True story: When I mentioned “communist sex forests” to my pal Kurt Schlichter, he immediately responded, “I saw Communist Sex Forests open for Toxic Masculinity in the 1980s.” Legend.
All kidding aside, this video and the City Journal report that accompanies it demonstrate a core truth: Socialists are not like the rest of us. They do not even belong to the same reality as the rest of us. And if you ever need evidence of their insularity, just take a look at the panel discussions that took place at the Haymarket Books 2026 Socialism conference in Chicago this weekend.
A few nuggets from the Haymarket radical-fringe fest did bubble up this week, but those only scratch the surface of the lunacy and Marxibabble. The word of the summit was “abolition,” and its main target was the nuclear family, even before capitalism:
You’ve seen all the Socialism 2026 clips, but I neglected to tell you one important detail.@CityJournal had an inside man on the ground.
While I was monitoring the livestreams, @AidanGrogan was inside the conference, sitting in on panels they never broadcast.
Aidan was… pic.twitter.com/NUvhfWV6Af
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 10, 2026
Aidan was subjected to family abolition workshops, discussions of “communist sex forests,” a literal crayon-coloring exercise during one panel, “transfeminist abolitionism,” and lectures about the “cis-sexist motherhood regime.”
Most of what has emerged thus far took place on panel discussions that were live-streamed. Aidan Grogan reports that the radical abolitionism clearly centers on the Queer Movement more than direct Marxist framing. One big tell: the COVID masks that organizers required all attendees and presenters to wear, which have become a hallmark of queer activism:
More than three years after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference required attendees to wear masks at all times except for when speakers were actively presenting. Some of the sessions were overcrowded, hot, sweaty, and smelly.
Is anyone surprised by “smelly” at a socialist conference? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Conference staff didn’t allow “comrades” to sit on the ground in the aisles, because it was considered a safety hazard for attendees with mobility issues. Rather than professional attire, the typical outfit consisted of denim jeans and radical T-shirts and buttons displaying slogans like “Black Lives Matter” or “Free Palestine.” Throughout conference spaces, both speakers and attendees spouted left-wing jargon and buzzwords repeatedly: “organizing,” “solidarity,” “praxis,” “resistance,” “liberation,” and, above all, “abolition,” not just of a market economy and private property but also police, prisons, border security, gender, the family, and the state itself.
To be fair, there’s not a lot of breathing space between the Queer Movement and Marxism in practice. Both are inherently nihilistic, with Marxism more concerned with economic and political destruction and Queers focused on social-sexual destruction. Both seek the same ends – to break down objective reality and reconstruct an authoritarian-enforced fantasy.
From Grogan’s reporting, though, it appears that the Queers took point at the Haymarket ho-down, with their requisite infantilization:
The other speaker on the panel, A. J. Bohrer, asked Lewis, “what’s the number one thing we can do to make socialism sexier?” Lewis replied: “Spend more time naked together.” Bohrer followed up by inquiring about “the most important feature of a communist sex forest.”
In another sex-focused session, titled “Sex for Pleasure: Controlling your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime,” doula Emily Likins-Ehlers argued that restrictions on birth control are likely coming in post-Dobbs America. “The fascists want you to have a lot of babies so that they can take them and turn them into warehouse workers and soldiers to be sacrificed at the golden calf of capitalism,” Likins-Ehlers said. The presentation offered advice on how herbs and other plants could be used as alternative contraceptive methods if (or when) a birth-control crackdown occurs.
The conference dedicated an entire session to family abolition “through a Black feminist lens.” Like a kindergarten classroom, attendees sat in a circle and used Crayola markers to participate in coloring activities.
That’s as much as I’ll excerpt from the column. One must read it in full to get a complete grasp of the unhinged radical Marxists in action, and then bookmark it for repeated later reference. The nihilism extends to the cosmic scale, literally, but it’s not all just cosplay either. Other radicals spoke about quasi-military direct action, ie, domestic terrorism, and not just in the theoretical sense, either. Hasan Piker even makes a brief appearance in the narrative, but by that point, Piker’s version of activism sounds almost quaint.
Grogan concludes in the end that the movement remains politically impotent. I do not share that point of view, at least not entirely. Better to nuke it electorally from space to be sure, and one way to do that would be to have a speaker at tonight’s GOP midterm convention take the stage and read this essay word for word. It would make the stakes in this midterm cycle excruciatingly clear.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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