Welcome to episode 4 of The Lavender Menace Podcast season 2, where we bring ourselves back to our podcast roots- generally being frustrated at leftist internet discourse started by people who don't read and have no true understanding of what Marxism even is, and then ranting about Taylor Swift's genius for an hour. The Tik Tok Sunny complains about for the hot take is inaccessible because the creator went on private, but otherwise it would have been linked here. Also, love yourself and go read The State and Revolution by Lenin! https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ Sunny reads an excerpt of it in the hot take section of this episode. Renaissance and Sunny also mention Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Walter Rodney as revolutionaries who shouldn't just be put on a pedestal, but also have their work and writing and ideas be engaged with seriously. For the second part of the podcast, as always, we discuss a shared piece of media that we both consumed, and this past week it was an Apple Music interview of Taylor Swift that you can find on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/CQacWbsLbS4 While most interviews of Taylor Swift frustrate both Renaissance and Sunny in how the interviewer often is disrespectful of Taylor as an artist and is treated less seriously simply because she makes very popular music for primarily an audience of young women, this particular interview by Zane Lowe really tickled our fancy. Clearly, since we talked about it for hours off the pod and could talk about it for hours on the pod. As always, our media recommendations for this week will be linked on our pinned twitter thread (follow us on twitter @thelavenderpod!) Sunny recommends the short story The Summer People by Kelly Link, and Renaissance recommends the show Fossy/Verdon.

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