The State Between Us

Comrades C and Adrian teach Fritz about the role that anarchist revolutionaries had in the development of science education in 19th-century Romania. In part one, they follow the Romanian movement's nihilist origins in Russia, the conflicts between anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and narodnik Pyotr Lavrov over the class-composition of scientific knowledge, and how the successes and failures of the 'to th...

Anti-fascist historian Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc returns to the show to share the indigenous Irish origins of Halloween. He gives us the lowdown on púcaí forest fairies, eerie banshees, and even scarier MI5 psyops to create a satanic panic in the 1970s. Sharpen your turnip-carvin' implements and get your Samhain right! Like it? Share it! Connect to The State Between Us at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs f...

Fritz follows a century of sticky historical webs connecting today's Nazi Satanic Vampires with the Pentecostal patrons of the early Revival movement, including the Kardashian family. From bedsheet-wearing Canucks hunting for Lemuria and the spooky Spiritualists that gave us faith healing, all the way to the ghoulish garbage of the American militia movement, this terrifying tale is full of Feds an...

Friend of the show, Nina Nix, introduces the hellish struggle of train workers in Slovakia to wrestle their dignity back from capitalist labor pressure and a nationalist mob state ruled by a corrupt OP goon who is more machine than man. Also, Nina discusses her musical history and latest album as TSBU's favorite composer, Koleso Nešťastia. Robert Fico All music in this episode by Nina ( Koleso Neš...

In the second half of Laura's two-part history of anarchism in China, they tell the story of the Tokyo and Guangzhou factions, anarchist feminism, the influence of anarchism on revolutionary peasant politics, and the anarchist connection to the New Culture Movement that transformed China's social and political landscape. He Zhen, Liu Shipei, and Liu Shifu Like it? Share it! Connect to The State Be...

Laura rejoins The State Between Us to tell the story of anarchism in China from the late-19th century through the early 20th. Though largely forgotten today, anarchism was the dominant revolutionary framework for Chinese radicals for decades, and each of the three major strands - 'Paris', 'Tokyo', and 'Guangzhou' - offered unique visions for radical change. In part one, Laura explains the historic...

Before the fash wore black shirts, they wore Buffalo Bill dusters and cowboy hats. This is the absurd story of Marquis de Morès, a 19th century French aristocrat and degenerate gambler whose ridiculous misadventures and financial flops in the American West, combined with his modern "social Catholic" variety of antisemitism, made him not only Europe's first fascist, but more specifically its first...

Following a recent attack against a Roma settlement in Slovakia, TSBU assembles an introductory primer on Europe's genocidal treatment of Roma people over the centuries. From the early-modern period to the 21st century, this story passes through the Holy Roman Empire's Mitteleuropa, Mediterranean states, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, as well as Tudor and Elizabethan England. Through feudalism an...

FULL FREE EPISODE at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs Author Joseph Kelly joins Fritz to discuss his new book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2026), and explains how the modern ideology of human inequality was built brick-by-brick by some of the nastiest villains of the 19th and 20th centuries. From the antebellum plantations of the Democrat south to the i...

Author Joseph Kelly joins Fritz to discuss his new book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2026), and explains how the modern ideology of human inequality was built brick-by-brick by some of the nastiest villains of the 19th and 20th centuries. From the antebellum plantations of the Democrat south to the imperialist adventurism of the Republican north, Joe...

Fritz's favorite historian, Marcus Rediker, joins The State Between Us to unearth long-lost nautical stories of bold and brilliant people liberating themselves from American slavery in the 19th century, and the incredible revolutionary life and fight of the 18th century Quaker, Benjamin Lay. Blood-spewing bibles, sailor solidarity, clever conspiracies, and the ruling-class' paranoid scramble to re...

Fritz's old friend, Salvador Ibarra of the new anti-fascist rock band Widows of the Night, joins the show to discuss his childhood during the brutal civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992). Son of a prominent lawyer for the left revolutionaries and unrepentant prankster, Sal and his siblings were witness to the atrocities of WACL-fascist Roberto D'Aubuisson's anti-communist forces. Salvador discusses...

Stepping away for a moment from his Novara Media series, Do Your Own Research , Richard Hames joins Fritz to explain the study of "Critical Collapsology" and what exactly 'collapse' really means. Richard talks about the limits of past studies of collapse, the problem of historical scales and comparisons (Indigenous America, the Roman Empire, the Bronze Age, etc.), and need to understand the "commu...

Fritz, still worried about what Tucker Carlson and JD Vance have in store for the post-MAGA right, uncovers the old WASP spiritual foundations of the American mythology around UFOs/UAPs/Flying Saucers, etc.. From a Swedish Psychic Astronaut in the 18th century, through the upper-class salons of the (2nd?) Theosophical Society in the 19th, and the fashy UFO cults of the early-20th, UFO-ology's orig...

From 1984 to '85, both sides of the Tug Fork river on the West Virginia / Kentucky border were occupied by private security forces, green berets, mercenaries, and other muscle for the bosses to terrorize striking coal miners under the UMWA. Historian Ashley Nguyen joins TSBU to explain how the tactics of class warfare that beset the Massey strikers were part of the larger global counterinsurgency...

Researcher Nick Graf joins The State Between Us to talk about the strangest May Day celebration the Midwestern United States ever had. In 1950, the American Legion organized a "high-effort LARP", transforming the small town of Mosinee, Wisconsin into the avant-garde of the "United Soviet States of America", complete with borscht, detention camps, and mock executions on "Red Square". *note: Nick po...

As Tucker Carlson splits the Right into weirder and more racist directions, TSBU examines a precedent to this contemporary moment occurring in the 1950s and '60s. William F. Buckley and his National Review cultivated a complex... 'frenemyship'?... with the hyper-conspiratorial N.A.M.-leader Robert Welch and his John Birch Society and the cringe-inducing fascist nerd, the classicist Revilo P. Olive...

25. Revenge of the WASP pt. 1: The Tucker Diaries Fritz fears the rise of the post-Trump right, arguing that a fashy new take on the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with some worrying and familiar characteristics is on the rise, and begins an investigation into the Revenge of the WASP with a look at Tucker Carlson, his notable rise on the MAGA right, his weirdo mystical racist beliefs, and how those...

[Trailer] Fritz analyzes a Trad-Cath classic, and is inspired to try his own hand at the genre. Written by a Carmelite nun in 1972, the novel AA-1025: The Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration into the Church , also known as The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle , pretends to be the diaries of a Soviet sleeper agent deep within the Catholic Hierarchy. The Agent, a mysterious orphan raised in Poland, hatc...

In TSBU's second edition of the News Rug, Fritz rips up the carpet on two recent U.S. press stories to track the long history of bad trouble underneath them: [2] trad-cath marine John W. Ripley's posthumous medal of honor taking us back to a militant traddy cult from Brazil: the infamous Tradition, Family, and Property, and [2] the news that American soldiers are being told that the war in Iran is...

Author and Journalist Jonathan M. Katz joins TSBU to turn the Smedley Dial up to 'Maximum Smedliness' by discussing Butler's formative role in the creation of the American Empire at the turn of the century, his transformation into an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist whistle-blower in the '20s and '30s, and the long shadow that Smedley casts over the USA and its subjects to this day. Like it? Shar...

Finally laying out the origins of the National Association of Manufacturers, TSBU looks at the tactics by Capital to shape the American political economy into a corporatist hell from George Pullman's dystopian town at the end of the 19th century, through the General Association of Manufacturer's open class warfare, to the bizarre religiously-tinged mass propaganda program of the NAM. Festoons abou...

Hooooo boy... Keith Allen Dennis drops by once more to help Fritz tell 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, co-founder of the private intelligence clearinghouse and Contra fundraiser, Western Goals. From Operation Phoenix to Iran-Contra to the "renaissance" of the Wo...

Fritz takes a peek under the disgusting rug of the news and finds a long historical chain of apocalyptic lunatics and klansmen crawling underneath the recent shooting in Minnesota of Democratic state representatives. We get to know William Brahnam, his KKKompanions, Gordon and Freda Lindsay, and many more strangebad folks! Like it? Share it! Connect to The State Between Us at patreon.com/TheStateB...

For true fans of the over-a-decade-long Christian fiction series, Left Behind , and it's apocalypse addicted author, Tim LaHaye. Follow Timmy's political and cultural rise, evangelical influences, and the birth of the New Right's gray eminence, the Council for National Policy. Then, Fritz reviews Timothius' unfortunately impactful series of books and films. Also, some original Left Behind fan-fic...