This episode of It's the End of the World As We Know it and I Feel Fine, was made possible by contributions from slaves like you. Spank you very much! Gooooooooood morning slaves and welcome to another sedition of It's the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine... the show where schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. As the morning papers blared the news some were stunned. Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Scheiße! Merde! I see. I am your host the Stimulator and for the past week or so, one thing's been dominating the headlines Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brisket Booyakasha! Yup... on June 23rd peeps in Britain voted in a national referendum to leave the EU We're out! plunging both the UK and Europe into a deep existential crisis. And like... our future's kinda been taken away. And as political commentators, journalists, bloggers and pundits of all stripes endlessly pontificate on the causes and possible consequences of the looming Brexit... the only thing that peeps seem to be able to agree on is that it's a fucking game-changer, and that the future is more uncertain than it has been in a long fucking time. As soon as the first poll results started coming in, the British pound went into mothafuckin' free-fall, dropping to its lowest rate in over thirty fucking years. London’s infamous financial district, the so-called City of London, also took a proper pounding, posting the biggest losses since the 2007-2008 financial crisis. All around the world stock markets are experiencing sporadic aftershocks, as ever-opportunistic investors shift vast sums of money around the world in a ruthless effort to profit off the crisis. Politicians in Scotland and Northern Ireland have already called for their own referendums - raising the spectre of the break-up of the UK itself. Some people hate the English. I don't... they're just wankers. We on the other hand, are colonized by wankers! The morning after the Brexit vote Britain's posh, pig-fucking PM, David Cameron, who initially proposed the referendum in a Faustian bargain to maintain his position atop the Conservative Party's pecking order, acknowledged in the most eloquent, face-saving way that he could muster, that he had shit the bed and had no intentions of sticking around to watch the help clean it up. I will do everything I can as Prime Minister to steady the ship over the coming weeks and months. But I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination. Just breathe it in. Let's just take this in together, shall we? A political legacy in tatters... ... the Prime Minister who - who took us out of Europe. Bye Bye! Frankly, I don't have anything to hide. Oink oink oink! He was a frat boy - a glorified frat boy. Stuck his penis in the head of a dead pig. David Cameron - pigfucker! Maybe WE should kiss just to break the tension. Buuuuuuuuut while it's a rare treat to watch David Cameron rewarded for his arrogant, tone-deaf hubris with an early fucking retirement, that doesn’t mean that things are necessarily going to be better off once he’s gone. Mixed in with the British voters' righteous anger at the austerity-pushing bankers and the faceless technocrats in Brussels, has been a terrifying rise in right-wing nationalism, racism and xenophobia. Despite England’s role as the literal fucking flag-bearer of centuries of colonialism and global imperialist domination, one of the main issues during the referendum campaign was fears over immigration, with the Euro-skeptic party, UKIP, headed by Britain’s creepy racist uncle, Nigel Farage, and former mayor of London and petulant man-child, Boris Johnson, leading the fascistic charge. Since the Brexit vote attacks against Eastern Europeans, ethnic minorities, and people perceived to be Muslims have spiked sharply, with over 90 hate crimes reported over the following three days - ranging from threatening notices and graffiti, to arsons and vicious assaults. While these tensions have been building for some time now, far-right groups are clearly on the march and have only been emboldened by recent events. On June 24th around 2000 people, including a sizeable crew of antifa, took to the streets of London to demonstrate their support for migrants and vent their rage at the right-wing tabloids that have been steadily churning out sensationalist headlines, and whipping up racist, nationalist sentiment for months on end. Despite all the uncertainty currently gripping the UK, one thing is clear. The time has come for bold militant actions and sustained anti-racist, pro-immigrant organizing in working-class neighbourhoods across the UK and beyond. Because make no mistake. While Britain is the first major country to ditch the EU, they almost certainly won't be the last. With far-right politicians in France and the Netherlands already calling for their own national referendums, the disintegration of the European Project may come sooner than people think. If the mothafuckin resistance doesn't rise to this challenge then we are in for some seriously dark fucking times. And finally, in sad fucking news, on June 7th Roger Clement passed away. Roger was an OG from so-called Ottawa, who did three years in the clink for fire-bombing a Royal Bank of Canada branch back in the summer of 2010. During his trial Roger was solid and staunchly principled, pleading guilty in exchange for all charges being dropped against his co-accused. He will be missed. Rest in power, comrade. As Europe finds itself plagued by a resurgence of right-wing nationalism and a corresponding rise in hostile anti-immigrant sentiment, over on this side of the pond, a similar dynamic is playing out in the United Snakes - albeit one with distinctly American characteristics. A group of Texans are pushing for a Texas exit... or Texit. Texit? Texit. Yee-haw! Buuuuuuuuuuut while the odds of a so-called Texit are slim to mothafuckin nil, there's no getting around the fact that the political atmosphere in the United Snakes is toxic as fuck, and shit only seems to be getting worse. Decades of neoliberal capitalist restructuring has produced vast economic deserts in so-called Middle-America, as jobs have been shipped off to hyper-exploited labour markets in the Global South. Public schools have been decimated by years of chronic underfunding, and federal and state prisons are overflowing. Mass shootings have become an almost daily fucking phenomenon and each fresh tragedy is immediately and reflexively seized upon as a chance to blame politically convenient scapegoats. A Muslim scholar says killing homosexuals is the compassionate thing to do. This is part of their religious doctrine.... their ideology. Within this bleak fucking context a growing army of pissed off Americans have retreated into fantasies based on heavily romanticized and white-washed images of a fictional past and vast fucking conspiracies promoted by red-faced asshats like Alex Jones. You're declaring war on this country with a bunch of jihadis you brought in! You did it, you son of a bitch! The Trump campaign has been a clarion call for millions of Americans disillusioned by the repeated betrayals of Washington-insiders like Hillary Clinton. When their holdings are invested in the Cayman Islands and her husband is middle-man to some of the world's biggest deals as they feather their nest at the expense of America... it is time to take the country back! And as his fascist calls for border walls and mass deportations of Muslims have sparked militant resistance from peeps in cities across the country, many Trump supporters have announced plans to descend on Cleveland for the RNC on July 18th, in what's expected to be an epic showdown between two bitterly opposed camps. Fittingly, this showdown will be taking place in an open-carry state, in the very city where 12 year old Tamir Rice was gunned down by racist fucking pigs in 2014. And outside the well-managed spectacle of the 2016 electoral farce, neo-nazi and white supremacist groups, like the KKK, have also been taking advantage of the current levels of racist, hyper-nationalist rhetoric thrust into the mainstream by Trump's campaign. In the latest example, on June 26th, members of the Traditionalist Workers Party attempted to hold a rally at the California state legislature, in Sacramento. They were confronted by a group of roughly 400 antifa, who proceeded to shut them the fuck down, and give the nazi scum a serious fucking thrashing. During the resulting scuffle, numerous people were stabbed, including at least 4 anti-fascist comrades - with 3 more comrades hospitalized due to blunt force trauma. That's why we need to take them on directly. Take them on head on. Confront them with as many people as possible - prepared to shut them down. And that is what this demonstration did today. Sacramento was the latest front in an increasingly violent battle between fascist and anti-fascist militants. The way things are headed, it's not going to be the last. So... to learn more about just what the fuck went down, I recently caught up with Brazo, an anti-fascist organizer who was on the ground in Sacramento. Hey Brazo, how the fuck are you? I'm alright. So what exactly went down in Sacramento on June 26th? Well in Sacramento on June 26th, the Traditionalist Workers Party, in conjunction with the Golden State Skins and the Klu Klux Klan, tried to have a permitted demonstration at the west steps, in Sacramento. Now there was about 25 to 30 Traditionalist Workers Party people. and the anti-fascist and anti-racist crews were about 400 deep. When we approached, it immediately turned into a brawl. They took knives out. They started stabbing people... people defended themselves. They took a really bad beating. I think that everyone on their side had some blood of their own on them. And we stopped them - we stopped them from having their meeting, but at a huge cost to us. On the anti-racist side there were probably a total of 9 people that were injured, and I think the number was 7 of them hospitalized. We had anticipated that there would be injuries... but really didn't anticipate that it was gonna escalate this quickly and severely for people on our side. But the medical people who were there, y'know, they did their job. They played their role well enough that people who were taken to the hospital didn't die. How was the counter-demonstration organized? We treated June 26th a lot like a major convergence, because that's how the fascists had plugged what was happening. You know, this was gonna be the time that the KKK, the Golden State Skinheads and the Traditionalist Workers Party were gonna show their level of coordination in the street and materialize their politics. And that's why we treated it as such a serious threat, to be able to physically stop them from manifesting that racist, fascist politics in the streets. So there were a lot of trainings that happened before. A lot of infrastructure was put in to get people from the places they were coming from all over the west coast - to be able to go to Sacramento. Medical teams were assembled and medics started gaining supplies. We did a couple of fundraisers to go buy the medical supplies. There were medical trainings that were done. The NLG [National Lawyer's Guild] really stepped in - so a legal hotline was established. There was also an immense amount of help by Indigenous groups in Sacramento that really supported us in many ways that I think are really important, and I hope we continue that relationship. So we really treated it not only as a convergence for anti-fascists and anti-racists on June 26th, but also a way to start to already build these networks. And to build them up strong and to build confidence in those networks. To be able to squash them out wherever they go, before this issue gets more severe. Who the fuck are the Traditionalist Workers Party? And why were they trying to rally? Well the Traditionalist Workers Party is a white supremacist, white nationalist group. They want your classic fascism. They want the consolidation of the economy and the state, under white culture. They're led by a clown named Matthew Heimbach who lives somewhere on the east coast. And what they're basically trying to do is trying to consolidate all of these different white power organizations. And they're basically trying to move their politics from online rhetoric into the material world. Their stance was that if they could converge in liberal California, then they could converge anywhere in the country, materially. Which is why we focused so much energy on stopping the rally from happening altogether. Anti-fascist militants are often denounced by liberals and so-called “progressives” in particular for their use of violent tactics when confronting members of the far right. What do you have to say to those critics who argue for a strategy of nonviolence and deescalation when dealing with these types of groups? It kind of brings to mind, when people start that conversation, to me, is that Howard Zinn quote: "You can't be neutral on a moving train." Our society, and our culture is already moving in this one direction. Hegemony is our society requires violence. Black and brown people, trans people, queer people - our identities are kept in check by violence. Whether it's public executions of black and brown people in the street, mass incarceration, gender policing all of these are ways that are violently keeping us in a subservient position to white supremacy, capitalism, the state and hegemony, basically. So our liberation requires anything in the toolbox, which unfortunately does include violence sometimes. It's not like violence is the objective of these demonstrations. It's a means for liberation. And it's a means for self-defense. Fascism, as a popular social movement, thrives on widespread feelings of victimization, or declining privilege among socially dominant sectors of society such as white, working-class men. Realizing this, do you think that groups like the Traditionalist Workers Party are actively seeking out physical confrontations in order to inflame these feelings of white male victimization and garner more attention? And if so, how should that factor into how anti-fascists, feminists and anti-racists should respond to their attempts to organize? There's no way for us to route around it. Other-ized identities: black, brown, queer, trans, what have you... all these other-ized identities that are not male or white - our liberation and their privilege are contradictory... opposed to one another. They can't exist in the same world. So every time that we're asserting our rights as other-ized people, asserting our dignity, it's a slipping of that privilege. So you could say that a lot of these white supremacist groups their sort of like, budding, it's at the same time that the United States sees its first Black president, and the ascension of the Black Lives Matter movement. Not that the Obama administration is an assertion of that, but, the ascension of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the wide criticism of racist police practices, is a slipping of white privilege - or at least the beginning of the dialogue about what white privilege does to black bodies. So, it's either white people - white working-class people - realize that their disenfranchisement is not because of other people - the disenfranchisement is institutionalized... and because of that we're actually on the same side of this struggle, but their privilege blinds them from being able to recognize that. And the crumbs of power that are given to them.... they want to maintain. So they're either gonna realize they have that privilege, and join the right side of history.... or we're take that privilege from them. Those are the only two outcomes. Much of the far-right in the US seem to be active supporters of Donald Trump. Why do you think this is? And what implications do you think that this will have in terms of the upcoming RNC in Cleveland and the political climate in the US more generally? Well I've listened to Heimbach's podcast and he sort of views Trump - he says.. if Trump doesn't take his rightful place as President of the United States, then Trump should start his own political party, in which the Traditionalist Workers Party, and all the other white supremacist groups can get behind Trump, and push their agenda. So they see Trump as being sort of like the electoral head of all of these other white supremacist groups. Now, in terms of how it will affect the RNC - it's difficult to say. The people from the Traditionalist Workers Party are saying that they're gonna do "security" for the RNC this year. What happened in Sacramento is going to set a precedent for how those interactions are gonna go down, but it really depends on what the anti-fascist forces - and anti-racist forces - look like in Cleveland. We already know what the Traditionalist Workers Party and all these other racist groups - what they're capable of, and what they're gonna do based on what happened in Sacramento. The level of potential violence is escalated. We're beginning to see, like, outright confrontation with weapons - with bladed weapons - the real sort of disregard for people's safety. That's really - it makes the spectrum of what these demonstrations will look like even larger. I've even seen on some of their forums and websites, they're criticizing themselves for just bringing bladed weapons. They're like, "if this confrontation had happened and we had prepared properly, we would have ended this confrontation in a rain of blood." That's what they said. Anything else you wanna add? It's really really important that when people go out and take this amount of risk in the streets, that they feel supported by the people around them - the comrades and their loved ones. Some ways that people can support is to donate to rally.org/june26th. The money will go to cover mostly medical costs and transportation. We had 9 people injured.... 7 of them pretty badly - had to go to the hospital, so the money that you guys donate will go to support them. Thanks Brazo, and that about does it for this sedition of It's the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine. I wanna send a massive shout-out to the peeps who donated cash to help us get through the dog days of summer. So merci beaucoup to: Gavin, Jeremy, Benjamin, Reto, Christopher, Renzo, Sebastian, Mifan, Puget Sound Medic Collective, Alexandre, Medicine Agency, Lars, Ricky Andrew, Mason, Gregory, Nas, Margaret, Megsha, Martin, Derek, Jonathan, Kyle, Shannon, Steven, Dylan, Peter, Matthew, Francois, Jennifer, John, Benjamin, Nicodemis, Cecil, Janya, Danielle, Jacob, Ranko, Samuel, Matthew, Justin, Crystal, Anton, Guillome, Robin, Nathan, Massiage, Hansen and Max. Balchie! I also wanna give a warm welcome to to the newest members of the taconspiracy: Leo and Aradore. Corundas! That's all for now. If you're heading to the RNC or DNC, remember to go with comrades. Find out who the groups are who offer legal support, and don't do any gangsta shit with people you haven't known for years. Stay safe.... but above all give them fucking hell! See you in the street comrades!