Joshua Citarella

Launching My New Video Podcast: Brace Belden

Added 2024-09-04 17:15:01 +0000 UTC

I’m excited to announce my new video podcast: Doomscroll. You can now watch episode #01 with guest Brace Belden. I’ve been hard at work on this project for many months and I’m excited to finally share it with all of you!

There is a lot more coming up for season 1 of Doomscroll — stay tuned for new episodes every week.

As a reminder, this is a subscriber supported project. If you enjoy this material you can show your support by becoming a monthly paid subscriber. This is how I get to continue doing this work and produce quality content instead of slop. Your support really makes a difference: support the show.

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This week, my guest is podcaster Brace Belden. Belden is a labor organizer, an infamous shitposter and the host of the show TrueAnon. In this episode we discuss:

How shitposting & online politics bleed into the real world
How to keep your humanity and love other people
How to overthrow the US government

I’ve spent the last few years interviewing young people who make radical posts online and later find their way into real world politics. Irony and humor play a huge role in this process. For the first episode, I wanted to talk to one of my favorite posters who has also lived his politics in the real world.

Like many people, I first became aware of Belden through his outrageous, inspiring and since deplatformed twitter account PissPigGrandDad. In 2016, he boarded a flight from San Francisco to Iraq. Upon landing, he waited until nightfall and snuck across the boarder to neighboring Syria. He enlisted in the YPG (The People's Defense Units), a Kurdish militia group in Rojava, seeking to build a new socialist territory. Belden fought against ISIS during the Syrian Civil War . His unit helped to take Tal Saman.

After returning to the United States, Belden worked at the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco in 2018. He was part of the organizing committee that unionized the Anchor Brewing Factory, joining the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in 2019. That August, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke with Belden and other union activists about workplace democracy and labor issues.