S2E3 Everyday Antifascism, Celebrity, and Making Something New with Candice Part 2 Transcript

Katherine (voiceover): Hello and welcome to Friendly Anarchism. This is Katherine. This is part two of my conversation with my friend Candice, who is an economist and a communist and a mother, and an all-around amazing lady. So let’s go ahead and jump on in.

Katherine: Alright, so where were we? We were talking about liberal anti-fascists.

Candice: Ugh.

K: That’s a thing now. You mentioned everyday anti-fascism. How I understand ‘everyday anti-fascism’ is not necessarily liberal anti-fascism.

C: Yeah, totally.

K: From Mark Bray’s book, he describes everyday anti-fascism… Oh, wait, that’s the wrong quote… This is how he describes liberal anti-fascism, He says, ‘Many people ascribe to a kind of liberal anti-fascism whether they know it or not. By liberal anti-fascism I mean a faith in the inherent power of the public sphere to filter out fascist ideas and the institutions of government to forestall the advancement of fascist politics.’

C: Right, so, I agree with that wholeheartedly. And that is definitely what I’m thinking about when I talk about liberal anti-fascism. But what I meant by mentioning everyday anti-fascism was just that it kind of tends to attract people who believe that the systems that exist still function in that regard, and it doesn’t give them a pass, I wouldn’t say, but it just frames the context of what anti-fascism and particularly the buzzword Antifa stand for, which is just like that everybody should functionally be against fascism and invites or welcomes people who are, for whatever reason, not gonna be in the streets, active anti-fascists, but who hold those beliefs, and even if they hold those beliefs within a systemic context of still being the job of government to resolve those conflicts, those folks are also welcomed into the fray of anti-fascism. First of all, I have so much mad respect for some of the people who have been spokespeople or who have really promoted the concept of everyday anti-fascism because of the fluidity of their rhetoric around the subject, and it’s not just a fluidity, but it was like the foresight and the vision to be like, ‘We need to be inclusive for people who might hold those liberal anti-fascist beliefs’, basically the antithesis of that, and you don’t even have to be the antithesis, but anything outside of inclusiveness of those folks is going to forward the agenda of fascism, if it has an agenda.

K: Right, yeah. And then when this book came out, when “Antifa” by Mark Bray came out with the term ‘everyday anti-fascism’ included in it, that was at a moment in 2017 was I really was unclear if anti-fascism was a societal value that we still hold as a consensus in this society, you know people were like, ‘Maybe fascism is a thing that we wanna do’, and so it was really important to push at that moment, push back on the encroachment of fascism into even liberal spheres.

K (voiceover): Now, clearly, this is still a problem. A lot of people like to think that defeating Trump means that we’ve defeated fascism, but we have entered a climate change era that is going to continue to be marked by more and more destabilization, so unfortunately, the need to fight fascist creep is as urgent as ever and will continue to be. Now, I’m not going to go into too much detail right now, but I just wanted to point out and direct you towards some resources about common forms of fascist creep that I’m seeing right now, the first being an emphasis on a fear about population growth. First of all, global birth rates are in decline and have been for decades, also, individuals are not equally responsible for the climate crisis, and by focusing on population, you obscure how the climate crisis is being driven heavily by unjust resource distribution, capitalism, colonialism, and militarism.

Next is wanting to blame all of our problems on a small secret cabal of evil actors, this is based on anti-Semitic tropes, so this is stuff like the illuminati or the ‘media elites’ or all that q-anon garbage. The third one is talk about purity versus degeneracy, so this is showing up a lot in natural food movements and farming movements, where you start seeing rhetoric about the pure traditional country side versus the degenerate dirty city. These things are often coded that the city is queer and black and the countryside is pure and white, even if it’s not being said out loud. Same thing with food and organic food movements. The original German Nazis were heavily involved in environmentalist movements and a lot of that stuff still exists today. The last one I’m gonna mention real quick is class reductionism, this happens a lot on the left, especially sort of Marxists and people in the Communist milieu will want to reduce everything to a class analysis, which often supersedes for them a race analysis, but just remember that you cannot understand our economic system without understanding systemic racism, you can’t understand climate change without understanding white nationalism.

Okay, so that’s just a really quick rundown, I’ve created a list of links on articles for all of those separate topics, if you are interested, check them out in the show notes… Okay. Back to Candice.

C: They’re looking at ways like, how can I vote, and march, and carry a sign and buy stickers and do whatever, that is really low barrier, just below educating myself a little bit more to say the right things and do the right things, and those unfortunately are the people who will get ahead. Those, unfortunately, are the people who get to be part of think tanks because they have a palatable message for the powers-that-be. They’re not saying, ‘Hey, you guys, we’re putting you on notice powers-that-be.’

K: I think that there’s an important discussion around how people conflate intensity of work versus quality of work versus the baseline politics that go into the work because people are unclear about some of those things sometimes. For instance, you can do very low intensity work with a really good politic, and that’s a way to include a lot of people that can’t be out in the street, are disabled, or there’s many reasons why people can’t be doing really intensive high risk work, right? But they can still do work that has a really radical politic at a low intensity, and that’s still better than people doing high intensity work with a bad politic.

C: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s really important for me that we recognize the work of people who aren’t necessarily able to be in the forefront or who maybe don’t want to be or are doing really important radical work in the background, because if they did it in the front lines, if they did it in the scope of the public, they would be at even more risk than they are by doing it in the background, and a lot of times that work is carried by marginalized people, disabled people, people who can’t present in front of cameras and who can’t march for whatever reason. Time constraints or physically. This year, to me, was such a natural experiment in all of that with the BLM movements that happened. I’m 36 and I’m a radical, and I’m an anarcho-communist. So if you think about the arc of time that I existed within as an active radical as a young person with more freedom and fewer constraints, was always about being in the streets, and there’s a whole lot of self-work and self-understanding and recognition that has to happen for the person going through that change of life, because now I’m not as able to be in a public sphere, march, do those things, like I have severe asthma, and this year it was covid, and I have all these kids and everybody wants to margin 6 PM, I think we’ve talked about this before. It’s just like I have to be cooking dinner at that time, I just got off work an hour ago. Or God forbid, it’s a Saturday, and I’m just kicking my feet up and that should be my perogative because while I respect and appreciate people who have a liberal agenda and those values who are marching in the streets trying to do the work, trying to forward the movement, trying to get the revolutionary shit going, some of them, and some of them are just like, ‘Can we ask government to do right us…’ Whatever spectrum of those values that were in place at that moment in time, they created a public image of what was happening. I think the thing that I’m really thankful for with the societal evolution that we’re experiencing now is that we have social media, we have the internet, we have public forums that are open source, open access, and people can share their values and their ideas and connect with each other broadly and while those spaces can absolutely be toxic as fuck and… Oh my God, they’re so annoying [laughter] But no, it’s like… So a lot of that work is being done by people who are behind the scenes, and that is real work. We’re writing actual policies that dismantle existing policies, we’re making sure that there’s food and child care for people who are able, we’re making sure that there’s a next step, a next path. I now have to place myself within that group because I just don’t have the time… Or space, or risk tolerance at this point to be in that confrontational marching around thing, and honestly, now after covid, I’m working on my physicality because I don’t even have the physical capacity to do that.

K: Yeah, I’m having the same… I’m the same problems and the same issues. After my arrest, I got really, really sick and is one of the reasons I stopped the podcast, and I’m still struggling with a lot of physical and mental symptoms, and I’m just not able to be out there doing that kind of thing.

C: Shit hurts.

K: Yeah, I’m getting old. I’m 33, which is kinda on the edge, people are still out there, being radical as fuck all the way up… I mean grannies are out there. I just personally, I’m not able to do that. Podcasting is not my favorite form of activism, but it’s what is available to me to be able to do from home, and it’s sort of the set of skills I have, I like ideas and stuff, and I appreciate people who are out there doing the good crime, [laughter] but I just can’t do it. I just am not able to do that. I really appreciate the abolitionist movement in groups like Critical Resistance who have a framework of understanding that there’s stuff people can do that is abolitionists and low intensity, as opposed to reformist.

C: Yes! Way to bring it home.

K: You can still do things that are working towards abolition even if it’s not burning down prisons, and I really like that. I think that that’s something that the more that we understand anti-fascism as a part of a larger abolitionist framework, the better for everybody.

C: Right. You’re so fuckin’ smart.

K: [laughter] Well I learned from the best. That’s why I’m doing this podcast, there’s lots of different kinds of smart, and I’m much more this kind of smart than street smart. [laughter]

C: This podcast has a longitudinal impact.

K: I hope so. I mean…

C: I’m not just juicing you up like legit, you’re doing something that’s gonna last. It’s a digital file now, it can continue on. People at the very least will know that they’re not alone.

K: I have seen the problem of the celebrity-type atmosphere thing that people get into and getting into this stuff for clout and all of that stuff. So I struggle with that, but one thing that I’ve learned too though, is that it’s really powerful to have a voice, and I’m the kind of person also… I realized I didn’t really know this until I got arrested actually, but there has been a downward pressure on me… what was that?

C: Oh, honey, yeah, of course. You’re a fucking working class person, you’re a disabled person, you’re a queer person.

K: [Laughter] Yeah, I know, but I just…

C: You’re oppressed!.

K: It’s like when people come out as gay and everyone is like, ‘Yeah, obviously, you’re gay’. I didn’t realize that I was visibly disabled. I didn’t know until I got into jail, and everybody in there was just like me [choking up].

C: Oh. Well those are our people.

K: Yeah, yes, yes. And I just, I didn’t know that I had a people and I didn’t know that…

C: But you did know at some point because you were always fighting for them before you ever met them.

K: That’s true, that’s true. Some part of me knew, but it didn’t really hit home until I walked into that jail and I was like, saw people moving the same way as me…

C: Mm. Yeah. Just awkward? We’re just awkward.

K: [Laughs] Awkward, yeah!

C: You know what though? Think about that. We could have met in jail.

K: If I do go to jail or whatever, then I’ll fight it. I can’t think of whatever stupid shit people would try and put me in jail for, but man, our government puts people in jail for STUPID shit. [laughs]

C: Well, I think you’re pretty well out of the scope of danger for the moment…

K: Yeah, I think so too.

C: You never know, they’re always changing the rules.

K: They’re always changing the rules, and I’m doing this thing where I’m being mouthy again…

K (voiceover): Candice is being really patient with me, here I am displaying some white fragility, because as a white person in America this is the first time that I’ve really personally experienced that sort of fear about my government. It’s one thing to know it intellectually, like my generation, millennials, we grew up with Abu Ghraib, with Guantanamo Bay. We know our government is capable of horrible evil shit. None of that was hidden, that stuff is from when I was in middle school and high school, but it’s a whole other thing to kind of feel the state clamping down on you, and I’m just sharing this vulnerability in this podcast right now, ’cause I hope that hearing that fear in my voice and from me, in that paranoia that gets caused when you realize really what this monster is, this carceral state that we have, just the heaviness of that. That’s my solidarity with criminalized populations, because really just… It’s horrifically cruel. If you want just a continuous run down about the atrocities our government perpetuates all the time, you can follow Alec Karakatsanis on Twitter @equalityalec, he’s the founder and executive director of the Civil Rights Corp. Or also, another good Twitter account is Jailhouse Lawyers Speak. That’s @jaillawspeak on Twitter and just constant barrage of horrific cruelty of the Prison Industrial Complex and of this American government. It’s scary, man. Me and people like me are just doing our best to try and survive and make this a livable world and make it a fair and just world, and it shouldn’t be this scary to do that, but… That is what it is. That is what it is.

K: [laughter] Well people keep trying to shut me up and that makes me annoyed, it makes me want to not do that, and it’s worked… I shut up for a minute ’cause it was just too much, ’cause it’s too hard is… [choking up]There’s a reason that this podcast has been really hard, and you mentioned earlier, you’re talking about celebrity, about status and I’ve been struggling with this show in particular, with my role as a host on a podcast, and what that means to be somebody who is taken from versus somebody who’s helping… I got to a point where it feels like the desire for the system to commodify me or you or anybody is so deeply embedded. To be a public figure, is to be somebody who then becomes commodified too… And I can feel that and I feel really uncomfortable with… I don’t know, I just really, really..

C: That feeling is really important. Because once you become a public figure, once you put your work out there, then you start to become the property of the public, right? But I will say this, when you’re adding to the discourse and the larger school of knowledge and body of work that’s out there about these issues and really doing so in a very accessible, revealing way, especially from an afab lens, from that raised femme gender lens, which is so often dominated and dictated by tankies and fucking… Dudes. [laughs]That that is worth it. It’s worth the risk, but then, of course, with every risk that you take, you have to find ways to mitigate it, and so it goes back around to like, Who do you want yourself to be, how do you want yourself to be commodified. I think you’ve done a really good job of taking a step back when it just became too much, and that’s totally respectable, and it’s also like a demonstration project in what you mean when you say community care, what you mean when we talk about activist burnout and all of those pieces. People look at me and they go like, ‘Oh, you never burn out’, and I’m like, you don’t really know, actually.

K: Right.

C: Because I always find ways to stay busy… I have to stay busy defacto, as a fact of my life. Part of the fact that I’m like, I’m a mom and I have to work and all these other things, but I often also just grab onto projects that are a little lower barrier for me to stay active so that I can continue and it’s not because I wanna be a public figure or a public commodity, it’s ’cause I just wanna keep my momentum up.

K: Right.

C: But people look at that and they do… They do look at that and they do try to define it for you, and it’s really hard to keep ahold of that.

K: Well, and all of these issues, all these issues are tying into things and finding out about myself and about re-evaluating my own life and my own way of being in the world. And it’s like, How much of this do I wanna do publicly? How much of this is useful to people, and it’s useful for me to find community and useful for me to create community, and how much of it is like… I’m just really struggling with that balance. You lose…

C: You lose status points, it’s like nobody’s gonna protect you if they find out all of the lower status things about you, they’re just like, Hey, let’s protect somebody we think is more important.

K: This is somebody that is trash, we can just throw this person out and not care about this person, and that’s a thing that’s happened to me in activist spaces, or it’s like You think I’m one way, and then you meet me and you see that I move and talk a little bit differently than you thought I would, or I look differently than you thought I would, and I can just see the status get lost… and it’s so painful and doing that in a…

C: Yeah, so those aren’t fucking activist spaces that we care about.

K: [laughter] That’s right.

C: Those are the wrong activist spaces.

K: Yeah. *sigh*.

C: No, honey, it’s fine. You’re a thing of beauty, and that a lot of people are just so caught up in their own belief and internalized abuse from society about what the truth is, that they don’t know how to behave properly in those scenarios to really be able to just take people as they are and meet them where they’re at requires you kind of being in a subverted position in a lot of ways.

K: I think it’s interesting that I reached for Christianity at that point too, when I felt like I was going to be doing something more dangerous with my life, I reached back to my ancestors and see what they did. My whole family is Christian.

C: You Sankofa’d. [laughter]

K: I what?

C: Sankofa. It’s like the original symbol of the heart, like the African symbol with doves or… I don’t know, my partner’s the artist, not me. But it’s like this circle-y… it’s a mythological bird. There we go. Reaching back for an egg on its tail. It’s an African symbol in the style of… what people? [indistince voice] The Akan. Yep. It’s something that all humans do. It’s a theme that’s repeated throughout most of our ancient ancestral knowledge.

K: Hmm. That’s interesting.

C: So we were talking about this before. So yeah, you reached back to your ancestors and were trying to do something…

K: It was like how did they find strength and how did they deal with the world when it’s difficult? I’ve had some crises of faith while I’ve been on hiatus. I’ve kind of come back around to deciding that faith is a practice and a choice, you know? That it’s like even if every moment of the day I don’t believe in God, the choice to be a person who lives in faith, is useful to me to be able to survive.

C: Yeah. Fo sho.

K: And when we’re talking about these hierarchies, there is something that was very strong about the way that the Christian tradition subverted the existing social hierarchy to say ‘Actually the wealthy are the least important people, that the refugees and those hated by the government are the most important people’. And I didn’t have a lot of exposure to the Bible when I was a kid, but my mom did read the Christmas story at Christmas every year and that’s a really beautiful powerful story.

C: No room at the inn.

K: No room at the inn. This refugee family living in poverty is being turned away from everybody, just hated by society, under risk from a totalitarian government.

C: Mmhmm.

K: That this person, this woman is the most important person in the world… she’s the Mother of God. That is a really powerful subversion of the social hierarchy in a way that I think is just such a good story that it’s really lasted and it’s still really powerful, and I still really believe that, and I still really love that image. And how you imagine your God is like if you imagine your God as the least of these, as the person that’s most hated by society, how does that change the way you move through the world? How does that change who you care about? Who am I trying to impress, right?

C: Exactly.

K: What would the woman who can’t find a room at the inn, the poorest person, what is this brown woman that’s living in poverty, what did she think about my actions instead of thinking about what are the people in power who can hurt me, like what do they think…

C: Or even like, what is the super cool hipster who started a blog page that talks about anti-fascism and is a well-known organizer, what do they think about my actions.

K: Right.

K [voiceover]: This is definitely a sub-tweet, but not towards any blog. Actually the only anti-fascist blog I know about is the threewayfight, and that’s a great blog, you should totally check it out.

C: Yeah, yeah. None of those people are important. The people who are most important are the people who are the stakeholders, right? The people who are the stakeholders matter in the decisions that you make. So I would say if the work that you’re doing is supported by those people, then great, if it’s not, then stop doing it. And really, the really, really difficult piece of that is like, I’m a leftist, I’m very often considered part of the stakeholder category because of all of my particular marginalized identity-related things, and those two identities leftism and being marginalized don’t always interact well in terms of being able to say definitively yes or no, I agree with this, and be of a spokesperson for other marginalized people, particularly people of color, because we don’t all agree. [laughter] And so with the Black Lives Matter movement, something that you were involved in.

K: I personally owe so much to Black women, just in my personal life. I don’t think I could ever make up for it.

C: Well, and we’re not asking you to do that because I think that in a lot of ways, what we’re just asking for is for you to within your capacity, within the safety of your person, support us and support our voices, and I see you doing that. So I don’t know, there’s a whole lot of white activists around who will frequently grand stand and are still to this day, even after all of the dialogue and all of the discussion around what it means to be an ally and what it takes to be an effective ally will still like for instance, try to center themselves and their version of the dialogue that they think will be more acceptable to the powers that be, and that is the problem that is the fucking problem that I have been facing for weeks now and for years, but really encountering it for weeks is because these people know that I’m right, the powers that be. They’ve encountered and dealt with me long enough to know that if I say something, it’s right. In terms of what needs to happen, what is to be done? What should we be doing? That’s the right thing. And they’re having a really difficult time confronting their own cognitive dissonance and their own positionality of wanting to and having the power to resist that progress that I’m saying that we need to be taking. And that’s just from a lens of progress, that’s not from a revolutionary lines, and so I appreciate you making the space where I can say that and they’re being other people who will listen to this and say, yeah, that is a lens I haven’t really considered. And that is a fact in factor of like, Oh shit, we should be listening to Black women, we should be listening to people who have not just lived experience, but also a fucking education, that’s the thing that they often forget about me and they wanna put me in the lived experience category, ‘they’- the powers that be in my life currently, but I have a background degree in Economics [laughter]. I have been as a child to four countries, like I spoke different languages, I worked in kitchens, I’ve worked for my whole life. People will still relegate me to entry-level labor or experience for the work that I do, and it’s like mother fuckers I’ve been working for 22 years. And if you think that none of that work experience that I have, none of that life experience that I have, none of it… And it’s the same with you. It’s like, if you don’t think that my lens on ableism or my lens on gender or the way that I walk and move and experience the world matters, then… Fuck ya, As my sister Jackie would say. [laughter] Fuck ya then. And her! She’s been all over this world, she speaks three languages, she fucking has a multiple, multiple skill sets and still makes not enough money to live on because she’s from another country and has an accent and she’s Black. So we have a whole lot of work to do. This new Democratic administration is like posing as being like, ‘This is how we’re gonna fix America.’ Like motherfuckers, unless you’re talking about a complete revolution, we ain’t fixing America and the AOCs of the world and whatever, who dilute our message and take a lot of flack for it… I give her credit for fucking being publicly socialist, right?

K: Mmhmm.

C: And taking flack for that, and on January 6, I was legitimately worried for her. I was actually thinking, Oh shit, fucking Rashida Tlaib, my girl. Omar and like AOC, those women were at risk. Those were the people they wanted to kill, you know? And so I give them credit where credit is due. But also, Bitch stop talking about my message! Because you don’t have it. [laughter] You don’t have it. You’re not revolutionary. Y’all are liberals. Although Ilhan Omar is kinda, she’s kind of… I fangirl her. I don’t know if she’s just quietly not saying things? She very infrequently pisses me off because she just does things that makes sense. But she doesn’t do them in a way to be like, ‘This is the way it means’, just like AOC is like ‘this is what it means’, and I was like, Oh, we needed a hot girl to fucking tell us some bullshit. [laughter] How about listening to some ugly motherfuckers, you know? ’Cause if you’re ugly you got the worst of fucking society. That’s the thing, and I’m like, you could be an ugly white man, really ugly, and probably be having way worse experiences than me. But that’s not saying that’s a fucking blanket thing, you could be an ugly white man and still be very high in the power structure.

K: That’s what the Nazis went after me for was for being ugly in my mug shot.

C: Oh yeah?

K: Because they knew that’s a societal weakness

C: Yeah. It hurts women.

K: You’re less likely to be cared about and listened to and have any sort of power to change anything if you’re ugly.

C: I don’t know, one of my favorite rappers is Trinidad James which he is trash by the way, but I love him. He has a song called ‘Ugly’, and… my partner is going ‘Yeah, yeah, quote Trinidad James!’ [laughter] because the song Is called ‘Ugly’ and the song goes ‘God made you ugly bitch, you ugly. That’s okay. If my baby come out ugly I’ll still love it.’ [laughter]

[matching clip from the song plays]

C: I’m just like, exactly motherfucker! [laughter] So what if you ugly, you can always put on fancy clothes.

K: It really is all about confidence, and it’s like… That’s what I’m trying to build up. It took a lot of chutzpah to be like, Okay, I’m gonna be an open anarchist in the middle of the fucking fascist uprising. [laughter]

C: Sure!

K: Sure! And it’s like now we have Democrats and still sort of got some blue MAGA stuff going on, and it’s like I’m just like, Oh man, can I get enough chutzpah to do this again? It was such a fight that first season was like… I just was fighting all… it was so hard, man. I was just fighting all the time, and it’s just doing that again makes me feel so tired.

C: I don’t think that’s the next thing to do, honey.

K: What, the show?

C: Oh, the show? Yeah, do the show. Fuck yeah. But if you’re thinking like this is draining you, then by all means don’t do it because you’ve put your fucking life on the line for this movement, and I just want you around for your wisdom.

K: I’m having a really hard time deciding if the amount of risk is worth the amount of gain or if I’m actually safer having more celebrity and having more people around me, ’cause I was reading this book, The Seven Necessary Sins For Women And Girls by Mona Eltahawy, and one of the things she talks about is how celebrity has saved her ass. We’re told as women to be quiet and to be small and to not make any fuss, but it actually…

C: So they can use us?

K: That’s one thing I was told, I was told that basically just like I was doing this for attention and that’s all that mattered, and it’s like, I don’t even understand your hierarchies, it’s definitely not why I was doing the show. And maybe it would make more sense for me to actually try and get some of the celebrity stuff and do that thing, even if it costs some things it’s like, well, I’m getting commodified anyway! I just almost got covid at my stupid ass job, so it’s like my body is on the line.

C: I would say that’s hella riskier.

K: I know! So it’s like, why am I doing that?? When maybe I could just…

C: Yeah, this show being called Friendly Anarchism, you’re maintaining that friendly lens and that care and concern and inquisitive based lens… I’m sorry some of your guests, current company included [laughter] are probably not upholding that as well, but they can come for me. Pull up, bitch. [laughter]

K: But maybe I should be doing that too. Am I leaning into whiteness by making myself small and kind and friendly to appease… so mean people aren’t mean to me ’cause I seem innocent and nice, is that actually… Is that actually a weakness?

C: I think you’re just doing you.

K: Yeah.

C: And I think that that’s reasonable for anybody to expect of anybody, in fact, if we could just get to that point, if we could just get to a point where we let people be them, do them… And people didn’t have to have all of this self-doubt around whether or not it was the right thing, we would find that within a couple of generations it would just be the right thing. Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, that’s my fucking theory is generally people want to be “good”, you know? The very fucking small incidents of people within our society who actually desire to be fucked up, that is more prevalent now because the model is be fucked up. The model is to exploit… The model is to do damage, and so by you existing the way that you do, like the very…

K: Oh no!

C: That was weird as fuck!

K: What happened?

C: My laptop went to sleep.

K: Oh. [laughter] Oh technology.

C: Oh technology. If I’m just not touching you, then you just must go to sleep. No, so getting back to it, dude honestly, just be you. Being kind is such a revolutionary fucking act in this world anymore [laughter].

K: You really get the shit beaten out of you for it, people really are mean about it.

C: People are fucking assholes, [laughter] that’s why it’s a revolutionary act to be kind. And you’ve never cowered away from a fucking nazi fight. So as a kind person who still steps up and is willing to punch a nazi, or has been in the past and maybe isn’t anymore because of the physical toll that takes on people.

K: The trauma is real.

C: The trauma is real. If punching nazis is a requirement for American citizenship in the… Well, in the new Turtle Island revolutionary society that I would create in my dreams, like only doing it one time is mandatory in anybody’s lifetime. [laughter]

K: Well there’s a reason that Taoists and monks and people that preach non-violence also do martial arts because if you’re just nice you just get smashed. So it’s like, Well, I wanna be nice, and in order for me to be nice I have to be able to defend myself.

C: Yeah, you gotta be a no-bullshit type of person.

K: I know, it’s like, I wanna be kind. That’s what I want, I wanna be kind, I wanna be nice, I wanna be non-violent, but there are people out there that see that and they see that as weakness, it’s like, well, I also know how to hurt you, I definitely do not want to, but I just need you to know that I do know how to do that, so that I can continue to be a kind person.

C: Yes, and for a time there, you put yourself on the front lines of that fucking conflict and that struggle, that literally put you in the cross-hairs of cops and nazis, sic: The same thing. [laughter] So there’s a difference between you and me, right? You’re a nice person who went out looking for a fight, and I’m a nice person, a really nice person, who often has the fight brought to me, just as part of my existence. Be kind to everyone, but when people have gotten their fill or they’re use out of me, than they decide to mistreat me and have had multiple scenarios where I’ve had to fuck somebody up, you know, and I never trained to fight or whatever, I just somehow inherently knew how to use this big body of mine to fuck motherfuckers up. [laughter] And then that becomes a stereotype, and it’s like that Black women are violent, Black women are angry, and it’s like No, society abuses us to the extent… and they’re okay with it… Including men. White men. Big white men with guns. Cops, ie, Sandra Bland, ie all of us who have been abused in that situation. In a sense we’re forced to take on that defense training.

K: And what’s happening with me is as I’m going through this journey of finding myself and not hiding so much about my queerness and my disability, it’s like the fight is coming to me more. That’s the price I pay for being more open about who I am, and I can see that in this happening in my life, just physically in the world, and that’s why I’m sort of retiring from being out on the front and stuff. Taking care of myself in a world that’s more openly hostile and violent to me for being more openly who I am means that I have a whole lot less spoons at the end of the day. I have a whole lot less energy to be doing other… So I feel for folks that can’t be out there, and I just happen to have already built this platform and put a lot of time and a lot of energy and money and pain into it, and it’s a successful show. I did the numbers, and it’s actually just literally a successful podcast, so I’m proud of that and it’s… I wanna be able to use that platform.

C: It has a lot more value to me, honey, honestly then fucking any ass protest any day. I’ll just say it, I don’t go, I don’t march in the streets. I don’t go. You know why? Because it’s like a moment in time that happens and we record it and it’s in the news or whatever, and it often can be like… Whereas this podcast very much claims and makes its own definition and is saying what it is through it being that. Marching down the street with a bunch of people who all have different ideas about what you’re trying to accomplish, more often than not is usually distilled down to a few palatable talking points for the public, which then become the fucking point and the fucking presence and the premise of that whole thing. And so what you’ve just done is something… It is a fucking exercise in commodification of your efforts, and it’s like misappropriation in a lot of ways, and then it makes space for fucking dumb asses to come in and try to tell me that they have a better messaging on what we should do with cops when they’ve automatically through their privilege, their white, female privilege and youth and wealth, and all of these things been thrust into these positions of legitimacy and power when they haven’t really had any lived experience dealing.

K: Right. And my focus hasn’t been protests, ’cause in a lot of ways, a protest is itself asking something of power, and I’m not interested in that.

C: Exactly.

K: I would go as security for people that were protesting because…

C: You don’t want people to get hurt.

K: ’Cause I don’t want people to get hurt, but the actual act of protesting can raise awareness and has a lot of good things and can build community.

C: I agree.

K: But what is more important is just taking care of people. We’re in a crisis moment, the state is failing, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, we have to…

C: Do something that tangibly makes the situation better versus like just do something where you’re asking… I said a bunch of times, and definitely a pretty unpopular person about town now, especially among Black activists about town, because a lot of them are liberals, to be honest [laughter]. And so in that unpopularity, I have said multiple, multiple times like how many more times are you all gonna go and yell at an empty building of people who have the power to create change that you want, but they won’t and they haven’t and they aren’t even present and often, they’re sending the cops after you for just doing that, and you haven’t even done anything confronting them directly.

K: Right!

C: Like you’re putting yourself at risk for a very, very low return. The economist in me says, Fuck that, let’s just pull our money and buy some land and fucking create a real revolutionary enclave that sits aside the fucking sick society that we live in as an example of what can be possible.

K: Yeah, just [getting] people’s material needs met is such a difficult thing to do, and the fight will come to you. That’s what you’re saying about when you’re just trying to survive, we’re trying to save the lives with people who are being killed, but not by just fascists, but the entire system that is eugenic-based, where if you don’t make it far enough up the ladder, you just get to fucking die??

C: Yep.

K: You just fucking die if you can’t climb this bullshit ladder that has all of these requirements that are like super ablest, super racist, super classist. So for some people, you never have a chance to get up the ladder, and so your choice, if somebody isn’t attending to your material needs, you’re just gonna die. That kind of work feel so much more revolutionary and more important to me than trying to put yourself in front of a line of cops to get your ass beaten and possibly your life ruined in order to ask people who don’t care about you at all to change policies that change very little.

C: People who don’t think it’s ‘feasible’. God, my least favorite word. People who don’t think it’s feasible to fucking care enough about your life to actually use their power that they have to enact change to actually do it. Yeah, yeah, that is… That is not who I’m interested in talking to.

K: Yeah, if the system is trying to kill people through poverty then alleviating poverty and getting people housed and getting people stuff to live is an act of resistance against that, right?

C: Yeah, help people squat. If you wanna be a revolutionary and you wanna counter-act the State and you’re pissed about the way things are going, help people squat. Don’t fucking make a sign and go yell at a court house that’s closed, quite frankly, it’s just stupid.

K: We have so many empty houses and so many people without housing… It’s just absurd.

C: Yeah. I mean, if you’re listening to this from the rest of the country or from the other parts of the world, America is Fucked Up. So I like memes a lot because I feel like they’re a super low barrier way to convey something that people really can understand at an accessible level, and also imagery is really good, and I saw a meme, it was like… For lack of a better term, a Native Chief saying, when y’all got here, when white settlers got here, they said that we lived in teepees and that made us savages, but when we lived in teepees, there was no such thing as homeless. Now we go on the streets and we see people living in tents, which you know, they’re not even allowed to be in, and now you have a thing called homelessness.

K: Right.

C: And it was just… I was like, I don’t know, I’m paraphrasing poorly. It was probably something like, there was never homelessness when we lived in teepees, it was that short [laughter]. So just like, motherfucker, this is real. And if you talk to fucking people who are living in a tent, a lot of those people are just like you. You are one injury away from not being able to work.

K: Yeah, the other thing I was seeing a lot, is there’s just a lot of lateral violence happening in a way that I don’t feel like is really that helpful.

C: What do you mean?

K: Like… we’re in a different world. People are romanticizing the way fascism was working in Europe in the 30s, and that’s not really how fascism really functions here now. Coming face-to-face with some of these fascists, it’s like… I don’t think punching you in the face is gonna solve this problem. You’re a Q-anon-er and you are not in the same reality that we are in right now.

C: Oh yeah, honey.

K: And it’s like, You are not a physical threat to me at all, you’re just a sad human, and we can solve this problem. I don’t think that this approach is gonna solve this problem. We need new ways of fixing this. You’re definitely a threat and you’re a problem but this in-the-street thing that’s happening is not solving this issue. You know what I mean? Like we live in a different world than 100 years ago.

C: Yeah, I guess I would say I got a pretty good tickle a couple of years ago when all those Santa Barbara anti-fascists were going around to the fascist rallies that were happening in the parks and fucking people up. I thought that was funny and I got to tickle out of it. I didn’t think that that was gonna become the model that people thought was the true legitimate way to fight fascism in America, and I think that what that does is it fosters an environment that makes it unsafe for the people who are truly affected by fascism to be part of the public discourse, right? What it does is it still provokes and promotes this space for white males, particularly white able-bodied males to be centered in the struggle, which they have the most work to do, I will agree, but what it does is it creates a false space… I’m most concerned because I have young black males as sons to be like, ‘Oh, this is our chance’, and then they’re the ones getting fucked up, arrested, and killed in those environments. The Kyle, whatever his fucking name is in Wisconsin…

K: Rittenhouse.

C: … or shooting antifascists. So the thing that I’ve been telling people the most is pick and choose your battles. If you have the energy and the drive to fight and you’re fighting for people and you’re fighting for our right to exist in peace and egalitarianism. If you’re fighting for that, then put that energy towards something tangible, something material that will make a difference in the lives of the people who… Yourself and everybody in your community that you’re trying to say ‘Let’s take a step away from this despotic capitalism and fucking bullshit eugenicist hierarchy and lets create spaces of resilience. Let’s not try to use our energy to tear down systems that have consistently throughout history used bigger, more powerful guns, the law, the fucking carceral system to oppress us. Let’s do something that they can’t even imagine.

K: Something new. Reminding myself why I wanted to do the second season, ’cause I think the anti-fascist discourse right now has been pretty heavily centered on Portland, and it’s not a coincidence that the whitest city in the entire nation is taking up so much space in anti-fascist discourse, right?

C: We know this, the South the ones out there holding it the fuck down. I see you, I see out there folks! Y’alls my people.

K: I’ve done anti-fascism… this is gonna get real controversial, I’m not gonna make any friends, but this is what we’re talking about, Who am I focusing on? Am I focusing on who’s popular or am I focusing on who needs to be uplifted in this conversation? I’m gonna say that since I’ve done this work all over the country now, Portland thinks it’s the best at it right now, and it’s not… It’s not. The fact that you have these really visible, huge, violent battles that are causing all of this propaganda opportunities for the fascist right, and so many people have been fighting fascism in a way that doesn’t make the press. People in rural areas, abolitionists that know how to quell a thing before it even becomes a thing, that kind of stuff is not getting enough credit for holding fascism at bay for the last four years. A lot of the problems that we have have come out of Portland. There’s history there, and there’s reasons why it’s a specifically much more difficult place to fight fascism, and I’m not saying that it doesn’t have a lot to add to the conversation, but the fact that it’s dominating the conversation right now… who knows about fascism? Rural Black people. [laughter] So it’s not a problem for people who have a lot of experience… but it’s also the fact that the discourse is so heavily talking about urban areas right now is a problem. A lot of the fascism problems right now are happening in rural areas. What Portland has offer is very different from what a lot of people have to deal with it, so again, it’s not like tearing down what Portland saying, it’s just saying that it shouldn’t have such a huge cultural influence and such a centrality in all of the discourse.

C: Well, I think we really have to hold the fucking mass media to task on that, right? They like a juicy story, they like a pretty background scenario. And the other thing is there’s so much hyperbole, there’s so much exaggeration about the level of conflict that’s happening in Portland to the extent that when you look at the actual geographic area of where things are going down, it doesn’t even equate to 16 city blocks, and that is a really, really sprawly city. A city that I love, don’t get me wrong. Even though it’s the whitest city in America it’s got a lot of juice to it, and especially if you live in Oregon, like I do, it’s got a lot of jazz to it compared to the rest of Oregon [laughter]. But denying that discourse of what it means to be rural and Black, we’re denying the fact that my people are out there. I so strongly resonate with Appalachia because that’s poor people just doing the fight because they know better, and it’s white activists a lot of it… A lot of folks out there doing the struggle and fucking working on the fucking human struggle out there are white activists, but they don’t forget where they came from. They don’t posture supremacy in the same experience that I’ve had in other places, where everybody’s posturing to be famous, to be notable for what they do. They’re out there really meeting each other’s mutual fucking needs, because the proximity for not surviving is so much closer when you’re that poor. And so my experience out here has been very much like I’ve met a lot of super teched out, like decked out fucking anti-fascists who will talk over me in spaces, and they’re like 25-year-old white dudes talking about their importance, and I’m just like, Okay, I don’t have to be fucking important, I can just leave. But what does that really do for the grander discourse? What does it do for moving forward real anti-racism or real anti-fascism? It doesn’t. It doesn’t do shit. That’s racism.

K: I think it makes sense for a lot of white people to be drawn to anti-fascism because it’s like other white people are kind of our problem that we need to deal with, like… That makes sense to me, but it does become problematic if we haven’t done our own homework to really strip down our own biases, and then those get permeated out through our praxis.

C: Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t wanna like just shit on white activists ’cause I do like I said I always get a tickle out of anarchists all fucking blocced up, going and fucking with Democrats or whatever, like I do, I get a kick out of it, but it’s not the movement.

K [voiceover]: To be clear, not all anarchists are white, obviously. And not everybody in bloc is white either. There was other context that I needed to edit out because I didn’t have time for it… That’s not what Candice was meaning.

C: It’s not the movement that is the problem, it’s the media, and you creating other alternative media that really talks about and explores this discourse around it is really important. So, I hope that you have the spoons to maintain the struggle on this and to keep it going. But if you don’t, I’m not gonna hold it against you because I know that you’ll have the spoons to do other things because you’re never gonna give it up. You’re like, what’s his name? Rick, what’s his name? You’re like rick rolling us. (sings) Never gonna give it up. [laughter] You’re like Rick Astley. You’re never going to give up the struggle.

[clip of “Never going to give you up” by Rick Astley plays]

K: Well, that’s just a great compliment. [laughter]

C: So I know you’ll never give it up, just like I will never give it up. The way it looks to other people might be different, and who gives a fuck what those other people think. Unless they are people who are direct stakeholders, who fucking are impacted by the work that you’re doing. So as long as that work doesn’t hurt those folks and as long as it’s aligned with the fucking goals and values that they have, then by all means do it. Until you’re satisfied.

K: Alright. [laughter] I appreciate you so much, I love talking to you. And we’ve been talking for another… I think this is gonna be multiple episodes.

C: Two hours again! [laughter]

K: We can’t just have a conversation! [laughter] There’s just so much to say! And I just love talking to you.

C: So I love you. Dearly.

K: I love you too, and I love your kids and I love your family. And hope I can come…

C: Come stay with us. We’re not dirty. We already had covid and gave it to all the rich people in our lives. [laughter]

K: I’m kinda, I’m kind of greasy. My hair is kinda greasy, but…

C: I mean that probably protects you from covid, my hair’s greasy too, bitch.

K: It’s healthy is what it is, it’s healthy.

C: It’s healthy. We put grease in our hair, and y’all trying to get rid of it. I’m just like What is going on? [laughter] I’ve never understood that, but anyways. [laughter] My white girlfriends would be like ‘my hair’s all greasy’, and I’m like, Yeah, what’s the problem? [laughter] Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, you’re rad, Kat. I miss you.

K: I miss you too. I will post this and consider my options and what I wanna work on, ’cause the idea of celebrity freaks me the fuck out, it’s terrifying. We’ll see what I decide to do. [laughter]

C: No, make us famous. We’ll be famous. We don’t give a fuck.

K: Alright.

C: Make us famous and then we’ll be targets, but then as soon as we’re targets, we’ll be like, GoFundMe. [laughter]

K: Y’all know how to do this, you have figured this out. I’m still figuring this out. So I’m just like famous and in danger, but poor… How did I do that?

C: What? Dude as soon as you’re in danger, I’ll make you a fucking ‘give me your money’ and GoFundMe page. Okay?

K: Okay. I feel better.

C: Alright, I love you.

K: I love you too.

C: Reparations.

[partner’s voice from background]: Reparations!

K [voiceover]: Okay, well, I actually do have to put this on a miniature hiatus again, just because life is fucking hard, and just keeping my white and liberal friends and family from becoming fascists as well as keeping my marginalized radical friends from dying, it’s like… And me, myself! Taking care of myself too is a lot of work right now, you guys… So I’m kind of focusing on that and some other projects and just gonna be considering what do with this thing that I made, ’cause I really like it, but… I don’t know, we’ll see. Anyway, I have a Patreon and ko-fi and would still love support on that because I do still have the hosting costs and the production cost to make up for. So thank you to my current patrons for that! The intro and outro music is done by the band Kylo Ren from their track ‘Towards a creative nothing’ off the album Decadence. Thank you for listening. I hope that you’re doing all right and take care of each other. Alright…bye. For now.