Etienne Cabet

Yeah, so shoe gaze, the genre, which is like, yeah, you're looking at your feet because you play in all these pedals.

And then Fugazi is a punk band, like from the DC hardcore post-punk scene.

So when I talk about my band's genre being Shugazi, it's a little pun that November understands.

And anyone who understands the joke will like the band, I think, is the sort of beauty of it.

Maddie, would you suggest that Shugazi ain't going away?

What's that?

Sorry, I'm going to take that again.

Please, one more time.

Maddie, would you suggest that Shugazi ain't going away?

Yes, Riley.

Could we get one more clean?

Thank you.

You're just doing like time after time repetition of it, like in the master.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

Stanley Kubrick is here.

He's not dead.

He's here and he's directing my riffs.

Yeah.

He's getting me to do it a thousand times.

Yeah, anyways, stream weird chills today.

If you like the joke, shoo gaze.

Hell yeah.

I feel like I've gotten a good grade in like your band, which is positive.

You're doing incredible.

Yeah.

It's a thing that

you can get a grade in my band.

That's a thing that's possible to do and good to achieve.

Yeah.

Shout out, Sarah McHenry.

Whereas Maddie is calling my parents, being like, I'm concerned about Riley's performance in my band class.

Riley doesn't understand the basic concepts of my band.

I was talking to a friend who's a teacher.

I mean, you got to put some shit down, like,

is starting to connect the dots between band types.

It has like sound positive, but you read between the lines, like, this motherfucker doesn't know what Shugazi is.

I'm, I'm gonna, you've given me a new anxiety, right?

Because I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna get all of my old report cards, which I still have in a filing cabinet.

I'm gonna go through them and look and see which ones have been like spun in a positive way by a teacher trying to do that and now read to me as an adult, like, this bitch didn't know what Shugazi was.

Yeah, I doubt you did.

No, it's, I think it's unlikely.

I mean, I was listening to Fagazi like relatively early in life.

So I'll give myself some credit because I was into the Dead Kennedys as a kid.

So I don't think I've ever listened to Fugazi.

I mean,

you're so far behind.

You're so far behind.

I mean, our theme song is a sort of Dead Kennedys sound-alike that I attempted.

Yeah, I am.

I really like it for just that reason, in fact.

Mayor's uberalis.

Am I going to have to go to summer school?

Yes.

For band.

Yeah, you were too busy going to the sort of like,

what is it?

The the no labels?

Not no labels.

The Adbusters.

The Adbuster.

No, no.

God, you can't think of

Adbusters and calls it no labels.

So few labels, in fact, that they don't even label the,

you know?

You come out in like the Camp Adbusters awards and Acon performing no labels.

Yeah, we really,

here at Camp Naomi Klein's no logo, we really subscribe to the belief of not branding anything.

To be fair, I was thinking about that again today and just like more of the weirdness.

Like I can't remember if I told you there was a whole seminar on driving barefoot.

What?

Yeah.

What?

I was always to understand as a child that that was illegal.

It isn't, but it feels like it should be.

Yeah.

You know, like I think, I think the police should be allowed to like hit you with batons if you do that.

So just about the foot.

Yeah.

I didn't have my full driver's license at the time, but I wanted people at camp to think that I was driving early.

So for my elective activity, I went to barefoot driving class, but we weren't allowed to drive.

So it was just like the guy with the sole patch and like the knit cap being like, hey, you should drive barefoot.

Oh, my God.

I'm imagining the Flintstones car.

When you say barefoot driving.

So you had like a classroom-based

barefoot driving class.

Like, you got caught drunk driving barefoot, and they made you go, like, a court-ordered barefoot driving class.

There's a whole parallel driving legal regime for barefoot driving.

Well, see, this is the thing.

Like, you know how you get a special marker on your license if you can only drive like an automatic instead of a stick shift?

It's the same, right?

There's a little flag on there.

There's a little foot decal that they applied that you can only drive either barefoot or wearing those barefoot shoes.

Yeah.

Officer, I was reaching for my Vibram's five-toed shoes when he he started beating me.

Come.

I'm reaching for my orange safety Vibram five-toed shoes.

All right.

All right.

Yeah.

Experiences of this just come back to me.

Another one was, this is the last thing I'll say about camp adbusters for a long time, I promise.

You know, normally when people have kind of stochastic recollections of a bad experience in childhood, it's a lot darker than a guy with a soul patch tried to teach me to drive back.

It was,

they held a debate who's better, men or women.

Okay, sure.

Okay.

And then they also had like a sort of

a presentation given by like an Israeli and a Palestinian where they hugged.

Good.

Good.

So it is it is kind of an it is kind of a no labels situation

in that regard.

Yeah, the no state solution.

One big commune of like all different peoples all driving around barefoot together.

Yeah, that's actually kind of a great lead into the episode,

Nova.

Anyways,

the episode of the show that we're doing,

we're on a podcast right now.

That we all wore our orange shirts for.

We all wore our orange shirts except for November.

It's true.

Forgot.

I guess we're not.

I did.

I'm sorry.

I wore my tautology shirt, which is the same shirt as I wore yesterday, as Riley will know.

And it just it just says all women are real women on it because I'm living out.

But it's cut off.

It's cut off below all women are real.

So it just looks like November's wearing a shirt that says all women are real.

Because if I try and give you the women, it just like it's just like bounce up into frame, right?

Like exactly.

Tremendous.

If I try to give you the women,

I'm here with the women.

I'm wearing my cut off gym shirt, which is an orange shirt that has a photo of a drawing of Garfield skateboarding on on it, and it says, on my way to fuck your dad.

And I wear it to the gym, and sometimes there's children there.

Getting pulled over.

You're wearing that, like, gym shorts, no shoes, no socks.

Okay.

I'm starting to live.

What seems to be the problem, officer?

I was just driving.

Can you tell me about

where you're headed today?

Well, I think the answer is pretty clearly illustrated on my shirt.

Yeah.

Okay, already, I already fucking told you, idiot.

Legally, you don't have to tell the cop that you're going to fuck his dad.

That's like, you don't have to disclose.

It's in the Constitution.

Weird that they just added that, but yeah.

What a power move to show a picture of, to show a cop a picture of you fucking his dad with the cop holding that day's newspaper.

So you're just like, I'm actually on my way from fucking your dad.

No.

There's actually no speed limit when I'm leaving your dad's house.

Okay, I'm going to start the show.

It is No Gods, No Mayors.

It is the free feed.

I am your mayor for the episode.

I'm not quite a mayor today.

I'm more of like a religious figurehead, psychopomp, cult leader sort of.

You're pope.

You're pope of this episode.

I'm sort of like the pope of the episode in a way.

I'm joined by my co-popes, Riley and November.

What's up, girls?

How are we doing?

Shotgun Avignon.

Shotgun Avignon, Pope.

Fuck.

God damn it.

Okay, where else do they have popes?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where else am I going to be fucking anti-pope of?

Like Viterb?

Well, there's like an American

anti-pope of the under Vatican.

The Vatican that's like there's like a city in the city situation in the Vatican.

And there's if you're not allowed to look at the anti-pope unless you are from the anti-Vatican.

Okay.

Yeah, weirdly, our timeline actually has the inverted pope, which is why they use the like inverted cross.

So like everybody else, you can't see the real pope.

That's right.

Okay, so I'm going to start us off with a little municipal roundup.

So I, there's no way to announce that I have something in from a listener and saying their username, like not like I'm sounding like on Twitch doing Roblox and I hate it, but this one is from listener H.

Jank.

Thank you, H.

Jank.

I'm straight up going to read an entire article to you, too, because it's very short.

Please.

Okay.

So first, I'm going to skip the headline.

The former mayor of a Croatian town was detained on Thursday on suspicion of having bought 1.5 tons of a famous local sausage with public money.

Local media reported.

Davor Milechevic.

He's like the Eric Adams of Croatia.

He wants to hang out with a really famous sausage.

Yeah.

Davor Milechevic is suspected of having bought 1.5 tons of kulen, a flavored pork sausage, from Zhupania's budget over a three-year period.

Zhupania is in non-coastal Croatia, which is depressing to think about being there and then just going inland and not even getting the cool Dalmatia stuff.

Things that you can do in inland, but not that inland Croatia.

Yeah.

Pork sausage is a beautiful, yeah.

It's like I looked up what Kulan looks like and they sell it at my local, the Euro market in my neighborhood.

And it's kind of like, it's this beautiful, like bright red pork sausage thing.

It looks delicious.

I mean, so understandable then to do like serious pork sausage.

A ton and a half of this.

It's like, how, how do you resist if you're a Croatian mayor and the, and the butcher is just there dangling a beautiful cool-in front of you?

You'd be lifting up off the air.

Yeah.

So I will say, speaking of the butcher, the manager of the butcher shop where the sausages were reportedly being bought was also detained.

They really busted the whole thing wide open.

You know, they're doing like a federal Rico case.

It's the end of a mob movie where they're like everybody got pinched.

It's like me, the guy I was buying the sausage from.

I guess there wasn't really anybody else involved in this whole operation.

It's the montage.

It's the montage from Goodfellows where they're all getting caught and killed by Robert De Niro, but it's actual meat hanging in the meat locker only.

After Lufthansa, everybody started eating sausage.

Yeah, I love that.

It's just, oh, I think, or it's like, it's like the untouchables, like taking it all the way to the top.

It's just, it's from here to here.

It goes all the way to the top, but of a very low ceiling building.

All the way to the local maximum.

All the way to the top round, I say.

which is a beef joke.

My grandfather was a butcher.

Yeah.

So, yeah, Malichevic, the former MP of the ruling HDZ,

which is a center-right, the Croatian Democratic Union Party.

He was the mayor of Zupanya from 2009 till 2021.

It's a decent term.

It's a decent term.

It's a lot of opportunity to put away a large amount of sausage.

Yeah, an investigation is going on with the National Bureau for the Fight Against Organized Crime and Corruption.

If you had 12 years, could you eat 1.5 tons of kulin?

Would you nationalize kulin?

I get sick when I eat pork now after years of not eating pork.

So I don't think I could eat even like a single bite of kulin.

I don't have what it takes to be a Croatian man.

Well, certainly not.

Yeah.

And this really lends a cast to the whole like Yugoslav like wars and the religious aspect of it afterwards, right?

Is to be like, on the one hand, you've got like a lot of Albanian Muslims.

On the other hand, you've got a lot of like Serbian Orthodox.

And then you've got, you know, like, so no pork, some pork.

And then up in the north, you have Croatian Catholics who are like the maximum possible amount of pork.

Frankly, implausible amount of pork.

This never would have happened under Tito.

My pork consumption will be measured in tonnage.

Yeah.

I feel like you would get executed if the like.

like socialist government had caught you embezzling sausages.

That's the kind of thing they would shoot you for, right?

Oh, yeah.

Tito would have had you built into a Yugo.

It was not immediately known where the sausages might have ended up, but some media reported that they were offered as gifts at various ministries and government agencies.

That's the end of that article.

But I love the idea of bribing people with pork.

Yeah, for real.

Just like, hey, you want to maybe build like a, you know, a train station in my town?

Here is some beautiful pork sausage.

Pork barrel spending is what he heard.

And he was just like, time to make it real.

all right i'm i'm my name is davor milicevic and i have the uh a special brain uh process that makes me think everything is literal i'm just learning about pork barrel spending from sarah palin now in the bridge to nowhere i can't do that but there is a butcher i guess i could do the second first one let's do it let's give out some sausages even buy one and a half tons of sausage like it took us three years Okay, so he was like

client butcher.

Yes.

Okay, sure.

He was stuffing it in his socks and walking around.

You could tell that the mayor was embezzling because he was getting chased around by stray dogs.

Getting chased around by stray dogs and also hungry inland Croatians.

Wow, the mayor smells really good.

It smells incredible.

I want to take us next to...

God damn, the mayor smells amazing.

Is he wearing a new cologne?

I want to take us next across all of Croatia to the coast and then across the ocean to Georgia, America.

Oh, I was thinking different Georgia.

I was going a different direction across the ocean.

No, no.

We're going.

Yeah, that's right.

So this one is a little no gods, no mayor's amateur episode in miniature occurred.

An $18,000 or $1,800 table, flight upgrades.

Residents want South Fulton Mayor investigated for his purchases.

Oh, more purchases, more things, more artifacts.

That's right.

So this is in South Fulton, Georgia, which is a small town.

It seems like

the long and short of the story is that the mayor had a sort of like spending card that was given him by the city manager.

According to policy, the mayor is not allowed to exceed $10,000 in one month of spending.

Seems reasonable.

I'm raising my hand here to say that it does appear from reading the thing that this card is called the P card.

It is called the P card.

That's true.

Uh-huh.

P-hyphen.

Is that like the face card?

But if you're really well hydrated, you can.

Damn, this guy's P card's amazing.

He's got P cards.

Pretty strong stream.

Really strong stream.

Totally clear.

100% hydrated.

I would actually piss clear, but you know, okay, whatever.

Instead of calling it like a pissing contest, it should be like a P-card contest.

Show me your P-card.

The Star Trek guy?

Yeah,

P-card decliner.

Also, I like that the implication here is that the mayor needs to be given one of those like capital one credit cards you get your parents give you when you're 16.

Yes, essentially.

He gets a free CD player with it.

He's got the mayor's HSA, basically.

Oh, you guys don't get those, do you?

It's a health spending account.

Anyways, it's a fun American thing that's very cool and not insane.

In September, he spent more than $9,000 on travel, including multiple flight upgrades.

Statements from June 2024.

There you go.

Expenses show the mayor purchased two plane tickets totaling more than $1,000 for a trip to Paris.

You know, Paris is always the first stop.

Always the first stop.

I can't believe the French were like, New York, it is done.

It It is already big, saturated.

We have to find the next New York.

Let's go to South Fulton there.

Yeah.

Oh, you went way Montreal are there?

I'm a Quémécois mercenary.

South Fulton.

The other thing is, right, if you remember all the Turkish Airlines guys who were texting Elder One or whatever, being like, Eric Adams is our brother now.

So it's very funny to imagine an Air France guy texting Macron to be like, the mayor of South Fulton, Georgia is now our brother, Mr.

President.

We have secured Mayor Kobe, I think they call him.

So the other thing is that.

Mayor Kobe is one thing.

Mayor Wagyu is even more succulent.

These mayors are fed

a diet of olives and are massaged every day.

This mayor's been acorn finished.

So the coup de grace to me is that the mayor spent more than $1,800 on a table for his office that converts into a pool table.

Cool.

And to me,

that's cool.

We're dropping this in the chat.

And I think this is cool.

And the mares are becoming a little too relatable to me, I think, because

I just wanted to think about, so imagine there's a bunch of money and you could just skim, skimming a little bit off the top must feel awesome.

It must be just a little bit off the top for me.

Just for me?

One of the key things that I've learned from both mob movies and doing this podcast, right, is that a key element of conspiracy is hanging out.

And you have to hang out with people that you're doing crimes with, you already have an interest in common.

You're probably having a great time.

Like the group chat for like any given corrupt scheme is probably popping off.

They've probably got little memes.

They're probably posting the after all, why shouldn't I, you know, meme.

They're probably doing that.

And at the end of that, you get to go and play some pool on what frankly sounds like one of the dumbest pieces of furniture I've ever heard of.

Like, does it, how does it, how does it, how does it transform?

Does it like rotate like an evil genius conference table?

Did you guys have in the UK?

You probably have this in Canada because Canada is just America, but did you have the thing that was not anymore?

Not anymore.

We're really against that now.

Yeah, I know you are.

Fuck you.

You're flying a maple leaf plane pattern in the sky.

No, there was the thing that you could get that was like a three-in-one table that was a pool table, an air hockey table, and a foosball table.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I know this.

So I'm thinking it's like that, where you just take the top of the desk off and under it is the pool table.

Oh, yeah, that's like all of your mayoral documents and your like computer and whatever, that's just like on a board sitting on top a sea of like bays, like green felt.

That's right.

For some reason, when I imagine this pool table, I want to know, Maddie, if you're picturing the same thing, I'm picturing red felt.

Oh, yeah, I mean, that is the swaggier color to have.

If I've got an ill-gotten, if I've got an ill-gotten pool table as the red felt, as the e-I feel like if you've got green felt, that's like snooker, right?

Or billiards, whereas like pool, maybe that's like, I could see a blue, I could say a blue felt potentially.

A blue felt feels institutional to me, like something that you see at like a cheap pool hall.

It's kind of like party affiliation, you know.

A red felt has swag, and then a green felt is like that's like in an old, like the billiards room in like a beautiful manor house, yeah.

In my view, I've been to a bar that has orange felt, and that always feels very cool to me.

You can go that way, it feels kind of Protestant, kind of like a ranger's bar.

Yeah, it's a Protestant bar.

So that is our municipal roundup.

One day, Sam's just going to leave us going

in the recording, and I'm not going to check it.

The guy we're talking about today that I bring you is Etienne Cabet, who's a French gentleman, but

all the dealings we're dealing with are in America, basically.

Like the Air France guy in South Fulton.

That's right.

So, you know, we've been talking about, we were talking about this when we were doing Popes with Patrick recently, which is like, are we just going to talk about stuff that is on our minds?

Or is it about, is it like not technically a mayor, but it is sort of like in the spirit of mayoraltude?

And I say to this thing, yes to both.

So is he a mayor?

I would say yes.

He was not strictly an elected official of an incorporated town, right?

But I think it is an illustrative story about how local power functions and how this guy basically rose to political power and then functioned and he fell in a very mayoral fashion.

I like this.

I'm thoroughly down with this, right?

And this too is part of the kind of like choir of mayors, you know?

Yeah,

if all of God's mayors sang in a choir, would Atien Kabe not be singing?

Exactly.

Ultimately, what we're here talking about is someone with a power, with power in a political system over the largest small amount of people there is.

And whatever that means, whether that's the popes as figures who are uniquely Roman, or whether that's that's like um the leaders of like religious intentional communities or whatever all of these are the highest low authority yes precisely so i want to start us off with a passage a very quick passage from this book that i used for research um that a book i really love called paradise now the story of american utopianism by a guy named chris jennings that details a bunch of these very similar like millenarian pre-marxist socialist communes that were all over america in the in the mid-19th century.

Hell yeah.

So, anyways, on November 14th, 1847, a month after George and Sophia Ripley left Brook Farm, the front page of Le Populaire, a communist weekly printed in Paris, bore a peculiar headline, Say a Texas, or it's in Texas.

Ten weeks later, down at the piers of Le Have, 69 Frenchmen filed aboard the Rome, an American-built steamer with three masts of large square-rigged sails.

As the ship pulled away, thousands waved from the shore, cheering arvois.

Standing at the stern rail, dressed in matching gray caps and black velvet tunics, the men sang a newly written anthem to the tune of La Marcella about their new home of Acaria

in America.

So, so all of these guys are like going to Texas to found a more equitable society on the prairie.

That's correct.

So, this guy, Etienne Cabe, he was the son of a cooper, like a barrel maker in Burgundy, a guy who made like burgundy barrels.

Riley, that's so important.

That's so, so, so important to make sure that's a lot of fun.

Teachers will just like point out the kid in class who might be interested in something.

Hey, Riley, this guy was a cooper and he made burgundy barrels.

Uh-huh.

I bet you'd like to look at some of that wine and be near it.

I bet you'd like to fill your basement with it and then just go downstairs and look at it and give it a thumbs up once a day before going back upstairs.

Just maybe giving it like the finger guns on the way out.

Riley's cask of a Montiato that he goes and checks on.

Some cabe.

it's really important in your daily routine to have a real like hitman assassination opportunity on yourself.

I, for one, I like to like open my windows and like stand leaning out of my window

just in a very precarious way.

I uh yeah.

Um so he was like a man of the new French Republic, right?

He was born in 1788.

And he's really as a young man, he's very big on the Jacobins.

He loves, you know, he's big on it movement-wise.

He studied law in France as they reinstated the monarchy,

but ended up on the barricades in 1830, you know, demanding Charles advocate with everybody.

And afterwards, he is such a sort of like leader of the movement on the barricades.

He gets an audience with Louis Philippe,

the new king.

And Louis Philippe is a little bit of a money.

You would hate to have a meeting with the first as tragedy, then as far as farce guy.

Yeah, correct.

So the farce man is so annoyed in his meeting that he sends him to Corsica to an appointment there.

It's just like, fuck you.

I hate you so much.

Go to Corsica.

He sent him to go get headlight fluid or like striped paint.

The new emperor commands you to get a box of grid squares.

Yeah.

He ends up coming back to France and he wins a seat in the lower house of parliament.

Hey, there's no such thing as headlight fluid.

Did that guy

go to Corsica?

He did for a little bit.

Yeah.

No, no, to like Louis Philippe being like.

that guy I did the bit to, did he actually go to Corsica?

He came back with a bunch of liquid wax.

He said it was headlight fluid because he had a candle on his head and it was melting.

He went to see.

This makes sense now, he went on to say.

He represents Dijon in the lower house of parliament back in France.

You guys have heard of Dijon mustard?

Because that's a kind of mustard and it's the name of a town.

That's why they make the mustard.

Yeah, while in office, office, he sort of aligns himself with like France's like reawakened proletariat movement at this point.

He helps organize all these classes for Paris's workers.

He's a big Republican guy.

He was doing like headlight fluid clinics.

He's doing headlight fluid.

He's doing a headlight fluid clinic in Paris.

God damn it.

Anyways.

He's going to drain all the candle wax out of your lantern that you have on the front of your carriage.

What to stop the deputies from like harassing you?

Your fucking Eugene Vidoc keeps pulling over my carriage and kicking the shit oh the monet looks like you have a uh an ed led broken

who just smashes over your candle with a truncheon yeah oh no not a truncheon

so he founds a newspaper called le populaire um which is like a communist newspaper um but it distinguishes itself at the time and here's what's an interesting thing about him he was like he wanted like a communist France basically, but was anti-class warfare and violence to get there.

So he was Elizabeth Warren.

I love this guy.

He's like one of my favorite genres or tendencies of communists, which is communist, but a huge pussy.

Like, absolutely in favor of that.

Yeah.

He was like all these

toxic Les Bros de Robespierre.

Lesme de Robespierre.

The Robespierre.

Giving the Mouve Mont a bad name.

Robespierre.

Robespierre.

There we go.

So he, uh but then despite being a pussy he writes a um

a newspaper article saying that louis philippe was like a and wanted to have french people shot in the street for protests i mean that's basically true like it's basically true but it's libel according to the king because there was a king This guy,

maybe he's not a pussy.

Maybe he's a principled, like anti-violence pacifist who like is just honestly that naive.

You know?

He has a humongous sense of his own.

We'll get into this, but he's a huge inflated sense of his own ego and his own ideas being like the only way forward for all humanity.

The owner of a communist newspaper?

You're telling me that the owner of a communist newspaper has this huge ego.

So dressing very strangely,

like black velvet tunics.

Yeah, is it Robert Avechion?

Although famously, famously, there were were always really good parties in the Populaire loft where lots of people were doing like opium and stuff.

Yeah.

The last place I saw someone smoking a cigarette indoors at the Populaire loft.

So

he gets very much exiled for sedition for this.

And they send him to Brussels.

And at this point, Brussels is like, you're sending us too many sedition guys from France.

And they kick him out also.

And he ends up in London, England, which you try to find.

I'm not cool that like all of of the like deported 48er radicals ended up there, like Marx, this guy for some reason.

Yeah.

So like it is like very much in the milieu of what he ends up in over there.

He reads in a library the 16th century book Utopia, which is the source of that word.

It's this old novel, which like was a travelogue of a guy going to a country and everything's perfect.

Right.

And it sort of like defines this, this sort of genre of book that becomes very popular, which is like some guy goes somewhere and it's cool.

Yeah, I mean, people think that like utopian or dystopian kind of speculative fiction or whatever has been around since forever.

And it's like, no, this is all posts.

It's all downstream of posts.

And if you come up with a post good enough, you too can change the course of like communism.

I mean, basically, so this, this makes him a communist, like a straight up communist reading utopia.

which is really funny to me because he was on the fucking barricades in 1830 and that didn't make him a communist, but reading a a book did which means real life organizing is fake and you should read more posts and you should

that is right like he he was genuinely like getting the like 18th century equivalent of tear gassed and he was still living out he was hashtag still with her and then he reads one book and he's like actually no all these guys gotta go yeah yeah um he meets uh around this time also robert owen who i don't know if you guys know who robert owen is he was a welsh industrialist who also was in the middle of building a lot of like these like utopian, he was like very into the idea of building with these utopian societies, mostly in America, but in a very like paternalistic way, because he was an industrialist.

But he had this whole thing.

To every Marx is granted an Engels, you know, it's just like it's a known type of relationship, I guess.

But he, you know, he studies the communistic system with Robert Owen.

And the whole thing about Robert Owen is that he was like, his whole big theory of it is that like man is determined by his surroundings.

So like if everything around you is a certain way, you will just, you know, go along with it.

And like, you know, this is sort of like, I think a big tenpole in a lot of like utopian or socialist anarchist communist thought where it's like, you know, if like certain things are taboo, it'll change how we act.

I mean, there's the read the dispossessed.

It's like an incredible

example of this kind of thing.

You build the, you build communism in a very literal sense, right?

In the sense that you build the kind of stalinkas with no kitchens in order to encourage like sort of communal living or whatever the fuck.

Precisely.

That kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yes.

So

our guy Kabe writes his own book called Voyage in Ikare or Voyages in Akaria.

Like if like if Icarus like was a place?

I don't know where he gets the name Akari is like named after the king of the place who's called like the good king Ikar.

So I don't know.

I don't think so.

Maybe who fucking.

It's all posting.

It's all posting.

I mean, I would love if you're naming your incredibly ambitious new way of organizing society after Icarus.

That'd be pretty funny.

That would be.

I mean, utopia is itself a joke, too, as you know.

Yeah.

No, no place.

It means both good place and no place.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

I've just realized it.

We're in the no place.

Sorry, sorry.

Sorry.

And that's it.

That's a series wrap on Riley, everybody.

Thank you so much for everybody on the show.

Bye.

Bye, everybody.

Riley Quinn has been a 24-month sociological study conducted by the University of London.

By the usual, yes, yes.

I'd like to welcome our new third Mike to the show, Riley Quinn.

Oh, my goodness.

I got hired back, huh?

Well, no, you're a separate guy.

It was a long time in the woods, and I felt like I really had a chance to say, I'm sorry.

In the book, Voyages and Akaria, which I have a copy of,

in it, a very merry-sue-ass guy named Lord William carisdahl he finds a name a nation off africa which is like a techno-communist paradise wakanda basic but it's like in the ocean off africa you know like okay sure atlantis atlantis in it the combined population of france and england live perfectly it is a 600 page book and it is no fun i have tried to read it it is like unbearably dull and horrible there's like no plot Oh, you just know this guy was so proud of it too.

And it was like a whole deal.

Anytime you saw him, he was like, hey, have you read my book?

Have you read my book yet?

Have you thought about reading my book?

He's right.

People do read the book.

So in it, the state takes care of like everything.

It's like luxury space communism, basically, but with like steampunk shit, you know?

Sounds pretty good, to be honest.

Like, I'm down to that.

Yeah, I've got a list of things about Akaria here because I found it very delightful.

There's no property or money, sure.

When a family is out of food, they place a little container outside their house and someone fills it.

Oh.

All the men are handsome.

All the women are beautiful.

But with the advent of standardized uniforms for all workers, jealousy has been eliminated from society between women.

I've been saying this.

Once the government issues everybody a flattering jumpsuit and a pair of hard-wearing rubber boots and everyone looks pretty good,

it's all going to be good, you know?

Yeah,

jealousy is a disease.

The cure is the Ikari hidden system, apparently.

That's right.

I mean, this is the thing, right?

Man is determined by his surroundings, right?

So, in order to cure jealousy and make everyone a bit like countier in a positive way, jumpsuits, you know,

we're creating the conditions for the outcome.

It's the same thing we're doing with uh with Riley in transition, you know.

Yeah, I was gonna say, well, you're creating much like with Riley, you with your jumpsuits are just creating conditions for beautiful lesbians everywhere.

Yeah, uh, workers ride around in public transit, and daily coal rations are delivered by dogs of quote, remarkable size and strength.

That's that's yes, yes, okay.

I want to,

I will die for Icaria.

Yeah.

Is this like a Saint Bernard who's got like delivering you some Eau de V and a barrel around its neck?

I think it's like carts drawn by dogs.

Is a St.

Bernard of remote

remarkable size and strength?

Because you wouldn't go like into if you came into work and you're like, I saw a St.

Bernard earlier, you wouldn't be like, you probably wouldn't even remark on it, you know, unless it was.

Yeah, I think I would remark, I saw a St.

Bernard.

They're great dogs.

Yeah, you would remark upon it if you saw like a St.

Bernard the size of a horse.

You'd be remarking the fuck out of that.

If you see like an Irish wolfhound, that's remarkable size.

I think that's like the lowest, the lowest, the floor of remarkable size is like one of those Irish wolfhounds that's the height of me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One used to be my neighborhood, and it scared the absolute bejesus out of me every time I saw it.

So while people work, something called music is piped into their workshops.

Insanely, this is not the invention of the word musak there was a corporation in the 30s invented it like independently just displayed i don't know but they listen to soft music all day called musak there's just something about the zed and the a the harder z and the more of and the pronunciation of an a a long a instead of an i that sounds more like tossed off

yeah it sounds very yeah uh the place is run in like a very staliny fashion like there's only one newspaper everything's controlled by the state there's like a very tight group of bureaucrats and then my favorite thing is that the toilets are gold.

So people do not covet gold.

But you just start coveting toilets.

Just you're looking at some gold and you're like, oh, that's toilet coated.

That's the stuff that I pissed

literally.

Literally, in like in the book, it's like diplomats from other countries will come and they'll be wearing gold and rubies.

And all the people of Akaria are like, that guy's wearing toilet stuff.

I hate it.

Showing up with my big toilet seat necklace.

So we had Balenciaga even in the 19th century, huh?

So, yeah, everybody's wearing like toilet porcelain.

Yeah.

I'm scrolling up a bit in the notes here.

It does say that women can't vote.

Women can't.

Yeah, they cannot vote.

Okay.

I mean, just so you know.

I'm not a huge fan of that, but I am a big fan of the kind of mandatory jumpsuits.

Yeah, I'm moving to a car and starting a reformist movement to get women to vote.

Change it from the inside.

I mean, they're non-violent.

What are they going to do?

Yeah.

You protest by like leaping in front of the king's dog of remarkable size and strength.

You know, okay.

So when you're blocking the dogs of remarkable size and strength, all you're preventing is people getting their cold rations for the day, Riley.

And I think it's bad optics.

Do you think like the

guy libbing out on the Paris barricades was like, you know, I agree with fighting the king, but I think I'm concerned we're getting in the way of people's cold liveries.

And we're just going to drive people from our cause.

He was thinking about the dogs.

He was dodging like royalist musket musketballs and being like, you know what would really fix this is a massive dog.

A big fuck off dog.

And like, no, bigger than you're thinking.

Yeah, you think it's big.

This is bigger than that.

So in 1839, he returns to Paris and he publishes his very insane, stupid, boring book.

But communism is very hot at the time in 1839, Paris.

And there's a lot of tension in France over a violent communist revolution.

It seems very imminent to the people in power.

Voyages in Icaria, however, contains no violence.

So the censors were kind of like, whatever, it's fine.

Weird about the dogs, but otherwise fine.

Keep an eye on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cabe's big thing was that he had his conclusions about humanity were so smart and good that if given the information, everybody would simply see the light, you know?

Like his idea was, once universal suffrage exists, people will vote themselves into perfect communism.

Universal male suffrage, unless all the women are voting ourselves out of voting, which maybe, I don't know.

It's just like, oh, let the guys and dogs take care of that, you know?

Yeah.

Also, I like this, like, as soon as people read the book, they're just like fashioning all of their gold jewelry into toilets, being like, we can be the change we want to see in the world.

Kind of.

Yes.

It's like an instant hit and he reestablishes his newspaper, which is another big hit.

People begin writing him and they're wondering how to get to Akaria.

God, people were so fucking dumb.

We still are, but we used to be as well.

We used to be.

All these Akarian clubs spring up all over France.

They would like read aloud from the book.

They'd sing versions of popular songs with the lyrics change to be about Akaria.

You know what this reminds me of?

This reminds me of like Harry Potter fans who kind of low-key believe that Hogwarts is real.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Genuinely,

as a kind of aesthetic, if not political, platform of being like, this compels me so much that it can't just be like something a guy made up, right?

Yeah.

It's the power of fiction.

My connection here is not Harry Potter.

It's people dressing up as fucking Navi after seeing Avatar.

Oh, Maddie.

I was just about to mention that.

No, I was just about to mention that.

Like, it feels very much like that.

Cause like it is like Avatar you could project actual politics onto, though they're muddled and crazy.

But you could if you really wanted to.

So

most of the Ikarians in France were urban artisans, weavers, smiths.

Half of them were tailors or shoemakers.

Well, yeah, because they were going to be in the jumpsuit business.

I mean, they're all fucking literate.

The guy guy who makes my shoes is just like, oh, I wish I could be making boots right now.

Sucks.

I wish I could be making the guy making the shirts and pants is just like looking at them and be like dreaming of the day he'll connect them together like one day.

But you know, much, much, much like sort of like a revolution of people who only post, these are all people that can read, right?

Like it's not going to be like working class people.

So these people, you know, they were all like afraid of revolution and they wanted to change.

You know, they cried out across time for like the posters revolution this is this is exactly the thing that marx talks about when he talks about like uh bourgeois communism right the idea that you're going to be magically transported out of capitalism and into communism with no kind of like interlude right yes it's these guys yeah and there's there's a lot of people like it's podcasters but no it's way weirder than that there's a bunch of french guys trying to sew all their suits and uh like their shirts and pants together

So I, you know, like a thing also at the time, there was a big, there was a lot of like, like this is, you know, during the Industrial Revolution, people were feeling very sort of unmoored and, you know, people are getting moved around a lot more than they used to.

People are leaving their homes.

People are changing their jobs.

People's jobs are disappearing.

New jobs are being created.

There's all these revolutions all over the world.

And it's like, there was a very, very serious strain of millenarian thought at the time, too, which is to say the biblical millennium.

Like the world's going to end.

A golden cube is going to descend from heaven.

We're all going to live inside of it for a thousand years, the millennium, like the biblical millennium.

It's like, oh, I hope I get a good room in the golden cube.

Oh, I have to share with the big boy.

Oh, nuts.

This guy keeps letting his dog of remarkable size and strength sleep on the couch.

I can't get rid of him.

All right.

Whose turn is it to spin the chore wheel on the millennium?

Come on.

I hate when I'm stuck polishing the outside of the giant golden cube that we all live inside of for a thousand years.

My cube mates.

How come your chore is organizing the schedule and my chore is polishing the entire outside of the golden cube that houses all of humanity in it?

Thousand mile by thousand mile cube, yeah.

Um,

um,

no, I'm not saying I don't think I should work.

I'm just saying I don't think this is a job for one person.

Um,

you know, he, he, the, the movement spreads like pretty rapidly across France all throughout the 1840s.

By 1846, there were about 100,000 Ikarians in France, many of whom started to call Cabe Papa.

That was his name in the

thus making him a pope?

A little bit.

And

he tries very hard to steer the Akarians into like an electoral movement, but there's a big backlash to communism in

France at the time.

People start burning.

uh their books they start boycotting the shops they're firing workers who are ikarians this is this is some real shit of of being like you know papa cabet i i tried to like organize the everybody sew their shirts to their pants party, but instead these Pinkertons beat the shit out of me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, turns out class warfare is real at Tien.

It's just, they're doing it.

In 1847, Cabe writes in his newspaper that the Akarians, who he starts calling them the new Hebrews.

And he says they need to find a fresh piece of land to start their paradise on earth.

Why is it that every like American

American utopian religion based on going out west is like, yeah, so we're Jewish.

We're all Jewish now.

Everyone else is Gentiles.

Because there was this huge success of like British Israelitism of being like, by the way, the real Israelites from the Bible settled in Britain and are like just us now.

Are you not familiar with that?

19th century British hoteps?

Yes.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Yes.

And a shitload of like

biblical exegesis and archaeology and shit was done premised on the idea that what they were going to find was that of the tribes of Israel, like a bunch of them just ended up in Britain.

England.

Yes.

That's

what Jerusalem, the song, is about.

Like, that's...

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to talk about that later for a long time.

So

like all, there's a ton of Christian stuff like this, like the kind of branch of Japanese Christianity that's like Jesus didn't get crucified, but instead went to Japan to preach the gospel.

That's cool, though.

I mean, that's, that's also Mormonism, right?

That he went to America during the time between him dying and him coming back.

More about Mormons soon.

So he, uh, Cabe signs a deal with the Republic of Texas, and now we're getting to real mayor territory.

A very bad deal with the, with the Republic of Texas.

Instead of a, so this is kind of complicated, but instead of a single tract of land, They would all get family-sized plots laid out in a checkerboard, and Texas would hold all the other checks in the board to be sold to future settlers at a premium once the Akarians got things going.

And the Akarians, as part of the money.

We've got our utopian society.

You can only move diagonally.

The Akarians would also have to have homes on their plots within a year, half of them, within a year.

And they failed to hit the deadline, they had to pay full price for all the land.

And Cabe, who is an idiot, says that his army of tailors would be able to build their own houses on the other side of the planet with no problem within a year.

Year one, 5,000 Sears houses.

Year two, big dog.

Year three, bigger dog than that.

Year four, golden cube.

Let's go.

He signs, yeah, a very bad year five.

All pets finally connected to all shirts.

Jealousy eliminated.

All women beautiful.

None of them voting.

This is dogs of enormous size and strength.

People don't know this, but capitalism, capitalism is actually stored in the belt.

And once you eliminate that, then all the class tensions just go away.

Yeah.

But how am I supposed to cinch my jumpsuit in a cunty way, November?

That's bad thinking.

You sew some little buttons in.

You get your Taylor comrades to sew some little button snaps in.

Great workaround.

That's called the dialectic.

So North America at this point, obviously, a lot of European visionaries are real.

That's Terra Nullius over there.

We can do whatever.

Chris Jennings in this book, which I cannot recommend enough, Paradise Now, called it an Edenic Void.

So, here's another quick little excerpt from there.

Uh, brimming with enthusiasm, Kebé sailed back to Paris and announced, first things first, contests to design an Akarian costume and write an anthem.

Doesn't he have a year to build like a thousand houses?

Yes.

Um, in a specifically printed pamphlet, he announced that he had purchased a new Eden, a million acres of lush countryside with the salubrious climate of Italy.

In fact, he had conditional ownership of 3,000 non-contiguous acres of scrub land.

Like a chessboard pattern of like mesquite and like prickly pear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Excellent.

So he he gets, he tries to get uh Akarians to go.

69 of them who had paid the 600 franc fee, they depart in their new velvet costume, singing their new version of the national anthem.

They go to Texas.

Velvets in Texas.

Black velvet in Texas.

With capes.

With capes.

Cabe remains in France.

This is the best retro futurism I've ever seen.

Like, the only better thing could be like, oh, yeah.

And they also had like

shiny silver domino masks made of aluminium.

So these guys are going dressed as the white glove society.

They're going to do an experiment to see what it's like when you try and sous vide a person's entire torso.

And they've, and they've, and they've got songs.

They've got, they've got the little, the little, like, Icarian songbook as well.

Yeah.

I think they were singing the, yeah, the, the, the national anthem anthem was a repurposed version of la marseillais which is very funny

yeah so they they get to uh new orleans uh kebe remains in france

y'all see how it goes if it if it seems good i'll come join you if it's he is also yeah he is he is uh nominally marshaling more support most of the money coming to the colony for a very long time almost its entire existence is from france from like a carians back home giving some money to the to the to the you know settlers this is this is just the playbook this is how you started a new colony anywhere like the early history of Zionism is exactly like this is just like

going around between different congresses being like can I have a bunch of money to build these beautiful homes and then you smash cut across the planet and the beautiful homes are not being built and everyone is broiling My favorite little bit of irony here is

while they're literally on the boat between France and New Orleans, the 1848 French Revolution actually actually breaks out back in France.

Like they missed it.

Oh, sorry, guys.

I can't join the revolution.

I am in New Orleans wearing my velvet cape.

So we get, a bunch of them actually turned around and went back because they're like, we actually the community is back home.

We're going to go back.

So help me.

I'm going to turn this boat around.

And there's going to be no Icaria for anybody.

Normal-sized dogs for the rest of your life.

You think you could bear it?

Yeah.

I think you're going to be getting colagua.

so uh some a lot of them stayed in new orleans while a small group headed out overland to texas uh on this crazy disaster of a journey where a bunch of people died one doctor went insane question mark people loved to do this back in the day yeah and then one guy was discovered to be a spy and was sent off alone into the wilderness for what

for a who they marooned a guy they marooned a guy for being a spy for the king who wasn't even the king anymore by the time they got there later he was found running a uh like a photo gallery in Texas, so he was fine.

This is a perfect like thrown clear of the wreckage thing to be like, yeah, I'm a spy for the king.

I have a secret assignment that's going to get me perfectly out of the country with the most harmless group of people just in time for the revolution to hit.

That's that's like being like a Libyan intelligence officer who works for like the football team one of Gaddafi's sons plays for in Italy.

So only 26 of these fucking tailors and cobblers reach the plot in Texas.

They turn around and go home after eight months because everybody starts dying of fever and they break their only plow.

This is the most prepared group of people in history.

This is great.

Strike the earth.

Your plow has been broken by a rock.

All of you have like gotten mysterious fevers from wearing black velvet.

It's scrub.

Back in Paris, they've now declared the Second Republic while this is all happening.

All the Accarian energy basically goes into the communist movements actually focused in France.

Imagine how fucking stupid.

Imagine how stupid you would feel getting if you're one of the people who went all the way, who didn't stay in New Orleans, who went all the way, was like, fuck you, you're a spy.

You've got to get out of here.

You're going to ruin Akari on behalf of the king who I assume is still in power.

gets to Texas, you start, you build a lean to, you put the plow in the ground, and it immediately shatters.

You're like, fuck, I guess we have to go back to New Orleans.

You go to New Orleans, like, you know, France is actually kind of popping up.

You get back to France.

You're still wearing like what remains of your velvet cape.

You remembered like your different version of the Marcia's.

And you get off, and you're like, oh, yeah, no, this is, it's just here now.

It turns out it was here the whole time.

How is Zakaria?

Are the dogs there yet?

Yeah.

Just getting asked about whether the dogs of unusual size were there as you get in the door and you're like, shut the fuck up.

It seems like your arm has healed weird from breaking.

Did the doctor go insane?

It looks as if your velvet, your beautiful velvet cape that you tailor looks as if it's been blasted to rags by a bunch of like Texas dust winds.

Anyway, you want to sing our new version of the Marcia's that you made up?

That was like...

That was the theme song of your cool new place.

No, fuck you.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

I just, I don't want to talk about it.

Yeah.

During the 48 Revolution, Cabe like abandons the project for a little bit and he joins the new government.

And it's basically all for naught because the election of Napoleon III happens and his coronation as emperor goes on and everything gets very anti-communist in France here.

The government circulates a pamphlet that reads, down with the communists, death to Cabé.

He didn't do anything.

If anything, he was doing them favors the whole time.

He got a bunch of them to like not endorse violence and then took them out of the country.

Yeah, but he's basically the most popular communist.

To go die.

Yeah.

That's right.

To go die.

If you are an anti-communist, this is, this should be your favorite communist.

Yeah.

Guy who thinks Kebé is an op.

Me, I do at this point.

So, um, much like they raided his newspaper, his office, they arrest him.

Um, shockingly, he skips town after this.

After the government writes a newspaper saying death to Kebe, death to this guy.

And he was like, I should leave, actually.

So So he himself goes to New Orleans to join the Akarians there.

He leaves his wife and his daughter behind.

Yes, that's right.

It's finally time for me to join you.

My calculations indicated that I was always going to come now at the time where I would be most impactful.

I have now raised as much money as I can back in France.

I have gotten as many Akarians as I can.

I was always planning to be here about now.

It's a coincidence that the French government has released a all my homies hate Etienne Cape.

We've made some slight adjustments to the uniform.

Do some vents.

I've cut the sleeves off.

So in New Orleans, he finds about 500 remaining Akarians.

Over 200 of them are very mad at him and immediately leave.

They go to sue his ass in France.

Surely you cannot get a fair trial in the country where the government is putting out the death to this guy, Pamphlet.

I guess, but also he's not there.

And at this time in history if you're being sued you kind of have to be there so crucially he this comes up but he has to go back at some point because he's getting so much monetary support from the ikarians in france that he needs to like maintain good legal and like social standing so he has to like go back to stand being sued later

so in uh the other 280 remaining ikarians who are not so mad at him they decide to find a new home and here's where things get very mayoral i promise uh-huh it's already been very mayoral.

It's been very mayoral.

This has been mayoral as hell.

This is municipal.

Tremendous.

This is a mayor without a town, you know?

So, yes.

So, finally, in 1849, Kebe and the remaining Akarians, they make a down payment on the center section of Nauvoo, Illinois, which is the town founded by future guest Joseph Smith.

What?

The crossover episode?

Just like, hey, where can our weird sort of like quasi-communist thing go?

I don't know.

How about Nauvoo, Illinois, a town that is significant to the audience, but not to us, due to a process called dramatic irony?

Yeah.

We're going to found it in dramatic irony, Illinois.

Place that will never come up again.

So at this point, yeah, Joseph Smith, like the Mormon, future guest, former mayor of Nauvoo, Joseph Smith, this was like their third or fourth attempt at American Zion and not their last.

But at this point, Smith had been killed and the Mormons were like, the Akarians were like, we're actually, we think that this is the right place for American Zion.

They were just the wrong people.

Yes, I think it was just abandoned.

Imagine being a non-Mormon.

What do they say for non-Mormons?

Gentiles.

They call us Gentiles, which is so offensive to me.

Do they literally

literally?

November?

They literally do.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Okay.

They call you a Gentile.

Can you imagine?

I'm not going to say.

Imagine being

a non-Mormon resident of Nauvoo, Illinois.

You have killed Joseph Smith and thrown him out of a window.

And then three months later, these guys show up

to be like, hey, what's up?

We're the next ones.

You know?

So there was like a, there was like a very,

it's, we're holding auditions for who's going to be like the new Jews.

And this is just like our call up.

Tryouts.

So

Nauvoo is kind of like, it's very, it's good for them because it's probably cheap.

It is this big abandoned center of town with a lot of like like apartment buildings and a humongous like sandstone temple.

So they take it over and they kind of make it their own.

They actually kind of thrive for a little while.

Like life is really simple.

I mean, a town was built for them, right?

They wear very simple clothes.

They're wearing wooden sabats around, sabots, whatever, the wooden shoes.

The cloaks?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The men are working the fields and the women are working the laundry or the loom or the kitchen.

They had like a little whiskey business because corn, it's like the best thing to do with corn is make whiskey.

They weirdly had like the most rich intellectual life of all of Illinois and people from people would like from miles around would come in to watch their 36-piece orchestra or go to their huge playhouse.

Oh, so Nauvu, Nauvoo is really like an all-or-nothing town for the cult, right?

Like they are either going to like kill you and run you out of town or they just love you.

They're because you have the largest library in Illinois.

Wow.

That's what you bring with you because you're a bunch of, you know, like

frufy intellectuals from France that just showed up.

Getting the sense that Joseph Smith didn't really know how to like work with people here.

I mean, I know you may not know the answer to this question, Maddie.

Are there people in central Illinois who still have French last names because they're descended from Akarians?

I would say probably not in Nauvoo, Illinois, but for reasons we will get to later, definitely in Iowa and Missouri.

Okay.

It's a very specific answer.

Sorry, not sandstone, limestone.

They built a new school out of the big limestone temple the Mormons left behind.

My favorite little detail in sort of like trying to make the techno-communist paradise, they build a little mechanical trolley to carry dishes around the communal dining room.

Oh.

I love these guys, maybe.

Like,

they're charming.

They're absolutely charming.

I'm absolutely charmed by them.

They're completely and utterly heartbreakingly sincere.

Yeah.

So Cabe, they get set up.

Things are going pretty good.

He's there for a couple of years and he's like, I got to go to France to deal with this lawsuit of all the guys who are mad at me.

So he, he's in France.

There's an attempted coup in the National Assembly while he's there.

He ends up on the lamb and getting arrested again and gets banished again.

Forrest gumping his way through like French revolutions.

Essentially.

And he gets back to Nauvoo and the settlers are like no longer see him as God or Papa because they've been like working alongside him for five years.

He gets very paranoid.

And like at this point, he's essentially, I would say, the mayor of Nauvoo.

He's not like a set.

He's, he's the president of Akaria.

He is not the, the act that Nauvoo has an actual mayor, but it's like he's the mayor of the non-Akarians, essentially.

And at this point, Kaibei is like the leader of a town.

So, but he gets very paranoid and he starts employing a network of spies around town.

A network of spies in your town of like 300 people.

That's right.

He's just like, hey, why is one of the, like, why is one of the 12 people I know wearing a fedora?

He's got a briefcase.

I don't know if those have been invented yet.

The Akarians start like splintering and he can feel it.

So he tries to, he tries to amend the Constitution to change the term of the president from one year to four.

And there's a referendum and it fails.

So at some point, he also, this comes up later, he buys some more land in Iowa, which is a month-long 500-mile round trip from Nauvoo.

And some Akarians, then they use it for more farmland, but some Akarians just end up staying there.

He's just like, all right, we've solved this one.

It's time for Icaria 2.

Yeah, we've already made one perfect society.

Yeah, just go to Icaria 2.

He's like, fuck it.

I'm tired of wearing jumpsuits.

I want to own my toothbrush.

I'm leaving Icaria.

The dogs of tremendous size and strength are never going to show up.

Yeah, that's just a horse wearing a dog collar.

You cannot fool me.

Having a real like kind of dark, like winter light, first reform style crisis of faith, but it's just like, I just don't know if we're ever going to get the giant dogs.

I don't know if that can happen.

You joke, but yeah, this basically happens.

Head in hands.

I don't know if a dog can get that large because of their bones or something.

I've been feeding these dogs so much and they're just getting fat.

So

in Nauvoo, at this point, things get very sectarian.

There's two opposing camps with names called the Kebaists and the spooky sounding the majority.

It's pretty cool to call yourself the majority.

Yeah, our team's called the winners.

Let's go, winners.

Let's go.

Yeah.

They like eat at separate tables in the commuting dining hall.

Like the majority gets like control of the school and they fire everybody else working at the school who's not part of their sect.

The majority is burning effigies of Kebe around town.

This is a town of 300 people.

I I think they've got like 500 at this point.

It's still, that's so small.

Also, they're eating at separate tables and just the machine that delivers food is rattling around between them.

I'm picturing like model train with a bunch of like closes on the back of a boxcar.

That's essentially correct.

Beautiful.

The people start getting disillusioned with the tension around because it's insane and they start leaving.

Because French people love to start a violent revolution.

It's just like they cannot stop doing it.

You leave.

It's like they made a Petri dish of French people in like a safe control condition away from France and they still did France to it.

They're doomed to repeat France always.

First is France, then again is France.

So

people from the majority win like an open election and Cabe loses his presidency.

Yeah, I mean kind of a foregone conclusion there.

But then an insane thing happens where like Cabe loses the presidency and all the Cabeists go on strike.

And then the majority in retaliation to the retaliatory strike, they occupy the refectory where all the food is being held.

So they withhold food from the Kebeists who then march on the refectory wielding axes.

So this is like not really super in line with this bloodless communist revolution that he was envisioning.

This has all gone so wrong.

Like brother fighting brother, bunch of fat Labradors.

Fat Labradors delivering nothing to nobody.

A little mechanical food trolley just spinning.

All the fat Labradors have little panniers on, but there's nothing in them because they're not delivering.

The logistics of this town is like broken down completely.

So the entire...

So imagine you're

the actual mayor of Nauvoo here.

You've sold most of the town to these insane people.

They show up.

They stage a civil war with each other.

A lot of them leave.

They're marching around with axes and burning things down.

So the sheriff and the real mayor are like, get out of here, please.

And in 1856, September, the majority votes to expel Cabe.

And a month later, he and a little less than 200 loyalists, they get on a boat up the Mississippi to go to Missouri to build the real Acaria.

Acaria 3.

Real Acarianism has ever been tried.

Yeah,

essentially, that's the rest of the show is that.

So I want to just real quick Cabe's fate.

This is right after they leave.

This is again from Paradise Now.

Two days after they arrived in St.

Louis, Kebé's chambermaid brought him the wrong breakfast.

In a fit of anger, he suffered a stroke and died.

What?

This never would have happened with the big dog.

This guy was killed by eggs.

How wrong can you get a breakfast?

I'm thinking, I'm trying to recall in my life the wrongest breakfast I've ever had.

Imagine explaining a martyr for communism to America, an American.

Imagine a a hamburger for breakfast.

So his followers, yeah, believed that he had died as a martyr.

Not even he didn't get breakfast.

Not even he choked on it.

Just is like, this isn't what I wanted.

This egg is, this is the wrong kind of egg for me.

And I'm going to die about it.

And it's your fault.

Coddled.

Coddled.

Listen.

The French are very persnickety about food.

This has all been worth it to get to this point

for me

his followers uh believed that he had been basically murdered by the traitors you know yeah they dressed him they dressed him in his ikari i i can't blame them for saying that he we gave him the wrong breakfast and he died he got so mad he died this is not a possible story

I mean, I am, again, I'm on to Ayanuchi.

I know you're love living out, but can you please write the death of Stalin 2 about Edward

Cabet?

Etienne Cabet.

Cabette, maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong.

Would you say it's Cabette and not Cabet?

I would say Cabet.

Etienne Cabet.

Okay, good.

My French is...

I speak Spanish, not French.

So

this.

The former chambermaid was like suborned by the majority.

And they were like,

okay, now

you know he likes his eggs cuddled, but you bring him just to normal fried.

Give him the deviled egg.

Give him the deviled egg.

She gets a micro dot and it says wrong egg.

Okay,

what he was doing, he was

bring the wrong egg there.

Riley, your French accent is so Quebecois, man.

Oh, for real, yeah.

It's tremendous.

I love it.

What do you mean?

I am from France.

I love the Quebec Sucre, French tradition.

Bonjour, I am from France.

Yeah.

So

they dressed him in his Akarian cape and tunic.

They cut a lock of his hair for a relic and they buried him.

One young adult German Akarian took his own life.

He was so depressed about it.

Jesus.

Why?

Yeah.

So

at some point you have to see that this isn't working.

And you're like, no,

we were going to get it.

We were just on the verge of getting it right.

The dogs were about to start delivering the coal.

All the women were going to be huge baddies.

What the fuck?

I sewed my pants to my shirt.

I'm all now he's dead.

It's never gonna fucking happen because he got the wrong eggs.

Depressed Ikarian slowly ripping the seam of his jumpsuit apart.

Yeah.

Now they're just pants.

That's like it's like when you were a Ronin, they cut your top knot.

In this case, when you're a Ronin-Ikarian, they separate your pants and change

shirts.

The cashiered Ikarian.

This is a guy

bearing pants and a shirt.

Oh, my God.

A guy wearing a normal belt.

The remaining people, they stayed on the boat and they went to a place called Cheltenham, Missouri, which is now part of St.

Louis.

Within a few years, it had dissolved and most of them ended up fighting in the Union Army.

At what point are you just like, we're just going to found a town?

The big dogs are never coming.

Yeah, the big dogs are never coming.

So back then.

The dream of the big dogs gets kept alive.

And like, all of a sudden, you are like a kind of like secessionist slave-owning rebel and you get shot with like a minie ball through the thigh that like shatters two of your bones by a guy whose main political drive is there was a guy once who said we should have a massive dog

and you're gonna die like bleeding out in a ditch at gettersburg because of that guy and your last thought is was that a velvet cape

Not the weirdest thing anybody was wearing to a battlefield in the Civil War.

So back in Nauvoo,

so that's that's the end of our friend Cabe.

But a little coda here.

Back in Nauvoo, the remaining members,

you know, who I want to say the people who ended up being like the majority, they were also the people when Cabe got back from France, they were like hunting and fishing and drinking too much of the whiskey and the women wearing makeup and it really pissed them off.

So these are people that are kind of like the world is like seeping in, right?

So they

realize they've kind of worn out their welcome in Nauvoo

for having a civil war downtown.

Yeah, the mayor of Nauvoo is thinking about like pushing them all out of windows.

He's like walking around town, showing them a window, like he's got a little one, and he's like pointing to it.

You check these out, check these out, just jump through.

Stand in front of this, see what happens.

Yeah, do you want to find out if there's help for the widow's son?

They end up going to

the, they go to, what is it, Iowa, to the, uh, where the other tract of land was in a town called Corning, and they kind of carry on for another decade there.

Icaria 2.

Yeah, they've made, yeah, they call it, yeah, Akaria 2.

There's like five Icaria 2s.

So they still somehow, they're still somehow following Cabe's writing and have like church-like reading sessions every Sunday reading his work, despite uh recently shit canning him from the religion.

It's weird.

All right, now we're gonna read from the book of never bring me a deviled egg.

Coddled eggs only.

If you bring me a deviled egg, I will will die of apoplexy.

Yeah.

So all these people that had like worn makeup and gone fishing and, you know, drank too much whiskey or whatever, they also like, instead of building commuter apartments, they build individual family homes.

I love that what we're basically describing is like casual Ikarians who are like culturally,

I'm culturally Ikarian, but like I don't really get super into it.

I go to church for like poached eggmas, but like, you know.

I'll put on my aluminum domino mask for Kebe's birthday, but that's about it.

Being a secular Ikarian, where you're just like, you know, because I identify, you know, with the tradition, but not, you know, necessarily.

I think the big dogs are more of an allegory for the power of municipal planning.

The dogs are sort of trains, I think, is what

you truly mean, like a big dog, because obviously that would be ridiculous.

That's ridiculous.

So they're the dogs of remarkable strength.

There are dogs with remarkable strength everywhere for those with eyes to see.

They raise sheep and they have like a tiny business selling wool to the Union Army.

And they're basically like at this point, like standard white frontiersmen, right?

Like they're just sort of like living on a farm.

and have sort of like a nominal Akarianism to them.

That's so funny, right?

To be like the town that seems like a normal kind of frontier town, but has a dark secret.

But the dark secret is not that dark.

It's just that they go to a slightly weird church that is pretty harmless all day long.

Yeah, they're like, instead of going reading the Bible on Sundays, they're reading Dune, and it's like, okay, English,

okay.

So I thought you guys were easing people or something, but no, you're just

a little, it's a little frontier town with a silly secret.

Also, I love that this basically proves Robert Owen right, which is that they go to a, they have all of these ideas that make sense in a big city where there are lots of other people where you can live an intellectual life as an artist, like an intellectual and artisan life where like that you don't have to build all the streets yourself.

Like a lot of infrastructure is taken care of.

You go to a frontier town and then by your circumstances, eventually all of the weirdness falls away.

You just become a normal frontier town that has one odd tradition.

Yes, literally, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was right all along.

Yeah.

So after the destruction of the Paris Commune, a few Communards end up there.

They're like, remember Akaria?

Let's go there instead.

Maybe it's going better over there.

It can't just be a normal frontier.

Maybe they have like medium dogs.

That's right.

And

the arrival of these communeards causes two more schisms.

I thought it was going to be a heartwarming kind of retirement thing where you get done escaping from the Paris Commune you go and pet the fat labrador but instead no no you bring you bring the schisms with you okay so they basically the arrival of them there's a bunch of young ikarians there who are like we're now calling ourselves progressives and we want to relight the sort of communist spirit of the original icaria and the conservatives who are basically like happy in their single-family homes farming sheep for the union army the conservatives uh put their houses on log rollers and moved them a mile away to new icaria they call it and the and the progressives progressives renamed Corning Young Acaria.

That's so, that's the most, that's the funniest thing you can do is put your entire house on a bunch of logs and just move it down the road.

A mile away, flipping off the kids the whole time.

I'm going to be, I'm going to still be mad at you a mile down the road.

And then the kids left behind, they call it like Kid Nation, basically, which is very good to me.

The young Akarians then suffer another schism where a bunch move to Sonoma County and start a vineyard

called Acaria Speranza.

We're going to teach the big dogs to harvest grapes.

Stopping the grapes of the giant pods.

This is from a history of wine in America.

The Acaria Speranza commune and its example completes the sequence of communal groups that chose wine growing as a way to realize the dream of self-fulfillment in

a new land, following the Hugheno, German Pietists, and the Rapites who were also seeking religious freedom.

The Icarians of Cloverdale were looking in a way to combine not just religious freedom, but to transplant a a European culture and find simple economic sufficiency.

Huh.

Isn't that fun?

How was the wine?

So I'm trying to, I'm looking at this.

Okay.

The California venture.

How was the rating of the wine, Riley?

The California venture was the last gasp in the struggle that had begun over 30 years earlier with the original Akarians.

Armand DeHay, an idealistic barber associated with the Iowa community, led the way to California, where in 1881,

he purchased 885 acres along the Russian River, three miles south of Claverdale, and at once began laying out a vineyard of, oh God, of Zinfandel grapes.

That's the taste that we all love.

So if you're sitting in America right now, sipping a beautiful Zinfandel, talking to your friend from Missouri whose last name is Pierre for some reason, think to yourself, you're living history because you are steeped in Akarian culture.

Yeah, I would like to say, by the way, that Russian River Valley, now much better known for Chardonnays and Pinots.

Should mostly best on that.

Russian River Pinot is really spectacular, in my opinion.

Yep.

So to end here, on the 75th anniversary of the departure of the original Akarians in 1895, the remaining eight communists in Iowa had an election.

I'm doing my best not to make a DSA joke.

I swear to God.

This is way more of an Avakian-esque scenario.

Who's going to say

old guys in a room?

But nobody wanted to be the president.

And they dissolved the community and moved into town because who wants to be mayor?

Nobody.

That's beautiful.

That is absolutely astounding.

Thank you so much.

This was great.

That's the man I found.

Again, yeah, I want to.

Yeah.

I just want to say.

If you are into things about millenarian socialism and

separatism and all sorts of things and also the stupid thoughts that live in my brain.

You should pre-order my book that is about a lot of this stuff that's going to be out this summer.

You can go to simplicitybook.xyz right now and pre-order it because pre-orders are very important for books.

And I would very much appreciate it.

I'm actually doing it right now.

It's easy and fun.

Wow.

You know what?

I'm going to do that right now in a way that you can hear me do it.

I would also, yeah, I want to plug again Paradise Now, the story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings, which I pulled from very heavily for this.

And I want to thank everybody for listening to this.

And if you like mayors and mayor-like figures,

thank you for indulging me this week because I was insane about this.

No, I understand absolutely a story that you have to tell.

Yeah.

This is this like it gets just like

Vernon got into Nova's head and was

and it became impossible for her to not think about it.

I can see how this became impossible for you to not think about.

Yeah.

And there's like five more in this book that at some point I might do more people from it because it's really amazing.

But also, if you like the podcast and want to hear twice as many episodes a month, you can go to no gods, no mares and sign up for the Patreon at $5 a month and help us support us to make the show because we love to do it, but it takes some research and time.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, just get into the mindset.

Have a big last of Zinfandel, has a fat dog.

And

that's true.

It's really

Friday night.

I think I'm about to go do that.

I mean, I got my fat dog.

I'm texting around my friends being like, which one of you has the fattest dog?

I'm bringing my own coal.

I have a bike pannier, and I have some, I actually do have some coal in my house for my girl.

So I am going to just load up the pannier with coal and I'm going to go find the fattest dog I can, and I'm just going to plop it right on there.

You're going to need to see some video of that in the group chat expeditiously.

In the meantime, thank you so much, Matthew.

That was wonderful.

That was an absolute heater.

And yeah, we'll see you all next time.

Bye.

Bye.