Before we get started today, I want to tell you about a podcast from The Washington Post. In twenty nineteen, The Washington Post reported on the remarkable case of a woman who'd spoken out to make sure that the men who sexually assaulted her was brought to justice. The Post's new investigative podcast explores everything that happened after it's called Canary. The Washington Post investigates. Canary is a podcast about what happened when that unusual public warning connected to women and how that warning led to a devastating allegation about a powerful man in the D.C. criminal justice system.

You can find a canary. The Washington Post investigates now wherever you get your podcasts. The cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, the cut, the cut. I think the one thing we can all agree on is that no one is happy right now with the way things are. But there's disagreement over how much change we can ask for right now.

Like, can I start to advocate for free college and legalized pot when, like, gay marriage might be repealed? I just worry that this Push-Pull leaves me somewhere in the middle and settling for less, limiting my own dreams of what the future can be because I'm afraid about the present. I just feel like I'm not radical enough. A recent example. So right now, people are rising up to protest against police violence and the phrase abolish the police or defund the police is really becoming an idea that is is much more mainstream.

Sophie now is an author and a cartoonist who's been involved in a lot of radical activist organizer circles. And so she posted something on Instagram about defunding the police.

And then I saw somebody else post something on Instagram that was like, you have to say, abolish the police. You can't say defund the police, because if you say defund the police, people don't know that. What you mean is that it's a step towards abolition.

So if he was like, wait, was what I posted, not enough? Should I have said abolish instead?

Then a friend of mine who's an older sort of activist was like, actually, I think the word defund is really important because it does represent a step and it represents an action that people can understand as a step towards abolition.

And so there's this back and forth about what is the right wording to use. And it was kind of interesting for Sophie that she was dealing with this dilemma because she just wrote a whole graphic novel about this, about how to try to be a good person in a bad world. The book is called The Contradictions, one of the reasons I ended up deciding to like do the book is because I was sort of talking to friends of mine in the anarchist scene.

We were talking about like when we first got introduced to lefty ideas and how those ideas came through people and how those people had an influence on how we thought about the ideas. And like ideas can be perfect, but humans are fallible, right? The comic is auto fiction.

So the main character's name, Sophie, and it's based on Sophie's life, but it's not actually Sophie.

The book starts in Paris with Sophie having just arrived to study abroad.

Here I was, age 20, the character feels out of place and pretty quickly meets somebody who maybe aligns more with her background. So she's exiting a bar. Who sees somebody riding by on a fixed gear, bikes? Well, fixed gear and makes the association that OK, if riding a fixed gear, then maybe they're a punk and maybe they're a punk band, maybe they're queer. And then maybe I have a friend here.

Hey. Hey, Spike. Hey, I saw you at orientation.

This person on the bike turns out to be another American in Sophies Study Abroad program, and they strike up a friendship. This person, Zeynab, is not as clear, Sophie Hope, but she is a punk. Xena is vegan. She is very active in, like animal rights stuff and very vocal about it. The guy just broke up with worked at the co-op with me and we used to sit outside and yell things like milk is full. Of course, I used to be vegetarian, but I'm anemic.

So I thought you could take iron pills or eat spinach. Character Sophie explains that she's tangentially associated with some anarchist or lefty friends back home. And, you know, she's dipping her toes into that world but hasn't really participated much. And then Zenna, on the other hand, you know, she talks about having a planner full of activist activities. And then she also gives Sophie a book about these two anarchists hitchhiking around Western Europe.

Everyone's making plans for spring break.

What if we went hitchhiking, taking a plane? The gas emissions are out of control. And also going hitchhiking is more living the ideals. I think I go vegan for the trip, like in solidarity. You don't have to do that. No, but I want to.

Zena and Sophie hit the road trying to thumb their way from Paris to Amsterdam.

This is a freeway entrance because it was actually exhausting and it takes forever.

So they when they get to Amsterdam, so kind of like pulls out the map and it's like, well, we could go to the Anne Frank house.

Hmm. And now we're like the Van Gogh Museum.

You, Nina, just does not seem interested. Museums only show the narrative of the victor, and they are a hierarchical thing that must be abolished or whatever. There's a comic shop I'd like to see. Maybe we can walk there. Sure. Well, they end up wandering around a fair bit.

It's sort of the the deflation of like we did the thing and we're here and. Now, now we're just here to get some food, sure. So the veganism, when they're in between Ghent and Berlin, is when it really kind of comes to a head where Sophie is just like incapable of functioning.

I need to eat something.

There's a scene at one of the truck stops where Sophie goes in and is trying to figure out if, you know, if the soup they have is vegan or if this or that is vegan. And the person there is just like, I'm sorry, I don't speak English, like I cannot help you. So she ends up just eating nuts. God, I'm fucking hungry. This sucks.

At the end of the story, the characters end up missing their flight back to Paris because despite everything, they were going to take a plane back to Paris, they end up missing it, taking an overnight train where they, you know, sleep poorly, saying goodbye to each other.

Well, that was fun. Yeah. Few associates for the time, they part ways, and so he takes the Metro back to her place, she's starving because she's been on a overnight train, hasn't eaten for hours and hours, and she goes into McDonald's and orders a burger. That last scene that really happened to real person Sophie, when I was in France and I was trying to be vegetarian, I did have a moment where I went to a McDonald's and I ate a burger.

And I was so ashamed. Like I didn't tell anybody about that for years.

And there was a point where I was like, oh, like, that's that's funny. That's a funny moment. It's an absurd moment. And, like, learning how to have compassion for, like, my younger self. Now I can look at it and say like, it's OK, dude, it's fine. I don't know.

It's hard to get to that place. I have a very hard time telling myself it's fine. Like I feel terribly guilty when I order a drink and it comes with a plastic straw.

There's this ongoing internal battle between my Sophi side and my Zeena side, my pragmatic Sophi side, who compromises to accommodate the world around her and an internal Zenna who holds fast and rigid to her ideals.

So what can you do with the reality that we live in? And I think that that isn't a place that the left is sort of starting to figure out.

Well, for so long, so much of what the left has asked for has been characterized as an impossibility. And to want these things, no matter how important, no matter how existential to people's lives, was to be characterized as living in a fantasy land Brianna.

Joy Gray is the former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders.

I think about the arguments that I have online, and it's very rarely with someone who's, you know, a right winger or a Trump person. The folks that I have the most contentious battles with our folks that I feel like should be ideologically aligned, people who say they care about the same things, who purport to support, you know, Medicare for all to understand the need for a green new deal. But who counter and say, you know, I just don't think it's possible.

I don't think it's realistic. You can't vote for your heart. You can't vote for the socialist. You can't vote for maybe a C because it's just too risky a proposition. And how many generations have to suffer under the status quo and the left? Because we do share these values and we don't want the world to get worse, is always willing to blink first in this game of chicken, we're always willing to put on the brakes before the other team who was willing to crash the whole thing in order to get what they want.

I guess it's gotten to like isn't compromise one of the core tenants of representative democracy? Like, no one's going to get what they want all the time, right?

Yet it seems like certain constituencies do get what they want all the time. And I don't I think this is the moment where we have to stop thinking about politics in terms of good guys and bad guys and think about in terms of the power dynamics at play. And the reality is that certain constituency groups, conservatives, constituencies, moderate constituencies get what they want, not because they're better advocates for themselves, but because their interests align with the donors that keep people on both sides of the aisle in power.

And this is where it all just starts to feel hopeless, like these wider economic systems are just so broken at the core that attempting political change feels like trying to add a bedroom to a house with a rotten foundation.

And then meanwhile, there's this chorus of people more radical than me who are like, well, we need to tear this house down and build a new house. But in the meantime, we actually need at least three more bedrooms and a new stove.

And I feel like there is such pressure on the left to get so woke so quickly to kind of wade in slowly or moderately entertaining, more lefty ideas is still not enough now to people who are, you know, struggling to come around issues.

You know, I'm right there with you. The first time I heard Abolish the Police, I thought, hmm, you know, I'm McCombs person. I assessed the kind of communications strategy aspect of it and whether or not it was going to be alienating. You know, I'm not an organizer and it's not my job to tell organizers what to do. And I think that largely they are right and taking strong positions and understand that it's going to be a process for the culture to come on board and in the meantime, as this process plays out.

It's a lot of compromise. The thing is about compromise is that no one ends up happy and I think that's true.

After the break, how one teenager transformed from Haseena to a selfie back in Tunisia and saw the other side of compromise. If you think you may be depressed or you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious, better help offers licensed online counselors who are trained to listen and help talk to your counselor and a private online environment at your own convenience. Better help. Counselors specialize in areas like family and relationship conflict, LGBTQ issues, self-esteem and more.

Whatever you're feeling, better help can help you navigate it. I know I personally have been feeling a lot of anxiety these days, and it just seems like every day brings some sort of fresh hell that makes it harder and harder to go to sleep at night.

If you think professional help could ease whatever you're going through right now, check out Better Help. First, you'll fill out a questionnaire to assess your needs and then they'll match you with a counselor in under 48 hours. You can exchange unlimited messages with your counselor in addition to your scheduled video and phone sessions and everything you share is confidential. Better help is an affordable option. And our listeners get 10 percent off your first month with discount code. The cut get started today at better help dotcom slash the cut.

That's better. HELOC dotcom slash the cut. Talk to a therapist online and get help today. I'm Julia Freelon and I'm the host of a new series called Go for Broke. It's about those moments in history when everyone goes a little bit overboard for a big idea in our first season.

We're going back in time to the late 90s. It's a time when computers are coming into every home and dot com companies are popping up everywhere.

Everybody wanted to stick dot com on the end of something. Cupps, Dotcom, Blastoise, dot com, you know, shoes, dot com, pets, dotcom.

And as the frenzy grows and grows, all of a sudden the dot com economy falls off a cliff.

People lost their houses, people got their cars recalled. They literally banked their futures on it.

This season, we'll explore what made the dotcom bubble and what could warn us when the next one comes along. If we're not in one already, go for broke from EPIC and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Subscribe for free on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Rene Otero is a natural diplomat and a master at seeing both sides of a situation, he was on the debate team in high school and actually one of the best debaters in all of Texas.

And so one day, Rene's debate coach informed him that he had been automatically accepted into a program called Boys State.

I was like, OK, cool, what is that? And she's like, it's an honor. I was like, cool. What is that? She's like. Not once did I ever get a chance to slow down and really understand what Boise State was, because, you know, I'm 17, you know, 17 year old boys do not their research. So I didn't do my research. I went and I just went in there, you know, expecting nothing that made everything a pleasant little surprise here.

I'm a right wing libertarian, big time capitalism. My uncle is the youngest Republican senator in history. My other uncle served in the exit polling.

I scored a thirty five on the seat, putting me in the zero point two percentile boys state and its twin program, Girls State are sponsored by the American Legion, a nonprofit run by U.S. war veterans.

Boys State is an exercise in democracy, kind of like model Congress or student government, except it lasts an entire week and it's statewide and super prestigious. Every state does this. And so many famous public figures went through the program, including Lou Dobbs, Tim Cook, Neil Armstrong, Roger Ailes and actually Bruce Springsteen. But that's neither here nor there. The year Renee participated in Texas Boys State, it was filmed for a documentary called Boys State. Renee, it was one of the main characters the film follows.

We have twenty four cities here at Boise State. Those cities filter into counties and that's very much like real life.

So over a thousand high school boys come together from across their state to form two fictitious political parties called the Federalists and the Nationalists. The boys then decide their parties platforms pass laws and at the end of the week, they elect a governor.

Somebody will run your city. Somebody will run your party. Sitting beside you. Or someone sitting in your seat may be the next governor of Texas boy state. By and large, there's a certain type of boy who is attracted to Texas boy's death, and I've never seen so many white people ever, and Renee felt like a fish out of water.

I was in line waiting to get my picture taken. And my mom was like, there's a lot of white people. And I was like, yes, yes, Bridget. I see. And she was like, it looks very conservative. And I was like, yes, I also feel this. And I was like, you're making this so much easier for me.

She was like, do you want to go home? And I was like, Yeah, but I couldn't say that because now people are looking at me.

I'm not going to be like, yes, I want to go home with my mommy right now. So like so I was like, OK, I'll do it.

In addition to being one of a handful of black people at Boise State, Renee, it was one of the very few liberals.

But Renee, as you know, is a champion debater.

He was like, maybe I can learn from this, I thought was really important for me to learn the conservative side of things because it forces you to think, at first I was like, this is a conservative indoctrination camp. And I was like, literally what every liberal means.

Seeing the other side wasn't just a thought exercise for Rene, it was also a survival tool. He already stuck out as a black, queer lefty to succeed at Boise State to play the political game to win elections.

Renee, I realized he was going to have to cool it down and I planned on having two options, either shut up, don't speak or find some way to conform and survive.

So Rene started with plan a day when he was very quiet and didn't say much. But shutting up and not speaking doesn't really do you any favors in politics. The first couple of days and Boise State, there are all these elections for various positions happening all the time. And Renee was just striking out day to rolls around.

I'm losing elections left and right. And so I just kept losing. And that got to the state party chair election.

The candidates for party chair sounded like this. Do you want a chairman who will act for each and every one of your personal desires? Our masculinity shall not be infringed.

I'm going to use this devotion to pressure the Federalists into a state of absolute submission.

The two fictional parties didn't have platforms or policies yet, but they already had the rhetoric. These party chair candidates were already talking about pummeling the opposition or strong arming them, and that just didn't sound right to Renee, he decided that he would shift to plan B. He decided to run for state party chair and I was revising and editing, writing my speech literally in the audience, and this is what he said, my grandmother told me a few things.

You have to have faith, hope and a bit of a pissed off attitude.

I want to be civil and represent a whole working body, and we're going to take the example of a plain body, it has two wings, a left one and a right one. We're not going to pick one. We're going to stay in the middle because we are not an intolerable party. We're one that is palatable to all. And so as long as we're able to keep this plane afloat with a healthy right wing and a healthy left wing, we have the ability and the capability to pummel any federalists into the ground because we are the only party that's worth voting for, because it's this party that's going to represent every individual.

Vote for me through your state chair. Renee won the position of party chair, so your state party chairman is Renee. Renee ran on the very platform of compromise. I think everybody has a secret underlying need for bipartisanship. So I think just running on a campaign of bipartisanship and being as specific as possible was a great way for me, I guess, to integrate myself.

I want to win something after losing so much the entire day and motivated by the fact that I wanted to like school these kids, but also I have to walk a very fine line if I even wanted to win.

You know, blackness makes my politics seem ambiguous, right, to everyone. Apparently, everyone's watching me twice as hard.

Renee turns out to be an incredibly adept chairman as he presides over a room of 550 tired and hormonal teenagers who are trying to figure out what their party stands for, a motion to secede and legally call this boy's nation.

We can't succeed. The boys are all throwing around far fetched ideas and pushing limits and bending rules, and Renee is keeping the peace, decorum, decorum.

Thank you so much that you would like impeachment and revote for the state chairman. In maintaining bipartisanship and trying to appeal to consensus, Reneg gets attacked by his own party. There's this whole campaign to try to get him impeached.

They want to impeach me. Just a little different for somebody that looks like me. So I guess my way of doing it is just going to be palatable and congenial to what the body wants. I'm going to vote for everything and that's what I'm going to adopt. And those that didn't vote for that side will be mad that I call for an impeachment. They're going to be on their one side and the other side is going to be mad.

And then what do we have a divided party.

When the opposition party hears about Rene's impeachment, they take advantage of the internal discord and they weaponize a meme Instagram account called Impeach Renney. And the account starts to post these really offensive racist memes, just going to boys state and dealing with like the stuff, the petty racism.

Right. I was already prepared to deal with that, deal with it all the time. Just wasn't I didn't realize how much of a challenge it would be for seven days straight.

And I was like, if this is supposed to be a political space, if these children have literally no political experience except for what they see on TV and they're reflecting these same actions like eloquently like I was, your racism is top notch. OK, I'm a little concerned.

I'm not going to give away the entire plot of Boise State. It's really fascinating. And you should watch it. But basically, the whole mission of Boise State is to encourage kids to get into electoral politics. And with Renee, it backfired, you're right, I did want to go into Boise State wanting to be a senator after that experience, I was like, I don't want to do this anymore.

My ideas of compromise were certainly not something that I would have said under different circumstances had it had not been five hundred and fifty white conservative faces in front of me. But I refused to completely abandon any of my politics. And so many arguing for bipartisanship was a compromise that I made.

If you could do both, say it again. Now, if you could make that initial speech that finally got you elected now, what would you do differently? I think about this a lot. You know, I was really upset with my boys state initially. Now I'm like really grateful to the whole experience, just thinking back. But I left feeling really jaded if I were to give that speech again.

I don't know if I went back now, I probably still go with my bipartisanship message because electability and unity is really what's most important to me at this time.

So you don't think unity, unity and compromise are not in the same boat for you? I don't think so.

I mean, I'm not you know, if you were seeing people that look like you on the news every night, you know, being rescued by police and someone asks you, but what if we kill less?

I don't think people understand that compromise shouldn't be a life or death situation, and that's what we're playing with now.

Unity and compromise are not mutually exclusive, but they're not mutually exclusive either. We should not be compromising for the protection of our communities on the basis of literally our blackness, our skin color. We do not need to be making these compromises yet.

We do. Yet we do. There's so much virtue with compromising, with giving up with you believe in for the sake of somebody else that we like virtue, single it so much that we think we're doing great by placating and being placated.

But like, what can we do? How can we stand up for ideals in a in a moderate world where compromise is preached to us as a virtue?

You start compromising, how so? I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to say this. Me and my friend have matching rubber bullet wounds above our knees because we were in Austin during the surge of thirty five. And then planned the very next day where we were going to demonstrate next and how we were going to organize like voting, is you compromising? Oh, I'm going to cast my vote for what I think the country should look like. I'm a 50 percent chance of that happening.

Right.

We need to change the way that we view civic engagement from being a systematic form of engagement, utilizing politics like voting and calling your senator to being a systematic, like being in the streets, protesting, organizing.

Are you I mean, you're still going to vote, though, right?

Oh, absolutely. Because I'm not going to change the world by November 3rd.

What I'm saying is, how do we get rid of the of of the economic system that quite literally forms the basis of this country? You don't vote it out. You don't call the senator about it, so I want to engage in politics and do activism, education, nonprofit work, because electoral politics require me to compromise, to drive a class and declaw. The only way for us to live outside of this system is to learn how and how do we learn how from those who have lived outside of the system, the most illegal bodies.

Black queer women have always been the foundation of literature, of liberation movement, so I think what we need to do is listen to them when we listen to those who have the most experience outside of the system, the most capability to imagine, like Angela Davis is alive friends.

And this is what Angela Davis said.

I don't see this election as being about choosing a candidate who will be who will be able to lead us in the right direction. That will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti racist movement. Think is very problematic in many ways, but Biden is far more likely to take mass demands seriously, far more likely than the current occupant of the White House, so that this coming November, the election will ask us not so much to vote for the best candidate, but to vote for or against ourselves and to vote for ourselves, I think means that we will have to campaign for and vote for Bidart.

Biden is a better. Opponent to have in the White House, then Trump, and that's how I look at it. Sophie, yanno, the cartoonist again. I know that.

If I you know, when I vote, I am participating in. Really a failure of an institution, but I'm not going to just not do it. This gets back to what Sophie said at the beginning about why she wrote her comic, Why Vegan in a carnivorous society, why vote within a rigid two party system that's rife with problems? It's what Sophie was talking about, how ideas can be perfect, but people are fallible, so much so that doing the right thing, trying to do the right thing feels wrong.

Feels like not enough. Especially as ideas become more and more perfect and more and more divorced from the real world.

I remember reading something by Fred Moten. He said that as you get closer to liberation, our ideas of what we want will change because we'll have more access to different forms of thinking. And it makes that fissure between the pragmatic and idealistic, the current world and the best world, a gaping hole. Which is painful. But crossing that divide is the work. And our task is to reckon with both those sides, the Sophie and the Zeena, and hold them both and not lose track of one in the name of the other.

In other words, not to compromise the. Our lead producer is Bob Parker, edited by Allison Barrenger, mixed and scored by Brandon McFarland, who also wrote our theme music character.

Sophie was played by Morgan Dewey. Xena was played by Gemma Rose Brown.

So Fiennes book, The Contradictions is out now from Drawn Quarterly special thanks to Corrine's A Cárdenas Sensitising Kurtz and Zachary Mac Stella Buckbee in the shop.

Koloa, are the executive producers. Cut is made possible by the team at New York Magazine. Subscribe today to support their work at Kate Dotcom slash subscribe. I'm every woman. Go vote.