The brothers are back with part 1 of a 2-part discussion of Raoul Peck's new HBO documentary, "Exterminate All the Brutes" (2021). The first thing G & O examine is how the film explodes the standard story that documentary tells about America. Documentary, O says, is related to ethnographic writing, a form of media innovated by the very same genocidal colonizers this film depicts. This film will guide you through a Frantz Fanon-style reading of the murder whiteness carries in its heart. it excavates the murderous events of the last 500 years so you can glimpse the sadistic drive in the collective unconscious of global whiteness. Be ready to go there. This film is made to take you there.

Today, the brothers conclude their 3-part discussion of Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave with a conversation about class, gender, and the definition of the term “to fetishize.” Does Django’s tendency to fetishize the violence of slavery detract from its ability to spark excitement in modern-day slave rebellions? If 12 Years a Slave shows how systemic the violence of slavery was, does it also dampen the sense that we can and should fight slavery as we encounter it today? And can we critique films we see as harmful without shaming the people who found enjoyment in them? These are some of the questions the brothers consider as they rate the potential of each film to help inspire revolution — but instead of “two thumbs up,” the brothers prefer "two AK-47s up!"

The brothers discuss Ice Cube (O'Shea Jackson) leaping into Black political leadership at the last minute with his Contract with Black America. Many people have focused on some fairly amateurish media maneuvers Cube made in relation to the professional liars at the trump campaign. But to do so is to take some needed focus off of something more deeply concerning: Cube's obvious embrace of both Black capitalism and an anti-PanAfricanist movement for reparations called the ADOS movement. After meeting with Cube and explaining how trump is an existential threat to her and others working for Black lives, Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter said, "ain’t no movement on an agenda without a movement. justice isn't a business transaction.." Regardless of what side one comes down on, this whole situation has many lessons for us to learn, including lessons about the importance of consulting with those who have already been doing the work, the timing of when we meet with our enemies, and how we enter the field of Black leadership.

In part 2 of their conversation about slavery films Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), G & O continue by comparing the politics of Black working-class political demands versus Black middle-class political demands in the two films. O describes his concerns about Django's individualism serving as a fantasy of resistance to slavery. "Whose fantasies," O asks, "is Django responsible to?... We have to be critical both of the film and of our enjoyment of the film." G argues that finally having this kind of heroic action fantasy in the genre of slavery films, while problematic, is "useful" to the Black political imagination of freedom as well as to our individual Black lives. O and G also talk about the difference between a film like Django that fetishizes the violence of slavery versus one like 12 Years a Slave that handles it a manner that is more "responsible to Black suffering"-- but also deeply disturbing and heavy. TO BE CONTINUED...

The brothers briefly discuss three TV shows -- The Wire, Underground, and Lovecraft Country -- Black stories that are really speaking to some concerns Black radicals have been raising for decades, shows that can be used to educate our movements, shows that make significant artistic contributions as well. **** NOTE ON SPOILERS!!*** We won't spoil Lovecraft Country for those who haven't seen it, but beware of spoilers in the first 3/4 of this podcast episode regarding The Wire and Underground if you haven't seen them yet!

Wisdom comes from studying history, and radical wisdom requires radical histories of the kinds trump aims to suppress. The more "unprecedented" we think this moment is, the more the tactics used against us have the potential to shock us into silence. (Joe Biden said we've never had a racist president before, which is not only a ridiculous thing to say, but also constitutes the type of erasure of Black and Indigenous history that is often used to gaslight us into the lie that amerikkka is good and fascism is somehow abnormal in the amerikkkas.) Even with all the unique and uniquely terrifying things about this present struggle against fascism, G & O urge folks to check out Agents of Repression by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall and other radical histories that are rich with lessons our Black/Indigenous past offers us right now. These books, articles, and videos offer important insights into how oppressors try to crush the freedom movements oppressed people use to survive the onslaught of white supremacist fascism.

On September 11th, 1851, in Christiana, Pennsylvania (u.s.a.), a mutual defense network of Black abolitionists led by William Parker confronted a posse of u.s. marshals and slave catchers pursuing 4 Black men who escaped from a plantation in Maryland. After surrounding and repelling the marshals, they killed the slaveholder, wounded his son, and helped the 4 escapees flee to a community of free Black people in Canada. Did you learn about this in school?

Revolutionary prison abolition activist George Lester Jackson (1941-1971) is central to why many Black people commemorate Black August. In this special episode, G talks about his work studying this great Black freedom fighter. The brothers discuss how the movement Jackson sparked behind bars faced conditions similar to those that Black people (and others) face today. Whether we're incarcerated or not, Jackson's books, Soledad Brother and Blood In My Eye, can teach us a lot about how our freedom struggle can survive and even grow under the harsh, repressive conditions of the present neo-fascist times.

With COVID raging and fires blazing, G & O, like many others, lament having no choice but to vote for the police-state presidential candidate in order to stop a nazi president who has weaponized the global pandemic against Black, Indigenous, and poor people. "Voting for Biden," says G, "is a speed bump on the road to authoritarianism...But we do need the speed bump because of the threat." O notes that in 2016, 14% of Black men voters, like musicians Kanye West and Jaheim Hoagland, fell for the okeydoke and supported the nazi. G & O zoom out from the present crisis moment to understand how Black men's position as providers in communities was deeply impacted over the past 40 to 60 years of deliberately antiblack policies like "tough-on-crime" police militarization, job flight from Black communities, systematic miseducation, and the crack/heroin epidemics, as well as more generally oppressive events like the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

G and O make sure this hasn't all been a bad dream. With u.s. COVID-19 deaths at 160,000 (and Black people making up 22% of those despite being 12% of the population) and the reopening of schools and businesses proceeding, the brothers ask "wtf." They talk about how, while Black thought has anticipated that the u.s. was like this, it's still shocking to see these things. Republicans are demanding kids go to school to deliberately get them to contract a deadly contagious pandemic disease. Donald Trump is openly using unconstitutional authority to block voters with little pushback from lawmakers. Also Kamala Harris joins the neoliberal Joe Biden ticket to oppose Trump's right-wing nazism.