It Could Happen Here Weekly 185

England Journal of Medicine about the COVID vaccine booster shots. Yeah, and are going to be changing the guidelines for how these are going to be administered and who has access to them, particularly those under the age of sixty five, might have a harder time getting the COVID booster that they have like the past few years, requiring certain existing conditions to qualify. And they have a whole bunch of

arguments for this. They say they're trying to make this more in line with the vaccine guidelines and other countries they're proposing for their studies on the necessity of COVID

vaccines for those under sixty five. Yeah, and for someone like me who tries to keep up with COVID boosters and you know, doesn't like it getting infected with COVID, some of this can seem a little bit both confusing and worrying and considering, like the anti vaccine takeover of the FDA and like the federal Health services in general, it's a frightening move.

process to it. If I can give you a little bit of a sense of how it normally runs and what's going to happen now, I think it'll explain why I might have my concerns.

And what this group. The first group is called the VRBPAC and they determine if it's a safe and effective vaccine. If it is determined that way, then the FDA grants a license and approval. From there. There's another group, the ACIP, and that's an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and it's the same sort of thing. It's a group made up of scientists, healthcare professionals, public health professionals, and people will

come together. They'll determine who should get it, and then the CDC director signs off and then it gets out there to the world. Now, basically what we have is two political pointees, both of which have these massive axes to grind on the subject, have some severe chips on their shoulder about what's happened so far to them in this conversation and this dialogue. Who are going to bypass this whole scientific system, who aren't to be looking at

these questions like what is our growing immunity? Is Annuel Booster still warranted? And they're going to take this outside of that and basically make the decision. And I find that to be very concerning, even past like this, this basic premise of like, you know, does this mean that my friends or myself I won't be able to at the vaccine that I want to get? So I find it to be very concerning. And you alluded to that article in the New England Journal of Medicine. It did not alleviate my concerns.

These these weird online figures who we've developed personal a grievances against for being bad people suddenly now are like in the p echelons of power in the US government.

for younger people. But there's a couple problems with this, Okay, One, I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Like, if we have something that works, if we know this vaccine helps, and we do CDC studies have shown that these boosters help for at least four to six.

different mutation. We know that this thing mutates, we know it's going to change into a different virus, and we won't even know if that study that we just spent all the time doing works on it. So we have other options for studying these things. They're not double blind,

randomized controlled studies. But we have other studies at work, and there are plenty of epidemiologists out there, vaccinologists, people who know way more about this than me, and to be fair, know more about this than Prasad and McCary. They're the ones saying this is not a good idea. So I'm like saying, let's listen to them. Let's listen. They know what they're talking about. They're smart people. I've

met some of them. They're great, and it doesn't make sense to me on an ethical or practical level to do it that way.

I don't know, I don't know what'll happen. That'll be a little bit of chaos and it'll be interesting to see what happens to that point. But if it goes as the FDA now plans, it will limit who can potentially get these vaccines if you're not over sixty five, if you don't have a what's considered a risk for serious disease like asthma, cancer, kidney disease, certain types of liver lung disease, diabetes. If you don't have any of

these things, then it's not clear to me. Will the pharmacist not give it to you, Will the pharmacist check if you tell them you have one of these things? Will insurance cover it? I don't know, and that's really concerning. I think the price is going to go up, and that does relate to the bigger concern, the long term problem in this, which is, I mean, Kennedy has said he's not taking away vaccines. Great, he doesn't actually need

to take away vaccines. He just needs to do things like this so that nobody wants to pay for it. Nobody wants to go through the process of studying it, nobody's going to make them. Insurance companies aren't going to pay for it. People aren't gonna end up being able to afford it. They're gonna be lesser and fewer of them, and they will go away naturally on their own because of this. That's really the long term concern that I

have with this. The short term concern, I mean, I don't know, it's going to be interesting, you know, like there's certain things on this list that the CDC has, Like for example, physical inactivity is on this list.

And at least you can say at least one hundred and thirty of those kids were directly related to COVID and not from some other problems. So this is significant stuff that we're still dealing with. In long COVID can affect people. Long COVID can affect all groups. It can affect young and old. So it is concerning and it bothers me in particular that the group doing this, as I said, getting is the medical freedom group, and this is this is sort of the exact opposite of this.

actually about medical freedom. It's about it's about advancing a very specific conservative and conspiratorial worldview that actually controls what other people are allowed to do with their bodies. This is like a massive, a massive part of their project, and like, I don't know how else you can like interpret moves like this which are just going to jeopardize people and put them even in more danger.

it. It wasn't a movie, but it was like a special they did, and it raised such concerns that letters started pouring in to the network, and they then started pouring into Congress and there was a whole hearing and after that we had a significant drop off in regards to the companies that make these vaccines, and we have a few now, and I am worried that this could be another sort of inflection point in that in that history, in that.

first few months. I'm super nervous about the COVID nasal vaccine getting basically shelved, and every like new thing we see come under the FDA just makes those fears heightened.

Committee again. If it's allowed to happen, and they allow people like Paul offit, people who are real vaccinologists, people who know about vaccines, not just pointed political people, but people who actually study this and know it. If they come on and they can provide enough pressure, if people can support them, then I do think that there is there is some hope that the pushback will will help us alleviate some of this restriction.

I don't know if that'll hold. I mean, I don't see any reason why they couldn't if they wanted to scrap the ACIP get rid of the people on it. You know, people who are vaccinologists who are of great significance to the community, like you know.

It is a blog post. And specifically they talk about how the United States has a much more like severe vaccine strategy than other countries in Europe, and they try to use this to justify their own beliefs, saying that they're trying to bring things in line with the vaccine policies in other countries.

And could we do that? So there is a difference are currently until now in the US, it was generally recommended for anyone over six months. People weren't being made to have this. By the way, again, medical freedom, you know.

are in a house where someone's demo compromised. They do it for anyone who's over sixteen who helps care for someone who's vulnerable. And they do it for all social and healthcare workers. I mean, they have a different system in place. They have, as I mentioned, socialized healthcare in general. They're very good about their vaccines, so it's hard to tell. It's a little bit of apples and oranges. But it's funny what they decided to pick and not pick about that.

And it's also funny why some groups are missing under our care, Like a lot of places will vaccinate anyone who's overweight. Here they don't consider being overweight a risk for COVID, so that it is funny how they're choosing their nitpicking certain things that are recommendations common recommendations in other countries and not using them here, so they do it a little differently in Europe. That is true, and again this is the kind of stuff that they're going

to evaluate every year. The ACIP will evaluate the look at the emerging data, to look at the other countries, to look at what's being done, and they'll discuss it. So it is true, and it does seem reasonable on the surface when they say it like that, hey, we're just trying to get and they mentioned this in the New England Journal of Medicine article, we're just trying to get more in line with the rest of the world.

And that's not really true. It's like they're just picking certain things that they want to agree with and ignoring all the other stuff about their healthcare system that we could benefit from.

a ripple effect. Public trust and vaccination in general has declined, resulting in reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital immunization programs such as that for these hills mumps and rebella.

The Plenary Podcast in the medical community. I never listened to it because I don't listen to medical podcasts.

don't know if it's true belief. I don't know what shifted, but it does seem that it was a steady growth into this contrarian perspective from the medical community that doesn't totally make sense to me, Like they all kind of feel like they're Galileo or samulwise, that they had this rare, contrarian opinion that made them special and they were attacked for. But in my mind, it's not so much that as it is. You know, there is a scientific process that

we have. Galileo followed a scientific process and that's how it came to those conclusions. These people, I don't feel are following that, and they are strict to their method idolatry to what they feel needs to be done, and I don't feel like they're listening to the experts in the field explained to them why that's not the case.

That's how every hero probably feels in every situation. But they have somehow become the victims in this story, and I am very curious to see now that they're in power, how that shifts and if they maintain this sort of victim mentality.

your heart. Yeah, so it's it's absurd that that's an argument that we're still having at this in twenty twenty now.

probably can see a risk factor that you don't. If you don't see one that automatically fits that list from the CDC, your doctor might be able to find one that is. And I'm not talking about fraud. I'm talking about like real things. Your doctor may be able to look through your chart, look through your history, talk to you and find a risk factor that you didn't think was a risk factor, like, for example, physical inactivity or you know, smoking. So there are things that we can

look for. And as they shift those goalposts, which I'm sure they will, we'll also be trying to find ways around that as well. And you know, when the ACIP comes out, there's going to be a lot of pressure on them, and I think we can pressure our Congress and we can pressure our representatives to support them at least nominally to discuss it, if nothing else, because I don't think this is getting talked about that much, So I think if we can bring it to the public attention,

I think we can shift the narrative on vaccines. I do believe that the narrative has shifted on covid and vaccines in this terrible way, this revisionist way, where everyone pretends it's not it wasn't a big deal and that we didn't lose millions of people. And I think if we can keep that in the public discourse, I think that alone will help.

can help in the immediate future. And then you know, stay tuned, talk to your doctor about vaccines and when you can get them, and get them as soon as you can. I do think that's a good idea for both flu and for COVID boosters when available.

the Bastard universe. You'll also get into I think our podcast the House of Pod and find it anywhere The House of Pod, the House of Pod.

history podcast, not a medical podcast. So as things just started, I was a little bit confused, and then I went back to reread the message of like, oh no, I definitely says medical, and I still don't quite know how I did that.

has been consumed by war. Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fact threat we defeated in the streets, returned to power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new, uglier and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tianeman, to return to one of the great horrors of another age to see if we can take anything new from the wreckage of the Death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today and tomorrow are Tianamen remastered. There were

really three Tienemens. The first and most famous Tieneman was a student protest inside Tianaman Square itself. If you've heard the word Tienemen before this story, you know. The second Tienemen was the Tienemen of the blocks of Beijing around the square, blocks sees and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard about this Tienemen at all, it's probably in the context of the tanks rolling through them on

their way to the square. And then there was the third Tienemen, the protests in other cities, of which we still years after I wrote the original piece. No distressingly little about our focus today is on.

should talk about what reform and opening actually was. On the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals and other people were so called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market reforms. I started to bring capitalism back to China. This was a shit show in

a lot of ways. If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt peonage about five years into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastard's episode about the poisoned milk scandal. But Reform and Opening is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression, golden age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed like they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform and Opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian

crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the One Child Policy, a hideous expansion of the states into the sphere of social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations, and the reimposition of patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one man rule in the factory, the destruction of any form of worker's decision making and control over the process of their own labor.

In these horrors you can see the beginning of the fragmentation of Tiannemen and Chinese politics more broadly already forming. The students wanted market reform to go faster, They wanted more freedom of speech, They sort of wanted democracy, but mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market

reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of these students were involved in what became known as neo authoritarianism, which holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy factions in the bureaucracy. It was an ideology that survived the death of the protests and went on to become a major faction of the CCP itself in the nineties and two thousands, and this is where some of the truly weird shit at Tianeman

comes from. The students were, in many ways an incredibly hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones, and these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual.

The guy they were trying to defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tianemen, as I mentioned earlier, was also the workers, and for most of the protests, the students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and

relations were in general extremely bad. This raises the question what were the workers doing there in the first place. There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed off at how badly the party was treating students in the square. But there were other things going on too. The late in eighteen eighties in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation. The rapid price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed

a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating, and suddenly you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes, and spending a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed people off, so they started organizing. I'm going to read a section from a piece by Uron saying about what the workers were doing during the

struggle to obstruct the military. Workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self organization ensued. The worker's autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations both within and across the workplace mushroomed. The development of organization led to a radicalization of action.

Workers started organizing self armed quasi militias such as Quote Picket Corps and Quote Dared to Die Brigades to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi militias were also responsible for maintaining public order so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Beijing became a city self managed by workers. It was reminiscent of petrograds self armed workers organized in the months between Russia's

February and October revolutions. At the same time, Beijing workers built many more barricades and fortifications on the street. In many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns, A possible general strike was put on the table as well. Many workers started to build connections between factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unaccepsible to the party, and so for the third time in seventy years, the CCP fed

its own working class to the machine guns. On the night of June third, the army began to slaughter its way to the workers defending the square. It was the workers who bore the front of the massacre. Most of the casualty and lead of political repression were against members of the workers faction. The army soon reached the square itself, for the Western press Corps bore witness to what became

known as the Tianeman Square massacre. This is where you get tank Man and the most famous accounts of the massacre. By that point it was almost all over. The protests were crushed and the Chinese working class died with it. But before the last bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives

about what had just happened. The most common narrative is that Tieneman was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent it's not exactly wrong.

intellectuals to oversee market reforms. Believed in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy operates at the level of the state. It's based on free citizens equal before the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate

economic sphere into which democracy does not extend. The capitalist firm or its state owned equivalent remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive wings of the pro democracy movements in Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to the welfare state, limited protections from the worst physical and

psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The workers of Tianmen alone disagreed. They stood against not only the rest of the world's pro democracy movements, but the

tide of history itself. By applying the principles of the pro democracy movement to their own concerns skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory, democratic workers' self management. This is,

to a large extent, what Tianmen was actually about. It was the culmination of a century and a half long war between the democratic wing of the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement on Earth. The workers's movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies, and at Tienemen they would lose one final time. That defeat is the origin

of the modern world. One man rule in the factory, in its thousand thousand forms is the author of the hell of the twenty first century. And when we come back, we're going to look at the international part of the struggle that ended at Tienemen. To fully understand the magnitude of Tianemen, we need to go back to the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. If you want a detailed accounting of eighteen forty eight, go listen to the Revolutions podcast.

It's great. It's also many many, many, many, many many episodes. The short version is that there were a bunch of revolutions across Europe in a eighteen forty eight, collectively known as the Springtime of the Peoples. It was the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction. Frederick Engels death that angles of Marx and Engels fame was on the barricades with a rifle fighting in Prussia.

There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed the king, and the question of how far democracy was going to go came for the first time to the forefront.

Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original French Revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but dictatorship in the workplace, and the new socialists who wanted to question property relations and the question of class itself, and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere and directly into economics. This prefigure is a split inside

the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control over them that means of production meant that workers would control the production process directly through free associations of workers direct democratic unions, a position later known as cynicalism or workers councils, but more conservative factions of the socialists became

enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. They watched with envy as the industrializing powers of the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies engaged in increasingly elaborate planning schemes, first of roads canals in railroads, then of entire cities with complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative

commonwealth of socialism, and that planning obsessed faction began to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided between two camps, the Revisionists led by Edward Bernstein, who renounced Marxism and revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism

in the state from within, and Karlo Okotski's orthodox Marxists. Basically, the only two things these factions, who otherwise despise each other, agreed on was the primacy of state bureaucratic planning over workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its own workers, but were still The person who became most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one

Vladimir Bilitch Lenin. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Lenin's obsession with the German postal Service was such that he included this passage about the future socialist state in his famous State and Revolution, a text written between the February October revolutions of nineteen seventeen. Quote a witty German social democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.

This is very true. At present. The postal service is a business organized on the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trust into organizations of a similar type, to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service, so that technicians, foreman, bookkeepers, as well as all officials to receive salaries no higher than a workman's wage, all under the leadership and control

of the armed proletariat. This is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This would set off a massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers movement who wanted workers control over the means of production to mean workers making decisions overworked themselves and not just working for a different set

of bureaucrats. The struggle bureaucracy and democracy in the workers movement mirrorred the struggle between the workers movements and the capitalist state. By the eighteen eighties, the workers movement had created variable states within a state in countries like Germany

and Italy. These quote unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, ranging from as Grape had described, free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries and theaters end quote to unions, co ops, neighborhood associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties, ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to workers and their families, and served so the workers hoped,

as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the popularity of these democratic workers institutions, Otto von Bismarck created bureaucratic state run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare services to replace them. Telling an American observer quote, my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.

And this works. It was enormously successful. Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself, and when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had forgotten the democratic core of the Rowan ideology, workers themselves never did.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils. The most famous of these councils, of course, were formed in the

spontaneous Russian revolutions of nineteen oh five. In nineteen seventeen, these councils, called soviets, were originally formed in nineteen oh five, out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The revolution of nineteen oh five was crushed by the Czar, but in nineteen seventeen, the Russian working class would once again form workers councils as

another revolution commenced. This time, the councils would take control of production, directly coordinating between various factories and industries, as well as serving as a worker's counterpower to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy and the factory and the newly formed

anti democratic alliance of social Democrats, Bolsheviks, capitalists. Between nineteen seventeen and nineteen twenty, workers councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland and were matched by revolts of syndicalus unions in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings wereal crushed in Italy, which saw some of the most intense conflict been synicalists and the Italian state. The famous occupation of the factories was ended not by the Italian government but by the

Italian Socialist Party in their union, the General Confederation of Labor. This, in large part was how fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced with workers movements on the verge of seizing power, social democrats turned on the working class slaughtered

their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the worst defeat of the democratic workers movements will come not at the hands of the capitalists or social democrats, but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the very party at the workers' councils had put in power. Lenin began to

undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere days after the October Revolution, his draft Decrees on Workers' Control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik dominated

trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be modified before they could be implemented, but while publicly declaring his support for the workers councils, the Bolshevik slogan was after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to trip away at their power until he finally admitted his real position of democracy in the Factory in nineteen eighteen in the Horrifying the immediate tasks of the Soviet government quote,

unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously

one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what one man rule in the factory actually entails, the system he's describing isn't actually different from one man rule and any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would be no different than capitalist, social democratic, or even fascist rule.

The movement for Democracy in the Factory now faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly, and as the nineteen twenties bled into the nineteen thirties, the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a haale of bullets and blood. But they didn't. And next episode, our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will

be back. They will do many, many more revolutions, and we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what the ruling class did to stop them. And then returned to the lead up to Tianneman Square to see the final stand of the Chinese working class. Welcome to seek

it happened here. I'm your host, Miya Wong. When we last left the story of Tieneman One, Vladimir Ilias Lenin had in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction of the workers movement that actually wanted democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately, for the Leninists, no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the factory simply refused to die for over one hundred years.

The development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly, coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the

workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically. As the Journal and Notes pointed out, this manifested in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers councils to manifest themselves in

moments of revolutionary crisis. In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the Second and third Industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the new world. This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers movement. The producers of this new world should also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the workers movement was to take control of production in itself and manage it for the common

benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs in and of themselves were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers movement. They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole, and by this point the workers movement was extremely brought, stretching from social democratic trade unionists the

intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity, not in

its innate humanity and creativity. Before the democratic wing of the workers movement, this solved nothing as long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one man rule in the factory persisted. Changes and owners of structure and health benefits missed the entire point that degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class, by giving it the class itself control over the production process that for so long had controlled them.

In nineteen thirty six, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seized control over their workplace's end mass. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic

worker self management before or since. Everything from public utilities to bakeries, to hospitals to shoe factories fell under the control of the direct democratic unions, and once the former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically the benefit of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiment in

democratic self management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self organization developed a universal health care system that dramatically expanded service into rural areas where care was

previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst a violent civil war in Spain and under the guise of an anti fascist alliance, Liberal socialist and stoutist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self management and returned the factories to their owners, before losing the war to the

fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of promannagerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers' councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in nineteen fifty six, and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight. Hungary, in particular is an interesting revolution because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tienemen, but

this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. But if you talk to the actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian workers council quote, the time when the boss

decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply instituting liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control of their factories and workplaces, forward workers' councils, and overthrew the government before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well, in Italy, in France and Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam. They spread everywhere, and

to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike. The development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often emerged in places without established workers movements and the political education effects typical of such movements. Was the course of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist vanguardist National Liberation Front f l N, which had

prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The Afalen's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed BenBella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him. Production would be managed by democratic workers councils built on the properties seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the

country following independence, left much of their property uninhabited. Then, Bello's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them. But the whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one man rule in the factory. Still, even by the late seventies, it was by no means clear that one man rule

in the factory would triumph as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy in nineteen seventy seven, and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish Revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment in the late nineteen seventies, it really looked like they were going to do it.

The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managery elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts

without giving up their power. As author and friend of the show, Viciostre Wild points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter, a kind of dark agra that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions allowed them to identify with each other as

a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in any way as liberatory.

This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well as the spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned to homeowners bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets.

class as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics, networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option in the left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional

workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement, But in order for the anti democratic counter revolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production to somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply. The capitalist class found that answer in China in the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in nineteen forty nine. The Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that

existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece rate system, a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had

very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a degree of participant patient in the labor process and the ability to criticize bosses, because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic, semi democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that, while raked by the party, ensured that managers would at

least be somewhat popular. Till the process was strictly managed, workers had the ability to criticize the cadra to govern them, and combine the work unit's system of folding home and

social life into the factory system. The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers' participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere, and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace, and it meant that the system, at least in the cities worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for me to do the culture revolution. Rant

everyone gets the Culture Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote unquote black blood, the children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds. These people were heavily persecuted. And you can make arguments about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch collaborates with the Japanese imperialists. But this extends to the children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds, and

that term is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared of black class background, who had quote unquote black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family had made bird feeders before the revolution. It

was as a system, absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff that was literally not their fault at all. They had no way to control who their parents were now.

The initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party, but as things became more and more chaotic and the attacks on CCP, Bear Gratz and Caudra escalated, it spiraled nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called the January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out the CCP, and this caused what I would describe as a oh fuck moment for Mao, because now,

despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually deal with a workers controlled city. And I found this incredible line from Joe and Lai in a meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to do with this new revolutionary Shanghai quote. When asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Joe and Lai bluntly replied that quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election

at the Paris Commune style. And this was obviously a problem for now because there was no way for the party to maintain its long term control if you know, you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of the Paris Commium. And so instead we saw a full on counter revolution. By about nineteen sixty eight, rebel workers

and students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards, was staggeringly by far the least violent part of the

cultural revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a significant amount of time studying the actual death records city by city and province by province in the Chinese Archives quote, more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local annals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase, in more than ninety percent of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. This third phase nineteen sixty eight onward is to the people, and the culture revolution gets killed.

And this is the opposite of the way that the Culture Revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control. It was the state slaughtering its way through various rebel factions that did most of the killing and the political persecution. And

this has enormous effects on subsequent Chinese history. It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state. And by the late nineteen seventies, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face

of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more intellectual driven liberal democratic politics that broadly ignored the working class entirely, as danzhel ping unleashed the horrific one child policy and in draconian an ultimately successful attempt to established the state's patriarchal control over the household and stripped hundreds of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they

had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution. But the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg. By nineteen eighty nine, the classical workers' movement globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social and political movements,

most notably pro democracy movement in China. But democratic self management and its critique of one man rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro democracy movement, which meant that its development by the workers of Ganemen was a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations to the workers' movement.

One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in the factory. Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom in the workshop? Does what the workers say count or what the leader says. We later talked about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator. What one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same one man rule. Our objective was not very high. We just wanted workers to have their own independent organization in work units. It's

personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at five, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonuses. This is personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules decided how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone, and then afterwards anyone who violent and we

punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now, we don't have this kind of legal system.

Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated. It had little or no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles. This was as pure a workers we've met as any in Chinese history, and for one final time, the instinct of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched on Beijing, it was the Chinese working class

wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the factory would be scrubbed from the records that the CCP and the pro democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning of the events would be lost. What then was Tianemen In some sense, it was a transition point between two different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high water mark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tienemen mounted

the final attack of the classical workers movement. Their defeat ended the old working class as a political force, and they were annihilated altogether in the economic restructure of the nineteen nineties, which crushed the last vestides of workers' autonomy in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese

welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class drawn from the rural and semi urban under classes of the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks of the two hundred and seventy seven million migrant works that today comprise the background of China's working class. This new working class, with rural household registration in no way into the remaining state owned factories, would have none of the benefits of the previous one.

It would instead face a full raft of capitalist ideology baked into every aspect of workplace culture, and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class could at least pausit a democratic form of the factory to which life could be improved. This new working class's greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to

be a temporarily embarrassed petie bourgeoisie. Such ideological selfconceptions are inimical to the formation of the classical workers movement, and indeed the new Chinese working class has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace. The situation is not unique. The death of the classical workers movement has seen the collapse of their demands democratic self management everywhere in the face of a working class it refuses to

cohere itself in the factory. China was just late to the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economic system has lurned from crisis to crisis for the better part of my lifetime, setting off in its wake an increasing number of revolutions, even as the darker gore of the factory ceased to function as a place to form

identities for this new working class. If a collective identity couldnot be forged in the factory, it would be foraged in the street instead, lacking a positive identity to cohere itself around workers were only able to mobilize on a mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens

it on a cross sectoral basis. The state, with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant fights against the police became the sole basis for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form of mass street movements in almost continuous confrontations with the states.

Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced by running fights with the police. But this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind without the leverage against the state the classical workers movement's control over the workplace, provided they lack the ability to bring down a government

firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over the last five or six years to carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong and Sudan were as Mela Testa predicted in the early twenties, easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations, but with current labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations. The way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce

democracy into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of tienemen The workers who assembled outside Tieneman Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that they spoke the language of the old workers movement, they stood and fought and died like we do in the streets.

They were the bridge between the world of the workers movements and the world we live in today, and thus faced the same revolutionary crisis we face today, the crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Columbia and Iran, of Mien Maar in Hong Kong, of victory just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped. The workers of tienemen I, suspect, have no answers to give us now, But expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those past

and present who died fighting for liberation. All we can do now is find our own way, and, with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for.

the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth. The pronatalists certainly think that the new administration is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in cahoots with their agenda. The main inns on the pronatalist front have come from the Peter Thiel tech right wing of the White House Right. This is like JD. Vance and previously Elon Musk yep.

Musk has been doom posting for years about how a drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large scale population collapse, and at an anti abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying quote, I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.

other ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The new big, beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House will create quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids. And here Mega stands for money accounts for growth and in for growth and advancement.

is so high is just direct social coercion. And if you stop having that or like you know, the amount of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are gonna to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies like and you know, and so they're trying to do all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort of like deal with the fact that if you don't force people to have children as teenagers, they.

but these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage, the Heritage Fundation recommends a program use government funds for education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women how to track their mental cycles using charting courses to both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote unquote

natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage proposed to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote horn balancing, dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.

money for urban public transit and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.

having the same fucking panic for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through newspaper archives and you just it's you're literally reading the same article over and over and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades, So like the first big modern freak out about birth rates is in like nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have the first big like japan birth rate.

one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the one party. This is a party established by a World War two Nazi, but that means that they run all of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them. They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on

the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're

going to promote this. And this is sort of one of the first places you see this huge intra intraclass conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to just like send every woman back to the household to raise children, and the business people who are like, no, you can't do that. We need to exploit these women's labor to like make money. And so the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying for childcare

leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally that their plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the daycare stuff.

second cabinet, the quote. Task Force for Overcoming Popular Relation Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pro

natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to like promote the traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations. There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this,

the one that's actually interesting is reforming work styles. So, like, part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably staggering over work, right. I mean, it's one of these things that's like a persistent social crisis. It's that there's a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long

everyone is working all the time. So Shinto Abbe's plan for this was to put into place a soft cap of you can only work one hundred hours a month of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right, Like one hundred hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like, you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.

But this is again this problem that he's having, which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe like people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just like being.

make more money. Right. They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children, and this just like didn't happen, which over and over again they're like, we're gonna do these kind of like these these kind of like okay, we'll give we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in order to like have kids, and it just doesn't happen. And so you know, this is one

of Abe's big initiatives. But by the time he's like assassinated in twenty twenty two, he what he was uh bye by time his political coalition was finally detonated, bye by one by one guy with an electric plunderbus.

be just straight up like child allowance. So Japan has the system that they've been you know, they've been sort of implementing over the course of like all of these fucking reforms, which is just like all right, we're just gonna like hand you cash. It's still not enough money to like substantively change stuff. But there's a lot of

different kinds of cash policies. They have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like okay, here, you had a baby we're gonna give you this amount per month. I think it's like ten to fifteen thousand yen which hold on, yeah, so it's like like seventy dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense date research on. They're supposed to have these like counselors that like come check in on you and like give

you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch of basically like childcare equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out to about like seven hundred dollars ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing. And then in twenty twenty four, Kishita is replaced by like some other dipshit who you know, if he lasts more than like two years, I guess

I'll tell you his name. But he's you know, attempting to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare subsidy and very importantly like tuition free high school.

So one of the continuous plans, if you like, if you go back to like what I was talking about with they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right, that never got implemented except in like the last two years, like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city, because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know, the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.

to like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And also they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this, but they're they're they're trying to set up a system where you can get full pay for couples who both take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right, They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll just pay people to leave the workforce to have children. They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying

for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And none of this shit has done anything at all, right, like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and and and if you want to look at like, okay, so, like what what's sort of actually happening here?

they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and this is not working at all, right, But you can look at the series of structural contradictions in their political collision, and then you can look at the fact that like, again, one of the important ideological things here is that these people hate immigrants, right, and they don't.

until about twenty ten. In Spain, abortion and and less it was like a serious health issue, elective abortion. I guess. Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence as or weapon, and we can see this as a kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right, yeah, who is a Francoist general? Right makes a speech in July nineteen thirty six, quote, Our valiant legionnaires and regulades have shown the red cowards what true men are. And

they're women as well. This is totally justified because these communists and anarchists anarkate free love. At least now they will know what real men are, not the militia gaze. This is a translation that I'm reading to so people can go to the original document. But gays is not the word he used. A better translation would be a word that begins with f Yeah. Okay, yeah. They will not escape, however much. They kick their legs and scream like this is a general in their army making explicit

rape threats. Right, They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a Cecion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Radcliff is written extensively about this. The group very much served as kind of the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught women from a young age they were inferior and you get to men. They had to go through the organization's programs. To do anything, any engagement with the state, they had

to first go through the women's section. Right. If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a driving license, if they wanted to engage with the world outside of their homes in any way, they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them that their highest

calling and only value was to have children. Women's role in the Francoist project then, was child bearing a child rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here in like quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology. Right. It's great to go to antiques markets in Spain because you

could always buy like a phrenology head. You can acquire like an og one, you know, like better if you know the replace to let you could find some find the calipers. That's the dream.

A big part of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation of an Arco feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. Right, the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage

and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right, So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance, the unions took on the role they would assign women I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right, So, like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.

Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position, so that in order to achieve more gender equality within that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated. It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that

doesn't really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something of a pathogen that spread within society. Welcome mind virus. Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's.

extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan. These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the parents had been killed. Sometimes it was when the mother had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women who

were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way to force any woman you want to into an institution. These children who were taken from their mothers were often trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty three at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told with a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called

routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who was a nurse called in for me that my baby had died. She said they would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far as to keep the body of a dead baby in a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers. They even dug grave for babies, but many of those

grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These babies were then given or sold to other families and raised, and in some cases they lived their whole lives and

died without ever knowing who their parents were. Right. I remember, like I was doing my PhD when the initial research into this was being done, And it is fucking horrible for people to find this out, right, like, because the people who were stolen from their families and in many cases are like still alive, right and in most cases

their birth ctificately exists with say mother unknown. And that was a process that existed to protect women who have had children outside of marriage, but was also used to steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've

linked it as an article. There was also like a I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one of their reporters had recently had a baby so it was able to make an appointment with the obgyn who was stealing these babies, and when she confronted him, he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing it at her. In Jesus, the first incredible country. The reason that they did this right was because their fascism was of a unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that

Franco wasn't fascist, you with something worse. They had what's called national Catholicism right, which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of the leftist kind of pathogen.

the rest of Europe, the Francoist predictive opposite. It returned for its inspiration to sixteenth century Catholic texts, and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth rates like they did have.

You have a post war baby boom rate. You have that everywhere that is affected by a large war, Like you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this, and then birth rates do go up until like the nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly and Spain is once again in like a sort of not so

much a birth rate panic. I didn't think, but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates never more particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to the economy, right, which made it harder for people to have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to read more on Ninio Strobados, I think there's a TV

series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm sure you can find it wastitles. But someone made a documentary on this that was presented in academic conference I did, and if I find the link, I will put it in the show notes. Hell.

and it's s chi Jescu regime. So we got to peel back a little bit here and talk about you know, when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind of the end of forty seven, early nineteen forty eight, and in the first years of the communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all tended to bring in the post war period, obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these are good actually, right, not to deny all the horrible things that were happening.

But life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for a lot of women. This is true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises, And this happened across society, right. A lot of the poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right. And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically. Rates of

accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant for women.

start to fall. This freaks out though a lot of these these communists, because the kind of communists who are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is a term that I found for the first time in a Journal of Family History article, But it's a term you can find other places. And the basic idea is that and this is an idea that then it goes back to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,

equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as a potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period of time. But this is like a thing that they think, right then that like if we don't bump up these birth rates we're going to deal with like an actual

economic disaster. So by the time Nikolaichichesku takes over as party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis and the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously. In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty five point six life births per thousand people in Romania, and by the time to Chescu takes over, there's about fourteen live births per thousand people. Right now, for reference, both of

those are still higher than the US birth rate. Right now, we're at about eleven a little less than eleven live births per thousand people in the country. The only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration, but

that's a topic for another day. Cichescu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family, and per that article in the Journal of Family History, Cichescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the family must be combated with determination because they result in an increase in the number of divorces in the disintegration of the family. And then the neglect of the children's

education and training for life. And this is something that had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the family in the society that it existed before. And a lot of people are like, well, but you know, we're becoming more scientific, you know, we have like women have jobs. Now, maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family

should be are kind of outdated. And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not, they're not you need to go back to having a shitload of kids, right, And he announces a new initiative to increase the population of Romania by thirty percent by nineteen ninety so, which I don't know if the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot.

women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion if you've had if you already have five children under eighteen in the house concurrently.

children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro natalist policies. It has been estimated that forty percent of the seven hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty five had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the State Security Police to combat this practice. So we're so close to this, we are we are not They really want to do all of.

of the party executive committee. He's like, women have gone fired up. Look at my wife. Classic chichesku. Yes, classic guy who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So, as is always the case with shit like this, women were not equally impacted by the abortion ban.

with the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago, when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him five thousand lay or about fifty dollars on the black market, and several women with professional degrees reported matter of factly that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes

without suffering any reprisals. Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected. The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion, and others like the ROMA had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women, urban ROMA, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations.

Their options were as limited as they were life threatening. Some used a variety of would be aborta fascians. Others availed themselves of the services of a back alley abortionist. Still others carried to term and the number of deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did right, Like, there's a lot of hideous stuff there.

We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, But I don't mean to paper over that a lot of women died and suffered lasting injury in fertility and a number of other things because of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they were given.

had completely disappeared. By the nineteen seventies, things were back to baseline. So in nineteen seventy four, Toichescu launches another push to increase birth rates, and again they briefly increase and then fall a year or two later. This process plays out a couple times throughout the administration, and one of the things that's important to note is that the increase that happens after every new sort of like focus on birth rates is less each time, Right, it gets

less effective every time. Now, the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population. Otherwise it dropped, right, because this just doesn't work, Like, you're not fundamentally changing anything, and none of these incentives because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right, but they never

are going to work. Like, as we went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch of fucking kids, and none of the people in charge of the Republican Party have any interest in making life affordable for people who are not rich.

of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania, a lot of kids who had different physical and mental disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their

parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that had been set up in Romania, And there were like posters that were going around that were part of the pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have a kid you can't take care of or that's not

like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle it better than you, So like, who cares have another kid and we'll just drop it off with us if you can't take care of them, right Like that was literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.

crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons, suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day, several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets from one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible. Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,

of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton stirves turned onto its and groans, Yeah.

then Chichescu's Children and The Guardian. Both of those articles do a good job of providing additional context and horror on this, But I think it's important to note that what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst this has ever got.

in their teens, I guess, oh my god. Yeah, I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had never really been able to play outside very much, and it was fucking yeah. Yeah, that shit will fuck you up. Yeah, that's a good museum. I'll see if I can find bradio Is, because if they've maintained one of the old orphanmagic as it was like with the eye and cribs and shit, and they have like projections on the walls the kids rocking and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah,

that shit is disturbing. Like I uh, I wouldn't read any of those articles before getting to bed.

Gideon Foundry. These these surveillance systems that are getting like spread all across the country. So we will do a whole episode on that in the future. But let's start with that and then pivots to Robert Evans to discuss terrorism.

Like an AP news story said that he had sixteen unused molotovs that were covered by law enforcement after the attack, but I think CNN said fourteen, Yeah, fourteen unlit molotovs, So it's kind of clear to be.

several of them quite severely. There's at least last I checked, six people who are still in the hospital, one in critical condition, although that may have changed since we recorded this podcast. The victims who were wounded range in age from fifty two to eighty eight. And yeah, so he hurts a number of people with these molotops, and then the way he described it, he like felt like he couldn't continue going through with the attack. He had been planning this thing for more than a year, we know,

or at least that's what he claimed. And he basically said that, like, yeah, once I actually started it, I found it very difficult to continue. So it seems like he kind of like didn't go as far with this thing as he could have, because it turns out, lighting people on fire, even when you're very angry, is something that most people cannot bring themselves to do past a certain point. He is on video screaming Palestinas free, and he stated to the authorities that when he'd been planning

this for a year. His goal was to kill Zionists. So you know, this is very it's very clear, like what this is motivated by, right, Like what his motivation was. His background is interesting. I guess you'd say he and his family come from Egypt, and yeah, he attended like high school in Egypt and later moved to Kuwait. He has a history of like it seems like he kind

of got politically active during the Arab Spring. He posted a bunch of pictures of Mohammed Morsey, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who served as Egypt's president from twenty twelve to twenty thirteen. He protested against the military coup that removed Morsey from power, and he and his family entered the United States in August of twenty twenty two as a non immigrant visitor, and in twenty twenty three he received a two year work authorization, which expired in March.

He had tried to come to the US in two thousand and five. His primary goal in coming here in twenty twenty two was to get his daughter, primarily into a good medical school. He moved there with his wife and his kids. His daughter was on the process of graduating. They had been living in Kuwait, but for a variety of weak reasons, especially the fact that they were not st She was like, I'm not going to be able

to go into medicine in Kuwait. His daughter seems to be a very gifted medical student, and so they moved here and she got into a medical school. And in fact, he seems to have waited to carry out his attack until her graduation, like he wanted her to be started on her path to becoming a doctor before he carried

out this attack. I think, both in the hope that it would protect her and she wouldn't get forced out of the country, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and I think probably just because easier to dad and he wanted to see her graduate, right. But then he carries out this attack. His family does not seem to have known. He basically left some messages for them as

he left to carry it out. His wife took his phone into the authorities, which I read as her being like, I'm at this point trying to do whatever I can to make the government less likely to prosecute the rest of my family. Like he's a writer, right, Like he like like I can't be concerned about him. Right, I've got kids, you know.

People try to keep it relevant for a little bit longer. I think part of the reason why maybe it went away faster than what we thought is so that it would not encourage like copycat attacks, and that still seems to happen to a degree. And I mean it's sounds like this guy was planning something for a little bit long, yess. But certainly having that other shooting in a close time proximity is notable.

on anyone's watch list. I'm sure neither will the next guy or gal who does something right like this is the world quite quite frankly, this is in part the world the Internet has made, right, Yeah, not that, not that it would be good if horrifying footage of the

genocide and Gaza wasn't getting out to people. But like, this isn't the first time we have watched a series of attacks carried out and copy attacks and copycat attacks like carried out and spread as a result of things that are spreading in digital media, right, Like this is a This is like a thing that's happened over and over again. This is just kind of how the internet and radical violence works well.

one should obviously be firebombing Holocaust survival. I think that's something we can agree on. What has happened to his family is also wrong, right, like it you shouldn't be punished for being related to someone who did a bad thing. And oh god, and this is yeah, this is also horrifying. Yeah.

could be deported as early as tonight. This is heartbreaking, right again, Like we've talked about habeas before, but the foundation of everything that legal systems based on English common law hold is you have to have evidence that the person did something wrong, not that they're related to the person who did something wrong. Right. You know, Robert and

I are both intimately familiar at least you know. I've received calls from young people in Burma who we've interviewed, whose families have been captured because of their participation in the revolution, and like, yeah, this is not a part of you. I should be going down. I want to explain very briefly what expedited removal is, because I have seen some shit that suggests maybe folks don't understand it.

That's fine, It's complicated. So expetitive removal is supposed to be reserved for people who arrive at a land border port of entry or EWI. EWIE is an acronym entering without inspection that means entering between imports of entry right over the wall. Under the wall over the beach. What have you? Right entering without going through a port of entry and they're supposed to have been here for less than two years. The Trump administration has been massively expanding

the use of expected to removal recently. Why they're doing this is because in an expected to removal proceeding, lower level immigration officials can remove people without them seeing a judge. Those people can still make a credible fear claim, which has to be assessed by an asylum officer and then approved by a judge. But this is a lot harder right than then going through the asylum process, and they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. I guess I think

it's a reasonable fear frame. I think incredible fear is a highest standard for another removal praceeding that they are likely to be tortured by the government or with the acquiescence of their government if they're sent home. Right, its use had previously peaked with one hundred and ninety seven cases in twenty thirteen that was under a Bama right

and surprisingly didn't see people writing about it. Then it was used even more extensively by the Biden administration, especially in twenty twenty four, with Biden passed his asylum ban right by executive order. The first Trump administration did use it. They used it in a more broad range of cases, but they didn't use it in as many cases as

either the Obama or the Biden administration. Right expertited removal is supposed to be for the most serious cases, for things where the person is a threat or a danger, or for other reasons need to be removed quickly. It was never designed. It was passed in I think in the early two thousands to first decade of this century. It was never supposed to be used like this, right, Robert, you mentioned these people had entered the United States in twenty twenty three, I think.

to send us back. I presume that citizenship is Egyptian, so I presume they will be sent there. That's a very high hurdle for them to clear. And I mean, I'm sure that there are national immigration nonprofits who are willing to fight their case because the abuse of expert to removal in the last two years, to be very clear, by dedministration as well, has seriously undermined the due process rights of migrants. But this is still a further step, at a significant step in removing those So I'm going

to follow this case. I'm sure i'll update you on it next week. I also just want to note that this has dominated a news cycle. Yesterday, twenty seven people were killed in Gaza attempting to obtain humanitarian aid. The IDF is still denying that. I don't really care that the Red Cross, as well as health authorities in gard they have confound that twenty seven people were killed en route to one of the humanitarians or the humanitarian aid

distribution point where they've concentrated it. In the sudden end of the Guard the Trip. We will have an episode on Palestine next week. I don't want one person's kind of stupid action to overshadow the killing of many more people and that tragic loss of life. Right so, I don't think that we won't be covering that. We will. What we will also be doing is pivoting to advertisements right now.

up to it. And I didn't want to say ship in the nation.

would lose by forty points. And it's like the Democrats are like those guys, those people are real fucking winners. We're going to adopt every single one of his platforms and then we're gonna run on he's not doing it well enough, and then we're gonna get fucking annihilated in every single election until like democratic process itself simply ceases to exist and this will be good.

series of terrorists is scheduled to come off. Is I'm pretty sure that China won in like the beginning of July could have.

on Canada and Mexico expired. Yeah, he just forgot about that one and no one was keeping count or they were like distracted, like I think specifically they were putting in some like European Union like tariffs like like that day and then just nothing like happy Yeah, And like I am wondering how much of that is, Like he's just gonna announce tariffs, put them on hold, and then just forget about them, but still announce new different tariffs in the future that may cover some of the same stuff.

first time. Is that like, Okay, again, Trump's actual goal here, which is to not have a trade deficit with China, is unachievable, right, There's nothing that can actually be done in order to do that, and there's no good way to claim victory either.

for Afghan people have an SIV especial immigrant visa. There are other smaller exemptions for the Olympic Games and sporting events for example. We will do a whole episode on this because we need longer than we have to explain it. But I just wanted to make people aware that we are tracking that, planning on getting something out about it, but we don't have enough space in this episode or

time to edit to address it in full. Today, Well, some things have been happening Garrison here in sunny San Diego.

craft bn next door. In this bungled raid, they entered drin in a late afternoon and the evening of Friday, and ice agents soon found themselves surrounded by an angry crowd at local people, patrons from the Vegan Small Plates cocktail place across the across the street, and the brewery it's now South Park Brewing, as well as folks from

the neighborhood. Right, this is one of those neighborhoods that like South Park of the concept was kind of invented by real estate agents so that it wouldn't seem like Golden Hill or Bankers Hill, and it would have like a more upmarket branding. So you have these very nice bars and restaurants, but then you also have like a laundromaut on the corner, and like a like a food market, like a non chain supermarket that serves a primarily Latino clan tel. I would imagine it's one of these very

sort of like class diverse neighborhoods, I guess. But people came out en mass. They surrounded these vehicles right, they were chanting let them go. ITTSI agents decided to defuse the situation by throwing flash banks and then leaving with four employees. I should add here that, as KPBS put it, quote, flashbanks were thrown, which is a cowardly use of the passive voice to obscure culpability.

are lots of them. Then I've seen this in multiple other cases, often from the kind of more lib sky people you see on Blue Sky right, who seem unable to comprehend the fact that no, they are cops and they are doing evil and cops do evil shit, cops can do bad things.

What if these are just like some kind of right wing militia, And yeah, with a little bit of checking you can usually tell that they are in fact from usually dhs.

been to and past that restaurant hundreds of times. I've never seen anyone who looks sad to be there. But it doesn't mean that's not happening. But I've seen nothing to lead me to believe that it is beyond this claim. Right, HSI had been in communication with bonafort Jetta's lawyer since February and they had been cooperating. Right Like one offort had given them these documents, which they claim were fake green cards. They applied for this warrant, which they got

an exceedingly broad warrant. One of the things that allow was for everyone inside to be detained and fingerprinted if necessary, even people who are not accused of any immigration offense, right, people who are United States citizens. The warrant also detailed that they had been surveiling the location. City councilman Shani La Riviera called the HSI agent terrorists. In a social media post, Bill Malougan got sad about this. Stephen Miller

quote tweeted Bill Milligan getting sad about this. Top Luria came out with three paragraphs of total bullshit and continued to unabatteredly support stripping our city of all its socially beneficial services in order to direct a fire hose of our money to the cops, one of whom earned four hundred and thirty thousand dollars in twenty twenty three. Jesus what yep? Yeah, San Diego's highest paid public officials of

cops by oh my god. Yeah, we are becoming a police department with a city attached because of Todd Gloria, someone who ran in twenty twenty on a reform agenda, right, who owns himself two hundred and fifty thousand much less.

San Diego never gets enough attention for being a complete shit show of a city, right Like and Ron by the Sea is the best way I've heard it described, right, Like, our city consistently has massive corruption in scandals and nothing happens.

This is a good thing. It means undocumented people are less likely to drive unlicensed and uninsured, right, and therefore it means that people are likely to stay at the scene of car accidents, and people who getting car accident to likely covered insurance. Right, I've been hit by an

unsure driver. It fucking sucks. Oh. DHS cannot access information on whose license is an AB sixty license, but they can access through a variety of databases and mechanisms other DMV data, which may include things like photographs, addresses, or thumb prints. So in this case, they were able to look at the fake green card and then look at other data, both in federal and local databases, from various things.

And some of these people had overstayed visas their claiming right be like, Okay, well we found a guy with this name and this date of birth, but the person hasn't minisued a green card, that that's their claim right, and the same with the driver's license database. So obviously, just to finish up on that thought, I guess this disincentivizes people from doing the thing which I've just said is good, which is getting a driver's license. Right. It disincentivizes.

I mean, I'm seeing things from students right now being afraid of going to their own graduations, being afraid of having their parents at their own graduation. Right like two blocks from a school, fucking chicken do not she's on top of the fence. Sorry, I'm just going to leave this. You're gonna fucking get out?

to work long hours. That doesn't matter, right, even if they did, you shouldn't be punishing the people who are being, in theory abused, right. I don't understand how you get to that logic. And even if that is the case, like having ice available on call to deport your employees only plays into the hands of abusive bosses who don't want to pay people, right, they can just call ice instead. This is a tactic that's been used for decades and

into migrants. So yeah, that's all I got. Good times, good times in San Diego.

that they're working to aggressively to revoke visas. As a direct quote from them, and this this is this was from uh Marco Rubio on fucking whatever social media app and you also say, quote, we will revise visa criteria to a hand scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's of Public of China and Hong Kong. So uh fucking rip all of the Hong Kong liberals who supported Trump.

I my guess is that it's going to be combined with the other horrible thing I been doing right now, which that they've suspended visits like consular visits to get student visas while they try to figure out how to like do this like implement this new social media policy where they want to just effectively. What it looks like they want to do is just like if you've posted

about Palestine, they deny your student visa. That seems like the thing that they're trying to put in place, Yet they haven't yet My guess is that these two are going to end up being linked and they're gonna and that that's gonna be what they're doing. It could also just be some sort of large scale of rollback of student visas for Chinese international students here, Chinese and national students have been targeted under so many goddamn administrations now, it's fucking horrible.

subsidies and contracts. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is talking about how Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, like duh, Like we don't already know this, but for some reason, this is blowing the minds of people like Alex Jones, who are now crashing out on the timeline, huge, huge shakeups in the mega world, with some people trying to cope claiming that this is a five D Chess move and that Elon and Trump are gonna come back together in the end, which is completely absurd. This is a huge

shift in the power balance in the New Right. We will be doing a whole new piece in the near future on the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story and how it will affect the Republican Party. But the following segment, which we recorded on Wednesday, will essentially outline how we got right up to this point, all of these slow microaggressions and fractures that led to this much more explosive breakup. So enjoy that and keep your ears peeled for a

future piece on Elon Musk Donald Trump's messy situation ship. So, Elan Musk donald Trump are now officially in their messy breakup phase where they're both trying to kind of play it cool, but resentment is clearly bubbling.

through as an more permanent advisor. He is essentially getting the soft boot. According to Axios, Musk had asked the White House about staying on as an advisor past the one hundred and thirty day Special Government employee threshold, but that was denied. Now, Musk has been reportedly disillusioned by the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through some of his Doge cuts, along with the growing frustration

regarding the Liberation Day tariffs which affect his businesses. To add to the tension, according to The New York Times, Musk has been upset that Trump has been negotiating deals with Open AI instead of Musk's own competitor, Grock god. In late May, Musk posted on x the everything app quote back to spending twenty four to seven at work, I must be super focused on x slash XAI and tesla.

team is doing unquote. After this, Steven Miller started subtweeting Musk on x the Everything app outlining the different types of cuts that Doge can make versus reconciliation bills can make, and defend it the big Beautiful bill, calling it quote the single largest welfare reform in American history, along with the largest tax cut reform in American history, the most aggressive energy expiration in American history, and the strongest border

bill in American history, all while reducing the deficit unquote, which it does not reduce the deficit. But now that Musk's White House exit has been more solidified, Musk's animosity towards Trump's main palsy bill has just skyrocketed, posting on June third on x Everything app, I'm sorry, but I just can't stay it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.

world in generations. Wow, now Steven seems pretty worked out, And I think this could actually have to do not just about Musk's tweets, but also maybe about Steven's own personal life, because yeah, Steven's animosity could relate to the fact that Musk seems to be stealing Stephen Miller's own life Katie Miller.