Part One: I Can't Tell You What's Coming

Margaret talks about the current political landscape and how to prepare ourselves.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to the Cool People
Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when bad
things happen, they were there for each other. We always
have been and we always will. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this is going to be another week where I
break from the regular format of the show because it

(00:23):
has been a rough week to try to act like
everything is normal. There have been a lot of weeks
like that in the three and a half years I've
been doing the show, to be clear, But for whatever reason,
I thought this was a decent week to try something
a little bit different. This isn't a new show, and
I don't want it to be, and we will continue
to do history and do all the things that we

(00:45):
do on this show. But I can't pretend like what's
happening right now, what happened last week doesn't affect me
and doesn't affect my work. This might have been the
worst week for free speech in the US since the
end of the Red Scare. I can't immediately point to
a worse time of that. People are being deplatformed at

(01:07):
an astonishing rate for sharing their opinions about the death
of Charlie Kirk and for sharing their opinions about the
government's backlash against free speech in the wake of the
death of Charlie Kirk. I'm recording this two days after
Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization he has vowed
to dismantle. Obviously, Antifa isn't an organization. There are no members,

(01:33):
there's no funding. Anti fascism is simply a position one
takes against fascism, But pointing out the nonsensical nature of
their plan is meaningless. They aren't doing this because they
believe there's some shadowy cabal called Antifa pulling the strings
on the left. They're doing it so that they have

(01:53):
an excuse to punish their political rivals. When Trump took power,
he said a lot of shit about coming for the
radical left, and look, that's me, that might be you.
I'm on the radical left. I'm an anarchist. I'm reasonably
open about that. So I got worried. But it was

(02:15):
pretty obvious right away that what he actually meant by
the radical left was the Democratic Party, his most direct
political rivals, even though the Democrats have been running towards
the right for years now trying to catch up with Trump.
So Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization, but specifically said

(02:37):
he's going to be going after its funding. There's this
long standing conspiracy theory that antifa or antifa, I guess
is the way that they would say it, because they
sure don't want it to sound like it's short for anything.
There's this long running conspiracy theory that Antifa is funded
by George Soros, the billionaire liberal philanthropist. So it seems

(03:00):
pretty transparent to me that Trump's primary target here is Soros.
I don't think Trump thinks that Antifa exists any more
than you or I think that. I'm certain that this
designation will be used against rank and file activists too.
The right wing is terrified to protests, and this will

(03:21):
be another tool that they can use against anyone organizing demonstrations.
So why am I talking about all of this? Well,
the not so subtle subtext of this show has been
from the beginning that you and I can aspire to
be cool people who did cool stuff too. I talk

(03:41):
about the various protest movements and freedom fighters in history
because I want all of us to understand that there
are endless numbers of them and that we can be
them too. Then, as I started to research episodes, I
quickly learned that all my heroes, all the people I
was researching, they're all flaw as fuck, which when I

(04:04):
first started this show was kind of disappointing. These days, though,
it's oddly liberating to realize that all of these people
I've heard stories about my whole life, that there are
just kind of a bunch of fuck ups and assholes,
because I'm like, hey, a lot of my friends are
fuck ups and assholes too. I bet a lot of

(04:26):
you listening are fuck ups and assholes. Not me, though
I've never done anything wrong, but fuck ups and assholes
can do amazing things. Because I do this show for
a living, because I spend all my time reading history,
I find myself thinking about most current events through a
historical lens. But the problem with looking at current events

(04:47):
like their history is that we can fall into this
lazy way of thinking that certain things are determined by history,
that certain things are inevitable. Historical determinism, we could call it,
and that's a joke and me taking the piss out
of Marx. Historical determinism is a different political idea, one
that I disagree with and that I don't want to

(05:08):
get too much of into a tangent about right now.
But basically, it's like if we think that history will
do something, it's kind of like when we think Dad
will come and solve all of our problems. You know,
it's this way of ignoring our own agency and waiting

(05:29):
for someone else to solve a problem. Have you ever
been in a like public situation where something bad is
happening and everyone just kind of watches the bad thing
happen because everyone's waiting for someone else to do something
about it. That's what happens when we forget that we
have free will. That's what happens when we think that
history will take care of itself. Capitalism will collapse under

(05:53):
the weight of its own contradictions. Fascism will fall because
it fell every other time. I mean, it's I need
to compare the Trump presidency to Hitler's Germany, because when
we do that, it's the worst case and the best
case of fascism all at once. Worst case because well,
it's Hitler, a man who is up there with King

(06:14):
Leopold the Second of Belgium, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zadung
for having killed the most people in history. We don't
want Trump to be a Hitler for obvious reasons. But
when we compare the Trump presidency to Hitler, there's some
optimism attached. The Nazis ruled Germany for twelve years from

(06:35):
nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty five. The Nazis famously
lost World War Two. A bunch of slightly less evil
empires like the UK, the US, and the USSR teamed
up to see to that. It took that whole World
War in neerd to stop the Nazis, but they were stopped.

(06:58):
Other fascists and authority tarian regimes, however, lasted for an
awful the fuck longer than twelve years. Most of the
ones I read about for the show tended to last
a good couple of generations, but again, that's presuming that
things in the future will look like things in the past.

(07:19):
Most of the authoritarian regimes I've read about they didn't
last any random couple of generations. They lasted for decades. Specifically,
in the middle of the twentieth century. The middle of
the twentieth century was a good time to be a dictator.
The end of the twentieth century it was a much
harder time to be a dictator who fucking knows what
the twenty first century will look like. Just because things

(07:41):
have happened in the past doesn't mean that that's how
they're going to happen in the future. I think that
we can all fall into that trap, and maybe especially
those of us who read history all the time. Although
you read enough history, and he used to be sort
of kind of galaxy braining it where you're like, actually,
nothing is ever the same. There's these patterns that repeat
over and over again, but nothing is ever exactly the same.

(08:03):
But do you know what is a pattern is that
on this show the discussion or the diatribe as it
were in this particular case, is interrupted pleasantly so by
goods and services letting you know all about themselves, letting
you know what other things you can buy, how you

(08:25):
can gamble your money, which you absolutely shouldn't fucking do. Whatever,
here's fucking ads, here they are, and we're back. So
historical comparisons are always fraud. People talk about the assassination
of Charlie Kirk like it's going to be the reichshag

(08:46):
Fire of our generation. I think even some like right
wing tweeter tweeters Twitter whatever, fucking assholes were like, this
is gonna be the Reichshag Fire, which is funny because
that's them admitting that they're the Nazis and this particular metaphor,
and look, it might prove to be the Reichstag Fire
of this generation, but I don't think it will. But

(09:10):
when people make that comparison, they're mistaking what happened with
the Reichstag Fire. Pop culture history remembers it as a
false flag attack that the Nazis burned the Parliament building
in order to consolidate power. This isn't true. I covered
the Reichstag Fire on this show in a two part

(09:31):
or a while ago. It's worth learning about if you
haven't already, because in some ways the comparison is apt.
The Reichstag Fire was set by a young council communist,
which is basically an anti authoritarian communist AKA person with
actually pretty decent politics. And this guy was named Marenus

(09:52):
von der lub Is this Dutch guy. He wants through
a cop through a plate glass window, which I think
is our right. Anyway, Marness was pissed off that no
one was doing anything about the Nazis, and so he
was like, all right, maybe if I go burn the
Parliament building, German workers will rise up against fascism. Unfortunately,

(10:17):
this isn't what happened. The workers did not rise up
against fascism at this particular point. And like it's easy
to read that outside of the context of the nineteen
twenties and be like, what the hell's wrong with the
German workers? Why didn't they rise up? The German workers
have been fighting tooth and nail for about fifteen years
at that point, and they were just worn down and losing.

(10:41):
This is the part that I haven't done as much
research about, but in general, I am aware of the
fact that the Nazis actually did a decent job of
recruiting from the working class. It's actually one of the
things that differentiates fascism from a lot of previous right
wing movements. Before fascism, the right wing was really not

(11:03):
a thing that the working class had like all that
much affinity for. You'd run across it, and there's always
this thing where like rural workers are always seen as
like more right wing. Marks was always on about that
he was wrong. It was actually rural workers who did
the Russian Revolution by and large. But you know, there's
always been this association between rural workers and being on
the right wing, like the peasants are not the industrial

(11:25):
proletariat or whatever. Right, But in general, the working class
has been largely a left wing phenomenon because well, class
solidarity against the rich. It's an important part of it.
But I've talked about this a couple times in the show.
What fascism did, what Mussolini's like magic sauce was is

(11:48):
that he took the trappings of the political left. He
took the idea of being a revolutionary and applied it
to the right wing. I don't know if this is
universally true, but in general, prior to that, the right
wing was like fundamentally conservative socially and just wanted to
continue the monarchy. And you know, it was just very

(12:08):
like not revolutionary, right. It wasn't about changing things. It
was about preserving things, you know, the nature of being
a conservative rather than a progressive. And what fascism did
is it said, well, we actually, like all of the
seizing power and the let's fundamentally change everything about society.

(12:29):
We just want to do that in the service of
right wing ideas like keep out the foreigners, super hierarchical power,
although later the you know, Bolsheviks are going to be like,
oh well, let's keep the conservative idea of super hierarchical
power and apply to the left. Anyway, that's a long tangent.

(12:49):
So basically, the German workers weren't going to successfully resist
the Nazis at that point. I sure wish they had.
It would have been great if they had risen up
after the Reichstag Fire. They did not. But more importantly,
the thing that people forget what the Reichstag fire is
that the Nazis were going to do what they were
going to do regardless of the Reichstag Fire. The Reichstag

(13:12):
Fire might have changed their timeline marginally, but honestly it
might not have. What I'm much more interested in learning
about from history is less does this modern event look
like this historical event, but more bigger picture questions about
overall patterns and strategy. It's this bigger picture viewpoint that
helps me understand that fascists are going to fascist. They're

(13:35):
going to do the fascist thing regardless of whether or
not people oppose them. Appeasing them, just like does not work.
Acquiescing and appeasing is not effective. It is no more
effective than kissing the ass of your bully in middle school.
That wouldn't have worked. Ask me how I know growing
up with the fawn response and as a bullied kid,

(13:57):
it did not get me out of that situation. That's
one of the most personal things I'll say on this show.
On an individual level, you can't get mad at people
about faun responses, fight flight, freezer faun or just things
that people do right. But you can get mad about
it on a social level. And the Democrats are doing
a fawn response and it is not effective and it

(14:17):
will not stop fascism. It's also this bigger picture look
that reminds me that effective social change seems to take
both action and organization. You have to have both. You
need to actually get together with people to discuss goals
and then work towards those goals. But the most effective

(14:38):
social movements I can come up with in history weren't
run by singular organizations, but instead various organizations and groups
and individuals working together towards similar goals, whether or not
they like each other. At a big macro level, take
World War Two, since why not we're already talking about

(14:59):
World War Two. The Nazis were stopped not by a
single organization but by many, many organizations, many of which
didn't even like each other. The USSR had been allied
with Hitler at the start of the war, and the
US and the USSR were never friends. But it took
the US, the UK, the USSR, China, the Soldiers rallied

(15:21):
by various colonies like India, partisan troops of all sorts
of ideologies. It took so many people, fighting for so
many different reasons to stop the Nazis in Japan. We
can look at the abolitionist movement in the US and
see something similar. It's easy to look at it and
be like, oh, that was the Union Army that did that.

(15:43):
The Union Army was part of that. And I actually
don't mean to disparage the courage of the individual soldiers
who fought in the Union Army. But it was an
awful lot of different organizations, formal and informal, working in
tandem that ended legal chattel slavery in the United States.
Black people self emancipating and creating abolitionist societies was probably

(16:07):
the core of a lot of it. Quakers risking their
lives to help people free themselves. The underground Railroad is
a very diverse organization of different people. Militant, multi racial
groups like John Brown's Raiders were involved. Northern industrial like
they literally were like, We're going to Kansas and killing motherfuckers.
It was I mean, it was terrorism, right. Northern industrialists

(16:31):
who just wanted capitalism to win worked alongside people who
actually understood that this was a battle for liberty. The
Union Army was involved, their motives were not exactly pure,
at least at the governmental level and honestly mostly at
the individual level. The massive general strike among enslaved laborers
in the South, which is the greatest labor action in

(16:52):
US history, was a rather important part of it. It's
maybe the crux of it. There were the guerrilla fighters
who came out from maroon communities and swamps and mountains
to fight. There were white working class revolts within the
Confederacy that seceded from the secession and fought militarily against
the draft. Movements are strong when they are built from

(17:16):
diverse organizations, and as the Zapatistas have taught us, they
are strong when they fight for a world in which
many worlds are possible. In many ways, that's the core
of the fight. In front of us. We have to
fight against the idea of a singular worldview. We need
to build mutual respect and solidarity between us or we're

(17:36):
going to lose. So yeah, this week I'm going to
share a few pieces written about the world we woke
up into last week. I'm recording this last Friday, so
it's impossible for me to be entirely timely. But again,
fortunately I am not a hot take writer and I
don't run a news show. Hopefully this is useful. Today,

(17:57):
I'm going to share a piece that I wrote and
posted on my substackle last week. On Wednesday, I'll be
sharing the work of a group called Crimethink. If you're
in a hurry, and honestly, I would recommend this head
over to crimethink dot com just crime th hi NC
dot com. They're fairly effectively shadow band on a lot

(18:18):
of social media platforms, or regular band on a lot
of social media platforms because the crackdown on free speech.
It's been happening for a while, because when we empower
various platforms to determine what kind of speech to allow,
it ends up backfiring and hurting leftists. Anyway, whatever you

(18:41):
can head over to crimethink dot com to read what
they have to say. But for now, ads, I bet
you new ads were coming. Here they are, and we're back. Okay,
this piece, I posted it last week on my substack.
It's called I Can't tell You What's coming. My dog

(19:06):
knows there's something wrong, and he's anxious. He hasn't mastered
the art of doom scrolling, and I don't think he
takes much in from the news podcast we listen to,
but he can tell that I'm worried, which makes him worried,
which in turn makes me worried, which in turn, well,
you get the idea. It breaks my heart that I
can't keep my friends safe from anxiety, and it breaks

(19:28):
my heart even more that I can't keep this four
year old mut safe from anxiety. He's got long walks,
and he's got as needed trazodone, and those things help,
but I suspect it would help more if all the
humans in his life weren't wound up balls of stress,
staring at an uncertain future. The news ascending waves of

(19:48):
stress through us, leaving fractures across our bodies, or at
least it's fracturing me and some of the people I
care about. Most people I know are tired, stressed, and
grouchy right now, and when they get together, they make
one another tired, stressed, and grouchy. Our friendships, relationships, and
communities are all strained by what's going on. I don't

(20:11):
have any solutions here, not other than the things you
already know, Like that, we need to be offering one
another grace now more than ever. We need to be
assuming best intentions of everyone we care about. We need
to practice our empathy and our conflict de escalation. We
need to build community even when sometimes all we want
to do is be left alone. We also, maybe more

(20:36):
than anything else, need to remember that we are strong,
that our enemies are just people, the same as us, mortal,
the same as us. It's weeks like this that I'm
grateful that I'm not a hot take writer. When you
write and talk for a living, there's this incessant pressure

(20:56):
to know exactly what to say about every news story,
every political development. There's good money in offering people rage,
bait or reassurance. Saying everything is fucked or everything is
fine is a good way to build your platform. As
mad as I sometimes am at the hot take machine,
I'm not mad at the people who live inside of

(21:18):
it and make it run. It takes a certain kind
of bravery to come out swinging with an opinion every week.
I just don't want to do it. I don't want
to do it because, frankly, I don't know anything. I
don't know what's going to happen. I spend countless hours
a week researching the history of social movements, but history
can only give you perspective, never answers. There is a

(21:43):
certain kind of reassurance I can offer you right now,
or at least I can share the reassurance I'm offering
myself right now. It's a strange reassurance, I admit, but
here it is. They are already instituting fascism as fast
as they can in this country. All the bad shit
we're afraid of, they're either already doing it or they're

(22:05):
trying to sort out how to do it, and they're
not going to be able to move substantially faster than
they already are. I'm not afraid of the fallout of
last week's news because everything bad that might come out
of it was already being planned. They've already been scapegoating
trans people for everything bad in this country and are

(22:25):
trying to criminalize our existence. They've already been talking about
declaring Antifa a domestic terror organization. They're already funding a
genocide and were before the current administration, and they were
already ramping up ice infrastructure as fast as they possibly can.
I don't know that there's any further acceleration available. The

(22:48):
fascist pedal is already to the fascist metal. That's not
to say that things aren't going to get worse. They
are going to get worse. They're just as far as
I can tell, getting worse as fast as they already can.
Our actions are not going to somehow convince the fascists
to get even more fascist. There's an odd sort of

(23:10):
freedom in that realization. We can and should collectively stop
saying shit like, oh, if you behave a certain way,
it will just embolden the fascists. They're already as bold
as they can get. And that doesn't mean that the
free speech crackdown over the past week hasn't been startling.

(23:30):
The level of hypocrisy from the right wing comes as
no surprise, but it's still worth noting a man they
touted as a champion of free speech was assassinated, and
their response is the suppression of free speech at levels
we haven't seen since the various Red scares of the
twentieth century. My friends are worried about me right now,

(23:52):
and I'm worried about me too, and I'm worried about them.
All of us are playing strange games where we decide
who should be more more worried about whom. We're all
wondering who is the most at risk, who needs our
support most immediately. It's our duty, though, to resist fear
and despair. Last week I saw people online, people I

(24:15):
usually respect, say terrible things like if you're trans, then
don't go home tonight, but stay with friends because we're
going to be hunted tonight. In so many ways, I
see people say we are weak and vulnerable, and that's
just not true. All of us are made of flesh
and blood, and there's a built in fragility to the

(24:37):
human body. But that's no more true this week than
it was two weeks ago. When I look at the
trans people in my life, I see the toughest motherfuckers
I have ever met. There's this meme that goes around
of two people talking, Wow, you're so resilient says the
first person, Thank you it was that, or be dead,

(24:58):
says the second. I know people share that meme to
critique how often marginalized people are told that they're resilient.
But there's still also an essential truth to it. We've
seen ourselves through so much, and we'll see each other
through so much more. Once, about half my life ago,

(25:19):
I went to foreign attention in the Netherlands for a
night because I was caught up in a mass arrest
of anti fascists who were trying to defend a mosque
against the Nazis who'd already burned the place down. Once
the police managed to single me out as a foreigner,
but we all refused to give them our names or nationalities,
and they singled me out as well as a few

(25:40):
Dutch people who seemed to potentially foreign to the cops,
And so there I was in foreign attention. I felt
defeated that night, lying alone on a wooden bench in
a cell across the ocean from where I was born.
Because of some complicated shit in the Dutch legal system,
I had reason enough to worry that I might spend

(26:01):
months or years in prison in a foreign country. I
made a bargain with myself, the kind of bargain I've
since learned you should never make. I told myself, once
I get out of this, I'll live my life in
such a way to not wind up in foreign detention again.
The police let me go the next day, and they

(26:22):
told me I'd fallen in with the wrong crowd, considering
two Dutch strangers let themselves be carted off to foreign
attention alongside me rather than break solidarity. I disagree strongly
with that cop. For years, I looked at that night
all wrong. I let it scare me. I kept that

(26:42):
terrible bargain I had made with myself. Whenever I was
in a legally complicated situation overseas, like sleeping in a
squat or marching in a demonstration, I was racked with
and wrecked by fear. I acted like the Dutch cops
had won. They didn't, though. I walked out of that
cell the next day, in no small part because several

(27:05):
Dutch people would refuse to identify themselves and gone to
foreign attention with me. I were rather we won. We
walked out with no charges. The real lesson I should
have learned that it took me a decade to learn,
was that solidarity is powerful, not that the police are powerful.

(27:28):
I can't tell you what's coming, and I can't tell
you it'll be okay. But I also really really can't
tell you that everything is fucked or anything like that.
I can only tell you that the future will be
determined by our actions. One problem with the current electoral
system in this country is that we grow up being

(27:48):
told that the only way we can make our voice
heard is by voting for representatives to various levels of government.
But history isn't written by voters. It's written by people
taking action. In particular, though not exclusively, history is written
by people taking collective action. In order to take collective action,

(28:10):
we need to act in solidarity with one another. In
order to act in solidarity with one another, we need
to offer each other grace. We need to assume best intentions.
We need to de escalate our conflicts. We need to
work hard, and we need to not let ourselves off
the hook. But we need to be willing to let

(28:31):
each other off the hook. And I need to figure
out how to explain to my poor dog that everything
is okay even when nothing is okay, because his only
job should be to live his best life. And be
good to people, which is actually quite a hard job.
But I bet he's up for it. At the end. Yeah, well,

(28:57):
I don't know what to say that I didn't already
just say take care of each other. Shit's rough, it's
going to get rougher. But as we approach winter, and
there's this thing I think about every year, and that
is that there's a delay between when you put into
place the processes that make things better and things starting

(29:17):
to get better. The best example of this is the
winter solstice, the longest night of the year, the darkest
night of the year. It's when the light returns that
the cold sets in. But the light returning is what
will eventually cause the cold to end. And so we

(29:38):
won't know when we start making things better by things
getting better. Right, as we start to make things better,
things will get worse. As we start to make things better.
And that's okay, right, we're in a very dark place

(30:00):
right now, but through our actions, the lightwar return. That's
my over dramatic thing for the week. But I don't
think you listen to this podcast because I don't have
a flair for the over dramatic. I was a high
school goth. I am and now an old goth. We
like dramatic things, we like being earnest and well, we

(30:24):
also like the darkness. So it's a very strange way
to use that metaphor. But whatever metaphors or metaphors, I'm
Margaret Kiljoy. What else to plug? There's so many other
good shows on this network I would listen to. It
could happen here, especially. I listened to The Friday's Executive
Dysfunction Disorder. I don't actually know the name of the podcast,

(30:44):
apparently because every week Robert makes a joke that confuses
me about what the name of it is. But I
listen to it every week. And also check out crimethink
dot com, who I will be reading a piece from
on Wednesday, and I have a and this the post
that I just read you, Like, almost all of the
posts on my substack is free. The only stuff I

(31:06):
put behind a paywall is more personal posts. All right,
be well, be as well as you can with everything
that's happening. I'll talk to you on Wednesday, and don't worry,
there will be I will continue to do the educational
fun history episodes I just had to do this week.

(31:30):
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