(I apologize in advance if talking about the podcast is discouraged. I don't know if that's a joke or if most hexbears feel that way). But anyway, next month marks the two-year anniversary of George Floyd's awful murder. Listening to the show in the summer of 2020, and later reading some stray commentary on this site, it seemed like the podcast kind of whiffed it on the protests. But idk, is that fair to say? I believe they participated in some marches in NYC, but I also remember Matt saying that "defund the police" was dead-on-arrival as a slogan, because cops will always be around as long as capitalism exists. I also remember there being a pretty rancid take about "working class" cops in a Taibbi episode, as well as an episode that dunked on a racial sensitivity/workplace training book. Fair enough about the capitalism opinion, and the book, which was no doubt written by a rich neolib that lacked any material analysis. I understand that CTH is a news commentary/comedy/dirtbag show co-hosted by white people, so it's not going to be the best resource on racial theory. I also understand that a big part of CTH is entertainment. But I'm curious if you have thoughts about Chapo's reaction to the 2020 protests. And thanks for sharing them.
they're openly not abolitionists, and i think they should be, but i can see why they don't have much faith in contemporary abolitionism when so much of it seems to consist of twitter sloganeering and pretending to do the reading without any plan or on-the-ground organizing, and when those elements of the BLM movement which did achieve success were co-opted by liberal peace politics before they got any airplay. if and when a real radical abolitionism takes form, it won't need the approval of podcasters.
i thought the taibbi episode was pretty funny because you could tell Will was having a meet-your-heroes moment and didn't realize he'd be such a dumbass. like he kept trying to get him to agree that worrying about cancel culture was stupid and taibbi kept "agreeing" that cancel culture was stupid and needed to stop.