertwined because the who would who allows films to be put on in theaters yeah state they all know all the theater so um in terms of culture actually know one of the people who had a play a play a key role in this which is Senen Boss and Senen Boss is this writer from a small town in Cuba small village and he goes to have an he's he's a writer and artist and he wrote this short story about this platonic relationship between a patriotic gay man and a patriotic Cuban heterosexual member of the communist youth who develop a respect for each other and it's like even though like the gay man is alienated from state policies because of the persecution of LGBT people he actually knows a lot more about history and culture in Cuba than the heterosexual guy who's ra ra revolution but doesn't actually know like all these important writers and artists and and things like that that are also important for Cuban national identity that when that was first read in the Casa de la Sameda Casa which is like this huge building for Cuban culture people wept just openly and then it was made into a movie called Fresceses Hucolapi so strawberry chocolate uh I can explain the type of you want but basically it's basically it's the same story it's expanded a bit because the original was a short story and you can actually get it in the United States I think uh paramount botherites the predestribution fox made botherites I don't know but it was came out in like 1993 and it was a big turning point for public public perception right um actually have a friend of mine was uh who who knows who knows the author he was stopped at his building and this the wife of a colonel who lives in this building says my husband wants to see my friends like what would you make what I do it goes up to the colonel's house the colonel says sit and what coffee or anything my friend says no the colonel says explain to me this film that's come out recently because the colonel wasn't gonna see it in theaters then my friend explains the movie and guys says no no explain everything so basically my friend does a scene by scene synopsis for memory and after like an hour and change in this guy's house the colonel's just sitting there not saying anything and said if I understood this and seen this earlier things might have been different oh it's like like think you know it's it's a huge turning point culturally and then politically you also have Maria La Castro so Maria La Castro is daughter of role Castro so Nisa Fidel and she from within the government using her position of privilege really starts to push for better LGP policy towards LGP people and better you know laws and rights and she at the head of the Sennisex which is the national center for sex education she really starts to spearhead an improvement and we start to see in the 1990s and 2000s not just a pulling back of persecution at least official persecution you know you can still have informal personal level jobs but you also start to see things like else trans people can have gender affirming surgery backed by the state you know for your costs like all these sorts of different protections and policies like the Sennisex will if there's like a homophobic incident to the school they can send out somebody to give a talk and say this is why persecuting someone for the gender identity or sex law orientation is wrong but you really see a shift in the position of the state and that's not just Maria La I don't want to make it about Maria La but behind her is of course all these other these LGBT people who would not be in the position to demand this for themselves but she definitely spearheads this and I think she deserves some merit for that yeah it's interesting that they have like that they have a level of sort of buy-in from the state because I think like that doesn't happen in like China or Vietnam and like you know I mean like Vietnam like there has actually been stuff there in the last like year where there's been a lot of real progress but like they like literally one month ago the government was like we're going to declare homosexuality no longer like a mental illness and like that's sort of just like a month ago yeah yeah yeah wow then this only people a bit like queer people have been fighting for in Vietnam for like a long time but like and even then like there's this whole thing there were like people like you get you get this we're talking medical people in like you start to doctors you get this thing where like well okay so there's like real and they the other thing is things is it outlawed conversion therapy but if you talk to doctors about doctors are like well there are real gay gay people and there are fake gay people and the real gay people you can't do conversion therapy on but but this rule but these guys are like this ruling only covers the real gay people doesn't cover the fake gay people because they'll do conversion there. Like it's a disaster and like I don't know, like it's and like China also has been really bleak. Like I'm just gonna you're talking about a lot about sort of like the fact the media has on it. I'm gonna read this thing from the Chinese general rules for television drama content production from 2015 which okay I've seen conflicting things but I think this is still an effect. If it's not still an effect it was only reversed in like 2021 but I think it's still an effect and also there've been news sort of guidelines that have been put out from movies that are about like I mean specifically there's stuff for like you can't have gay men in movies you can't have men there are two affeminate in movies like you can't have men that look like they're cross dressing in movies. I'm gonna read this thing from the TV code. So this is this is something it says is explicitly is not to be shown content which depicts or portrays unnatural sexual relations and actions such as incest homosexuality, perversion sexual harassment sexual assault, sexual violence, etc. This is version that's version two, version three content which portrays and promigates unhealthy perspectives on marriage and married love such as such as extra marital love one night stands free love, etc. Sorry 2015. Sorry try guys not a laugh. Yeah no like it's like it's oh god yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna do a try guys joke every episode for all eternity now. Never said never get you off the recording. The French are surely complaining that the ban on cheating on your wife is a imposition on their culture. Yeah definitely. That's actually extremely racist against the French. I should wait. It doesn't mention I was gonna make a French film pedophilia joke but it doesn't actually ban it bands incest but it doesn't actually ban like the I mean I think the thing on I think I'm pedophile I think I think it's a different section of the code that I didn't copy here but who knows. Yeah so I think part of what was going on there was like yeah like there wasn't like I mean things have gotten like it the law that was being used to arrest like gay people in China like was they abolish it in the 90s but like there was a culture shift but it didn't like the state decided it was gonna do the same thing the US state which is doing which is like do this sort of backlash to it and it didn't like that kind of stuff didn't happen which is I think really bleak but also like is Jenny Windley a thing that like like yeah like the good good good for good for the Cuban people good for Cuba like glad glad you all are doing this. Yeah because like major win. Yeah because like you know you can you can see what happens when like this doesn't happen which is all of this bullshit that exists in a lot of the other sort of post-Soviet like or post-communist countries. Yeah I think the Cuba would have done it eventually but I think that Mariela definitely just sped it along. Yeah. Like there's definitely a problem of a cult of Mariela with like abroad where it's like all all thanks be great be due to Mariela it's like completely cut out while the people behind her you know who also been like please ask your uncle that's for me I gotta get married someday but you know but at the same time I think we can't cut around with the story. Yeah. Yeah and that gets us to well I guess she's starting to not T first but yeah the new family code that's passed which also I do want to mention this because I don't think like people don't seem to know this when I tell them about this about neither China nor Vietnam is game in in neither China nor Vietnam is gay marriage legal and there's a lot of people who think that the repeal that happened in Vietnam legalized gay marriage and that's not what happens like the thing that it did is you will no longer be arrested for having your own unofficial marriage which is a thing that could happen. Oh gee. This is not this is not this is not the thing that is happening in Cuba like I see there's a lot where like something good will happen in Cuba and people will protect it onto like China and it's like that's no like they're not the same place like don't don't do this with this stuff don't project the Cuban medical system onto the Chinese medical system they're not the same please stop. Yeah yeah yeah okay but yeah going on to the stuff that's good and the stuff but on also the sort of like yeah so can we talk a bit about like what but talk about like the the the 2019 referendum and the sort of like the stuff about sort of how the fun is like the the the the story of how the stuff that's happening now didn't happen in 2019 yeah so yeah so when the in the 2010s the Brawl Castro who took over after Fidel he began using a bunch of referendums to decide major things major policy changes and using referendums kind of just till like because like because the nationalists have been placed basically a rubber stamp committee like referendums really took to the fore as a way to like channelize channel support and you know show popular acquiescence to major changes among the constitution so as part of the they did a draft constitution they debated it there were debates all around the country at local levels in neighborhoods and workplaces and people gave feedback the the marriage equality and and and things connected to it which we can get into in a second these were part of for the most part part of the 2019 constitution but there was a lot of pushback like obviously if if the state has been repressing LGBT people for decades that part of their coalition just doesn't stop overnight doesn't just stop being bigoted overnight because of you know a change in policy so you know it wasn't just that the religious right like evangelicals there are a lot of evangelicals in Cuba right now there's a growing evangelical population I'm sorry to say yeah backed by the evangelical money oh no please repressing the wrong people and and then there's the the Catholic right obviously you know much more you know discreetly but still very you know against this and there was an up pushback that the government was worried that I don't know if there were words that the constitution the referendum would fail entirely but it did seem like they were worried that it would lower the voting percentage in favor of the new constitution enough that it would hurt the new constitution's legitimacy or something so I decided to carve off the more controversial parts about the LGBT rights and basically carve them off push them into a referendum on the family code which so all the new laws based on the new constitution all the new laws governing family law and punt that down the road indefinitely and so what's happening now this would just happen is the culmination of this referendum that they punted down the road in 2019 of original the 2019 constitution was passed was something like 90% approval and and this was just kind of left it on the to-do list and then with the current crisis in Cuba I mean like there's a couple there's a couple ways to read this but I think one of the most obvious is that the Cuban government needed a win and this was an easy win they could actually deliver in the age of extreme scarcity and rolling blackouts it's like we can just at least deliver on this promise and they did yeah and I guess so can we talk a bit about like what what what actually is in the new code and what like what what it does yeah so it does it does a bunch of pretty cool things uh it legalizes same-sex marriage which is great for a lot of people yeah not just because you know that not just because of the principle of it but also things like okay you're separating from your partner but everything is under your partner's name you're not never nearly married what are your rights pop up up up up up so you like for separation for immigration if you're trying to immigrate and you're not married to your spouse you know you know if you're trying to inherit and it's all these kinds of things you know this is going to be this is like important and concrete material ways it legalizes adoption by same-sex couples which is also pretty cool yeah that was not allowed at all good sucks it wasn't before glad glad glad glad you can now do that that that's good hopefully we can still continue to do that here for like a few more years at least like yeah um it legalizes surrogacy and same-sex couples can benefit from can you surrogacy now uh although on a not-for-profit basis and that's that's specific uh I I'm not an expert on whether or not it is the best policy to have it as only not-for-profit um I I know that there's a lot of debate over it but the law says not-for-profit only for surrogacy but that's still another option for people in addition to adoption uh it expands civil unions to be much more inclusive they're called um when you're not at the H.O. in Spanish so now they're much more inclusive and also you know you know you you don't have to get married you can get a civil union if you don't. can we explain what that is because that was a like there there there was a whole thing in the U.S. like in the in the 2000s about like oh like you can do civil like there was a period where it was like there were a lot of places you could get civil unions but you couldn't get married so couldn't explain what a civil union is because I think that's a thing that like a lot of our audience probably isn't gonna like remember when that was a thing anyone talked about sure I mean like I'm I'm not a lawyer yeah my understanding is it is it is a way to recognize your you're basically partners you have some rights and it helps with some issues of like right I think it also varies country to country but it's basically like a step down from the full commitment of marriage is my understanding um sorry that's less no yeah no like that that was that was by understanding of it it was like like in the U.S. it was this whole thing of like wow you can have civil unions so you don't need to be married and then people were like no because it doesn't give you doesn't give you those sort of full suite of like rights and stuff but because you some things which I'm glad I'm glad he was doing like no you could do both of these things and it wasn't there's something about like like yeah there were changes to like what like changes to what can be recognized as a family that is the part that I've seen the most like I have read a bunch about this and I'm I still feel like this is something that's not it's not entirely clear what this is gonna look like in practice so basically it expands the the legal definition of what can constitute as a family unit to be more focused less focused on blood ties and more focused on effective ties so love affection you know caring for each other so that for example let's say I think like the the big hypothetical that was held up was like grandparents so like if the parents aren't around but in practice these people are the ones that raise you you know you know for for legal stuff that has to do with kids and family law like we can consider this a family unit is my understanding it's still really murky and it's not really helping me feel like like I the the right things I've read on this also seem to be kind of like like here's an explanation I'm like that that doesn't really help me understand this at all yeah it is a little and and I've seen people running about this is like human government has abolished the family right and I'm like did it yeah everything it really seems like it's all of the abolished the family it's that they've allowed you to change what a family is like in the like in the eyes of the state which is not the same thing right right like I it's like giving you more wiggle room yeah is my understanding but again it's one of those things where I feel like I everyone who I've seen running with it has run with a completely different very triumphalistic explanation that are sometimes mutually contradictory and I'm like I'd like to see what this actually looks like in practice and like seeing the effects better because it's it's an underdiskous dynamic of it because like what most people abroad were looking at was like same-sex marriage so like this so that was less discussed but I mean it seems to be positive the thing that the thing that caused more controversy on the island was there was a shift to Fathodia Fultistub which is father paternal rights basically parental rights right and basically the idea is to switch the child from merely being a subject of their parents will in theory they have more rights in our subject on their own even if they're just a kid that's really cool yeah to like prevent things like proper punishment and things like that you can't be your kids which also seems like a positive change yeah yeah yeah I mean what would would love more of that in the US to just like absolutely clobber the like parental rights people because all my fucking they're they're going to kill us all yeah and I mean the funny thing is like every time that there's a leftist movement the the thing is always they're coming for your kids and then like oh god yeah anyway sorry no yeah like it's the right has one thing it's the same thing every time yeah uh those are the kind of the big things that they're referring to that then why do you think I wanted to talk about was like I okay so there is a thing of okay so like obviously it passed like like 67% of the vote I think um something like that like basically two thirds of the vote um yeah and I want to talk a bit about like okay so something I saw okay so like okay so you have the people who voted against it because they're Christian and they suck um the other people who are just homophobic I like not Christian homophobes non-Christian homophobes but then there was also like something that I saw that was like like people in opposition groups being like we're gonna vote against this as like a vote against the government which yeah can we explain what that was about because that's yeah sure and and I think that you also have a division there between the people who are like it's really against the government but really it's against the yeah yeah yeah I'm also about like I think that even there's a mixed bag of of both but um basically the idea was that by approving this uh and voting in favor of something cooked up by the government that they were given credence to the government legitimacy to the government uh air go the only moral position was either extension or voting no uh and so I mean again a lot of its mixed up with they also really as a rule did not like the contents of the law yeah uh I mean the part of the thing is like it's the the the opposition is in this weird space right now where they have like the more historical branch which is you have like a historical branch that is like rapidly far right uh and then you have as there's a lot of overlap with like the fault Catholic right in there uh and the Catholic far right in there as I'm sure you understand what that means yeah but but but then you also have a growing prominent liberal contingent who speaks better not just doesn't just put on a better face for international audiences but also puts on a better face for Cuban audiences um and because like Cuba is not a far right wing society like for example abortion like I spoke to a right wing Cuban who left who's like yeah I like Ben Shapiro and a lot of what he says but I don't get his obsession with abortion that's a woman's right like that's just so weird to me it it it's because like Cubans aren't aren't necessarily super religious as well which is a big part of it uh and so on into the fetus and all that uh so the so that's so they're kind of like a butt like it's like cats and dogs tied into a sack so there's like you have these different opposition figures and I think that the really right wing ones know that they can't be as openly homophobic as they used to be and so they need to couch it in a different way I think it's not just that I don't want to reduce everyone to that but I do think that's a huge part of that project and then in addition to that just people who are like anything that the government does is bad because they're exhalationists which is another big part of the opposite. Oh no why is everybody in acceleration is down this is the worst I I love for the days I wonder why everyone's in acceleration. I don't know if there's material realities of Turkish. I'm to that to the I am going to take a time machine and I am going to hunt down Nick Land and I am going to stop the GRU from forming and no one will ever know what accelerationism is. That's not you know that's not true without Nick Land someone else would come up with this with accelerationism it's a very easy thing to think of. Yeah but I mean to be fair reality to to be fair to Nick Land and at least his version of accelerationism had to do with like at least it was everyone. Yeah what the version of accelerationism were like like capitalism is a human machine that's also a god that only exists in but that exists continuously in potential and I all all of you like the market being irresistible because it because it because it because it like the market itself is the thinking machine that this is at least funny. Yeah the modern stuff is I God this is like they I I long for the days where there was an argument where people where people would do the modern accelerationist thing and like the land ends were going no no no that's not what accelerationism is. This is that I hate this reality it's the worst. Yeah so I think I think a good chunk of the opposition movement can be described as I'll accelerationist it's not just right it's not just accelerationist but I do think a lot of them are in there any improvements to anything is helping the government that's why they support the embargo that's why they don't want to improve on any laws they want things to be as dysfunctional as possible because they think that like the government is incapable of actually getting doing better and to the extent that it becomes better and stronger it's just going to be more repressive air go the solution is bring the country to a standstill so there will be a general strike and overthrow the government that's their plan I think. That seems like a terrible plan I just gonna throw that out there that's that like I get at that point like why do why not just become a terrorist like I don't know like because that's because that's more scary. Yeah that's the actual reason. Yeah it's like yeah it's people people people who were too cowardly to like kill someone with their own bombs so they they kill people by trying to get sanctions due instead which is like no although there have there happened there have been turns there was the yeah yeah yeah Posa Carriless he blew up a put a crack bomb in a Cuban hotel and killed a Cuban an Italian tourist. Yeah actually actually my my dad was working on the extra edition case to get him extra digested. Yeah he's he also committed the first act so Cuban a CIA trained Cuban ex-al committed the first act of terrorism involving civil aviation in the western hemisphere 76. That's pretty late. Yeah I mean maybe it was just people were just doing it in and maybe it was just a European thing and then the CIA was like what if we bring this here it's like no surely surely this will work better for us that it worked for every other group who's hijacked a plane in the 1970s. Oh god this sucks I hope I hope those guys have a bad time in that yeah yeah well Posa at least kicked it a couple years ago. Oh thank god okay rest in piss official official pot opinion do it we're doing the crabs. God these people suck up. Yeah so yeah I guess do you have anything else you want to talk about or I think that's it just thanks a lot for having me on it was great to be on. Thanks thanks for coming on yeah queer rights goods not doing them bad. I don't kill people with sanctions. Yeah definitely the embargo has been an outer failure at everything. Yeah I get it. I'm feeling sorry. Yeah yeah fuck that like all right yeah and I guess um yeah well nothing do you have do you have stuff you want to plug. Oh sure uh that's that's a very good and generous point um so you can find me on Twitter at at as peritera pisan peter er tisan tom ira i also have a podcast which is linked in my bio uh i'm doing a history of Cuba um as an academic but writing for a popular audience and we're going way we start with the indigenous people we don't just jump over them and we're currently working on Columbus and then uh let's see and I also have a sub stack called scene embargo s i n and then the word embargo so yeah yeah and that that's without embargo if I'm my my my Spanish is okay yes it means without embargo but it also sounds like said in bargo which is I feel like yeah would be a cool band thing so yeah yeah well we we will we will link to stuff and we'll link to that in the description and yeah thank you for joining us this this has been a kid happened here um yeah make bad things happen to homophobes and get good things happen you've probably never thought of a comfortable set of tires the same way you think of a comfortable pair of shoes but then maybe that's just because you've never driven on the Cooper CS 5 family of tires the Cooper CS 5 grand touring and ultra touring tires are designed to help give your car SUV or minivan a smooth ride with excellent comfort and minimal road noise so you can keep your mind off your tires and on the drive right where you want it and because being comfortable on the road requires being in control the CS 5 ultra touring and grand touring also have stable edge technology designed to help enhance traction and handling at favorite pair shoes you like to slip on might just start to get jealous learn more at Cooper Tire.com go with the Cooper's it's never been easier to communicate with people but it's also never been harder to know which platform you're supposed to be communicating on there's a simpler solution ring central is the complete phone system that makes it easy to call meet message even facts all in one app and with seamless device switching you'll always be able to stay on top of business even as your business grows because whether you're working from home the office or anywhere else ring central can help you be there without having to be there when it comes to communication simple is better learn more at ringcentral.com ring central simpler communications hi i'm ebony mone and i'm rick schwarz and we're here from the sandy egazoo wildlife alliance we're the host of amazing wildlife a show from i heart radio that deep dives into the fascinating world of the animal kingdom and our conservation efforts through sandy egazoo partnerships rhinos are huge a white rhinos head can weigh more than a thousand pounds that's comparable to the same weight of four full size refrigerators you'll also hear eye opening stories through conversations with our wildlife care specialist these are important because they are pollinators and this means that they perform a key step in the life cycle of many plant species they pollinate many of our food crops all episodes of amazing wildlife are available to stream now on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to it could happen here today it's just me because it's early and i live on the west coast and today we are talking about America's drug problem and i'm joined by david michael from patients for affordable drugs and we're going to talk about the cost of medicines why it's so astronomically high why i sometimes go to mexico to buy my insulin and why you probably know someone who can't afford the medicines they need to survive or maybe thrive so david can you explain a little bit about first of you'd like to introduce yourself and explain what patients for affordable drugs does and the role that you play there that would be wonderful i am the founder and president of patients for affordable drugs where the only national patient organization that focuses exclusively on policies to lower drug prices we're independent we're bipartisan we don't take money from any organizations that profit from the development or distribution of prescription drugs we do two main things we collect patient stories and we amplify those stories to policy makers and elected officials so we can bring home the human impact of ridiculously high drug prices on the people in the united states and the second thing is that we recruit and train patients to be advocates we teach them about the policies give them coaching on presentation and prepare them to go tell their story and deal directly with the people who set policy in this country and so we've had patients testify in state legislatures all over the country we've had patients testify in congress on many occasions just last week one of our patients who happens to be a type one diabetic introduced the president of the united states in the rose garden and a speech the president made talking about the new inflation reduction act and how it's going to help lower drug prices and out of pocket costs for people so that that's our work i do this work because i'm a patient i have an incurable blood cancer it's called multiple myloma it's incurable that's not good but it's treatable for some period of time with very expensive drugs right now my oncologist have me on a four drug combination that carries a list price of more than $900,000 a year he says christ the these drugs are literally keeping me alive and i'm very grateful to have them but they're wildly overpriced and the drug industry drug companies exploit patients everywhere in the world but especially here in the united states they use us as a piggy bank to hit their targets for executive bonuses to trigger executive bonuses and they hit profit targets for their shareholders and the unfairness is not acceptable anyway when i got diagnosed and suddenly i found myself with a disease through no fault of my own they require very expensive drugs i began this journey and the journey taught me a fundamental point and that is that drugs don't work if people can't afford them and so i retired and decided to devote myself as a patient to trying to change a system in this country that really is built to benefit the people who profit from it at the expense of the people that's supposed to serve and i work for free as a volunteer and i've been doing it for six years that's great yeah that's a i'm sorry to hear about your own wealth but i think it's a very admirable thing you've done so david can you explain because it does yeah i think people sometimes maybe if they've only lived in the u.s they might not realize or uh perhaps they're extremely aware uh why are medicines so why can i travel 16 miles right go across the border flash my passport at someone have a bunch of scans taken right go through a bunch of machines and then buy medicines for less than half the price on any given day why why is it like that it's like that because we are the only developed nation in the world that lets drug companies dictate the prices of brand name drugs to the to their citizens every other developed country in the world negotiates on behalf of their citizens directly with the drug companies to get a better deal uh and we don't do that uh the net result is that americans are paying almost four times what other wealthy nations pay for the exact same brand name drugs and the impact is that three out of ten americans report that they are not able to take their medications as directed because of the cost uh this has a direct impact on health uh and you know i understand that you are the type one and that you're insulin dependent and so you know the struggles and the high prices of insulin but we've had five people confirmed dead because they tried to ration their insulin in the united states of america this happens because we grant the drug companies this incredible market power and we let them dictate the prices to us prices that are completely unjustified uh and the patients suffer financially and worse because of their health due to these high prices yeah i think it's just heartbreaking the stuff like and i've known people have died from from lack of access to insulin and it's it's just it's pretty horrific stuff and can you explain because let's get into that lack of justification right there's there's ways that a drug the caught the things that make up the cost of a drug would be the research and development of the drug uh the distribution of the drug and the marketing of the drug and maybe something else i'm missing but can you explain like how do we arrive at this insane price for insulin which was synthesized in a lab more than a hundred years ago like what what makes up that price structure and how much would it actually cost to uh produce that insulin if we stripped away some of those things well you're asking a very intelligent question about what should exist but doesn't and that is a framework to arrive at an appropriate price that will provide a reasonable return to the drug maker and ensure that drugs are affordable and accessible for the people who need them we don't have a system like that the drug companies charge as much as they think they can get away with period this was shown just last year when one of the drug companies named biogen tried to bring a drug to market for Alzheimer's and proposed to sell it at fifty six thousand dollars even though there was no proof it worked and after it got big pushback and no one wanted to pay for it the government private employers uh they cut the price to twenty eight thousand dollars now wasn't worth fifty six thousand if it wasn't then why didn't you just price it at twenty eight thousand begin with why because they thought they could get away with fifty six thousand dollars a year for this drug now where insulin is concerned it's very unfortunate there is an insulin cartel three companies control ninety percent of the global insulin market in the world and here in the United States as well and it's it some people would say correctly you know you have to call it correctly an oligopoly a small number of producers and sellers who are controlling the market uh at what happens as a result of that problem well insulin costs roughly ten dollars of aisle to produce it sells for more than three hundred dollars of aisle it has gone up in price more than six hundred percent in the last twenty years because of this cartel that literally controls the insulin supply in the world i'll give you another example i take a drug it's called before my cancer it's called pommelist it's an oral drug uh that i get under medicare part D pommelist costs less than one dollar per capsule to make it sells for almost one thousand dollars per capsule yeah you cannot justify you cannot tell me that there's justification for a thousand percent margin it's just ridiculous but because we do not use our power our market power to negotiate for a better deal um they can get away with it and they do and there there are many examples of this now all of that is about to change with some new legislation that has been enacted into law it's about to start to change i should be more precise um uh and we can talk about that yeah let's talk about that one thing i want to get into first i think is this i think sometimes we have this impression certainly with new or novel compounds that uh there's this massive lab and it's entirely funded by the money that's made from selling other drugs and in that lab people are just all day cooking up cures to the embole virus or these various very deadly conditions and so i wanted to explain i wanted you to explain like who pays for the r and d for the most part and who decides what that r and d focuses on because i think those are both very important topics yeah well it turns out that every single drug approved by the f d a from 2010 to 2019 was every one was based on in some part on science paid for by taxpayers through the national institutes of health uh another organization in government called barta and another organization in the government called darpa darpas who invented the internet for example and gps um uh we pay taxpayers billions of dollars every year to finance basic scientific research that lays the foundation for all these drugs and when a drug company sees a drug that uh has promised uh it will try and acquire from the NIH or the other government agencies that do this work fund this work uh the intellectual property uh and then they'll finish the job of running um late stage clinical trials and going through the process of gaining FDA approval i'm going to say a couple of things here that are critically important to understand to try and illustrate this the drug industry tries to take credit for the m rna vaccines that were developed to fight covid 19 and these are the vaccines that are marketed by Pfizer and it's partner in europe by on tech and by moderna here in the united states um it turns out that in the eighties nineties and early two thousands drug companies were investing in vaccines because it didn't produce they didn't produce a big return so the federal government invested through NIH DARPA and barda all of them to uh develop the technology that we now call m rna so that when the virus hit that technology was ready for moderna and Pfizer to run with but they didn't make the big investment we did we being taxpayers uh to get that technology ready to go and in the case of moderna we paid for everything and i'm not exaggerating they had never produced a drug so we stood up manufacturing uh capacity for them we paid for their late stage clinical trials and we signed advanced purchase agreements to completely de-risk the enterprise but they will tell you that they saved us it's not true we saved ourselves there's a reason that the president who cares deeply about trying to reduce the death toll from cancer has to have this new organization called uh arpa h which is going to be funded with billions of dollars to try and do something to accelerate cancer research why did why do we have to pay for that because the drug companies will not pay for the high risk early stage uh research that uh goes into getting really breakthrough new drugs uh to market so who who does this who pays for it by and large taxpayers are underpinning all the basic science drug companies are taking drugs that show promise acquiring the intellectual property and then charging whatever they want for the drugs um so that's our system in the United States of America it's completely screwed up we need to have a process more like what you described in posing this question which is well shouldn't we look at what the government invested what the company invested uh you know what would be what does it cost to manufacture the drug and distribute the drug and all of that and then arrive at a price that provides a fair return uh for investment and risk to the drug company but not any price they want to dictate that's what we have not is they get the drug from us and they get to dictate the price we don't have a system like for one time you uh referenced yeah and it's much toward detriment right and i was that it's interesting you talked about how like this profit driven model tends to focus on certain conditions and not others and i know that you focus mainly on the United States but perhaps we could get into a little bit what that means for neglected diseases on a global scale right how looking at only patients who can afford to pay these inflated prices means that we both drug companies are sort of tacitly saying well we're okay with people dying from conditions that people don't get in America are you comfortable talking about that a little bit well we only work in the United States because that is a big enough challenge for us uh i will say that drug companies want to invest only in drugs that produce a big return their profit maximizers their corporations and we don't have a way that we balance that out where we say yes but but but but taxpayers are doing the foundational research that leads to these drugs and and these are in that sense public goods uh and we need to figure out how yeah you can have a fair return but we also make sure that they're priced to maximize affordability and accessibility and in this plays out overseas with neglected tropical diseases which you reference which you know drug companies don't want to spend a lot of money on because those countries don't have a lot of money to pay for them because all the companies care about it's honest to God you know they they want us to believe that they're all about looking after our well-being they are corporations and corporations by law have to maximize profits for their shareholders shareholders and that's what they do um uh you know who invests in neglected tropical diseases the Gates Foundation and other foundations that uh put the money out to do that early stage research that changes the pricing equation should should change the pricing equation um so that we can still develop the drugs that people abroad would benefit from tremendously uh if if only we made the effort and made the investment uh which they're not inclined to do yeah that is your question yes very well very well i think a people are like looking for evidence on this they could look at the speed at which we started to develop uh Ebola treatment of vaccines once that became a threat to us versus once it became a threat to people in the global periphery by the way i will say one more thing yeah of course it's not that drug companies only hurt people in poorer countries in the world yeah it is that drug companies insist on high prices everywhere and for example um the disease cystic fibrosis is incurable and um there are new drugs that help people live longer uh they are marketed by vertex interestingly the gene that all of these uh drugs are built on uh the genetic component was identified by the former head of the NIH Francis Collins when he was doing research paid for by the NIH at the University of Michigan his his discoveries were seminal uh but still the drug companies wouldn't invest so the cystic fibrosis foundation raised money from its community to do more early stage research and when it showed promise vertex bought the intellectual property from them uh and uh brought these drugs that are built on that genetic discovery to market but in countries that have said we can't afford the price you're demanding because we only have so much money to pay for our citizens for health care because we provide health care to all our citizens vertex will let people kids because it generally affects kids and younger adults will let them die if the company if the countries want to agree to the price that they are insisting on literally let them die and say look you know if you want strike a deal that has an eye in that price for us we're not going to sell the drug in your in your country so it isn't only the poor people uh uh you know the poorer countries around the world it's patients who are stuck with a drug uh a disease that requires a high-cost drug and maybe they can't get access to it because it's not affordable for their country or them yeah yeah it's it's really pretty bleak stuff in that sense let's get on to a little bit then of how we can make this better and I know that there are approaches that are incremental and there approaches that are more revolutionary or sort of making these big leaps so let's start with talking about how this legislation that we've just seen the inflation reduction act does that make a difference how much of a difference does it make and how does it make that difference the inflation reduction act is really historic legislation that is going to save millions of people in America millions of dollars over time uh it does four big things it does many more but four big things uh one for the first time ever Medicare is going to be able to use it's it's purchasing power as the largest purchaser of drugs in this country to uh negotiate lower prices for people on Medicare for the first time ever we are going to curb price gouging by forcing companies that raise prices faster than the rate of inflation to pay a rebate uh to Medicare we're gonna that will curb their their price increases uh third we are going to limit the amount of out of pocket annually a Medicare patient can pay under the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit right now there is no annual out of pocket limit I pay for that drug I described to you before to cost almost a thousand dollars a capsule I pay out of pocket more than sixteen thousand dollars a year in 2025 there will be a limit uh of two thousand dollars no Medicare beneficiary will pay more than two thousand dollars out of pocket uh for uh Medicare Part D drugs and for for the first time starting next year people who depend on insulin in Medicare will pay no more than thirty five dollars per prescription per month uh for their insulin um these are all truly significant changes uh and begin to shift uh drug policy uh in this country begin to uh uh break the dictatorial pricing ability that the drugs drug companies have and I want to take a minute to explain why Medicare negotiation in itself is such a big breakthrough very quickly when the Medicare prescription drug benefit was enacted into law in 2003 the drug companies in the dark of night got stuck into that law something called the non interference clause that said that the secretary of health and human services could not negotiate directly with drug companies period it got stuck in in the dark of night by a man named Billy Thousand who was then share of the energy and commerce committee in the U.S. House of Representatives and within months after doing that at the behest of the big drug companies he went to work to run the big trade association for the drug companies it's called pharma at uh a salary of two million dollars a year in other words they bought the prohibition on Medicare being able to negotiate and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to keep that prohibition in place ever since then just in the last two years uh in fighting to not let Medicare negotiate over any drugs ever directly with the drug companies they spent north of two hundred million dollars to try and stop that legislation from passing um so these are all big significant important changes they are not enough uh if if if we wrote the world we would have written legislation that uh negotiated over more drugs and uh the pricing for which extended into the private sector and to people without insurance but we had to to do that to extend it to the private sector and people without insurance we needed 60 votes in the Senate because of the filibuster rules and we couldn't get one not one republican vote so it had to be passed under a special procedure called reconciliation the democrats used it they stood up to pharma and they passed the bill god bless them uh we in the course of it had um a vote i'm trying to extend the thirty five dollar insulin monthly copay to the private sector we could only get seven republican votes um and so we couldn't take it all the way there so there's much more work to do but this breakthrough is truly historic yeah let's get it it's it's good to see some progress because there hasn't been progress for a very long time uh let's talk about the difference in between a cost and a copay because i think it's easy for politicians sometimes that you know tweet insulin will cost you x and in fact it only costs you x if y and z are true so can you explain for folks what a copay is and why sometimes he's claimed to made about copay since those are not the same as costs well the big difference is the word price versus cost in our system yeah we in order to lower out a pocket cost for people we have to lower price why if you were paying a hundred dollars out of pocket for your medicine and we zero that out to nothing but we don't lower the price the overall price that hundred dollars has to be paid for it by someone and what happens is patience wind up paying higher premiums or higher taxes or getting less money in their paychecks you know half of more than half of all americans get their drug coverage and health care through their employers so if that hundred dollars still has to be paid by somebody then we wind up paying for it either with higher premiums higher taxes or getting less money in our paycheck because someone needs to absorb that hundred bucks this is very important for people to understand there's no free lunch unless we lower prices that's why pharma will always say the big drug companies will always say well what we need to do is we just need to lower everybody's out of pocket make it zero and let them have all the drugs they want and let us continue to charge any price we want but that's not there's there's no free lunch it would still have to be paid and so we fight very hard at patients for affordable drugs to help patients and policy makers understand that we need to do both we need to lower out of pocket costs for people and we need to lower the price in order to do that co-payments co-payments are what you pay when you go to the pharmacy counter and they tell you that your share of this prescription is five dollars or ten dollars or twenty dollars and lots of times employers and the insurance companies they hire to run their programs will use co-payments to try and steer you to a less expensive drug a generic yeah right so if you want a brand you're going to have to pay fifty bucks but if you take the generic you pay five bucks for example they're trying to steer you to an equally effective drug generics are by definition the same exact drug and they are trying to steer you to the less expensive but equally effective drug the problem with our country big time is that sometimes they are not used for that purpose in my case I have co-payments on all my drugs right yeah but I don't have a choice I don't have a cheaper generic I gotta I gotta take the drugs they're telling me to take and so when we misuse co-payments like that we are hurting patients and it's how we also need to change it points to how we also need to change our benefit design in this country if if we can steer a patient to a healthier or as healthy least less expensive option that makes sense but if you're charging me for something that I can't do anything about that makes no sense at all and so these are changes that we at P4AD work on and we'll continue to work on in our benefit design in this country yeah I can see they're trying to give you a price incentive to what not buy your drug in your case or be poor or be sick because you can't afford it which is rid this not the function of the incentive and it's silly can you explain how why the some drugs have generics and some don't so boy you're asking some really good questions you're going right to the heart of our system thank you a long time ago in the 80s 83 or 84 a bill was passed called the Hatch Waxman Bill and since then everyone for it refers to a concept called the Hatch Waxman Barbin and the bargain is this if you're a drug company and you bring a valuable new drug to market you get a period of exclusivity along with your you have a patent already probably but upon approval we give you a period of exclusivity where for sure no matter if your patent is old and only has a year left we give you additional years of exclusivity where you have them the nobily on that drug but at the end of that period of exclusivity generics and biosimilars biosimilars are the generic name or the name for generics for biologic drugs they're more complicated drugs but at the end of that period of exclusivity a generic I'm not a generic generics and biosimilars come to market and we use the competition from the generics and biosimilars to drive down the price the when you have one generic that comes to compete the price goes down about 15 or 20 percent two generics the price goes down 35 to 40 percent three generics you know 40 to 30 percent by the time you get five generics in the market the price is roughly five to 15 percent of the original brand name price so the hatch wax and bargain was you got a good drug you bring it to market we give you a time where you you can charge whatever you want you have exclusivity in the market but at the end of that we have competition from generic some biosimilars to lower price why are there generics and biosimilars that was your question for all drugs well some drugs are still in their period of exclusivity but the drug companies don't let competition come to market the brand drug companies they fight they file additional patents they they sign deals with generic companies not to bring a drug to market a competitor to market and pay them not to they make small changes in the drug and then file additional patents there is something called a patent thicket humera the best-selling drug in the world has like 132 patents 132 75 percent of which were filed after the drug came to market but they have four well they could be for the packaging the instructions the color of the capsule they've had everything and why because a generic biosimilars competitor has to fight it's way through all of them to bring a drug to market so we call them patent thickets it you know if you grew up anywhere near you know a place where there were thickets you know it's very hard to get through a thicket and so in some cases there is no competitor because they're in the period of exclusivity but in far too many cases there are no competitors to drive down the price because the drug companies are manipulating our system and they're very good at manipulating our system yeah yes they are exceptionally good and that has terrible results okay so we've spoken about that the way that they've manipulated the system the way that maybe that's beginning to change one thing that I'm interested in I've written about it a little bit is these ways that are perhaps more revolutionary if not always as like a cast iron safe and one of those is obviously people making their own medicines which is something that we'll see unfortunately increasingly in this country because of Bans on Access to reproductive healthcare and I wonder how you think that has the potential to change this that's we've seen like the epipensal we've seen these home brewed abortion drugs things like that do you think that has the capacity to change access or remember I'm a patient and it scares the hell out of me yeah and the reason is there was a time in the United States and in most of the world when drug companies were not regulated and they they brought you know patent medicines and you know mix it at home brews and sold them and we had no way to make sure that those didn't hurt people they killed people in some cases and then in the 20th century the government realized and our congress and our elected officials realized we needed a way to regulate this industry which would you know sell poison in some cases and they created what is now called the Food and Drug Administration. Food and Drug Administration is charged with making sure drugs are safe and effective. I'm a patient I want the Food and Drug Administration to do its job I want drugs that are safe and effective. I do not like drugs that are not subjected to some scrutiny to make sure that they do what those who are selling them claim they do so remember I'm not big on taking chances with my life and I if the drugs don't work I'll die that's that simple I'll die of cancer not not to mention I could die for a drug that's no good some drugs cause harm you know yeah even drugs approved by the FDA. I'm not a fan of home-brew drugs I'm a fan of a system that protects me and ensures that drugs are safe and effective but that's one man's perspective. Yeah I think it's reasonable to say that like we have a way to make drugs that are safe and effective and it's the Lord legislation or a system that's getting in between people and the life-saving medicines that they need and no we should certainly struggle to fix that instead of looking for ways around it even though I understand why especially with things like reproductive health care that doesn't seem like it's getting fixed anytime soon. No it's terribly sad it's heartbreaking. Yeah this whole thing is extremely and I know you've obviously seen it too but my my previous life I've worked with one of someone who works for you now in diabetes nonprofit and seen firsthand the consequences of this and it's really heartbreaking stuff to look at and I wish it just seems so unnecessary in a world where like these pharmaceutical companies make we should say like billions of dollars right it's it's not as if these people are you know driving to work in a second hand Toyota Corolla like they they are doing very well for themselves of the system right. Yeah and people will be familiar with like Farmer bro Martin Screlie the guy yeah yeah but this is just one example of a very problematic industry I think you've done an excellent job of explaining it David is there anything else you'd like to get to before we finish up here. Just Martin Screlie you you call it to mine I wouldn't take you back to Moderna and the MRNA vaccine plan. The fact that we not only developed the MRNA technology to taxpayer money but we brought the Moderna vaccine to to people with taxpayer money and in the course of doing that we minted three new Moderna billionaires. You're talking about them not driving to work and you know second hand Toyota Corolla's oh far from it. Yeah these are the people who's yachts I see in the bay I think that's disgusting three new millionaires off the back of the back of the billionaires billionaires. Yeah God it's gross isn't it yeah it can't be said enough like not only does the NAA fund the research but often the taxpayers will fund the lab right if it's at a university. Yeah. Before before before you try and pay for it again. Yeah it's a very broken system David how can people find P4AD how can people find you is there a website a Twitter or a Facebook where should they go. Go to our website patience for affordable drugs dot or just like it sounds you can leave your story if you or someone you love care about has struggled with high drug prices give us your email address we don't ask patience for money but the stories and email addresses are our power. They're the currency we trade on to make sure that the voices of people in this country are heard to counter the propaganda and lies that are put out by the drug companies. Okay yeah that's very important stuff that people can hopefully do even if they are struggling sort of materially to afford their drugs maybe they have some time so that's great and it's for FOR right not the number four. That's correct. All right great thank you so much David it's been a pleasure you've done excellent job of explaining a very convoluted and broken system. Thank you for taking this. Change your your patient man. I tried to be sometimes I'm very much not that but yeah I do appreciate your time on this Monday morning. 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You'll also hear eye opening stories through conversations with our wildlife care specialist. These are important because they are pollinators and this means that they perform a key step in the life cycle of many plant species. They pollinate many of our food crops. All episodes of Amazing Wildlife are available to stream now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. I am Robert Evans. And today we're going to talk about a specific part of Eurasia where I don't know, things are kind of on the edge of falling apart and maybe becoming something else. As I'm sure most people are aware, Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. It has not gone well and the government has recently announced that they are doing a general mobilization to bring in other 300,000 soldiers into their armed forces. The significant chunk, if not the bulk of these recruitments are coming from areas away from the on the periphery of Russian power, you might say, particularly different chunks of the Russian state where there are minority populations who have been dissident to the federation of Russia in the past. Probably the most active of these is a place called Dagestan. Most Americans probably are not super well-versed on this area. It is the furthest southern point in the Russian state. It borders Azerbaijan. It's pretty close to Turkey. This is a region that has a massive Muslim population and has been the side of a lot of resistance to the Russian state in the recent past. Today we're going to be talking about what that looks like now as the government is attempting to draft men from this part of the state. As resistance has risen up significantly within Dagestan. I'm going to be talking with Karina Avedisian. Karina is a PhD studying social movements in particularly in Russia. Karina, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. First off, I'm not an expert on Dagestan. What do you think is important for people to know about the relationship between this region and the Russian state? It's the biggest republic in the North Caucasus. It has actually independent media, still despite the really intense repression and the dozens of disappeared or murdered journalists from the republic. Canchip ties are strong in Dagestan. The announcement of mobilization and the sort of mobilization process really affects people because extended families are close. When someone is taking away it affects a lot of people. That in large part explains the level of mobilization. The other thing I want to mention is that the North Caucasus region in general, but especially Dagestan and Chechnya, just don't see themselves as part of Russia. To be honest, Russians don't really care about what happens there either. It's another country. It's a huge disconnect. There doesn't really exist this civic Russian identity. The concept of Russia as a country is to a large extent held together by sheer repression and propaganda. Yeah. I try to focus on this as part of the Russian state rather than these areas of Russia because that's certainly not the way it feels on the ground or the people feel about themselves. Yeah, exactly. You can see differences in the way police respond to these protests in Russian regions versus places like Dagestan. By Russian region, I mean places where ethnic Russians are majority. You have people or you have police arresting or detaining and arresting protesters. Whereas in Dagestan, the tactics of de-arresting people who are being kind of carted off is really significant because of the history of violence and the republic. So, abduction, disappearances and murder is very common. This is something that I've heard Dagestani protest participants express fear about. People know that that might happen. You might get identified among the protesters and you might not get detaining or arrested. You would in Moscow, for example, but you might get identified and then targeted later. Which is, yeah, obviously very frightening. One of the things that I had read kind of about part, some of the origins of the conflict in the region right now is that it had been common for some time because the economy in Dagestan, Dagestan is in the Caucasus, which is a mountainous region in southern Russia and it's where a great deal of the country's fuel comes from. There are kind of folks who will say that the government of the federation has avoided utilizing that infrastructure to the most that it can to avoid providing jobs and it's made a lot of young men join the military to become contract soldiers. In the past, that was a good way to provide for if you had a large family. You do a military contract. You're not going to get sent outside of the region. It's pretty safe. But then, of course, Putin invades Ukraine and suddenly a lot of these people who had been doing this, not because they wanted to support the Russian federation because it was a job are suddenly being sent to go fight and die outside of Karkev or wherever. Yeah. The other thing is that's why there's so many security personnel kind of internally in the republic as well. So the Republic experience is high of unemployment as mentioned poverty. It's almost by design, right? So many people just rely on the state for jobs and security services is one of the main sources of employment. But that also kind of has that double effect of being used as a tool for repression. So anytime kind of dissent comes up even when a large part of the grievances are about poverty and unemployment, and just kind of having a future, you have kind of excess of people who are ready to kind of suppress any expression of kind of dissent that might lead to problems later. And it seems like a great deal of dissent right now is coming from the Muslim pop in particularly like the Muslim religious community within Dagestan. The reason that you and I are talking right now is you shared and commented on a post without someone was sharing a piece of protest art that was referencing a recent comment by the deputy move of Dagestan. And it's a stylized drawing of several mountains on a green background that says the invader doesn't become a martyr. And if I'm interpreting that correctly, what that's saying is it's a statement of protest from within the Islamic community of Dagestan saying if you go to someone else's homeland to take part in an invasion and you die, you're not being martyred. You're not dying in a way that is that is, you know, respected by Allah essentially. Am I interpreting that correctly? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what it's saying. I found that remarkable for a couple of reasons. The first is that descend in the region originally. So, you know, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the first church in war, there was descent, but it was mostly limited to ethno nationalist movements who were very narrow in their messaging. So their grievances were, you know, just about their one ethnic group and, you know, whatever repression that they experienced. So, they kind of missed out on broader support. And political Islam became a channel for kind of representing oppositional identity. And because of that cutting across of ethnic lines through Salafism, which is kind of a structure interpretation of Islam, which is pro-Neroticization, that had much broader support and posed a significant threat to Moscow. And I want to kind of make a parallel here because mosques and religious communities across the world are actually really interesting spaces for social movement mobilization. Some of the earliest works on social movement mobilization talked about black churches in the US as being, you know, key to the civil rights movement. Absolutely. Because of all these spaces that are kind of away from the state, away from surveillance, although in Pakistan and lots of parts of Russian Muslim spaces are are totally infiltrated by the state, or they're actually, you know, state movedies or the state's eyes and ears are kind of there. But still there's these spaces. And I think that's a big kind of significant key factor in how this movement has been able to mobilize. And I'm interested in, because obviously Chechnya is another part of Russia that has a large Muslim population. There was a horrible war there, not all that long ago. That is really a prelude in a lot of ways, the kinds of violence and the kinds of repressive tactics that are being used right now by the Russian state. What sort of separates, like why didn't Dagestan kind of go the same way as Chechnya? Like how I'm kind of interested in that because it seems as if the the mopedies there are much more willing to kind of act in resistance to the state still. Is it just a factor of the violence that was unleashed on Chechnya earlier? Is there more to it? I think in large part it's yeah, I mean that's the legacy of violence and war in Chechnya, but I think it's partly because of how of this kind of historical view of Chechnya as being, you know, a threat, a problem, or the Russian Empire previously and then so be union and then now, you know, independent Russia, independent, you know. And it's really the rule of Ramzan Kadido, which plays a really suppressing role in the Republic and his security services. Chechnya has experienced post-war. I would argue it's calmer in a strange way. I mean, I was when I was doing my field work in the North Caucasus I visited Chechnya. I was in Kabardino, Blocaria, which is, you know, a couple of republics over. It didn't experience war, but I remember at the time there were counter-terrorist operations in Kabardino, Blocaria where the security services would kind of walk down whole neighborhoods and kind of storm- and-arm buildings to go after someone who had been, you know, identified as a problem and just kind of, you know, neutralize that person. They were rarely detained. They were just kind of killed. No questions asked. Then going to Chechnya from that kind of context, that stuff doesn't happen just because the security apparatus is so strong and so on, that kind of thing doesn't happen. At the same time, you feel that tension, that kind of fear. So I think that's the main reason why you're not seeing these sort of protests in Chechnya. When we talk about like, what is it reasonable to hope for here? I wonder if you have any thoughts on that from Dagestan, like in terms of resistance to both this kind of general conscription order and resistance in general to the increasing imperial aims of the Russian state. Yeah, I think it's revealing those cracks that I mentioned in the beginning about identity and then kind of this region not feeling like a part of Russia. Yeah. And I think the other thing is that it's unprecedented in many ways just in terms of its messaging and your protest movements in general are seen to kind of- when you participate in a movement, it's sort of transforming on an individual level. You feel like you're part of something, you see all these other people on the street who are agreeing with you in a context that's so authoritarian and you don't have that freedom to speak out. There's no free media in general. It's transformative and I think that's probably for me, at least as a social movement scholar, the most interesting aspects. I mean, we can't predict, we don't know what's going to happen. There might be a new wave of repression, but it's revealing these cracks and kind of almost providing this proof of the lie of this unified Russian state that is being kept together by repression in propaganda. I think the messaging also reflects a change in identity, an oppositional identity in the region. Previously, protests in the region were directed at the local leadership, so at the Republican level. So these are usually co-SNICS who are installed by Moscow, not so much to govern, but more to manage. And Chechen leader Ramzan Kadirovic is an extreme taste of this. And it was a practice, comment in imperial Russia, right? You install your own guy, but he's local, so it sits better with the population. Even if they're only there to carry out policies that are decided and so. So those protests who was for normally against the Republican authorities, their accesses, their corruption, and again, the exception to that is the law of the system, which is targeting both Moscow and the local leadership. But here, in this new wave of protest moment, the sentiment, the grievances against Putin, and that's totally now. And one of the things that is kind of remarkable is you've gotten in the wave of, and these are not just in Dagestan, but Dagestan had a lot of the protests against this general mobilization order. You actually have what looks to me, and you're certainly no more than I do. So tell me if you think my analysis is wrong, but looks to me like the regime blinking a little bit, because in the wake of the protests, you had both Putin and a number of different local leaders come out and say, we, because one of the things that was happening as soon as the mobilization started, as you saw, a lot of these people, including like doctors, healthcare workers, other kinds of professionals and industries that are generally protected from this sort of thing, getting pulled in by state forces and effectively drafted on the spot, along with protesters. And in the wake of the outcry against that, Putin himself and a number of other local leaders have come out and been like, this was a mistake. We're releasing a number of these people. These certain, you know, we're not supposed to be drafting people from these certain professions and whatnot. And to me, that looked like, well, maybe that's a little bit of a blink, but I don't know if perhaps I'm being overly optimistic there. No, I agree. And it speaks to the level of mobilization that kind of unprecedented levels of mobilization on the street. And also speaks to the fact that, you know, previously Moscow, I mean, they didn't care as much when the protests were directed at the local authorities. I mean, they did, but not like this. This is threatening. And I was listening to an interview of a protest organizer from Dagestan. He's exiled, that he's kind of, you know, in touch with the people on the ground. And he was talking about how he felt that the reason mobilization orders have been commissioned kind of to the Republican, or there was a regional authorities is on purpose. So that grievances aren't directed towards Moscow because it's a regional authority deciding on who's being mobilized. And it's the kind of deflection of blame that he thought was by design. And the interviewer asked him a couple other questions. He was saying, oh, you know, we're hearing reports about the police being really brutal. And again, he was like, no, not really. Or that's not the point. That's not the question to be asking. It's actually deflecting because, again, the grievance is not to the local police. It's actually towards Moscow, who is, you know, they're the origin of this whole problem. And I think that's a threat. Do you have any kind of advice for people if they're looking as kind of things continue to develop in Dagestan as there are more protests, which I'm sure there will be? Are there actually like organizations over there that can be supported by people, including you mentioned independent media there? I'm just wondering if you have any kind of particular advice for folks who might either want to learn more about the region and what's going on, or who might want to try and help the people who are protesting right now? Unfortunately, there's not much for outsiders to do a lot of the news. And I think it was kind of expecting the next day. It's kind of a denied context. Where I get the news is a couple telegram channels that are only in Russian. So that probably doesn't help your audience if they don't speak Russian. There's a couple Twitter accounts that I would recommend people follow. There's I don't know if I can mention that or. Yeah, please. No, absolutely. Let me quickly find the guy personally. When it comes to like where I'm able to get English language news about the region, Medusa is generally kind of like one of the places where I've gotten some. Medusa is a Russian news site that's or news organization that's banned in Russia. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, a Medusa journalist just got arrested in Dagestan by the state security services. But you can go to Medusa.io and that's one place where I've come across news that's English language. It's not the most detailed coverage, but it's kind of hard to find that in English about stuff going on in Dagestan. It is it is hard to find and I would echo that sentiment of Medusa being a good source for that. There's a researcher on Twitter named Harold Chambers. His handle is Chambers Harold 8 and number 8 and he is an analyst and he is posting kind of more detailed, you know, in the weeds up to date, day to day developments from the region. And is there anything like as we I'm kind of closing out here that you wanted to particularly get into about what's happening over there about the development of social movements in Dagestan right now that you you find particularly fascinating that you'd like to kind of talk about to the audience? Yeah, I think the context of the Russian war on terrorism in the North Caucasus plays a huge role here. And I mentioned, you know, the counterterrorist operations that Russia used to use in the region as a repression tool. So they didn't have to be cell office or kind of, you know, seen as, you know, extremist to be targeted and stuff like that, like secular Dagestanis and Chunchons were absolutely targeted and that kind of in those in those in that context of counterterrorism. And it's really the fact that you've dug a study is really tired of the repression. People leave the republic and move abroad because they've been labeled a terrorist and they don't want to die. And when their family send them money to support them abroad, they get labeled as terrorists because they're helping, you know, support a terrorist. So it's why it's also why the movement is leaderless because there's really no intelligentsia or leaders left in the republic anywhere. Anyone who had any kind of critical standpoint has either been killed or exiled. So we have to see the mobilization in Dagestanis kind of, you know, with that backdrop, people are tired of the repression. And yeah, the protests are spontaneous and the fact that it's horizontal is also unprecedented. And it obviously means that it's much harder to repress the movement and suppress it because there's no, you know, individuals to kind of target. That's interesting because that's obviously a global trend that we've seen in protest movements, not just against the Russian state, but around the world. Governments have gotten much better at not finding leaders in protest movements, compromising them, going after them, targeting them, arresting them. It's, and I think this has been a part of why all over the world, you've seen so many more horizontal movements leading street protests against different kinds of repression because it's really the only thing that can't be compromised easily by the security forces. Yeah, especially in an authoritarian context. Yeah. Well, Karina, is there anything else you wanted to say before we close out? No, no, that's it. All right. Well, why don't we talk a little bit about your plugs here because you have a podcast that you're about to be starting? Yeah, starting a podcast, it is called Obscura Stan podcast where we'll talk about the bizarre and fucked up nature of the region of Eurasia, but also more importantly how it got that way. Yeah. That's what we're doing. I can think of few more topics, more important topics for people, particularly people just where I live to understand. So many people have been affected in, you know, we're looking at the energy crisis hitting the UK and to a slightly lesser extent, potent over Europe right now. We're looking at rising food prices in the United States. All of it tied to this conflict, which people wouldn't have been surprised by if they'd been paying attention to Eurasian history and politics a little bit more. So I think that's a commendable effort and I'm excited to start listening. Thank you so much. Oh, yes. Can I mention one last thing? Absolutely. So I'm sitting in Armenia and speaking to you from Armenia. So I would just encourage your listeners to find out about what's happening. We were recently attacked by Osprey John and we have some 41 score kilometers that are currently occupied by Osprey John's soldiers. So I would encourage people to learn about the conflict and kind of pay attention to what's happening here. Yeah, absolutely. We continue to be big advocates for folks paying attention to that. And yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. You know, I had this brief period of like optimism when the White House started making statements and Pelosi visited that like and we'll see maybe that I know there's like there's a vote coming up right now in Congress to stop selling weapons to the Azareas, which would be at least a start. But I mean, you know, it the what's I think is necessary is for Armenia to have access to the kind of weapons that have been so successful at stopping for an aggression in other countries, shall we say? Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. Karina, thank you so much for your time. That's going to be our show for the day. Have a good one, everybody. Keep paying attention to stuff. You've probably never thought of a comfortable set of tires the same way you think of a comfortable pair of shoes. But then maybe that's just because you've never driven on the Cooper CS5 family of tires. The Cooper CS5 Grand Touring and Ultra Touring tires are designed to help give your car SUV or minivan a smooth ride with excellent comfort and minimal road noise. So you can keep your mind off your tires and on the drive right where you wanted. And because being comfortable on the road requires being in control, the CS5 Ultra Touring and Grand Touring also have stable edge technology designed to help enhance traction and handling. That favorite pair of shoes you like to slip on might just start to get jealous. Learn more at CooperTire.com. Go with the Cooper's. 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A white rhino's head can weigh more than a thousand pounds. That's comparable to the same weight of four full size refrigerators. You'll also hear eye opening stories through conversations with our wildlife care specialist. These are important because they are pollinators. And this means that they perform a key step in the life cycle of many plants species. They pollinate many of our food crops. All episodes of Amazing Wildlife are available to stream now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You try to conceive of a girl boss noise? No, I'm trying to think of something that's about like Italian racism and how we should all be racist against Italians because now it's important. Oh, hi, welcome to Icon Halfen here, the show where we're talking about anti-atallia racism. And also girl bosses. Finally, two great tastes that go great together. Mm-hmm. It's like mixing peanut butter and piss. That's right. Yeah. The piss being Italians. Yes, the poor being girl boss. Usually don't say things that are that obvious, but yes. With me today is Chris, James, and Robert, I'm Garrison. And we're talking about girl boss fascism today. And are we going to say Georgia? Is that how we're going to do it? Is that how we're going to say her name? Georgia, but I don't know. Georgia. Georgia. Georgia. Georgia. Melani. Georgia. Melani. Yeah. It leaves new Prime Minister. Georgia. Melani. That's what I was waiting for. Thank you. Thank you. Put some it put some Italian on it. Yeah. Spice up that meatball. Mm-hmm. So since since 2014, she's been the head of the Brothers of Italy party, which is funny, because what I think of the Brothers of Italy, I just think of Mario and Luigi obviously. That's what most people think. But Mario and Luigi also fascists. So well, they're monarchists. Yeah, they they're monarchists. They specifically serve the princess. So so Bowser, who is a girl boss? Is Bowser is your standard issue left wing polat bieiro chief type leader, whereas what Mario and Luigi are doing like Mussolini is installing a royal in power is taking it's like essentially every Mario game is recreating the march on road. I have like 10 pages to get through. Okay. Well, it's a toad's tool come into it. So since 2014, she's been the head of the Brothers of Italy party. A party with direct lineage from the fascist Italian social movement. And Melani herself has been on camera praising figures like Mussolini. And until very recently, the Brothers of Italy party, besides being a very pro plumbing, we're pretty on the fridges of Italian vomit. Here we go. Just four years ago, the party won only 4% of the votes in the last election. And now it's become Italy's largest political party claiming the greatest percentage of the vote in the last month's election. So today, we're going to talk about who Melani is, what what she believes, what she kind of what what her rhetoric is. And then also the types of how the types of ways that media has been framing her relation to fascism. Because there's definitely been this perception that like liberal feminists and mainstream media have been kind of soft on Melani because she's the first woman prime minister of Italy. And they've kind of framed her ascension to power. And like a girl boss go get it sort of way and have been downplaying her more fascist views. So we're going to talk about kind of where this perception comes from. The few ways where it's kind of correct. And some of the ways where it's I think a little off base to start off with this one of the kind of one of the biggest things that pushed this perception into the forefront was a tweet from political Europe accompanying in article. Now this this tweet again. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you. And because I hate basing our research off of things that are just on Twitter, this tweet has been referenced a lot on like television on like news and like news TV has been using this tweet a lot as well. This is this is kind of shaped the way that discussions happening on a national stage even off Twitter. But the the tweet the tweet reads in 1992 a 15 year old school girl went to join her local branch of the far right youth front in Rome. The all male group of radicals met her with the amusement 30 years later Georgia Melani is now on course to become Italy's first female prime minister. So the way that framework says like yeah, this this little girl wanted to join her Nazi club and was a boy's girl boss. And now she's finally prime minister the first one. And so yes, obviously this is very cringey. Not not great framing a lot of good girl Hitler jokes. In a more classic, we even picked up president. Listen, I'm No, really. I'm I'm happy for you, honey. Wow. A girl president. How progressive. And so takes like venture brothers. Venture brothers credit. No, uncredical support. It's just just support to venture brothers. So takes like like that like what like what we just heard a dean of venture say kind of kind of spawned a big slew of of comments. You know, I'm just going to read read some of the stuff that the people have been saying in response to stuff like that political Europe. A piece quote, begging liberals to stop praising girl boss Alini for bringing brave enough to shatter the glass ceiling in the neo fascist parties she's joined. And like why is media treating this as a freaking girl boss story? The girl bossification of Georgia Melati has been interesting to watch liberals will literally stand anybody. So there's a lot of a lot of take like that have been have been going around. There's there's been extremely viral viral tweets getting hundreds of thousands of of likes thousands of thousands three tweets and shares stuff getting referenced on national TV all kind of about this. You know people complaining the takes from political Europe and other other kind of various soft headlines emphasizing the girl boss nature being like the sweet little girl defies the odds and grows up to be the first female Mussolini. So like some of these jokes are pretty funny. I think I think they're they're funny. They're fine. There is oh probably the worst one of these takes that I found that still got hundreds of of retweets and thousands of likes was quote the American right and the American left the aesthetics are different but the effect is the same support for the rising tide of fascism. Communists are the only people now as in the past who truly opposed fascists. Well I don't far fuck sake. This is true. I for those of you following along. No. Yeah. There was a terrible Megan McCain tweet which is very funny because people definitely were standing. We'll talk about the Megan the Queen. Yes. Can't wait. I have. Yeah. So we'll talk about our good friend Megan McCain. But yeah. So you know Italy's Italy elected their first female Mussolini in a remarkable victory for both girl power and diversity in politics and people people had some good shapes. So the other the other kind of big thing that caused this perception that that like that like the liberals were literally stand anybody. The other big thing I kind of caused that was some viral quotes from Hillary Clinton talking about the role of of women in politics and referencing Milani. So some remarks from Hillary Clinton published in Italy last September. I think it was that I think it was that like the Venice film festival actually. So some quotes from an interview that she gave at the Venice film festival went viral mostly because tweets included two small clips of these quotes when she was talking about both women in politics and Georgie. Georgie. Georgie. You're doing great buddy. It's a multiple viral tweets circulated mostly with two short quotes from Clinton getting the majority of attention saying quote the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past and is certainly a good thing. And a second quote is being every time a woman is elected to head of state or government that is a step forward. Unquote. Obviously those takes in and of themselves not very good. I don't think there's a good opinions. Shocking, shocking that we are going to criticize this statement from Hillary Clinton. I know. This is this is rare for us. It's you know it's it's I'm surprised as well. But these kind of are slightly cherry picked from a larger section of this interview discussing women in government and how the far right is starting to use tokenized women to uphold patriarchy and conservatism. So the first quote's taken from this from a translation of an interview that that that Clinton did at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022 prior to Melani's apparent victory in the Italian elections on September 25th. So she do it in Italian. She speak Italian. No, but it was only published in Italian. I so were translating from Italian back into English. It's a double translation. Yes. But the so in in a section of the interview talking about the increase of women in government in governmental leadership roles, a translation from her remarks in the larger section of this interview reads quote the election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past and a certainly a good thing. But then as with any leader, women or a man, she must be judged by what she does. I never agreed with Margaret Thatcher, but I admired her determination clearly than the ideas are voted for. I admired her determination to what stamp on the neck of the working class. Fuck off. Also does does she really oppose Margaret Thatcher's policies? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I believe that one. No, that lady's dead in the world is better for it. Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power? Yes, of course. Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary desquads in northern Ireland? I don't know about that. There's this thing that you get with like people talking about all of these ghouls where it's specifically like a centrist thing where it's like well certain things are just admirable traits no matter about who has them and you can admire that trait. And I was like no, it's it's not like there were a lot of men in the SS who you know, we're we're willing to do things that you would call brave, but it doesn't mean you have to consider them admirable. Right. I think like you don't have to have respect for that. You don't have to hand it to the Nazis. Exactly. Like just fuck certain people. Yeah, they're contribution to the world is bad. You can just stop stop that. Yeah. Margaret Thatcher being a good example. I have kind of the same thoughts on the inclusion of Todet inside the new Mario Kart games. It's just really it's it's just you're signifying it, but it's not actually a step forward for the Tod race. It's so in the next section of the interview, Clinton also acknowledged it. There's a question to come out against woke Mario Kart. And the next section, Clinton also acknowledges a conservative women politicians role in upholding patriarchal government saying quote, women on the right are protected by patriarchy because they are often the first to support the fundamental pillars of male power and privilege today in America. The right wing leaders are very much against abortion. So she did like it was part of this section talking about how women who are on the right and are running as conservative politicians actually support all of the all the things that keep patriarchy alive and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. Well, it's it's true centrist and right. It's half of a good take and half of a terrible exactly exactly exactly exactly. So a lot of his and peanut butter again. So yeah. So our snippets of her comments embarrassing, re women being a break from the past always being a good thing. Yes, most certainly. Are they taken out of context enough to change the scope of what's being said? I suppose that's subjective. But I just thought that's interesting that there was very select few quotes that were getting a whole bunch of traction and her larger statements are actually slightly more interesting. Yeah, go go read the article. Don't do the Alex Jones shit of getting mad at a headline. Yeah. Or yeah. Yeah. Like come on people. You have to be better than this. And I think it's still to pay. You know, I see the same thing whenever I'm playing Mario Sunshine and there's the graffiti. And you can you can get mad at just saying is the graffiti all over Duffelino Paza. You can get mad about that. But once you actually start learning how Bowser Jr. was treated as a kid is it's you there's actually more there's there's more that you actually can understand about what's going on and what leads to that behavior from Bowser Jr. Very identifiable. Everybody understands those references. Gareth's good work. Yeah. I just want to say that there is only one square in Italy that matters. And that is Piet Salioreto. And you can you can Google it. I just I love the juxtaposition of garrison struggling over every single word that's in the in the neighborhood of Italy. And then James just perfectly saying some fucking Italian shit. It's great. My Italian is bad. My Italian comes exclusively from your Italians much better than anyone else here's maybe I know I swear swear other managed band X is how I know a couple of curse words from watching my uncle's play pool when I was a kid. But that's about all I've got. I rely on that hand gesture which works very well in hand gestures are 80% of Italian. Yeah. Yes. It's true. Okay. So now having now exhausted every conceivable Italian joke we could proceed with the script. Oh, no. We can actually proceed with an ad break. Do you know what else isn't supportive anti-italian racism? Mm-hmm. Who won't kill Miss Lini and hang him upside down in a square? I mean probably the current prime minister of Italy. Yeah. That's true. Also probably these advertisers. Okay. And we are back. So there was there's been this kind of perception that the media kind of by and large dropped the ball on this one. And this element was pretty widespread among leftists that they kind of there was a lot of emphasis on the the breaking the fascist glass of ceiling and less on the fascist part. There was even people like the MSNBC host Medi Hassan who ran a whole segment on his show about kind of mainstream liberal media. Let's downplaying the fascistic elements of Milani in headlines in favor of the girl power angle. What's been so depressing is to see so much of the quote unquote liberal media, the mainstream media, the MSN giving a past to Maloney or playing down her and her party's fascist roots focusing more on the fact that she's female and less on the fact that she's you know fascistic. That has been deeply, deeply depressing to see. There was the Washington Post headline. Georgia Maloney could become Italy's first female prime minister. Here's what to know. Now here's what you wouldn't know from that headline. You wouldn't know that she has ties to fascism. But hey, she's female. Now there was the headline in the financial times. We could pull that up as well. Likely victory for Italian right portends risks but no lurch into extremism. Don't worry, no lurch to extremism even though they just elected card carrying extremists. But still hers is a heartwarming tale isn't it? I kid you not, this was the tweet from Politico Europe. Let's pull up the tweet from Politico Europe. In July 1992 a 15 year old schoolgirl rang the doorbell at a local branch of the youth front, a far right movement in Rome and asked to be let in. This weekend that same schoolgirl could become Italy's next prime minister. Wow. Forget the fascism. Forget the fascism. Focus on the inspiration there. Then there was this op ed in the New York Times. Georgia Maloney is extreme but she's no tyrant. Well, that's all right then. At least she's not a tyrant. There was this op ed in the Atlantic which argued that the most immediate concern about Italy's new government is not any threat to the country's democratic institution. Still less a return to fascism. Did you notice a trend yet? It's not as bad as you think. This isn't really fascism. So we'll talk a bit more about media coverage of Maloney's election in a bit and how I think some people are desperate to see the stupid Democrat lib's shill for fascism trope, especially with the whole girl boss thing. They actually kind of miss how the framing of Maloney's fascist ties has been perceived on a broad scale. But first I want to get into who she actually is, what her views are and what her election means. So at least a home. Italy is home to 60 million people. Which is the sentence you have a problem with Rob? And then we should just move on. And it's content until Europe's third largest economy. When it comes to the actual election, the right wing coalition that Maloney led one around 44% of the vote with Maloney's brothers of Italy party getting around 26% for the Senate race. So in all around three out of four voters did not vote for Maloney and one in three didn't even vote at all. No surprise there. But overall that means like only one in six Italian adults voted for the brothers of Italy party. And that does that does make them the biggest party in the new parliament. But it's long term legitimacy is still kind of in question because she was leading a larger right wing block. But the but the actual party that she's in and leads got like 26% of the vote. So it's right. It's I think that's an important perspective on like how long she'll actually stay in power. Italian politics are kind of known for their kind of residing government not lasting very long. There's usually a pretty high turnover rate. So we'll see. It's an interesting composition of like moderate ish right wing people and then some more hard core. It's the people who used to be the League of the North. I think are the second largest party. So it's not like a homogenous block that she's in charge of. So it'd be kind of interesting to see how they hold together. Yeah. And I think Maloney can be an example of what political scientists call gender washing when female politicians adopt a non-threatening image to blunt the force of their extremism. I think you can see this as well with Daisy inside Mario Kart for the Wii. Extremely brutal character playstyle very brawly but you know she acts very nice. Yeah. She just like just powers through other other carts on the track. And it's it's it's it's to this slightly worked perception of what Daisy actually does. So and Maloney's signature look involves flow egg outfits in pastel shades kind of like Princess Peach and to uninformed foreigners her aesthetic could look like female empowerment. She poses as like a defender of women even though her party has rolled back women's rights just like in the 2006 Princess Peach game. She was did brutal suppression of protests around the mushroom kingdom. So David a broader author of Mussolini's grandchildren fascism in contemporary Italy wrote in political Europe. Get funny. This is a very different take from political Europe in this one. Uh quote Maloney owes much more to the moderate forces in what Italians call the center right alliance. They've allowed her the opportunity to present herself as part of the mainstream. Not just because she's been softening her policies at least in presentation but also because the center right politicians jumping on her bandwagon has given her a veneer of respectability and credibility. Um you can see this in Super Smash Bros. Brawl when Wario shows up in a biker outfit not wearing the regular Italian uniform and they just let him play like Mario Luigi are wearing their proper outfit and warrior and just like showed up in like like a leather jacket and like ripped shorts. That's not okay but it gave him the the veneer of respectability because others allowed it to take place kind of the kind of the same thing here with Maloney at the same time attempts by the mean like center left rivals to make the election about this kind of ghost of fascism spreading again through Maloney have proved unsuccessful. Voters by and large did not buy the narrative kind of that that the left was trying to push that Maloney was this reincarnation of fascism. They just it just that that they were not they were not convinced enough to affect the election results in any meaningful way. Same way Nintendo is not convinced that putting Wallweeji in the new Smash Bros will actually lead to more people buying the game. Italian essayist Roberto Slovenio wrote quote the far right can succeed in Italy because the left has failed exactly as in much of the world to offer credible visions or strategies. The left asks people to vote against the right but it lacks the political vision or an economic alternative. And I think these are all the kind of factors that actually led Maloney to win this election. Should we talk a little bit about the sort of democratic party like five star alliance thing that was happening. Sure if you could win a do like a TLDR on that that would be great. So all right long ago in a galaxy far far away Italy had a very very large and powerful left. And then with the Soviet Union fell so that they had a Communist party the Communist Party was like one of the most powerful Communist parties in the world that wasn't like a sort of like dictatorial ruling party. But when the Soviet like when the US is our felt it like voted to dissolve itself basically and became the democratic party and all of their sort of militant like much of the militants basically turned into libs. And you know I mean any Italian left like held together for kind of a long time after that because they had you know there's the there's a very long tradition of sort of an extra part of inventory left. And like specifically an anarchist left in Italy but like the modern I don't know it's kind of a shit show like in terms of actual party politics like there's there was this thing called the five stars movements which was like kind of like basically astral turf by a billionaire is this like very weird very like early 2010s party that was like doing the whole sort of like we're going to do direct democracy by like online polls things it has this like really weird mishmash they're like the main social democratic force. Yeah well a social sort of but like they're very weird like like I don't know you'll get things from them like okay we want like like they're not a normal social democratic party right they're close to like the pirate party but like way we're there like so you'll you'll you'll get people in this party who are like you know who were you are like you know sort of like old school like like leftist militants because this is where sort of like the energy was going right but also like there's like anti-vaxxers in it it was just it was just really weird ideological like sort of mishmash and then when they sort of got into power like none of these people had ever been in politics before and so like you know you'd get someone who was like the head of garbage collection right who's from this party and they have no fucking idea how to collect garbage right and it was it's this real shit show because like you know and then you have the democratic party which are basically sort of just like lib hacks at this point and this meant that like you know and they they eventually sort of align with each other to try to keep like other like fascist basically like right wing groups out of power but they like they they also like had it alliance for a little bit with one of the right wing parties it's it's an incredibly like bizarre story ends like I'm honestly like deserves like its own episode one day but yeah yeah they're very weird they're not ineffective left thing at all they're just very very sort of like mishmash confused populist thing and it didn't like they yeah like they they definitely did not sort of like succeed in preventing an alternative etc etc it was I don't know kind of a disaster yeah it's at least like it's worth noting as well I think that like anti-fascism is sort of baked into the myth of the Italian republic right like that's what the republic rests on that's where it comes from that's creation myth but like much in the same way as people living in the United States will be familiar with how these creation myths kind of lose all relevancy apart from like some kind of totemic meaning like their repetition has some kind of linked to that but they don't really have any any value in in the contemporary discourse in terms of animating the way people act I think you could say that that's happened in Italy right like people talk about people in institutions talk about anti-fascism as where they come from it is foundational to Italy's democracy but it's been so subsumed into structures of power that it that institutional discussion of anti-fascism has lost its relevance from like the street fighting like anti-fascism that created the republic in the first place so that concept is kind of defanged along with like Italian liberals have always walked hand in hand with like vicious interests and the right wing right like from even previous two fascism like there was an adequate liberal monarchy right so Italian liberalism isn't necessarily this anti-authoritarian force it was briefly like it got made to be briefly by the organized working class movement but it hasn't been and it's going back to not being yeah I mean I think I now think we should may as well get into Milani's actual like views and what she actually believes in this process which I mean what she actually believes in this process is maybe slightly different things but we'll at least at least start so Milani's party the brothers of Italy party was formed to quote carry forth the spirit and legacy unquote of the Italian social movement or the the MSI the and and the the MSI is the descendant of Mussolini's national fascist party it's it's it's like it has a direct lineage they even have the flame right they are still using the same local which is to flame on his tomb I think if that's where it comes from right yeah yeah great stuff so Milani has said that quote LGBT lobbies are out there to harm a woman and and they're and they're attacking the family by destroying gender identity she's made statements about George Soros calling him an international speculator more on more on that in a sec yeah I get who says that that Soros finances global mass immigration that threatens a great replacement of white native born Italians yeah Milani shows affinity for other kind of authoritarian strongmen like the the the marine le pen who's the leader of the of the national rally party in France that's a strong woman in that's not a man it's part of this section on strong men like political political strongmen okay she's she's she's previously supported as as Joe Rogan taught me garrison strong times make hard men and also what I've learned from that well she's what is a woman so yes yeah strong man but like Milani is previously supported Putin although she's kind of lowered that enthusiasm since the invasion since the invasion of Ukraine she has she does have a pro Ukraine position on that publicly but she's a expressed kind of affinity for the types of other fascist leaders across Europe we see in Sweden we see in Poland we see in Hungary she kind of aligned aligned herself with some of some of that kind of trend inside Europe Milani wants to ban same sex couples from adopting children and possibly dissolve same sex couples legal parentage over the children that they've already adopted her party has sought to ban a cartoon featuring a bear with two mothers arguing that kids should not be seeing same sex adoption as natural or normal because it's not so basic kind of right wing censorship of materials that they don't like I don't think children should be allowed to watch cartoons with bears in them okay good for you it's going to reduce their readiness when it becomes time to fight the bears Milani also wants to ban gate allians from traveling elsewhere for like surrogacy so like so like they can't they can't leave the country to get to get like to to have them become parents in return that's like it's this is this is this whole whole thing I'm gonna read a quote from Ruth Ben Gaet of a professor of history in Italian studies at New York University quote since 2017 she has tweeted repeatedly that Italian identity is being deliberately erased by globalists such as soros and European union officials who have conspired to unleash quote uncontrollable mass migration so normal normal stuff there and more on so so in in a in a speech in in a few speeches and repeatedly she refers to financial speculators and has called people like George soros international speculator and you know when when she says financial speculators I don't think she actually means just people who speculate about finances I think she means something slightly different Michael Benchloss who is a kind of history political person who works for NBC MSNBC PBS had a really good thread on on this and I think it's important like this is this is a mainstream media guy like this is not coming from antifil 161 on Twitter this is like coming from like like in terms of like mainstream media actually talking about this quote the new Italian prime minister says that quote we will never be slaves at the mercy of financial speculators sounds just like 1930s in Italy and Germany no thanks for the memories Mussolini enjoyed publicly referring to Jewish people as financial speculators who needed to be controlled when a fascist leader speaks whether it be in Europe or America never brush aside what you are hearing as meaningless rhetoric do not fail to learn from the history of the 1930s history of the 1930s shows us that fascist leaders in the United States have been very eager to link us and pool resources often in secret with fascist leaders in Europe monitor carefully and beware and please never take it at face value when and if fascist leaders in America and Europe tell you that they have no personal or political animus towards Jews or other minority groups in society too many examples in history tells us the opposite unquote so that is like you know regular MSNBC NBC people being like hey when she says this thing she beats Jews should should we also talk about like the way parts of like the left on Twitter reacted to this and also the sort of history of like how some people were like oh wow she's calling out the capitalist like you guys are like no that's not how that I saw a lot of this is like you guys are maybe the don't you ever lived like she immediately like acts the I know she like this the same thing we see with people like like doagan even right what she's saying she she's not saying that you know international capital is bad because it hurts the poor people or workers she's she's mad about it because it's a because it's a threat to traditional identities it's it's it's it's a threat to the the way that you want the the idea of the family it's the way it's it's it's threatening all of these things that are about you're like god family country brotherhood shit it's not about actual poor people working class people at all that's not that's not what it is it's it's not a good criticism of capitalist modernity just to just to propose another form of more like authoritarian capitalist modernity it's it's it's it's it's not it's not good the original fascists in in Italy did the same thing when they denounced like british um pluricrats it's it's it's not it's not the it's not a good critique of capitalism wait and we should put it out to that like like so miter Savini who was like the the the former like he basically until this lesson he was like the guy he was in charge of the right wing like he he's a guy who got like arrested basically for trying to sink a migrant boat like so that that's actually this guy he sucks um and but he he would do this like for more explicitly he would do you know like specifically use Marxist terminology to push right wing stuff so he he had a speech where he talked about like the reserve army of labor which is that this concept of Marxism that's about like but basically what Marx is arguing that like like capitalism inherently produces this like quote unquote like reserve army of labor like industrial army of labor which like an enormous mass of people who are unemployed you've been spit out of labor process and you know okay like and and and like Marx is like Marxist pro these people which is a very important thing he's like these people are part of the poll theory but they've been spit out of like you like the capital wage relation to spit them out and they they're they're they're they're just sort of like regulate like wages must have happens but also there are people who've just been sort of like disenfranchised etc etc so V.A. when he talks about the reserve army of labor specifically is like there is a reserve army of labor uh these people are immigrants to North Africa and like the like the elites are like shipping these people into Italy to like destroy your jobs and it is it is again very very important that you understand this is what he like when he's using the Marx term he is using it he is using it Marx racism and not like yeah Marx anti capitalism and you you need to be able to tell the difference between these two things because yeah like especially in time politics like this this is the thing that happens like people people will use like even literally explicitly stuff that is from Marx but they will use it to be like we need to like machine gun every like boat of small children trying to flee Libya like it's like cherry yeah cherry picking these these bits of Marxism and then arranging them into a racist as fuck collage that you used to justify your bigotry yeah it's fashion it did that the first time it's doing it again then and other thing that kind of that is that's notable in case people have not have not seen it there has been a lots of video going around of of Mulani openly praising um uh Mussolini saying quote I believe most Lenny was a good politician everything he did he did for Italy and there have been no other politicians like him in the past 50 years that now these interviews all come from the mid 90s she has since said that uh her opinions on Mussolini have changed not she has not she has not said what her opinions have changed to yeah just saying that they were changed but this was this was these interviews all come from when she was when she was a young plucky girl getting into the boys not the club of and leading the youth wing of a fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini's dictatorship since since her her own modern party the brothers of Italy which was again started in 2014 emerged from the fascist national alliance which grew out of the Italian social movement which was founded by Mussolini regime officials and she still uses the same logo for her current mario and Luigi sorry of brothers of Italy party um so yeah let's have let's have one more ad break and then we'll talk about how mainstream media has been talking about the new girl boss Mussolini and we are back oh I'm so excited I'm so excited so we're actually gonna talk I'm first gonna read some stuff from the intercept which is not I would not say is actually mainstream media it's a little bit outside of that but it sets a good stage for the rest of the stuff that we will be talking about which actually is dealing with how mainstream media has been framing uh uh Milani's uh election so quote the media got this right much of the time giving predominant billing to Milani's far right nationalism but numerous English language headlines focused solely on her being Italy's first woman prime minister it's tempting to say that her position as a woman leader should be considered irrelevant given her and her party's vile anti-immigrant nationalist racist anti LGBTQ plus policies but ignoring her womanhood misses some crucial points about her political ideology being a woman a white woman that is is not in conflict with Milani's fascism white supremacy is always relied on active enforcement by white women especially when it comes to upholding racist po nationalist narratives so yeah I think that's that's that's a good stage for kind of how every other headline and article we're gonna talk about here uh let's start with uh the guardian the guardian ran a piece saying quote the election of Italy's fascist adjacent uh Georgia Milani is a public reminder that women can be just as awful as men that's a good headline and this was was was this was the guardian you west the guardian UK this was guardian UK interesting yeah fashion is and and this and this article was actually a chef guardian and this this article is actually directly in opposition to Australia's sky news headline uh Georgia Milani is not a fascist um this is this is a next article which is directly in opposition to this sky news article which is kind of funny um uh NPR's morning edition went with quote a far right group with neo fascist roots wins big in Italy's election um a cbs morning's host said Milani rejects the label of fascism while embracing its symbols just it symbols just it's symbols you know what that like they were specifically talking about like the actual like iconography that they directly lift like this like the slogans like brotherhood god country type things and like like the logo and it's it was a part of a larger thing around oh around fascism look we'll actually get more into that on our Tucker Carlson's section uh good the washington post headline quote the mainstreaming of the west's far right is complete and then opened that article with saying in the land that invented fascism the far right is back in power Milani has a lengthy record of extremist rhetoric has embraced the white supremacist narrative of the great replacement theory and has engaged in frequent dog whistling to a radical base uh the Atlantic had a good piece titled the return of fascism in Italy um saying the brothers of Italy which Milani has led since 2014 has an underlying and sinister familiarity the party formed a decade ago to carry on the spirit and legacy of the extreme right in Italy which dates back to the Italian social movement the party that formed in place of the national fascist party which was banned after world war two now just weeks before the 100th anniversary of the march on Rome the october 19 22nd event that put Mussolini in power Italy may have a former uh Italian social movement activist for its prime minister and a government rooted in fascism so that's like overall there was a lot of really good like most of the of the extremely uh reference or viral kind of articles on this had decent headlines and decent content actually emphasizing the fascist nature now it's funny because the Atlantic had this return of fascism in Italy one but the Atlantic also ran an op ed piece titled Milani's election win is not a vote for fascism um which later changed its title to Italians didn't exactly vote for fascism um which to its credit still discusses uh Milani's links to fascism but it questioned how much power she actually will have to enact said fascism um but so there was there was some like both sides in going on on some and i'll a lot of these news outlets they'll put one up they'll put one piece out that's actually very good about centering the fascist rhetoric another one being like eh she may be a fascist but it's not like she could do much and she's a woman i i i think this is kind of like i think i think this is kind of a post j6 thing like i i i i i i think if this had happened in like 2017 or 2018 i don't think the limited media would have been like as willing to just do this i absolutely that is that is undoubtedly true um i think i think they kind of like like like liberals in general kind of were shaking out of their complacency when there's sort of like beautiful symbols were under like finally actually came under attack and not just like us routers ran a confusing headline titled nationalist Milani sets to smash Italy's glass of sea lake and become premier which is really just just sounds super weird nationalist Milani smash his glass of sea lake it's just like it's like yeah i guess the coffee has never been nasturanga suit that that's what it's what that was one of the weirder headlines because it still has nationalist in it but it has the whole glass ceiling bit which is just like yeah why there was another guardian uk piece that had the headline uh italy's georgia milani is no musilini but she may be a trump which is an interesting article um it it has some a lot of it's actually pretty reasonable uh and emphasizes her more recent comments trying to align herself more with the modern u.s republican party rather than any kind of form of 1930s style of fascism uh quote hawkish on foreign policies orthodox on economic policies nostalgic nationalist and inimical to civil liberties this right wing politics is illiberal at heart but it would aim for respectability in what used to be called the establishment including by not undermining the rule of law in the way that hungarian prime minister victor or ban has done unquote so there it kind of i do like the there is some things that are worth we're thinking about in terms of how she has a lot in the past year tried to align herself more with the modern republican party in the states which still is as we discuss in the show a lot is kind of getting more fashy uh i would say so um so i i will say it is it has i don't know if you can hack about this but it has been very funny she she managed to sort of like lose like the like really hard line like american right wingers because she did some sort of like pronato e things and so now there's like like like like like sort of no bitch and a whole bunch of other people like that were posting about how like she's like an op and she was part of some i don't think i don't even i don't even think sort of sort of sort of know that you even believes that because i don't i don't i don't i've seen much more people be very enthusiastic about her than people being critical of her who are on like the fascist right in the states yeah i mean i don't know like there's definitely was especially like there's whole thing about her being like member of the aspin institute that i think was happening for like i don't know maybe maybe maybe there's just a thing like right after she got like elected i don't i don't know i mean yeah on kind of on this note of of her trying to align more with like modern united states conservatism um in one of their newsletter is politico included that uh melani has appeared at c pack this past year and the national prayer breakfast and uh and it did did join the aspin institute in 2020 uh but she and steve bannon were filmed strategizing together as far back as 2018 and bannon instead of her back then quote you put a reasonable face on right wing populism you get elected um so her and bannon have been strategizing for years she's at c pack this past year she gave a speech there that uh tucker was very enthusiastic about in his segment about her that politico newsletter that included the bits about bannon and c pack also had i think this line which sums up some of my thoughts on this quote you've already read in dozens of headlines that melani will be italy's most far right leader since miscellini but don't fall for the trap of reducing this far right fire brand to simple labels like the italian donald trump or victor or band or marine lipenn global takeaway right wing populism is getting smarter it could have died off with trump selection loss or borrach johnson's humiliating ejection from downing street but that isn't happening so i have a few more of a few more things here which will lead into kind of how the right has been talking about this um there was a scene an article on the victory that had lined uh the conditions are perfect for a populist resurgence in europe uh which also referenced the anti immigration suite in uh democrats who are expected to play a major role in the new government after winning the second largest share of seats in the general election last month uh the party has been now mainstreamed and initially had its roots in very strict neo-nazism overall i was less happy with some of the new york times headlines uh relating to melani's election there was there was the the cheeky headline georgia melani is extreme but she's no tyrant uh which is of again a weird way to frame a headline um but even that piece still opens with this line saying quote it happened here again nearly 100 years since the march on rome italy on sunday voted in a right wing coalition headed by a party directly descended from muslin east fascist regime and this is melani is the first post fascist leader to win a national election in italy after world war two and her party is the air to the italian social movement the reincarnation of the long dissolved and constitutionally banned fascist party so weird headline still it includes stuff in the article but in the age of social media and honestly on news media headlines are way more important unfortunately yeah um and there is an an actual new york times article not just not just opinion piece have the headline uh melani wins voting in italy and breakthrough for europe's hard right another times piece read uh europe looks at italy's melani with caution and trepidation melani posed to be the country's first far right leader since muslinie so still not the worst not the best from the new york times which i mean no no shockers there um now on to kind of the right so the right had a really big mix of reactions based on how the left was talking and liberals were talking about this there was a lot of enthusiasm coming from the right a lot of people on the right questioning the fascist framing being like i can't believe i know i mean we can talk about the megamakain tweet everywhere to want some woman in power until it's a conservative woman in power this one bright barter reporter said quote calling her muslinie just because she's italian is racist which is yeah this is great what are the best what are the best tweets about this laveron spicer said so everyone calls melani a fascist can anyone offer proof of that most people most of people just replied with videos of her praising muslinie um yeah yeah the twitter will ban you for the american muslinie picture lore and bobbert had the extremely extremely bad tweet uh this month sweeten voted for a right wing government now italy voted for a strong right wing government the entire world is beginning to understand that the woke left does nothing but destroy november eight november eight is coming and the usa will fix our house and senate let freedom rain um great great prouds there uh just shouting at cloud but i i it is fresh it is actually super messed up to be praising sweetens new right wing government because they're pretty pretty bad the wall street journal had the great headline melani is no fascist but can she revive it leaves economy of what is that when that is perfect that's what it really is yeah that's the classic yeah well i'm i'm i'm very excited in about eight months when the Italian economy is like like it makes the british economy look fucking great when the watch is going to post their turn around like can some other random person save italy that's not saying awesome mario yeah like somebody further to the right and they'll just continue to be like well maybe it's good for the economy the economy i have running in my super mario rpg game is better than the current uk economy so again it's not saying much more on that later a fox news headline in the lead up to the election read italy on track to elect first right wing prime minister since world war two first female to hold office i really i really do this one thing i really need to get people like is is is is fucking silver bearless goanie joke to you like the answer should be yes but also like come on man like that was a power forever a few days later another fox headline read malani's Italian election win renews spotlight on europe's continued migrant woes great great great have a look there that's definitely what we should be focusing on and so now onto friend of the pod tucker carlson so on September 26th tucker carlson ran a 15 minute segment titled we live in a fake democracy and there will be a revolution like italy so the segment was on the election of malani and how she's daring to address the issues that voters really care about but aren't allowed to talk about like the attacks on the family immigration the unpopular climate change policies that are ruining the economy aren't allowed to talk about that's what bonus gody has literally been saying whatever the fuck comes into his brain for like 30 years at this point that was that was a big thing of the tucker segment was that voters have all these issues they care about but they're not allowed to talk about it's actually illegal in some places to talk about this that's an actual quote from what he's at and obviously tucker office key did her links to muslimy style fascism while still praising the fascist rhetoric that to malani as spouses here is a clip from the segment she's not the first person to say this people have said it before but she's just been rewarded for saying it that's the point the population likes it this is what they actually want they're not that worried about global warming they don't want open borders they think the woke stuff is absurd they want to see what they think and now it's obvious because she just won and so even in this country the people running and benefiting from a deeply corrupt and doomed system are hysterical watch the reaction to them i want to start today by talking about a politician on the right who we should all be worried about who's on the rise today a politician who has brushed off accusations of fascism what separates us from let's say Italy who elected a fascist she is from fascist roots they far right political party whose roots go back to post world war two neo fascist a party that has its roots in Italian fascism it's roots in Italian fascism to find that for us if you would Joe Scarborough oh you're an idiot you can't but the point is fascist means unacceptable whatever this chick is saying you're not allowed to agree with they're very worried that that many Italians do agree with it so she has to be completely unacceptable don't read further she's a fascist so yeah that's that sucks that's not great i i don't need to waste any more time talking about to talk her segment because it's typical to to talk her carol and stuff pretty fascistic pretty awful chanting the rumberg at the end of every time you can't say anyway um so yeah kind of the reaction was as one might expect american right wing operatives have celebrated her rise to power for example Keith Roberts head of the heritage foundation drew on some of the familiar kind of language in terms of uh and i'll just i'll just say this this is what he said about her victory on twitter this can be a trend conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as to what it is us versus them every day people versus globalist elites who shown they hate us so familiar dog whistles and shit but to kind of close this up i'm actually going to do uh i'm going to do a guy debord quote one of our favorite philosophers on this show can we put a little French on it can we have guida boe guida boe quote yeah yeah so he he wrote the situation the situation is phosphor this in 1968 italy sums up the social contradictions of the entire world as such it is a laboratory for international counter revolution um oh yeah so and hilariously they held out longer than the french did so well what what what he's trying to say there is that it's a way to try out social change and try out the suppression of like progressive social change yeah um and it's like a model for the rest of europe um like it's like it's it's it's his own like miniature model that you can try out things and see how they'll react on a on a grounder european political scale um and kind of rough in in the in the vein of that i'm actually going to do a quote from one of the Washington post articles about what what what one one of the better articles about uh melani to kind of uh finish finish up the types of stuff that i wanted to talk about so if there's been one dominant story in western politics over the past decade it's that the far right is no longer beyond the pale indeed it has taken over the right wing mainstream in many countries including and arguably most significantly the united states in France the far right has long been the leading force of the opposition in spain it's also gained ground in Sweden a party originally founded by neo nazis and other right wing extremists will now be the second largest faction in parliament in hungry in poland the far right is already in power so just in terms of this overall trend of how people are trying to mainstream far right things and how they're getting more normalize across europe in the united states here and the types of aesthetics that they're using to gain such ground because the italian voters were not convinced by the left's attempts to paint melani as a reincarnation of musalini the way that she wrapped her fascism in contemporary u.s style conservatism was convincing and the left did not offer any viable alternatives to fix the problems that the country's facing so she got 26% of the vote which was enough to get a majority so yeah that's that's kind of that's most this stuff i have on the girl boss musalini any any other any other uh comments on how the right has been talking about this how liberals have been talking about this how media has or anything at all before we close up no uh i wish her the best of getting the strung up in the street yeah it's very funny to turn pictures of her upside down people tell you it's not funny it is funny you know i like the the 2020 cdb turning into 1920s but like tragedy as far as version of it but this means we can do it funnier we can we can do it funnier we can't all go to italy wearing mario costumes uh that's right we can we can do it we can do it funnier it's always possible to be more funny that's what we strive for so yeah i'm still laughing about the brothers of italy thing that's i have it's pretty funny anyway uh go have fun fighting anthropomorphic lizards who steal the princess and hang her in a cage and go race around the mushroom kingdom on your way to save her with your brother that is how i spend most of my free time yeah and the mushroom kingdom in the mushroom kingdom jumping on lizards yeah yeah let's let's uh let's go let's go oh you drive a truck because when you've got a job that needs doing you can trust your truck to get it done and to trust your truck you need to be able to trust your truck tires that's where the Cooper Discover 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can help you be there without having to be there when it comes to communication simple is better learn more at ringcentral.com ring central simpler communications hi i'm ebony mone and i'm rick Schwartz and we're here from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance we're the host of amazing wildlife a show from iHeartRadio that deep dives into the fascinating world of the animal kingdom and our conservation efforts through San Diego Zoo partnerships rhinos are huge a white rhinos head can weigh more than a thousand pounds that's comparable to the same weight of four full size refrigerators you'll also hear eye opening stories through conversations with our wildlife care specialist these are important because they are pollinators and this means that they perform a key step in the life cycle of many plants species they pollinate many of our food crops all episodes of amazing wildlife are available to stream now on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hello and welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how everything is falling apart and today we are talking about how the United Kingdom agree bridge and north and island is continuing to fall apart and James can i can i say great job nail bit thank you buddy out of the park i've got you absolutely just stunning work introducing this podcast yeah i i've bought the level of commitment that british people have bought to governing half of the world for centuries i have my coffee cup says fuck it and that that's where we're back with this one that's exactly what we wanted from you yeah i'm incredibly sad about the plight of my home country and continue to be so that i'm going to explain the reason for my sadness to garrison and chris and robert today one of the reasons one of the reasons for my sadness i okay so what i want to talk about today is Elizabeth truss listress i want to talk about the british cost of living crisis and i think more broadly i want to talk about like how we consent to be governed by people who do not give a single fuck about our well-being well now James that's an experience that only the british have so that's correct yet it's it's known to be not something that much of the colonial periphery experience for centuries yeah which we fought the the monarchy away now we're free beat beat the monarchy garrison yeah what's it that's a bold we garrison from a canadian yeah that's right your people trying to stop it yeah that's all we did was invade you a couple of times don't think you can sneak in that and then ambiguity of accents my us passport is on the way on the way on the way yeah so was the queen of anglitz mm-hmm yep listress gonna come take that away king Charles it's gonna make it not allowed i do have to get a new canadian passport with the king on it now which sucks that was the the most i guess we all learned a lot because it's been so long since you had a change of monarch but the fact that everyone has to stop using the money and everyone has to do that is fucking absurd yeah this is the worst political system i've ever heard of just wait because it's gonna get even more cut okay Chris you live in Chicago yeah but here's the here's the right in Chicago right everyone everyone like like two in the core of their being they know that the people who ruled him are robbing them everyone in Britain actually genuinely like wants to be like this no nobody in Chicago wants any of the people in Chicago who rule us to be ruling us right everyone in Britain is like pro they they want to have to throw all their money away because some fucking 90 year old and a hat died it's it's an incomprehensible level of just yeah outstanding yeah it's a marvelous country there's nothing wrong with it it will continue to be marvelous and the lowest 10% of income people in Britain now enjoy a quality of life which is substantially lower than that same income bracket in Slovenia which look yeah the economic powerhouse of Slovenia yeah i just want to say we do not deserve a better quality of living than the people of Slovenia they have Slovenia actually fucking rules yeah it does great place yeah it's a really nice place you take about two hours to cross but it's a great gun yeah right you can ride your bike across it but that's great that's what you want to do well it what's what's what's happening here is that Maoist lose trust is like very slowly returning all the brits of the countryside yeah she's she's there you go she's doing a cultural revolution and let's talk about Maoist lose trust so her parents are actually a long way to her left there was a thing a little while ago where her dad refused to campaign for her when she ran for a seat as a conservative which is based or have critical support for lose trust is dad her mum also ran as a lib Dem which is not exactly like the liberal democrats are not exactly like the party that are going to liberate the working class through glorious revolution but it's still pretty funny to have your mum running for a different party than you and like objectively amusing and she was born in Oxford her parents her mother's a teacher her dad is an academic I think it leads her dad so he's a mathematician I'm just nerd god damn it so her dad is not the nerd here her dad is is the best trust as far as I can tell it's it's it's Liz who we're worried about she described her parents as being to the left of labor which is not hard right labor just exists to kind of these days really to have the the pretensive opposition right they've deliberately purged the left from labor after 2019 and they exist for key a starmer to say I'd broadly support this terrible neoliberal policy but and and then say something completely ineffectual and I'm sure he will be prime minister soon and nothing will change nothing that Liz trust is done and it is doing will be walked back because Britain doesn't have an effective left opposition parliament it does in society and in the streets and we'll see there are lots of movements our parliament is a farce and continues to be a farce and it's lots of dudes who went to the same educational institutions making this funny kind of noise that there are more diverse people in parliament but I'm sure people have seen videos of the British parliament right and everyone is like yeah it sounds just like that yeah that that was a sound but thanks Daniel Americans who don't understand entirely how British educational culture works the fancy schools that they go to they're like Hogwarts if you replaced like the magic with kids beating each other in the shower and yeah yeah with the repressed sexuality and yeah violence bullying and being picked on because you're the poorest kid in a school for the rich so actually it is it is a lot like Harry Potter it's a lot like Harry Potter it's actually quite a bit like Harry Potter yeah yeah there are still turfs it's very disappointing so it talking of educational institutions trust went to Oxford right she went to Merchant I went to Oxford too I didn't go to Merchant that's a better off college I went to a college to just renowned for being poor for what's that worth within Oxford colleges which are all full of rich people doing rich people stuff she read pp politics philosophy and economics which I don't think you can really do as a degree in the US right what is that politics philosophy and economic what yeah yeah it's called pp three made up things yeah well what are you saying are there other degrees on the other hand a real and tangible and yeah of course in the physical space where you could touch them everyone knows that yep it's true apart from pp pp is so like I went to Oxford too I took modern history in politics which is way cooler and better in every way but I the pp kids so so that people understand a vast number of British prime ministers have taken pp as as they're undergraduate degree it's like the king maker of degrees and you take it because you're an insufferable fucking dog who wants to be prime minister or like work for the British government in some way right like it is this like king maker would be prime minister looks like such a good job yeah they they last a long time they have universally great approval ratings and to be fair they do just go on to grift to shoot out of money like it it's not yeah and they don't have to do it for like a fixed period of time like America presidents do so that's nice they can just have a bunch of parties for their friends in the lockdown and then leave which is more or less what Boris Johnson did and I don't I don't expect Liz to be prime minister for long but it's what she's doing and what she has already sort of done that I think it's of interest here right I tend to she was also president before we get off her university time at the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and so yeah great stuff and the so like she's gradually drifted to the right which you know what are we what we she's drifted to the right you know the Lib Dems were a little bit more left then but a labor was very neoliberal in the 90s right when she was in when she was in parliament so sometimes the Lib Dems provided something of a left opposition if you remember like Tony Blair and you labor it was just kind of bold neoliberal like shameless neoliberalism right now Tony Blair is the one who was pillayed by Hugh Grant right is he the one he's he the inspiration for love actually I was assuming because Tony Blair was the only British politician I could name as a child okay so he must have been right because Tony Blair is completely devoid of charisma and the one thing that that Hugh Grant character has is is charisma so maybe maybe he does kind of I mean they're all white men they are all white men that is a very white movie he looks like him but then that's not exactly a remarkable thing is it in his sort of homogeneous British ruling class that we have so trust has gone through like being Secretary of State for Justice through being Lord Chancellor through being foreign Secretary God okay Lord Chancellor is a pretty cool sounding title I got to give it to him first that's like Star Wars shit wait do they have a shadow Lord Chancellor too yes the thing that your people is right is they pick the terms to make it all sound cool like it went whenever one of like your parliamentary coalitions collapse though like the government has fallen yeah it just makes it all sound like it's so much cooler than it is it does lend it air of Shakespeare in epic where it's one is is these 17 people who all went to the same schools and read the same telegraph newspaper columnists have disagreed with each other from minor point and will shortly be reconstituting their alliance in a slightly different way yeah but it sounds like people are fighting each other with machetes and a center of blood and it has a game of thrones beheading via which maybe that's where this is heading who knows she I think if people had heard of Livestress until she became Prime Minister it was probably from her really wonderful pork market speech which if you haven't watched the pork market speech is a study in where you should and shouldn't pause for applause uh Robert have you seen this pork markets no okay what is a fucking pork market in December I'll be in Beijing opening up new pork markets what the fuck is this shit she's not a real person she it's yeah it's it's reminiscent of like when you take a fish out of water and it moves its lips but makes no coherent noise I think an alien trying to pretend to be human yeah it's it's it's wrong it's just a great leader of our people and it's like the uncanny valley of politics it is a little bit like it is almost like a crafty and it's and it's unsettling this yeah yeah right what's what's happening here what we're seeing is there what this is this is the risk this is the final result of affirmative action for white people yes we're gonna get it today this is what this is why she has this job she she benefited from affirmative action for white people uh other examples of this include destiny and yeah yeah you get the same kind of person every single time same same right like destiny and the premieres through the UK and yeah yeah so like she becomes prime minister and it's worth noting that like the way you become prime minister in the UK is different to the way you become president in the US right you you are the leader of the majority party in parliament or of the coalition that controls some majority of the votes in parliament so she becomes prime minister not through a vote of the people but through a vote of the members of the conservative party um you can understand as like people whose dogs have girls names and whose daughters have dogs names uh that is i think that's a trash future bit i don't know where it came from but it explains them perfectly uh so these people got together and they she ran against Rishi Sunak right and who who is eminently more capable of doing the fashy neoliberal shit that they want to do as are many other people of color within their party but above all things they are racist right above even doing this kind of speed run extraction from the British economy they are still racist uh they're they're they're fine with having people of color in in positions in the hierarchy right there's something to Britain established through hundreds of years of empire but the idea the idea of having someone in leadership position is is fundamentally a nathma to the conservative party so instead they picked kind of uh uh Liz Truss to just flap her lips around and uh and talk about pork markets right so that's how we get Liz Truss as prime minister so no one per se votes for Liz Truss no one even per se votes for like the Liz Truss a gender that we're seeing now right and and i think that's really important and in her acceptance speech she talked to Boris Johnson uh she said you're you're admired from Kiev to Carlisle uh what yeah it's yeah okay first of all bizarre absolutely one thing i know about Boris Johnson is that he looks like Donald Trump if Trump didn't have his shit quite so together yes yeah he looks like Donald Trump his mum didn't tell him to Kobe's head and tuck his shirt and furry went to school yeah if Donald Trump couldn't have paid a half pay to have people like check him before he walks out the door that's how he would look yeah yeah yes exactly if you fell over in a wind tunnel he would like Boris Johnson Boris Johnson a guy so fucking rich he's never had to comb his hair stop being prime minister because of these scandals right these sleaze scandals about them having parties during lockdown more or less that was what destroyed him not any of his terrible policies his bigoted bullshit him bringing up ed saying that the problem with us was not that we were in charge of Africa but that we're not anymore uh it's what god yeah yeah this is a type of guy who exists and can become prime minister like people don't understand i think um british the british right is very different from the american right and i think we're gonna get into that um also a guy who famously just like pulverized a small child on the trip to japan uh play pay rugby okay you don't need to say the things that he did that are rad yeah he he he he he did finally discover the actual third real british politics which is that if if you have fun in a way that someone else can't have fun they will destroy you yes like yeah the the mere british per think the mere act of a british person seeing another person having any joy whatsoever like just like it's a switch flips in their brain and they just turn into like brits but worse this is yeah so this is like there are basically two ways a british political party can be right one is that they enjoy themselves while they're plundering the institution to still remain in the United Kingdom and the other one is that they are like magnetically abstinuous while they're doing it right and labored tend to be the abstinuous ones uh and tori is tend to be the ones who drink the poor and have the lockdown parties and have like literal karaoke events when they're asking people not to go today grandparents fuel rules and labored tend to be the ones who ring their hands go oh no uh and then fundamentally do the same shit right that that is a difference Chris is entirely correct that that is uh the thing that irritates british people most right and maybe we'll just talk about this right now it's increasingly like it's not the material conditions that bring down british governments because material conditions are getting worse and have been getting worse since we started this this austerity stuff in 2010 it's these stupid scandals right these these personal scandals which yes normally involve them having too much fun when they're supposed to be pretending to be serious while they steal all the all the things that still remain in britain and then want to talk about a little later so yeah she said Boris Johnson was a buyer from key of taqala he's not that's why he's not prime minister anymore everyone fucking hates him uh and also i don't think she's been to kala because i got family who live there and not everyone loves Boris Johnson there um and i'm sure not in keve either uh but so the uk has been having this cost of living crisis since the economy reopened in 2021 right since the end of lockdown and uh what this cost of living crisis is what it what a cost of living goes to this generally is that when the goods that you need to buy to exist are rising more quickly than the wages you get paid for working uh now some of these causes are global right we have this inflation issue in the us too uh but the uk has compounded this by leaving the european union that creating massive labor sort labor shortages and these repeated bumps in the energy price cap right which is the limit that an average family should pay for their energy consumption it's not it's not a hard stop it's not a limit on like how much you definitely will pay but it's a limit on how much the average family should pay right and so trust comes to power in the context of skyrocketing energy rates for british consumers uh gas is used for hitting most homes in the uk um it's increased uh 926% in price since the before the coronavirus times uh despite the fact that most british people don't pay spot prices for gas that in and pay the the the going market rate for gas uh there's a serious crisis in affordability now it was looking like the that gas bills were going to go up into the average gas bill for the average british person was going to go up more than it now is because trust has has announced some capping of spot rates we're going to get into why that isn't as great as it sounds the biggest you hear is that britain doesn't have a nationalized provider right it's privatized it's energy graded it's privatized it's energy generation and it ends up with this bizarre situation where one of the one of the people you can buy energy off and often you don't have a choice right depending on where you are um is the French national energy company that makes sense sure it makes perfect sense right it's it's great and uh one of the notable sort of consequences this is a gas price we've gone up price caps the prices at consumers can pay britain allows them to charge a lot more so british people at this is as a rule one thing that british is telling me that France finally won that long war saying that we have been owned by the French and if that doesn't bring down the conservative government i don't know what will because there's one thing british people dislike it's French people and and so yeah britain is now subsidizing energy rates for French consumers which is great having just left the European Union because we are uh incredibly xenophobic as a nation as it turns out and and people may have seen this uh UK TV show called this morning where they did a wheel of fortune type thing where you could win a thousand pound oh god that was brutal or they will pay your energy bills yeah but for like three or four months right yeah four months four months of energy bills are the plug that they're doing it in it's just like it's this sigh of relief when he gets energy bills right he's like oh massive like I'm gonna have my energy bills pay for four months it's such a relief and and this guy is one of four million people in the UK who uses what's called a prepayment meter which I'm reliably informed that Americans don't have so do you do you all uh are you familiar with the concept of prepayment meters uh no okay uh so maybe people are familiar with like pay as you go phones right where you go to the shop yes yes what yeah if you if you're like selling drugs or you're you're you're engaged in anti-government extremism yeah you want you want a phone like that sure yeah yeah uh or if you're doing journalism you might want to follow you to put journalism reasons it's same as one of the others yeah uh yes true yeah here at call zone media you know you know you know you know who won't use a prepaid cell phone to sell you drugs because they're not wait yeah they would you think so I think they just got enough money they they would just use a regular phone bill and have a lawyer just you know I think I think they're deep into boost mobile okay for the only thing you've been John loft they're fucking back you know who has to go to Walmart to buy more credit to their phone so they can sell you some weed it's the advertisers who support this show okay we're back and we are talking about prepaid energy meters a centrelating topic so the prepaid energy meter where you have to go out you have to pay for energy so if if your rates go the reason for these overwhelmingly is that like there's a agreement by which most energy suppliers won't just cut you off in the UK like if you have old people in your house you have children in your house like they like they have to do this the appearance of caring is this thing that we're going to see is really important in lots of these policies right so they they can't cut you off but if they have it if you have a meter and you can't prepay for the electricity then your de facto cut off right and the best statistics I could find about this was in 2017 where roughly 140 000 households 16% of those that had prepayment meters self-disconnected self-disconnected the euphemism for they couldn't pay right for gas or electricity in 2017 they couldn't afford to add credit to their meter right they didn't have the credit so they couldn't get the electricity so they they end up disconnecting and if you add to this that like British houses are made out of cheese like our houses are very poorly insulated for the most part right they're often single brick so it's expensive to heat them and they get cold in the winter and they get hot in the summer we're not we have like houses that are designed to deal with the extremes in temperature which we are now experiencing because we have ruined the climate so people are spending more and more using more and more electricity and gas to heat their homes it's costing more and more and increasingly they kind of forward to pay it right and this will lead to people dying so if we look at like what the average pensioner in the UK right I looked up some statistics really office of national statistic here the average pensioner in the UK has on a fixed income it's making 17 000 pounds a year which I guess 17 000 pounds of what though oh they're gold rubbing gold you take your pounds to the Bank of England and they give you gold in return okay not any more that actually interestingly was if we go on a side note for a minute one of the ways Britain achieved greater democratisation when the middle class excluded but landowners were included was that the middle class had cash money and the landowners had wealth in the form of property right so in the middle class threatened to tank the entire Bank of England by taking all their pound notes and asking to have them converted to to the gold that they that they were supposedly pegged to and there was not enough gold to actually to do that for the entire money supply so they could have tanked the Bank of England so yeah bit of 1868 reform act history then no longer they're decoupled now from that so you can't do that sadly but 17 000 pound is not a lot of money right trust has just announced that the energy bill for an average family is going to be capped at 2,500 pound a year which is a decent chunk of your income right if you're making 17 000 before that the previous plan limit have been 3549 pounds for an average family based on average consumption which is a very significant chunk of your 17 000 pound a year right especially if if you're renting on top of that right the cost of housing the cost of rental housing has gone up in the UK and so and this is a rise again the capital already been risen in April right it's not a price cap right this doesn't mean that you as a family are guaranteed that you will not pay more than this 2500 pound number what is it a unit cost limit so not all families are typical not all homes are typical but the cost is for those who are interested 10 pounds per kilowatt hour for gas 34 pounds per kilowatt hour for electricity so what this means is that like we've capped a little bit of the cost and in response like and this is pretty this is pretty typical for what the conservatives do right they'll do this thing where they give the appearance of caring and then at the same time they bundle it in with a bunch of incredibly like the just like the best way to understand these people is that they view the free market as a religion right so and they believe that like the only way out of anything is to cut taxes whether they actually believe that because they think it will generally make the situation better or they're just trying to get as much as they can for them and theirs I think it probably I'm leaning towards the second one right but so she bundles this with the UK is going to going to lift its ban on fracking right and the UK ban fracking in 2019 after a series of earth tremors near blackpool which is like there's a lot of cursed things about Britain but until recently we hadn't added earthquakes to that list so thank you Liz they it's very funny a warwick business school public to study in 2020 pointed out it is widely I widely recognize at the open and liberal nature of the UK's gas market means that the market price the national balance you point is unlikely to be influenced by shell gas development so shell gas is fracking right in the UK so the UK is going to start fracking which is great and she also proposed removing the top tier of income tax which is reducing the amount of tax paid by people who earn more than 150,000 pounds a year right now they pay 45% tax above that this announcement caused a pound to fall to a historic low against the dollar and for trust to find herself in open beef with the the works golds at the IMF so the IMF said new economic measures laid out by the UK government will likely increase inequality and they added that the IMF does not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture so she also during this like she promised that she was going to cancel a plad rise on corporate tax and scrap a proposed cap on bankers bonuses this has been one of her big policy things along with Simon Clark who declared a new age of austerity at the time they announced this right but there's this constant like everything Britain does is only one way in which conservative governments to move can move and that is taxing the other people who went to the same schools and universities as them less so I kind of want to take a step back here and talk about the ideology that underpins a lot of what Truss is doing and it's that she and Charles Dixie Cacquistie-Quarting and Pretty Patel and Dominic Robb who were all in her cabinet I think a part of this free enterprise group within the conservative party and much like you have Caucasus and the American Senate in Britain we have these these groups and they wrote this book called Britannia Unchained which I don't know if people are probably not familiar with right I've heard of it but I know very little about it yeah it's just like a it's a series of short essays just like doing a Milton Friedman like an unreconstructed free market fundamentalism that it's very different to what the because the American right likes to talk about markets and libertarianism and stuff right but like in general their entire politics is just kind of owning the lips right like these social cultural grievances and then when they get in power they they they're spending is largely just about one my argue staying in power right and whereas the conservatives in Britain are genuinely committed to slashing government including slashing services including slashing any kind of social safety net right it does have these amusing consequences sometimes like Britain continually cuts the number of police it has which is great yeah it's genuinely really funny yeah it's very funny it's very funny that like our most right-wing party I guess not our most right-wing party if you've got some proper nutters but we've defunded the police just by not wanting to spend money on them yeah it is also okay and by by funny you have incredibly depressing that like like Corbin Corbin was running on adding more cops which is like the most cursed like the the British left like always like they always find a way to destroy themselves that they've been doing this for like 200 years it's really impressive stuff yeah yeah it's incredibly it's incredibly depressing to watch like yeah it's a British left just tear itself to piece not that the American left doesn't tear itself to pieces right seems to be a thing on the left but yeah when the British left had a serious run at making a serious difference in 2019 instead we decided to just absolutely like tear each other to shreds and and here we are right here we are with the number of children in poverty going up by 600,000 since 2012 with the number of from 2019 to 2012 the number of children who rely on food banks for their food security has tripled by the end of this year their national health service national health curve which is our nationalized socialized medicine system right the budget will have been cut by 24% compared to 2016 that's despite the fact that we just went through a pandemic the poorer socio economic groups in the UK are experiencing a fall in life expectancy for the first like we we have life expectancy is pretty much continually trucked up since the industrial revolution but we're now finally slashing that down again I wonder I wonder why yeah it there's no way of explaining it does it's just happening the only solution is a free market a free market a free market yeah to pump more things into the air yes yeah me well here I'm going to take a puffer my inhaler because my lungs are dying yeah well that's because our rage is right now you're not getting fracked hard enough in the the Pacific Northwest yeah more fracking will fix my ears the pollution and air quality the fact that people are literally dying yeah younger than their parents did and the Tories don't they have these like they're what's very important to them is their performance of patrician care right like we saw this with Theresa May's burning injustices which of course remain burning injustices should do anything about them Boris Johnson's leveling up agenda of people familiar with his like oh my god I can't believe you have a minister you have a shadow minister of leveling up like we do I just like at what point do you just go none of this is real and like if they start sending cops you just keep beating them up until everyone else is forced to concede that they're like no there is not in fact a shadow a shadow minister of leveling up yeah I don't know that is the the big the big question that I want to ask is at what point do we realize that there is not a shadow minister of leveling up and that we don't have to open new pork markets and that maybe that isn't the solution to us dying younger than our parents and that we don't have to do what these people say when they are just very blatantly like truss is very obviously doing an extractive speed run on the British economy right there and I tell you what you know who else will do an expected street run on the British economy is that the products and services that's good to show it is sadly yeah all right we're talking about extractive speed runs we're back so with Johnson and even with which are these a may right who is a Prime Minister before him there was this important performance of of caring right being like oh we're going to make life better for the poor socio economic groups the poorer people in the UK I think what's changed is that like the nature of of consent from the governed is this thing that maybe we need to elucidate more right like in Britain there was this kind of consensus that like the governing party will pretend to care and we'll pretend to do things and sometimes they would let you have nice things right little treats and trinkets and that in return you would largely not kick them out right like either physically or electorally although it's very hard to kick them out electorally because of Britain's ass backwards electoral system which is another relic of a previous era now they don't seem to be bothering to pretend to care right like when you're looking at a system in which like when trust came to power old people were going to die when we were looking at a system in which people are dying younger than their parents and old people were going to die in the cold this winter like I've got friends I remember this was years ago but it was when utility prices maybe started going up when my grandfather passed my grandmother lived on her own and her being really afraid to heat the house because of how much it cost right and I've got friends who I've spoke to this time who are like well we're preparing to have our grand come and live with us so that we can we can heat the house or like if we just move into the downstairs parts of the house then we can keep those warm right or like you know we're going to go back to having fires and we'll just we'll warm our house with a wood fire right lots of houses in the UK still have fireplaces that are functional yeah my my house growing up was heat with a wood fire it's great it's good for the lungs it's gives them a good coating that they can then use in the rest of your life to repel other pollutants coal fires are great inside the home highly encouraged so like people were really making these like it's it's it's a sort of stuff you associate maybe with like the hard times in the Soviet Union right like like sort of being like out well we're going to go to the food bank and we'll line up and get food and then we'll we'll all hug them one room to stay warm but these are the plans that people were making like this this summer looking to this winter and Liz trust responded to that with like okay well the way to fix this is lower taxes for high earners and no cap removing the cap on bankers bonuses so that the financial services industry will relocate to the UK I wish it weren't because the UK has left the European Union right and it's now kind of a pariah in that sense so like I don't really understand how the UK up to how the British government abstains consent from the government anymore and I'm partially interested to see how this goes and partially obviously like a pool to see the costs of this like they're not even trying to care they're not even pretending anymore they're just going to take what they can and then presumably bounce to some tax island where they can they can survive and thrive while the rest of us freeze our arses off over the winter so what I want to and I guess finish up with is this idea that like so in America you have fixed terms of elections right so every we're having midterms next month and then we'll have the presidential in Britain we don't right in Britain the the government has to lose a vote for no confidence which is when the majority of MPs vote they no longer have confidence in the government or the prime minister have to worry theory they're the monarch cast a court election right so I guess King Charles could just because they didn't let King Charles go to the climate summit recently which is another amazing thing that is Truss has managed to do within like a month of being in office she's already like openly in beef with the monarchy which is it's the one thing that conservative people might like more than white people who tax rich people less if you wouldn't let King Charles go to a a climate summit because conservatives are more or less climate change deniers or at least sort of climate change don't give a fuck because we need to extract more money and so like at some point like I don't know what the withdrawal of consent looks like anymore right it's the people who are British politicians see themselves like see themselves as governing for like their constituents are seemingly like columnists in the telegraph and people who are the CEOs of these big companies in London which have grown and grown and grown based on this endless supply of free money that is now drying up right so instead of dealing with a record of that they're going to try and look at other ways for those people to continue to grow and extract finance and I don't know what that means for the rest of British people like I don't know what the withdrawal of consent from a system which so obviously doesn't care about the material conditions you live in looks like but if we want to talk about collapse it collapses a thing that gradually happens rather than the thing that kind of we click our fingers and it's there I think some of this is what it looks like like people refusing to pay their power bills is becoming a thing in UK right I should mention the energy companies are recording record profits throughout this time period maybe it looks like protest industry the Britain has had these like they had big tuition fees protests and we had the quote unquote London riots right which were incredibly high if you put down and people went to jail for a long time for like stealing a bottle of water from a Tesco so like I think it's worth watching for people who are not in the UK like what does it look like when you're governing a lead stop pretending to care about you and what is the withdrawal of legitimacy or the withdrawal of consent look like and like I say I don't know it's it's look different every time it's happened right look different in the Soviet Union to the way it looked in like I'm trying to think of other like regime collapses in South America but like we say that a we say that a regime is consolidated when the rules of the game are more important than the outcome of the game and I think we're getting to a point in Britain where maybe the outcome of the game is going to be more important than the rules of the game so that might mean some serious change it might not it might just mean you know we put a new dude on our on our coins and everyone puts bunting up industry and we do nothing fundamentally different and just acquiesce in living conditions getting worse and worse and worse and more and more people dying because they're poor I don't know but yeah I think that last one's going to be the one that happens yeah maybe we'll do it at Olympics and we'll spend the next what was London 2012 the next decade just reminiscing over how great that was and and then we'll just not notice that you know our grandparents are dying unnecessarily because this trust his friends have to make more money I have I have an enormous amount of faith in the British people to just do nothing like they they they they they have they have an unbelievable ability to just be like eh things are getting worse like I don't know who cares like we're still British like they like they they they can't even really effectively do imperialism anymore but it's like everyone's so wedded to the like imperialism machine that everyone that like you know everyone everyone will constantly vote against their class interest everyone will constantly act against their class interest everyone will constantly just sort of like literally let hundreds of thousands of people die around them yeah yeah because flags and sports I think Corbin has energized a lot of people into realizing their class interest perhaps more than they were before because they was briefly a parliamentary alternative but right now there isn't like Kirsta Amar is not Jeremy Corbin but then you know but it's also the British right like it's like well okay so they they sort of reconsole dated to the left it did nothing got owns and then imploded and now it's being split between like just complete peer like people arguing that Starmer is doing socialism like like here labor party hacks and then like a bunch of people just doing nothing because it's the UK and it fundamentally never gets any better yeah yeah there is like I take a little bit of hope from like have you seen the the where people are to be deported from the UK and then there are like mass mobilizations to present happening yeah that gives me some hope right that's a lot of people willing to give up this after they all this Sunday to shout immigration offices and like that's something that didn't happen by and large in the in the US right even with the the the like gross abuses of the immigration system under Donald Trump people people didn't stop that happening so some of that it did it did happen in places like there are a lot of flights that got blocked and stuff yeah I guess I guess yeah yeah yeah happened invisible then yeah in a different way some people here did so like in 2020 I think there was an icing and burial Logan and it got run out of town so I shouldn't say that and but that gives me hope it gives me hope that maybe some people will realize that like the solution solution is not to vote harder right and the solution is to is to organize and then to do things in an extra parliamentary fashion and not trust the people who are participating in your exploitation to live you from your exploitation which has maybe been our mistake for too long yeah we we everyone in England needs to take a page from the Harry Potter books and arm the children to murder government officials if I remembering how those books ended for form form form a guerrilla army of you and your friends and attempt to overthrow the government yeah probably yeah let's yeah that's that's that's the plot of the order of the Phoenix okay yeah yes I remember it now when they uh yeah when they do a carbon yeah that's it that's that's that's that's our message to you today Rita I apologize to a carbon there we go there we go that's our legally binding message for you today no an actionable threat hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of Coolzone Media for more podcast from Coolzone Media visitor website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening life insurance isn't just a plot point on true crime podcasts in the unfortunate event of a death wish box life insurance can be a backup plan to help protect your family go to wishbox.live to create a flexible term life insurance plan and get a quote in less than 10 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