Hey folks, welcome to the Mind of a Skeptical Leftist. I have another great interview for you. In this episode, I talked to Tori Douglass, who does the podcast White Homework. And I know I usually try to do some kind of intro for these episodes, but I'm just going to send you right over to this one because it was so much fun and Tori was such a brilliant guest. Not that my other guests haven't been brilliant and not that nothing has happened over the last two weeks, but yes, Tori was a brilliant guest and it was a lot of fun talking to her.
Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to do an intro, but a lot of stuff has happened, actually, and it's all been relatively recent.
The most recent Red Reviews is out with Nino Brown and Justin. We talk about a book from the PSL, that's The Party for Socialism and Liberation. We talked about the book Revolutionary Education. Now, whether you feel one way or another about the PSL, the book is a great resource for people who are looking at a more radical revolutionary way of approaching education.
I think it's a great resource, and I think that Nino was a great guest and Justin is an amazing person. I know that there's a lot of anarchists who have a lot of information that they have sent my way about the PSL, and I haven't had a chance to go through it yet, but I will.
I don't know what conclusion I'm going to come to. I know Justin is an amazing person and he's a great co-host, and I'm not going to really say anything bad about him or the party that he belongs to.
I don't know what to say about it, except that if that means I'm not cool in your books, I'm afraid I'm going to have to just live with that.
There was another thing there that somebody posted in the comments under the video for the Revolutionary Education, and it was in one of these Facebook groups that I'm in, and they posted a link to a video by somebody named Mark Passio, and it was “fake ass anarchists”.
Clearly, it was a shot at me because this person thinks I'm not a real anarchist. But I watched this video by Mark Passio and this guy is a reactionary. He's a conservative. He's a hardcore Christian fundamentalist who believes that Satan is trying to take over the world. He's a conspiracy theorist on the level of Alex Jones.
He's interviewed David Icke or being interviewed by David Icke, who is the dude who believes that reptiles run the world, reptile people rule the world like it's just not a person I'm going to take seriously. Your “fake ass anarchist” video, it's nonsense. And when I pointed that out, obviously the commenter said, “well, I thought he nailed you pretty good”. And the fact is that, yeah, I am an anarcho-communist and left wing anarchists are actually anarchists. If you are a centrist anarchist, I can see you disavowing say capitalism and the state and not wanting to be a communist or not wanting to assign yourself with prosocial movements per se, I can get that.
But if you're an anarcho-capitalist, if you're a capitalist, you aren't an anarchist. And I don't know how many times I have to go through this. I'm going to start a series where I explain and examine different types of anarchism. In the simplest terms, I can possibly do it in. I know that there's lots to cover.It would take hours and hours and hours of content to cover all the different kinds of anarchist, but there are certain fundamental core things to all anarchism. And if you are a capitalist, you can't have them. If you are pro capitalist, you can't have them. And if you're a reactionary, you're not an anarchist. I'm sorry, that's just not how it works.
I get frustrated because I don't like gatekeeping. I don't like to say so and so is an anarchist. So and so isn't an anarchist. And I've explained this multiple times. Why anarcho-capitalists aren't anarchists is because they're propertarians. They believe in private property, and the ownership of private property leads to the state being replaced by those with land. It's like replacing the state with a King and saying, oh, that'll do. I'm sorry, that's not how it works, right? What you're doing is corporate feudalism, not a free society of free people. And I just can't take you seriously as an anarchist.
I think this is an issue that we have on multiple levels. Sure. Maybe it's not a big deal for the odd person to encounter anarchism from these capitalists, from these pro authoritarians who just use the aesthetics and term anarchist.
Maybe it's not a big deal at all. But for me personally, if I had been a more vulnerable person, like the first person I encountered online who said they were an anarchist was Stefan Molyneux, who is a white supremacist and a hard core reactionary. But he used the libertarian line, right? And he was an MRA and all this shit. And if I had been a more vulnerable person at that time, if I had been less of a critical thinker, then I might have fallen for his version of anarchism.
And this is a real problem. We need, I think, more voices out here pointing out what anarchism is supposed to be. I know on Twitter there's a lot of anarchists, and hell, I can have it so that my entire feed is just anarchists in the same way that I can have my feed set up so that it's only showing me feminists or only showing me anti racists and never seeing anything outside of that except through, quote tweets or what have you. And I can do the same thing on Facebook and I can join my discord communities, and I can stay in those and not go out of them and not encounter these people. But Stephanie Molyneux has a big following or did have a big following. I don't know if he still does. This guy, Michael Malice, that a lot of “anarchists” follow. He's a capitalist. He's a reactionary. He's a MAGAhead.
Like, you can't be a fascist and an anarchist. You just can't. So he's lying to people, but also he's adopting the name and aesthetics of anarchism, and that can confuse people and lead them down the wrong path, a less socially good path, a less pro humanity path. And it really concerns me. I really hope that we can get more people going in more places to where they can learn about real anarchism.
My friend Rene, some of you might remember if you watched some of the longer episodes in the Ask Anarchist section. He brought up Michael Malice because when he Googled anarchism, that's who came up. And Michael Malice is a shithead, as far as I could tell. I know. I don't know these guys, whatever.
But the stuff he puts out is harmful, misinformation. It's harmful, and it's backwards thinking. It's straight up, status quo, capitalist, free market nonsense. It's just without States, like, it's just pure bullshit. So then you also have, like, this Mark Passio, who is I mean, I didn't go that far into his shit. I've just kind of just skimmed the surface of it. But he seems like exactly the opposite of what an anarchist is. And yet he's using the term anarchist, and he's actually applying, like a strategy that says he gets to pick who's an anarchist. He gets to dictate that he puts himself as an authority on what an anarchist is.
So I think it's scary and harmful and if we want an actual anarchist society, then this is the misinformation we have to tackle.
I've often said that I would like to see more people addressing the misinformation that Joe Rogan puts out because he's a well known person. He's got a mainstream platform with millions of viewers. But Mark Passio has 123 thousand YouTube subscribers. He's got a radio show. He's got a podcast with thousands of thousands and thousands of downloads a nd these people, they all are getting the wrong idea about what anarchism is. So it is a problem. I know some people think that it's not a big deal, but it is a problem. Misinformation is a major problem, and it's something that we have to find a way as a community, in my opinion, to address. So for something I wasn't going to say anything about, that came out a lot longer than I had intended.
But before I send you over to the interview, I just want to say thank you for watching or listening to this, and thanks for sharing this around if you do. And that helps get more views and more listeners. And maybe if we're lucky, we can show people that anarchism is different than what these reactionary shitheads say it is. So this show is available on all the podcast places as well as YouTube and I stream on Twitch whenever I get the chance.
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