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The State Between Us podcast

@thestatebetweenus.bsky.social
121 followers 70 following 108 posts

The Looney Lorebase of the Long Red Scare Histories, interviews, games, news, and stuff like that. The very long histories of ruling class power, their fashy goons, and their idiotic and dangerous schemes to keep us all isolated, overworked, and sick.

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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Part two of TSBU's History of Anarchism in China on patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs right now! Subscribe for free today! #anarchism #china #history #podcast
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Paris Tofu Grinder! Laura rejoins TSBU to discuss the history of Chinese anarchism in a two-part discussion. Check it out free at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Dolly hogtying all our bosses. Rest in Peace :(
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Great interview with Joseph Kelly, author of 'The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915' published last month by @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social. Hear the full episode here: www.patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs/posts/34-biggest-lie-w-166462656 (or wherever you get your podcasts)
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Hear TSBU's full interview with Marcus Rediker at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs Join for free today! This is a good one folks! We talk hydrarchy, the nautical core of the underground railroad, and the 18th century quaker Ben Lay, a man way ahead of his time!
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
New free episode out! Listen to my interview with Richard Hames @richardhames.bsky.social of @novaramedia.com 's excellent series "Do Your Own Research". We talk 'collapse' and the critical study of it, the limits of past studies of collapse, scales and comparisons, and our "communist core".
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
It's all about that Vril-Power... Hear the whole story by joining patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs today-ish...?
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
New Free Episode! Revenge of the WASP II looks into the woo-woo foundations of the #Amerifash 's perennial interest in UFO/UAPs as either mechanical or spiritual phenomena, and what that lineage says about #TuckerCarlson and #JDVAnce 's post- #MAGA ambitions... patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Great week to become a Patron of TSBU! Sunday the 24th, Ashley Nguyen and Nick Graf will be joining us LIVE to take patron questions and comments; patrons of certain membership tiers can join and contribute to the discussion live on Patreon and Discord! To learn more: patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Almost a year ago, TSBU released episode 1 on the Manhattan Conspiracy of 1741 inspired by The Many Headed Hydra (Beacon,2000) by @marcusrediker.bsky.social & Peter Linebaugh (literally my favorite book! Get it!). Have a listen here: www.patreon.com/posts/1-welc...
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Ep 28 trailer features labor historian and organizer Ashley Nguyen on the 1984 Massey Coal Strike and the elaborate counterinsurgency (w/ green berets & snipers) that the UMWA stood its ground against ✊⛏️ Hear it at: www.patreon.com/thestatebetw... #Appalachia #Coal #ClassWar #podcast #laborhistory
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
The only LARPers not actually LARPing that day...
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
@nickgiraffe.bsky.social In 1950, the American Legion organized a "high-effort LARP", transforming Mosinee, WI into the the "United Soviet States of America", complete with borscht, detention camps, and mock executions on "Red Square". #ushistory #mayday #redscare #uspolitics #socialism
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
6/7 (Thread) #MayDay
Though he had tried so hard to be a "good worker" for the old GMA, Gompers and his AFL were now the prime targets of National Association of Manufacturers, ensuring that his corporatist efforts at compromise would become what they were always destined to be, a floormat for Capital. NAM advocated for the federal government to deal with labor the same way they had dealt with indigenous resistance in the past, stomping them out, destroying their places of community, and 'civilizing them' through technical schools. All the while, they were building the new 'Science of Management' to break down existing relationships of skill-transmission and rob talented workers of their shop-floor authority.

Over time, the NAM learned to cool its fire and brimstone rhetoric, at least in its more public facing circles, and farm-out their gospel by backing the theo-fascist Spiritual Mobilizers of Reverend Fifield in the 1930s, the conspira-brained Capitalist Jesus of Robert Welch’s John Birch Society in the 1950s, and then finally in the infamous Moral Majority co-founded by Tim LaHaye as the '70s bled into the '80s.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
5/7 (Thread) #MayDay
The National Association of Manufactures was aware that, even though the General Association of Managers had won the battle in 1886, they struggled to hold popular opinion on their side. The brutality of the GMA ultimately worked against them, creating new generations of workers who saw their bosses and owners for what they were, tyrants. NAM president, David M. Parry put it like this:
"Organized labor owes its present power mainly to the support of public opinion. A propaganda for evil is to be neutralized only by a propaganda for good...We have been intimidated by a handful of anarchists and so-called labor leaders, it is now time to settle this issue once and for all!"

From its high-rise HQ overlooking Broadway in Manhattan, NAM began working priests, media people, teachers, and so-called 'citizens alliances'. They created a new theological object, "The Great Manufacturer", and refit Christianity for its Americanist future. They pioneered mass mailing, opinion polling, and even held what they called "revival meetings" that blended religiosity and capitalism into holistic sense of "Americanism". By 1906, NAM dwarfed the old GMA, controlling upwards of $22 billion in collective capital.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
4/7 (Thread) #MayDay
The counter-revolutionary reaction of Rail Magnates to the 1886 strike wave took the form of The General Managers Association. 24 rail firms centered in Chicago controlling $2 billion dollars in capital, 50k shareholders, and 220 laborers pooled their resources, hiring strikebreakers, violent thugs, and producing massive blacklists of agitators which would model the Ruling Class's reaction to our misbehavior even to this day. This cartel literally gave orders to federal troops from their Chicago Office space as they stomped out the '86 uprising.

The success of the General Managers Association working in concert with the State to crush the 1886 uprising called for a new, more expansive base for Class Rule. The Rail and Steel Magnates held undeniable power in moments of war, but how to win the peace? In 1895, hundreds of younger and often less WASP-y industrialists met in Cincinnati, OH with the express purpose of forming a "National Organization" of capital to prevent the next great class war from even starting. This became the National Association of Manufacturers.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
3/7 (Thread) #MayDay
Pullman Town failed to "civilize" the working class, who were not fooled nor cowed by its patrimonialism, and the great strike wave of 1886 which led to the Haymarket Affair - also covered in CrimethInc.'s write-up - exposed the fraud of the 'Capitalist Daddy' idea, and Pullman stepped back in the 1890s to allow the great Railway Magnates to wield collective authority over his workers. This signaled an important defeat of the 'utopian' cellular model of control - though it wouldn't die for some time - and the rise of a more overt self-conception of a Ruling Class wielding force in a State of War.

Unable to entirely accept the class struggle model without admitting that they were basically vampires, capitalist propaganda committed strongly to a good-worker/bad-worker narrative. "Yes there was class struggle, ok fine we admit it, but only because 'bad workers' corrupted by commies and whatnot fired the first shots." The capitalist was ready for war, but had to prove to the public and probably themselves that it was the 'subversives' who started it and that only the coordination and collective management of industrialists working in concert could defeat it. As the CrimethInc. write-up points out, they could find enough allies in the likes of Samuel Gompers and the AFL to feed this delusion, even though even they would come to see AFL's compromise corporatist 'tri-partite' model of labor/state/capital as a dangerous amount of power for the working man. Collaborators are there to be betrayed, make no mistake about it.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
2/7 (Thread) #MayDay
May Day contradicted the *idea of corporatism* that underpinned the new model capitalist's claim to rule; the idea that classes were not realized in the struggle of opposing interests, but rather were functional parts of a whole that would come to be called "Americanism". Some 50 years after the Pullman Strike, we still hear this echoed in the proclamations by the American Legion in the inter-war period that the organization stood opposed to "both the masses and the classes".

Pullman's final efforts to prove that Industrial Capitalism was not a warzone but instead a complicated family with misbehaving children took the form of Pullman Town, a cross between a classic company town and a pre-Fordist experiment in social control. Its construction was simultaneously an instruction, it's layout naturalized the hierarchy between labor and capital by its cellular structure, where privileges and obligations translated, for the workers, into parceled access to places of manicured culture and pressures to mimic 'their betters' through planned and socially enforced consumption habits. A state official claimed, completely unironically, "If the workman at Pullman lives in a ‘gilded cage,’ we must congratulate him on its being so handsomely gilded; the average workman does not have his cage gilded…". Sound familiar?
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
If trump rly wants the medal for most assassination attempts, he's gonna have to try harder...
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
TSBU's Quick Intro to Tradition, Family, and Property, the premier international TradCath fashy cult. From the World Anti-Communist League to the CIA to the Council for National Policy today, the Tefepistas are up to some whackybad stuff! www.patreon.com/posts/23-new...
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Patreon exclusive! Bircherized Trad-Cath Fash-Fic: 'AA-1025'. Fritz works through the Trad Cath classic novel, AA-1025, about a Soviet sleeper agent deep within the Vatican. It's whacky stuff, but it inspires Fritz to try his own hand at the genre... www.patreon.com/posts/24-bir...
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
If you enjoyed learning about Smedley Butler with @katz.theracket.news in episode 21 this week, don't miss episode 19 on the Anti-Smedley, the unhinged gnome John Singlaub and his time in the private fashy intel org., Western Goals! patreon.com/thestatebetweenus #irancontra #johnsinglaub #coldwar
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Ep 21. Smedley Butler and the Invention of America w/ Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news turns the Smedley Dial to 'Maximum Smedliness' discussing Butler's role in the creation of the American Empire and the long shadow that Smedley casts over the USA and its subjects to this day. On Patreon now
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Out now on Patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs! Episode 21. Smedley Butler and the Invention of America w/ Jonathan M. Katz. Pass it on!
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
19. Western Goals pt. 2: John K. Singlaub and his Cubitmaxxing Contras - feat. Keith Allen Dennis A darkly fantastical tale about a little weird looking dude who specialized in leaping out of planes to 'spread democracy' via death squad, Major General John K. Singlaub.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Is the Trump admin recruiting for The Order? This looks like the cover of a Bob Matthews slash-fiction novel.
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The State Between Us podcast @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
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