I got turned on to CZM with Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here Season 1 (aka “Robert Evans doomposts about the impending 2nd American Civil War”). I would have placed them as quite anarchist which, while not my preferred leftist tendency, I still respect as an important faction in the fight for global liberation and international communism.
I had assumed they were leftist and they do seem to be most of the time, but there are some weird and jarring… exceptions.
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The ICHH host Mia Wong seems to have this unbridled hatred for China. I’m no expert on China and I would not want to live with Chinese working conditions, but they seem to go beyond reasonable critiques into full on animosity.
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They’ve been pro-Ukraine without acknowledging that the Ukraine War is a NATO-provoked proxy war, and that continuing to fight over territory that doesn’t even want to be Ukrainian has just gotten so many Ukrainians killed for nothing, in a doomed fight. That’s fucked up.
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The sub
for Behind the Bastards (yes I know I should leave but there’s still niche stuff I like there) appears to be full of Blue MAGA Vote Blue No Matter Who Is Being Genocided shitlib fascists. I only joined it recently and it was jarring to get dogpiled and downvoted for saying such basic things as “fuck Genocide Joe”, etc. These fans seem to have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Now, I know CZM has no official relationship with the subreddit, but I can’t help feeling it’s a mark against them that they attract this crowd! OTOH, CZM platforms a host who’s explicitly pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist so maybe judging them by their fanbase isn’t fair, and the problem is just that shitlibs have exactly 0 critical thinking skills
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Robert Evans worked with the FBI personally, and the outfit he works/worked for, Bellingcat, received/receives NED funding.
CIA
For real?
Evans is sus
Not really. Robert Evans worked for Bellingcat, which has gotten funding from the National Endowment For Democracy, which is basically a state department cut out.
He also gave a talk to the FBI about right wing extremist groups in the US.
His politics are a sort of anarcho-liberalism. He doesn’t recognize that the machinery of the US empire is inherently evil and cannot be used for good, so he was in favor of terrible ideas like enforcing a no fly zone over Syria.
Edit: also, I was listening to It Could Happen Here a while back, and the Washington State Police were running ads on it lmao. Pretty much stopped listening to all of their shit shortly afterward.
The Trueanon subreddit dislikes Behind the Bastards, so by default a large amount of Hexbear users hate him too 🤷♀️
OK but what’s the criticism? I haven’t found anything really damning or convincing, just a user saying they’re CIA
It was something about him needing to be in contact with the CIA because he was reporting from Mosul / Syria / Rojava? It was always vague and vibes-based. IMO nothing serious, just a continuation of hexbear’s collective trend of hating certain people based on optics
They’re all somewhere between anarchists and progressives. The criticism I tend to see from Marxists about them tends to be about relationships Robert has had with various entities and not about the content itself (outside of Mia’s cringe takes on China)
I wouldn’t look to them for materialist analysis of current events, but I don’t think you can actually listen to the content and still think they’re feds or a psyop or whatever. I don’t agree with a lot of their takes, but if I were to only listen to people I 100% agree with on everything I’d have literally nothing to listen to.
