At the Haymarket Books 2026 Socialism Conference in Chicago, a panelist named A.J. Bohrer asked the audience a question: "What's the number one thing we can do to make socialism sexier?"

A speaker identified as Lewis had the answer: "Spend more time naked together."

That exchange happened during a real panel at a real conference attended by real adults who presumably drove cars and operated door handles to get there. City Journal reporter Aidan Grogan went undercover at the event and came back with footage that makes the whole thing look like a parody someone forgot to label as fiction. The panel titles alone — "Transfeminist Abolition," "Communist Sex Forests," and "Sex for Pleasure: Controlling Your Reproduction Under a Pro-Natalist Regime" — read like rejected Monty Python sketches. They were not.

The conference also featured a family abolition workshop framed "through a Black feminist lens," because apparently regular family abolition wasn't specific enough. His colleague Kurt Schlichter cracked that he "saw Communist Sex Forests open for Toxic Masculinity in the 1980s," which honestly tracks better as a band name than a political movement.

But the real gem came from Emily Likins-Ehlers, a doula who participated in the reproductive panel. Her contribution to the national discourse: "The fascists want you to have a lot of babies so that they can take them and turn them into warehouse workers."

That's the argument. Having children is a fascist pipeline to Amazon fulfillment centers. The woman delivers babies for a living.

Grogan's City Journal report detailed the atmosphere beyond the panels — COVID masks were mandatory throughout the conference except during active presentations, attendees participated in Crayola coloring activities during at least one session, and organizers reminded everyone not to sit in the aisles for safety reasons. The vocabulary ran on a loop: "organizing," "solidarity," "praxis," "resistance," "liberation," "abolition." Every sentence sounded like a graduate seminar that replaced the reading list with a mood board.

The word "praxis" — for anyone lucky enough not to know — means putting theory into practice. At this conference, the theory was communist nudity and the practice was coloring with Crayolas. So we're in good shape.

These are the people who want to reorganize the economy. They can't organize a seating chart. They want to abolish the family while hosting workshops that require name tags and ground rules about aisle safety. They want a sexual revolution but enforce mask compliance between sessions.

Somewhere in Chicago, a conference room full of socialists is workshopping how to make collectivism appealing to normal Americans. They landed on naked forests and reproductive conspiracy theories.

The marketing meeting is going great.